LRB | Vol. 27 No. 6 dated 17 March 2005 | Sheila Fitzpatrick
I sailed away with a mighty push, never to return

Sheila Fitzpatrick

The Jewish Century by Yuri Slezkine · Princeton, 438 pp, £18.95

This book changed my sense of the big story of Soviet history as well as the
big story of the Jews in the modern world.* Chapter 4, in particular, the
interpretative history of Jews in the Soviet Union (and the United States
and Israel), which takes up almost half the book, should be compulsory
reading for everyone who has ever expressed an opinion on the subject.

Yuri Slezkine dedicates the book to his grandmother: not the Russian
noblewoman who, despite having ‘lost everything she owned in the Revolution’,
‘at the end of her life . . . was a loyal Soviet citizen at peace with her
past and at home in her country’, but the other grandmother, Berta (Brokhe)
Iosifovna Kostrinskaia, born in the Pale of Settlement, who ‘went to prison
as a Communist, emigrated to Argentina, and returned in 1931 to take part in
the building of socialism. In her old age, she took great pride in her
Jewish ancestors and considered most of her life to have been a mistake.’
The Jewish Century is an exploration of that ‘mistake’: the love affair of
Russian Jews with the Russian Revolution. Slezkine probably shares her final
view of the cause to which she devoted her life, but the dedication implies
more than sympathy. Soviet history has generally left out its Jewish
component (except for the anti-semitic campaign of the late Stalin period),
just as 20th-century Jewish history has left out its Soviet component (with
the same exception). This book is an act of historical recovery.

It starts by creating a category, ‘Mercurians’, the purpose of which is
simultaneously to explain the singularity of the Jews and to diminish it by
making them part of a larger group. Mercurians are ‘the descendants . . . of
Hermes, the god of all those who did not herd animals, till the soil or live
by the sword; the patron of rule breakers, border crossers, and go-betweens;
the protector of people who lived by their wit, craft and art’. They are
diasporic ‘service nomads’, in Slezkine’s term, who provide various services
and skills to the natives they live among, whom Slezkine calls ‘Apollonians’.
Mercurians were

  transients and wanderers – from fully nomadic Gypsy groups, to mostly
commercial communities divided into fixed brokers and travelling agents, to
permanently settled populations who thought of themselves as exiles. Whether
they knew no homeland, like the Irish travellers or the Sheikh Mohammadi, or
had lost it, like the Armenians and the Jews, or had no political ties to
it, like the Overseas Indians or Lebanese, they were perpetual resident
aliens and vocational foreigners.

Mercurians were ‘admired but also feared and despised’ by Apollonians, and
these feelings – at least the last two – were mutual. The Mercurians,
embodied in classical mythology by Odysseus, ‘possess a quality that the
Greeks called metis, or “cunning intelligence” (with an emphasis on either
“cunning” or “intelligence”, depending on who does the labelling)’; and they
tended to take a dim view of slow-witted Apollonian Ivans. For much of human
history, Slezkine concludes, Apollonians and Mercurians ‘have lived next to
each other in mutual scorn and suspicion – not because of ignorant
superstition but because they have had the chance to get to know each other’.

\Suspicion increased with the advent of capitalism and modern state
nationalisms, which, on the one hand, required Mercurian rather than
Apollonian skills and, on the other, marginalised Jews and other diasporic
(non-national) peoples. Ever greater Jewish business and professional
success was accompanied by growing anti-semitism in the increasingly
nationalist nation-states of Europe and – by way of revolt against Jewish
parents as well as anti-Jewish discrimination – the growing involvement of
young Jews in socialist and revolutionary movements. When a son was born in
1889 to Alexander Helphand (Parvus), ‘world revolutionary, international
financier and future German government agent’, he announced ‘the birth of a
healthy, cheerful enemy of the state’.

It is often suggested that Jewish advancement in Russia was blocked by the
quotas introduced in the 1880s. But Slezkine, following Benjamin Nathans’s
lead in Beyond the Pale: The Jewish Encounter with Late Imperial Russia
(2002), shows that the quotas ‘succeeded in slowing down the Jewish advance
in the professions but failed to halt it’. By 1913, a majority of dentists
in St Petersburg were Jewish, as were almost a fifth of its doctors and a
large contingent of lawyers. These were Jews who had left the Pale,
sometimes formal converts to Christianity. However, the two really important
Jewish ‘conversions’ in Slezkine’s argument were not to Christianity but to
revolutionary socialism and Russian literature, both of which drove a wedge
between generations in many Jewish families. ‘I sailed away with a mighty
push, never to return,’ Trotsky wrote. Despising his family’s ‘instinct of
acquisitiveness’ and ‘petit-bourgeois outlook’, he too had fallen in love
with Russian literature as well as revolution. ‘Many, too many of us,
children of the Jewish intelligentsia, are madly, shamefully in love with
Russian culture,’ the Zionist Vladimir Jabotinsky lamented in 1903.
Paradoxically, their eager embrace of ‘the Pushkin faith’ (as Slezkine calls
it) made Jewish intellectuals co-creators of the icons of cultural
nationalism that emerged in most Central and East European states and
would-be states at the turn of the century: it wasn’t a matter just of
Pushkin in Russia but of Goethe and Schiller in Germany, Petöfi in Hungary,
and Mickiewicz in Polish lands.

The steady but relatively small stream of departures from the Pale to major
cities of the Russian Empire in the late 19th and early 20th centuries
turned into a flood with the 1917 Revolution and the Civil War that
followed. The Jewish population of Moscow, Russia’s new capital, grew by a
factor of almost ten between 1912 and 1926, and continued to grow until by
1939 it had reached 250,000, making Jews the second largest ethnic group in
the city. More than a million first-generation emigrants from the Pale were
living elsewhere in the Soviet Union, mainly the big cities, at the outbreak
of the Second World War. This demographic shift, which warrants further
study, was of enormous significance, not just for the history of Russia’s
Jews but also for the social and cultural history of Russia.

We come now to the crux of Slezkine’s narrative: Jewish identification with
the Revolution and its success in the new Soviet state. The more familiar
story of Jews in the Soviet Union is a story of victimisation (which
Slezkine also tells); while the success story, or propaganda versions of it,
was appropriated by the Nazis and subsequently by other anti-semites, and
has tended to be shunned as a result. But avoiding certain questions because
one may not like the answers is a kind of intellectual dishonesty, no matter
how virtuous the motives (my comment, not Slezkine’s: his work, for all its
potential for controversy, is free of polemics). It is, in fact, impossible
to understand the victimisation of Jews of the late Stalin period, and its
weaker versions thereafter, without understanding the achievements and
standing of the group being victimised.

Many Jews of the younger generation joined the Revolutionary movement in
Russia, most often the Menshevik Party or the Bund in the pre-Revolutionary
period, but many also joined the Bolshevik Party. They embraced the October
Revolution and quickly became, as Slezkine shows, ‘the backbone of the new
Soviet bureaucracy’. In the top Party leadership of the 1920s, Jews were the
largest single ethnic group (though secular atheists whose parents and
shtetl background had been left behind in Trotsky’s ‘mighty push’); they
included Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Sverdlov and Kaganovich – though only
Kaganovich remained at Politburo level through the 1930s and beyond. As it
turned out, even Lenin, who fully appreciated the Jewish contribution to the
Revolution, had a Jewish maternal grandfather, though he probably didn’t
know it. Within the Party leadership’s relatively small contingent of ethnic
Russians in the prewar period, a remarkably large number were married to
Jewish women, among them the Politburo members Molotov, Voroshilov, Andreev,
Bukharin, Rykov and Kirov.

Jews were an important presence not only in the Soviet political elite but
also among the intelligentsia. This was a continuation of late imperial
tendencies, but mass emigration from the Pale had brought about a dramatic
increase in scale. By 1939, Jews were by far the most educated national
group in the Soviet population: under 2 per cent of the total population,
they constituted a seventh of all Soviet citizens with higher education,
second only to Russians in absolute numbers. In that same year, a third of
young Jewish men and women in the 19-24 age group were college students
compared to one in 20 of the age group as a whole; while in Leningrad
(Moscow figures were roughly similar) around 70 per cent of dentists, 40 per
cent of doctors, 30 per cent of writers, journalists and editors, and almost
20 per cent of scientists and university professors were Jews. In other
words, Jewish upward mobility needs to be added to the upward mobility of
Russian workers and peasants and culturally ‘backward’ Central Asians as a
key process in the formation of a new Soviet elite, even though Jews, unlike
the other groups, were not the subject of formal state ‘affirmative action’
programmes.

As Slezkine points out, the Jewish contingent in the Soviet intelligentsia,
secularised and assimilated, was notable for its Soviet and Communist
orientation, comparable in this respect only to the vydvizhentsy, but
surpassing them in cultural confidence and educational level. Slezkine calls
them ‘the most important and most influential generation in the history of
the Soviet cultural elite’. Many had severed ties with their parents, whom
they often despised for their backwardness and commercialism, as in this
chilling repudiation by the popular Komsomol poet Eduard Bagritsky:

  Their love?
  But what about their lice-eaten braids,
  Their crooked, jutting-out collar bones,
  Their pimples, their herring-smeared mouths,
  The curve of their horselike necks.
  My parents?

But this kind of anti-semitism was the prerogative of Jews writing
autobiographically. The Party’s policies in the interwar period were
strongly opposed to ethnic or racial discrimination, and teaching people not
to be anti-semitic was a major aspect of Soviet propaganda. Potential
resentment of Jewish success was no doubt defused by affirmative action
programmes for other groups and the huge overall expansion of educational
and employment opportunities that came at the end of the 1920s with the
First Five-Year Plan. The ‘new-minted, self-confident, optimistic and
passionately patriotic’ Soviet intelligentsia of the 1930s, Slezkine
concludes, showed ‘no anti-Jewish hostility and generally very few
manifestations of ethnic ranking or labelling’.

The Great Purges of the late 1930s were a milestone but not yet a turning
point in the history of Soviet Jews. Most of the victims of the Great Purges
were members of an elite (especially the political elite), some minority
nationalities, or those on the margins of society (tramps, beggars, runaways
from the Gulag, habitual criminals). As a minority nationality, and one
disproportionately represented in the Soviet elites, Jews look like prime
potential targets, but the reality was more complicated. As Slezkine shows,
using data collected in post-Soviet archives by Russian historians, Jews
from the political elite indeed suffered heavily (among the victims was
Parvus’s son Evgeny Gnedin, sometime head of the press department of the
Foreign Affairs Ministry, dedicated by his father from birth to the
revolutionary struggle). But this was because they were members of the
elite, not because they were Jews: non-Jewish elite members suffered
equally.

As for minority nationalities, those targeted were the ‘diaspora’
nationalities like Poles, Finns and Koreans who had a nation-state outside
the Soviet Union but, in most cases, no autonomous national territory within
it; and Jews were not on this list. In fact, ‘Jews were the only large
Soviet nationality without its own “native” territory that was not targeted
for a purge during the Great Terror,’ which could mean that their exclusion
was a matter of policy. Overall – and this is a somewhat surprising finding,
reminding us that we tend to overestimate elite victims just because we know
more about them – Jews were not over-represented among Great Purge victims,
because of their under-representation in targeted non-elite groups.

Jews in the Soviet cultural and intellectual elite – among them the writers
Isaac Babel and Eduard Bagritsky, and Meyerhold, the great theatre
director – suffered along with non-Jews during the Great Purges, especially
if they had close personal ties to purged Communist leaders. And no doubt
many of them, like Babel, were interrogated by Jewish members of the
security police, one of the Soviet institutions with a particularly high
proportion of Jewish officers (almost 40 per cent of the NKVD’s top
officials at the beginning of 1937). Although Slezkine does not provide data
on the post-Purge leadership of the NKVD, very few of this group can have
survived the purging of the purgers instituted by the new head of the NKVD,
Lavrenti Beria. In the wake of the Great Purges, newly-promoted vydvizhentsy
of working-class and peasant origin swept into top positions throughout the
Soviet administration. Comparatively few of them were Jews; and the Jewish
share in the post-Purge political elite dropped accordingly. But that was
not the case with regard to the intelligentsia, where Jews were still
strongly over-represented and notable for their Soviet loyalties and high
rate of Party membership at the outbreak of the Second World War.

It was in the postwar period that everything started to go wrong: a story
that Russian scholars like Gennady Kostyrchenko and Israeli scholars like
Mordechai Altshuler, whose work Slezkine draws on, have been researching in
newly opened archives over the past decade. On the one hand, the Nazi
example of mistreatment of Jews seems to have reawakened popular
anti-semitism among Ukrainians and Russians both in the occupied territories
and in the Soviet army, and perhaps had the same effect on Stalin. On the
other hand, the Nazi destruction of European Jewry shook up Russia’s Jews,
including the secularised Communists who, for the first time in decades,
suddenly felt the need to proclaim their Jewishness. As Kostyrchenko was the
first to show (in his book published in English in 1995 as Out of the Red
Shadows: Anti-Semitism in Stalin’s Russia), this groundswell of support
created an extraordinary situation for the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, a
‘voluntary organisation’ set up during the war which was supposed, like all
other Soviet voluntary organisations, to mobilise a particular popular
constituency, not to be mobilised by it. The JAFC started pressing the Party
leadership to revive the long-dormant project for a Jewish autonomous
territory in the Crimea (partly depopulated by the deportation of Crimean
Turks during the war, and much more attractive than the struggling and
distant Jewish autonomous region of Birobidzhan in the Far East). On top of
this, the creation of the state of Israel changed the status of Jews in the
Soviet Union: they were now a ‘diaspora’ nationality with a nation-state
outside the USSR to which they might conceivably feel a primary loyalty;
their ecstatic reception of Golda Meir on her visit to Moscow in 1948 drove
this point home.

The predictable happened: the JAFC was dissolved and its leaders put on
secret trial before being executed for treason. This was a tragic hour for
Soviet Jews but also a fine one, mainly because of the comportment of
Solomon Lozovsky, the Old Bolshevik who headed the JAFC: in contrast to the
Bukharin/ Darkness at Noon model of confessing everything, no matter how
bizarre the accusations, ‘for the good of the cause’, Lozovsky was
unintimidated and pointed out the absurdity of the charges against him, thus
emboldening his fellow defendants and even shaking the presiding judge’s
belief in his guilt. Pace Slezkine, who incorrectly writes that Lozovsky’s
‘eloquence’ was ‘wasted on his hanging judges’, the presiding judge was so
impressed by his testimony and the lack of material evidence against the
defendants that he put up an unprecedented, though ultimately unsuccessful,
struggle against the death sentence behind the scenes.†

The postwar anti-semitic campaign reached its apogee early in 1953 with the
announcement of the discovery of the ‘Doctors’ Plot’ against the Soviet
state and its leaders. The defendants were almost all Jewish physicians from
the upper echelons of the profession. Rumours flew round Moscow to the
effect that the entire Jewish population was to be deported, though whether
the leadership actually had such plans remains unclear, despite diligent
searching of the archives. On Stalin’s death in March 1953, the case was
abruptly closed, the doctors released, and the anti-semitic campaign of
Stalin’s last years halted. It was too late, however, to prevent enormous
damage being done not only to Soviet Jews but to the Soviet intelligentsia
and the regime itself. As Slezkine says, that campaign ‘was directed at some
of the most vital and articulate elements of the Soviet state – and it
contradicted some of that state’s most fundamental official values.’ There
would be a big price to pay in the future. Before the late Stalinist
anti-semitic campaign, Jews formed the core of intelligentsia support for
the regime, and arguably of the Soviet intelligentsia itself; after it, not
only were Jews alienated and disoriented but so, if to a lesser degree, was
the intelligentsia as a whole. Though Slezkine does not push his argument
that far, it is tempting to see this as a turning-point on the road that
ended in the Soviet collapse of 1991: the first stage in the regime’s
progressive and ultimately fatal loss of legitimacy in the eyes of the
educated elite.

The story of postwar anti-semitism is the ‘victim story’ that so many
commentators have taken to be the whole story of the Jews in the Soviet
Union. What happened, as Slezkine makes clear, is not that Jews were
expelled from the elite or subjected to out and out persecution, but rather
that they descended to a second-level elite status which was particularly
painful both because of their past successes and Soviet loyalty, and
because, for the first time, everyday anti-semitism became permissible in at
least some quarters of the intelligentsia. Jews ‘remained by far the most
successful and the most modern – occupationally and demographically – of all
Soviet nationalities’, with the proportion of Jewish wage and salary earners
who were college graduates five times as high as among Russians. The attempt
to limit Jewish access to higher education and top jobs in the Khrushchev
period was both ‘relatively small-scale’ and ‘not very successful’, in
Slezkine’s judgment, but its ‘secrecy, inconsistency and concentration on
elite positions made it all the more frustrating’.

The Jewish reaction, however, was one of outrage. Slezkine quotes the claim
of Mikhail Agursky, a Soviet dissident who emigrated to Israel in 1975, that

  the Jews had been converted into an estate of slaves. Could one really
expect that a nation that had given the Soviet state political leaders,
diplomats, generals, and top economic managers would agree to become an
estate whose boldest dream would be a position as head of a lab at the
Experimental Machine-Tool Research Institute or senior researcher at the
Automatics and Telemechanics Institute?

As Slezkine remarks, Agursky’s assertion that ‘the Jews were oppressed and
humiliated to a much greater degree than the rest of the population’ may ‘on
the face of it . . . appear patently untrue and perhaps morally questionable’,
given the oppressions visited on (for example) deported Crimean Tatars or
even ordinary Russian peasants who, unlike city-dwellers, were not yet
routinely issued with internal passports that allowed them to move freely
about the country. However, he charitably interprets this as a requirement
of the genre: Agursky was not writing history, ‘he was writing a memoir
about the making of a rebel, and what made Jewish rebels was the perception
of unrelieved humiliation.’ Jewish intellectuals – among them Parvus’s son
Evgeny Gnedin, who survived his imprisonment – were as prominent in the
dissident movement that emerged in the 1960s as they had earlier been in the
Revolutionary one.

With dissidence came the demand to emigrate, taken up with Cold War
enthusiasm by the United States Congress and leading to a remarkable
situation in the 1970s whereby emigration – a privilege unavailable to
almost all the rest of the population – became possible for Jews, arousing a
resentment among Russians that only increased the feelings of formerly
assimilated Soviet Jews that they should leave. The collapse of the Soviet
Union at the beginning of the 1990s was ipso facto the end of the story of
Jews in the Soviet Union; it was followed by a much larger wave of Jewish
emigration. Yet not all Jews emigrated. In a striking throwback to the
situation in the 1920s, when the short-lived business class of Soviet
‘Nepmen’ was predominantly Jewish, Jews like Boris Berezovsky, Vladimir
Gusinsky and Mikhail Khodorkovsky were prominent not just among the
so-called ‘oligarchs’ but also in the wider class of New Russians, whose
ethnic composition was sufficiently non-Russian to give the term a tinge of
irony. Once again, Mercurians seized opportunities while slower-witted
Apollonians hung back.

Slezkine’s narrative isn’t confined to the history of Jews in Russia. The
Soviet Union was only one of the ‘three Promised Lands’ beckoning to Jews in
the Pale. The others were the United States and Palestine (Israel), and each
had its own distinctive ideology and promises. To tell this story, Slezkine
introduces a new metaphor – that of Tevye’s daughters (after Sholem Aleichem
and Fiddler on the Roof) and their different, interlocking fates. Beilke
went to America; Chava (as Slezkine parses Aleichem’s story) ended up in
Israel; while Hodl married a Revolutionary and, Slezkine proposes, became a
member of the Soviet secular metropolitan elite like his own grandmother,
Brokhe. The Jewish Century is mainly about Hodl, but Beilke and Chava are
nevertheless important presences.

In Slezkine’s typology of Mercurians and Apollonians, ‘the United States
stood for unabashed Mercurianism,’ while in Palestine/Israel, by contrast,
‘the world’s most proficient service nomads’ were doing their best to turn
themselves into nation-building Apollonians. The similarity of ethos between
Zionist settlers and Soviet Revolutionaries, both sharing ‘a messianic
promise of imminent collective redemption and more or less miraculous
collective transfiguration’, does not escape Slezkine: ‘Chava’s children
were living a revolution of their own – building, consistently and
unapologetically, socialism in one country.’ But he is most intrigued by the
comparison between the fate of Jews in the Soviet Union and in the United
States.

In both countries, ‘the children of Jewish immigrants were going to school
at about the same time and with the same degree of eagerness and excellence.
In both places, the dramatic expansion of the educational systems coincided
with the Jewish influx and helped accommodate it. And in both places, there
arose – eventually – “the Jewish problem” of excessive success,’ leading to
attempts to limit Jewish upward mobility. In the 1930s, in a paradoxical
development noted by Slezkine, both Soviet and American institutions of
higher education were producing a generation of Jewish Communists
contemptuous of their parents and eager to forget the shtetl. In the 1940s
and early 1950s, as the Soviet Union was conducting its anti-Jewish
campaign, so ‘the United States Congress was conducting its own purge. In
scale and severity it was not comparable to the Stalinist version, but the
targets came from similar backgrounds and had similar convictions – except
that in the Soviet Union they were persecuted as Jews, and in the United
States as Communists.’ As in the Soviet Union, this led to a rediscovery of
Jewishness, both in the sense of nostalgia for the shtetl and the embrace of
Zionism by the new generation.

Thus, Hodl’s choice of promised land, once envied by Beilke’s children and
admired by Chava’s, now ceded place to Chava’s choice – Israel. Moreover,
all three sets of Tevye’s grandchildren – children of Hodl, Beilke and
Chava – roundly condemned Hodl’s choice; and even Hodl herself, Slezkine’s
grandmother, Brokhe, who came back from Argentina to join the Revolution,
repented of it. Samuil Agursky came back from America after the Revolution
and named his son Melib, for Marx-Engels-Liebknecht. On her deathbed, his
wife told their son (now innocuously renamed Mikhail) that ‘I should have
lived my life very differently,’ to which he replied that he had always told
her so. Slezkine’s book is not an ‘I told you so’ to his grandmother:
rather, it is an exploration of what her life and that of her generation
meant. There are shafts of pathos, indignation and contempt in his narrative
(the last usually associated with something Soviet), as well as a pervasive
irony and love of paradox familiar to readers of his earlier work. It is
Slezkine’s great merit to have found a way of writing passionately while
maintaining balance and a certain detachment. The Jewish Century – like
Peter Novick’s different but equally remarkable The Holocaust in American
Life (1999) – is an opinionated, idiosyncratic and exciting book that
achieves fairmindedness so casually it seems like an accident.

Footnotes

* I should say straightaway that Slezkine was a PhD student of mine in the
1980s – his subject was the ‘small peoples of the Siberian north’ – and that
more recently we edited together a collection of interviews with Soviet
women, In the Shadow of Revolution (2000). I also read an early draft of The
Jewish Century.

† See Stalin’s Secret Pogrom: The Postwar Inquisition of the Jewish
Anti-Fascist Committee, edited by Joshua Rubenstein and Vladimir Naumov,
translated by Laura Esther Wolfson (2001).

Sheila Fitzpatrick is the author of Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in
Extraordinary Times. She is Bernadotte E. Schmitt Distinguished Service
Professor at the University of Chicago.