Between “wretched antisemitism” and “disgusting Zionism”: Pain and hope in a Jewish old Bolshevik’s diary

ABSTRACT

The article, centered around a late Soviet Jewish diary, examines constituents of Soviet Jewish identity in autobiographical writing, asking how the modes and measures of Jewish identity expression are influenced by genre frameworks (memoirs vs. diaries), political climate, and principles of socialist subjectivity. Discovering Jewish roots in seemingly orthodox Soviet statements and, thus, substantiating the public anti-Zionist discourse of the late Soviet decades with a private diary, the article argues in favor of the idea of multiple dynamic identities, of which a dormant one might be invoked and replace a salient one, and vice-versa as more accurate than the rigid Soviet/Jewish dichotomy.

KEYWORDS:

• USSR
• Jews
• Antisemitism
• Anti-zionism
• autobiography
• diary

Acknowledgement

This work was supported by the Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center in Moscow (within the grant program sponsored by A. Klyachin). The author gratefully acknowledges helpful criticism she received from two anonymous peer-reviewers.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Zvi Gitelman, ‘Thinking about being Jewish in Russia and Ukraine', in Jewish Life After the USSR, ed. Z. Gitelman, M. Glants, M. I. Goldman (Indiana University Press, 2003), 49.

2. See also other works by Zvi Gitelman, who authored this description of late and post- Soviet Jewish identity: Zvi Gitelman, A Century of Ambivalence: The Jews of Russia and the Soviet Union, 1881 to the Present (Indiana University Press, 2001), 265ff.; Idem, ‘The meaning of Jewishness in Post-Soviet Russia and Ukraine', in Contemporary Jewries: Convergence and Divergence, ed. E. Ben Rafael, Y. Gorni, Y. Ro’i (Brill, 2003), 194–215.

3. See Anna Shternshis, Soviet and Kosher: Jewish Popular Culture in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939 (Indiana University Press, 2006); Jeffrey Veidlinger, In the Shadow of Shtetl: Small-Town Jewish Life in Soviet Ukraine (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013).

4. See Harriet Murav, The Music from a Speeding Train: Jewish Literature in Post-Revolution Russia (Stanford University Press, 2011); Olga Gershenson, A Phantom Holocaust: Soviet Cinema and Jewish Catastrophe (Rutgers University Press, 2013); Gennady Estraikh, Evreiskaia literaturnaia zhizn’ Moskvy, 1917–1991 (SPb.: Izdatelstvo Evropeiskogo universiteta v SPb, 2015); Klavdia Smola, Izobretaia traditsiiu: sovremennaia russko-evreiskaia literatura (Moscow: NLO, 2021).

5. Arkadii Zeltser, Unwelcome Memory: Holocaust Monuments in the Soviet Union (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2018).

6. Shternshis, 185.

7. Elissa Bemporad, Becoming Soviet Jews: The Bolshevik Experiment in Minsk (Indiana University Press, 2013), 216.

8. The ideas of dynamic identities, identity shift, or identity choice, have been elaborated widely with regard to various identities, including gender and ethnic identities, and Jewish among them. See, e.g., Willy Jansen, ‘Creating identities: Gender, religion and women’s property in Jordan', Who’s Afraid of Femininity?: Questions of Identity, ed. Margaret Brügmann (Rodopi, 1993), 157–168; Kiyoko Sueda, Negotiating multiple identities: Shame and pride among Japanese returnees (Springer, 2014); Diasporas and Exiles: Varieties of Jewish Identity, ed. Howard Wettstein (University of California Press, 2002); Robert DiAntonio and Nora Glickman, Tradition and Innovation: Reflections on Latin American Jewish Writing (State University of New York Press, 2012).

9. As an example, one should cite not so much the memoirs by eminent Soviet intellectuals of Jewish descent (such as Sarra Zhitomirskaia, Igor Golomshtock, Lev Kopelev, Lev Klein, Revekka Frumkina, etc.) who either were born in rather assimilated families or their own engagement with Russian culture deprived them of interest in the Jewish entourage of their childhood, as memoirs of ‘ordinary’ Soviet Jews. See, e.g., Vospominania [Memoirs] by Moisei Schorr, Tak my stroili kommunizm [That is how we built Communism] by Esther Smekhova, Vospominania i dnevnik [Memoirs and Diary] by Mordko Ostrovskii, Zhizneopisanie [Life story] by Mark Golub, all published at Zemelah: Ego-documents of Soviet Jews: http://zemelah.online; Vospominania [Memoirs] by Vladimir Grossman (Archive of Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center, Moscow).

10. Elena Mikhailovna Dub (Goldfarb), ‘Where is truth?', 8–11. Typescript. Museum of the history of Russian Jewry, Moscow.

11. See collection of these letters: Sovetskie evrei pishut Ilye Erenburgu, 1943–1966 [Soviet Jews write to Ilya Ehrenburg] (Hebrew University in Jerusalem, 1993).

12. Archive of Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center, Moscow.

13. All the texts belong to Kokotov family archive. Kokotov’s diary is partly deciphered by Zemelah and Prozhito and partly published at Prozhito.org: https://prozhito.org/person/2884. Lipman and Boris Kokotov’s memoirs are published at Zemelah.online: To my children, grandchildren, greatgrandchildren (https://zemelah.online/documents/kokotov-memuary), Notes about myself and my family (https://zemelah.online/documents/boris-kokotov-txt2), Notes about my Parents (https://zemelah.online/documents/boris-kokotov-txt1). I am grateful to Anna Rudlja, Kokotov’s granddaughter, for sharing her grandfather and her uncle’s memoirs with me and for her own comments.

14. Boris Kokotov, Notes on my Parents.

15. Hereinafter I refer to the diary by entry dates.

16. Philippe Lejeune, On diary, transl. by K. Durnin (University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2009), 153.

17. Two books by Aron Vergelis fit this description: 16 stran vkliuchaia Monako: Putevye ocherki [16 countries including Monaco: Travel essays] (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1979; 1982) and Vstrechi v puti [Encounters on the way] (Khabarovsk: Kn. izdatel’stvo, 1986).

18. The letter was published in September-October 1964 issue of Sovetish Heymland. Cited by: Gennady Estraikh, ‘Aron Vergelis: The perfect Jewish homo sovieticus', East European Jewish Affairs, 27:2 (1997), 7.

19. Original initials changed at the diarist’s granddaughter’s request.

20. Irina Paperno, Stories of the Soviet Experience: Diaries, Memoirs, Dreams (Cornell UP, 2009), 1–56.

21. Ibid., 13.

22. e.g., ‘ … distrust of the Soviet state which he considered as a step-mother, not a mother’ (Mark Kupovetskii, ‘Ia kak byl romantikom, tak i ostalsia', Galina Zelenina, Iudaika dva: Renessans v litsakh [Jewish studies II: Renaissance in Portraits] (Sefer; Knizhniki, 2015), 190); ‘[The country] was not a mother for us, but a stepmother. We felt like inner emigrants’ (Abba and Inna Taratuta, Non-melancholic memories of our family, our life in Leningrad and the struggle to emigrate to Israel (Haifa: G.M.C., 2016), 125).

23. Jochen Hellbeck, Revolution on My Mind. Writing a Diary under Stalin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006), esp. 347–351.

24. On ethnonationalists and antisemites within the party-state apparatus in the 1960s––1970s see Nikolai Mitrokhin, Russkaia partia. Dvizhenie russkih natsionalistov v SSSR, 1953–1985 gody (Moscow: NLO, 2003), 77–98; in particular, on so-called ‘Shelepin’s group’ promoting the ideas of Russian nationalism, 98–118, and on high-ranking sponsors of nationalism and antisemitism, 119–131.

25. Literary journals seem to have been rather informative in this respect; official press was one of the main sources for one Alexander Yanov’s The Russian New Right (Berkley, 1977), one of the first books on late Soviet Russian nationalism.

26. See, e.g., Larissa Remennick, Russian Jews on Three Continents: Identity, Integration, and Conflict (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publ., 2012), 27–28, 143, 38.

27. Evgenii Karmazin, Povest’ o vremeni i o sebe [A story about the time and about myself] (Paris, 1996–2004), manuscript. Archiv der Forschungsstelle Osteuropa. F. 30.132: Ewgenii Karmazin. P. 52.

28. Izrail Mazus, Rodoslovnaia (Opyt avtobiograficheskogo issledovaniia) [A genealogy. An attempt at autobiographical survey]. Manuscript. The author’s family archive.

29. As further detailed in: Galina Zelenina, ‘Gevalt! Eto zhe prostye bazarnye liudi’: sovetskie evrei na puti ot mestechkovosti k intelligentnosit [‘Gevalt! They are Simple Market Folks’: Soviet Jewry on the Way from Shtetl to Intelligentsia], in Semiotika povedeniia i literaturnye strategii: Lotmanovskie chtenia – XXII, eds. М. Nekliudova, E. Shumilova (Moscow: RGGU, 2017), 322–356.

30. As further discussed in: Galina Zelenina, ‘Otravlennaia vata’ i ‘privitaia gipertoniia’: istoki i funktsii sluhov vokrug dela vrachei [‘Poisoned cotton’ and ‘vaccinated hypertension’: Origins and functions of rumour around the Doctors’ plot], Antropologicheskii Forum, 31, 2016, 119–154.

31. See, e.g., memoirs by Moisei Schorr (https://zemelah.online/documents/shorr-text) and autobiographical sketches by Isaac Barats (https://zemelah.online/documents/puti-dorogi); the same attitude is recorded in oral histories: a Leningrad Hebrew teacher recalls how his grandfather used to exclaim, ‘Imagine what Soviet power gave me! Can you imagine in czarist Russia my son Abrasha becoming a holder of a Stalin grant and a rear admiral and my Firochka – a professor of Japanese!’ (Semen Iakerson, ‘Mne udivitel’nym obrazom absoliutno vsë udalos`', Zelenina, Iudaika dva, 136).

32. Leonid Lipkin, Diaries, 1951–1989. Manuscript. Archive of the Prozhito Project. European University at St. Petersburg.

33. Igor Golomshtok, Diaries, 1961–1974. Archiv der Forschungsstelle Osteuropa, FSO 01–061/D-1–D-4.

34. Pawel Rodak, “Suffering and Writing: Autotherapeutic Functions of Some Polish Writers’ Personal Diaries,” European Journal of Life Writing, 8, 2018: 161.

35. Lev Kopelev, O pravde i terpimosti [On the truth and the tolerance] (New York: Khronika Press, 1982), 61–62.

36. On Valentin Pikul and Jewish question see Gennadii Kostyrchenko, Tainaia politika: ot Brezhneva do Gorbachiova (Moscow: Mezhdunarodnye otnosheniia, 2019), part I, 270–83.

37. On Jewish national (or independent) movement of late 1960s – mid-1980s, including ‘Zionist propaganda’ and Hebrew study see most recent and comprehensive collected volume: The Jewish Movement in the Soviet Union, ed. Yaacov Ro’i (Washington, D.C.: Woodrow Wilson Center Press; Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012).

38. Mark Nixon, Samuel Beckett’s German Diaries 1936–1937 (London & New York: Continuum, 2011), 35–36.

39. Helen Tookey, Anaïs Nin, Fictionality and Femininity: Playing a Thousand Roles (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 32.

40. Annemarie Pabel, ‘I want the diary to be my friend’: The Imagined Friend in Anne Frank’s Diary, Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics, 36, 2016: 140–157.

41. Hellbeck, Op. cit., 7–8, passim; Igal Halfin, Terror in My Soul. Communist Autobiographies on Trial (Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003), 4–5, 44, passim.

42. Oleg Kharkhordin, The collective and the individual in Russia: A study of practices (University of California Press, 1999), 231–278.

43. As discussed by Mikhail Weisskopf in his Pisatel Stalin [Stalin as a Writer] (Moscow: NLO, 2001).

44. On self-censorship in diaries see Hellbeck, Op. cit., 85, 103.

45. Moyshe Altshuler, Hagode far gloybers un apikorsim (Moscow, 1923), 5; cited by: Shternshis, Soviet and Kosher, 27.

46. Jonathan Frankel, ‘The Soviet regime and anti-Zionism: an analysis', Jewish Culture and Identity in the Soviet Union, ed. Yaacov Ro’i and Avi Beker (New York University Press, 1991), 311; Ezra Mendelsohn, On modern Jewish politics (Oxford University Press, 1993), 28–30, 33–34.

47. Shternshis, Op. cit., 33, 64, 81, 86, 91 Elissa Bemporad, ‘Behavior Unbecoming a Communist: Jewish Religious Practice in Soviet Minsk', Jewish Social Studies, n.s., 14: 2, 2008: 4, 9.

48. On ‘the earnestness of Bolshevik efforts on behalf of ethnic particularism’ and the policy of compensatory nation-building designed for formerly oppressed nations, Jews included, see Yuri Slezkine, ‘The USSR as a Communal Apartment, or How a Socialist State Promoted Ethnic Particularism', Slavic Review, 53 (2), 1994:414–452. On korenizatsiia and bolshevization of the Jewish street in Belorussia and Minsk as the capital of Yiddish see Bemporad, 81–111.

49. ‘Zakat sionizma [The decline of Zionism]', Za rubezhom, No. 22, 1933: 16; Br. Frei, ‘Evrei-fashisty [Fascist Jews]', Ibid.: 17; Ilya Ehrenburg, ‘V dzhungliah Evropy [In the jungle of Europe]', Izvestia, May 6, 1934.

50. Ilya Ehrenburg, Po povodu odnogo pis’ma [Concerning one letter], Pravda, Sept. 21, 1948; Izrail Genin, Palestinskaia problema [The Palestinian Problem] (Moscow: Pravda, 1948), etc.

51. See Asmund Borgen Gjerde, Reinterpreting Soviet‘Anti-Zionism’: An Analysis of‘Anti-Zionist’ texts published in the Soviet Union, 1967–1972 (M.A. thesis. University of Oslo, 2011), and Idem, ‘The logic of anti-Zionism: Soviet elites in the aftermath of the Six-Day War', Patterns of Prejudice, 52, 2018: 271–92.

52. Frankel, Op. cit., 310–311.

53. Caesar Solodar. Dikaia polyn’. Moscow: Sovetskaia Rossia, 1977 (reprinted in 1980, 1981, 1986).

54. On David Dragunskii as an exemplary Soviet Jewish hero see V. Krivulin, Yu. Pivovar. I eto vse v odnoi sud’be. O dvazhdy Geroe Sovetskogo Soiuza, general-polkovnike D.A. Dragunskom (Moscow, 1986).

55. On the Anti-Zionist Committee, see simultaneous studies: Theodore Friedgut, ‘Soviet Anti-Zionism and Antisemitism – Another Cycle', Soviet Jewish Affairs, 14(1), 1984: 3–22; and William Korey, ‘The Soviet Public Anti-Zionist Committee: An Analysis', in Soviet Jewry in the 1980s: The Politics of Anti-Semitism and Emigration and the Dynamics of Resettlement, ed. R.O. Freedman (London: Duke University Press, 1989), pp. 26–50.

56. See Estraikh, Aron Vergelis, 12–13, 20.

57. e.g., ‘Otpor provokatoram [Rebuff to provocateurs]’ published in Pravda on March, 5 1970 and stating, in particular, that ‘Zionism is alien to the masses’ (р. 4).

58. Open letter of 21 Leningrad Jews to the authors of the statement published in Pravda on March 5, 1970; Letter form 40 Moscow Jews to Head of the Press Department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs L. Zamiatin; Open letter of David Zilberman from Riga to Arkadii Raikin and others, all published in Evrei i evreiskii narod [Jews and the Jewish people. Petitions, letters and addresses by the Jews of the USSR, 1968–1970], ed. Shaul Redlih (Hebrew University in Jerusalem, 1973), 113–116, 121, 148–149, 221.

59. Yeshayahu Aviam, My meetings with Aliyah activists in the USSR. Central Archives for the History of Jewish People. ARS. Box 24. File 02052023181423.

60. Howard Spier, ‘The West European approach to the Soviet Jewry problem', Robert O. Freedman, ed., Soviet Jewry in the 1980s: The Politics of Anti-Semitism and Emigration and the Dynamics of Resettlement (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1989), 112–113; William Korey, Russian Antisemitis, Pamyat, and the Demonology of Zionism (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), 53; Robert S. Wistrich, From Ambivalence to Betrayal: The Left, the Jews, and Israel (University of Nebraska Press, 2012), 453.

61. Theodore Friedgut, ‘Soviet anti‐Zionism and Antisemitism – another cycle', Soviet Jewish Affairs, 14(1), 1984, 20.

62. William Korey, Op. cit., 54. Or, more recently: ‘You cannot but doubt the credibility of his [Solodar’s] recollections’ (Evgenii Kazakov, “V poiskah ‘sovetskogo evrejskogo’: pozdnesovetskaia nacional’naia politika, [In search of the ‘Soviet Jewish’: late Soviet national politics]” Neprikosnovennyi zapas, 122(6), 2018: 190–215.

63. e.g.: Belaia kniga: svidetel’stva, fakty, dokumenty (Moscow: Iuridicheskaia literatura, 1979); David Dragunskii, O chem govoriat pis’ma (Moscow: Izdatelstvo agentstva pechati ‘Novosti', 1984).

64. Sectoral State Archive of the Security Service of Ukraine. F. 16(1115). Secretariat of the KGB USSR. File 2, vol. 2, p. 284.

65. Although the opposite is often suspected; for instance, Estraikh mentions “many spoof readers’ letters written by Vergelis” (Op. cit., 12).

66. On the upsurge of Judeophobia parallel to Jewish revival during the Perestroika see Kostyrchenko, Tainaia politika, part II, 262–433.

67. Notably, he uses the word recidivism (albeit, perhaps, ironically), pertaining to the context of crime or illness and therefore connoted negatively, and not return, or revival.

68. Mendelsohn, Op. cit., 50.

69. Moisei Belenkii, Talmud v svete nauki (Moscow: Znanie, 1960), Idem, Iudaizm (Moscow: Politzidat, 1966), Idem, Chto takoe Talmud: Ocherk istorii i mirovozzreniia Talmuda i sovremennyi iudaizm (Moscow: Nauka, 1970), Idem, Sovremennyi iudaizm (Moscow: Znanie, 1972), Idem, Kritika osnovnyh dogmatov Talmuda (Moscow: Znanie, 1975), etc.

70. Lipkin. Diaries, 1951–1989.

71. See Galina Zelenina, ‘“They Left Not for Sausage, but for Dignity”: the Concept of Dignity in the Late Soviet Polemics on Jewish Emigration [in Russian]', ISTORIYA, 13.6 (116), 2022. DOI: 10.18254/S207987840021759–3.

72. Yuri Slezkine, The Jewish Century (Princeton University Press, 2019), 96, passim.

73. On Vergelis’ activities in the 1990s see Estraikh, Op. cit., 18–19; On Dragunskii’s self-positioning in the same years see Matvei Geizer, ‘Istoria zhizni generala Dragunskogo', Lehaim, 98(6), 2000.

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Galina Zelenina

Galina Zelenina is an associate professor at Moscow State University and Russian State University for the Humanities and a senior research fellow at The Russian Academy of National Economy and Public Administration. Her work has focused on the history of Soviet Jewry with particular reference to autobiographical writing, issues of identity, memory, and gender, and questions of emigration and cultural revival.