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ABSTRACT
The paper offers a reading of the trial transcript of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee that examines the multiplicity of Soviet Jewish identities under high Stalinism and explores what such multiplicity may suggest about the existing historical paradigms of the Soviet subject. How the defendants constructed and defended Soviet Jewish identity was bound up with how they negotiated the ambiguities at the heart of the public discourse on nationality, nationalism, and nationality policy. The range of Soviet Jewish identities the defendants projected calls into question the presumably monolithic nature of the Soviet official discourse from which identities were to be fashioned and complicates some of the more prominent conceptions of Soviet subjectivity.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Gennady Estraikh for his comments at the Forty-eighth ASEEES Convention, and to Harriet Murav, Alexander Nakhimovsky, Alice Nakhimovsky, Leo Zaibert, and the anonymous reviewers for their suggestions and criticisms on the paper’s prior drafts. I am also grateful to Jennifer Lee for her patient assistance with locating the materials I needed. My very special thanks go to Vera Bergelson who has spoken to me about her mother, Nadezhda Zheleznova-Bergelson, and her grandmother Mirra Zheleznova, a leading journalist for Eynikayt, shot in 1950 for her journalistic activities and for her connections with the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee. See Nadezhda Zheleznova-Bergelson, Moiu mamy ubili v seredine XX veka (Moscow: Academia, 2009).
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
Anna Schur is the author of Wages of Evil: Dostoevsky and Punishment (Northwestern University Press, 2012). Her most recent articles have appeared in Slavic Review and Russian Review. Her current book project focuses on Russian law and letters from 1864 to the present.
Notes
1. Naumov, Nepravdenyi sud, 338.
2. Naumov, Nepravdenyi sud, 91.
3. Rapoport, Stalin’s War Against the Jews, 126, speculates that Shtern was spared (she received three years in prison and five years in exile, Naumov, 388) thanks to her research on longevity, the subject that was increasingly preoccupying Stalin in his older years. Others have argued that the disappearance of Shtern, a figure known in the scientific circles the world over, would have created an international scandal that Stalin wanted to avoid. For a summary of speculations regarding Stalin’s softer treatment of certain well-known women, see Farnsworth, “Conversing with Stalin, Surviving the Terror,” 944–5.
4. Naumov, Nepravdenyi sud, 319.
5. What they could not expect in return was absolution of their sins. Sheila Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism, 103.
6. The most complete published transcript is Nepravednyi sud. Poslednii stalinskii rasstrel (stenogramma sudebnogo protsessa nad chlenami Evreiskogo antifashistskogo komiteta), eds. V.P. Naumov, N.V. Teptsov, which itself is an incomplete publication of the 8 volumes of the actual trial record. A further abridged English translation of this book is Stalin’s Secret Pogrom: The Postwar Inquisition of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, eds. Joshua Rubenstein and Vladimir Naumov, transl. Laura Esther Wolfson. For a critical assessment of the English translation, see Kojevnikov, “Stalin’s Secret Pogrom.”
7. The expression “speaking Bolshevik” was coined by Kotkin in Magnetic Mountain, ch. 5.
8. Naumov, Nepravdenyi sud, 172, 183, 184, 209, 339.
9. For a helpful discussion of the “jurisprudence of terror” and of the “Kirov” law see Sharlet, “Stalinism and Soviet Legal Culture,” 155–79, especially 163–8; Solomon, “The Great Terror and Criminal Justice,” especially 236–7, 260–1. On the Military Collegium of the USSR, see Jansen and Petrov, “Mass Terror and the Court 2.” On ambiguities of Stalinist judicial policy, which combined extra-legal repressions with concern for socialist legality, see Getty and Naumov, “Repression and Legality,” in The Road to Terror; and Cadiot and Penter, “Law and Justice in Wartime and Postwar Stalinism.”
10. Solzhenitsyn, Arkhipelag Gulaga, 1:78.
11. Sharlet, “Stalinism and Soviet Legal Culture,” 166; Solomon, “The Great Terror and Criminal Justice,” 362.
12. Naumov references 42 volumes in Nepravednyi sud, as does Kostyrchenko, Tainaia politika Stalina, 268.
13. Kojevnikov, “Stalin’s Secret Pogrom,” 462.
14. Among the reasons for the protracted timeline of the JAFC case, Kostyrchenko names the need to divert resources to other priorities, such as the case of the “Zionist spies” at the Moscow car factory and the “Leningrad” affair, and the shakeup of the higher level cadres at the Ministry of State Security. Kostyrchenko, Tainaia politika, 2:265. On the delay between sentencing and execution, see Naumov, Nepravednyi sud, 5.
15. See Kostyrchenko, Tainaia politika, 270–1.
16. Like that fact that contrary to the initial plans to forego witness testimony such testimony was later introduced.
17. Naumov, Nepravednyi sud, 5. For a discussion of possible motives of Cheptsov’s behavior, see Kostyrchenko, Tainia politika, 270–2; Rubinstein and Naumov, Stalin’s Secret Pogrom, 59–60. Cheptsov’s possible unwillingness to convict on such flimsy evidence, especially in the case of the high-ranking party official Solomon Lozovsky, Cheptsov could rightly fear that a problematic case such as this may have serious repercussions for his own fate, particularly in light of the constant reshuffling of the security apparatus.
18. Rubenstein lists the retraction of the defendants’ confessions as the main reason for Cheptsov’s request to return to the case for further investigation. On the value of confessions in this period, see Solomon, “The Great Terror and Criminal Justice,” 361. Vaksberg, Stalin Against the Jews, 227–36.
19. Bukharin claimed that his was the responsibility of “a leader (rukovoditel’), not a switchman (strelochnik).” Alice Nakhimovsky discusses other examples of retracted confession in her contribution to this cluster.
20. As Conquest points out, those were “minor hitches,” The Great Terror, 178. Krestinsky, for instance, re-confirmed his confession the following day. As to Bukharin’s qualifications, they appear to have been too subtle to cause much discomfort, let alone pose practical challenges for the regime. For a detailed discussion, see Conquest, The Great Terror, 499–513. In contrast to Conquest, Tucker and Cohen regard Bukharin’s performance as a triumph over Stalin. For a useful summary of interpretations of Bukharin’s confession, see Hellbeck, “With Hegel to Salvation,” discussion at 56–7, footnote 3 at 82–3. Hellbeck himself interprets Bukharin’s confession as a means of achieving ideological re-integration into the Soviet fold and of merging his purified subjective self with the objective march of history. On the centrality of confession in the logic and mechanics of the purges, see Conquest, “The Problem of Confession,” in The Great Terror. On confession as a central element of Andrei Vyshinsky’s jurisprudence of terror, see Solomon, “The Great Terror and Criminal Justice,” 362.
21. On the climate of pervasive suspiciousness designed to inspire not only mistrust of others but also doubts of one’s own worth as a Soviet citizen, see eg Fitzpatrick, “Lives under Fire,” in Tear off the Masks! 91–101, especially 100.
22. Naumov, Nepravednyi sud, 373.
23. Naumov, Nepravednyi sud, 370.
24. Naumov, Nepravednyi sud, 364, 366, 367.
25. Naumov, Nepravednyi sud, 369.
26. Naumov, Nepravednyi sud, 368.
27. Naumov, Nepravednyi sud, 371.
28. Naumov, Nepravednyi sud, 367, 371–2.
29. Naumov, Nepravednyi sud, 311.
30. Rubenstein and Naumov, Stalin’s Secret Pogrom, 58. Also see Slezkine, The Jewish Century, 312–3, and Alice Nakhimovsky in this special section.
31. Naumov, Nepravednyi sud, 271, 293.
32. Naumov, Nepravednyi sud, 149.
33. Naumov, Nepravednyi sud, 159.
34. Ibid.
35. Naumov, Nepravednyi sud, 179, 175. For a discussion of what the charge of fictionality of the police record may have meant, especially when made by writers, see Vatulescu, Police Aesthetics, 17.
36. Naumov, Nepravednyi sud, 369.
37. I borrow the term “police aesthetics” from Cristina Vatulescu who, in turn, borrows it from Osip Mandelstam, and who similarly argues that in charging the presumably documentary police record with fictionality, the writers retaliated by judging the police on its aesthetics. Vatulescu, Police Aesthetics, 17.
38. Naumov, Nepravednyi sud, 125, 271.
39. Naumov, Nepravednyi sud, 80, 81.
40. Naumov, Nepravednyi sud, 93, also 274.
41. Naumov, Nepravednyi sud, 167. Vatulescu makes a similar observation about the “estranging” quality of the interrogation room, Soviet and Western, which “flaunted” its surrealism, in contrast to the historical penitentiary which aimed to pass itself, like realism itself, for natural, unmediated reality. Vatulescu, Police Aesthetics, 175–80, especially 175.
42. Naumov, Nepravednyi sud, 167, 177, 344.
43. For a discussion of “algebraic” language of the Moscow trials, see Getty and Naumov, “Repression and Legality,” 208; Tucker, Stalin in Power, 397–8.
44. Naumov, Nepravednyi sud, 340.
45. Naumov, Nepravednyi sud, 344.
46. Naumov, Nepravednyi sud, 341.
47. Naumov, Nepravednyi sud, 311.
48. On how Soviet cosmopolitanism of the 1930s can be seen as a vehicle for Soviet cultural hegemony on the international stage, see Clark, Moscow, the Fourth Rome. For a fascinating discussion of how anti-nationalist cosmopolitanism is removed from liberalism and the anti-cosmopolitan argument is aligned with liberal anti-totalitarian positions in the thought of Isaiah Berlin and Jacob Talmon, see Dubnow, “Anti-Cosmopolitan Liberalism,” 8.
49. Gitelman, “A Jagged Circle,” quotation at 524.
50. Pinkus, The Soviet Government and the Jews, 1948–1967, 161.
51. Gitelman uses the term “nationalist nihilism” in “A Jagged Circle,” 526.
52. Such indiscriminate hurling of accusatory labels was reflective of what Katerina Clark has called a “hyperbolic antiparticularism” of Soviet political persecutions in which “any one of the accused could, as accused, potentially have the entire inventory of negative characterizations leveled at him.” Clark, Moscow, the Fourth Rome, 238–9. Getty and Naumov describe these labels as “attributive” and note that their goal was to represent “not so much categories as tropes, or metaphors,” to symbolize rather than define the enemy. Getty and Naumov, The Road to Terror, 12.
53. Slezkine notes that “The postwar Soviet officials probably realized that the attack on Jewish ‘cosmopolitanism’ was, in some sense, an attack on Communist internationalism.” Slezkine, The Jewish Century, 315. Brooks makes a similar observation in Thank You, Comrade Stalin, 216.
54. Naumov, Nepravednyi sud, 33. On the notion of “unmasking” see Fitzpatrick, Tear off the Masks!
55. Naumov, Nepravednyi sud, 373.
56. This was the case even when they were unaccompanied by the qualifiers “great nations” and “bourgeois” that distinguished between nationalist “deviations.”
57. Naumov, Nepravednyi sud, 274.
58. Naumov, Nepravednyi sud, 156.
59. Kostyrchenko and Redlich, Evreiskii antifashitskii komitet v SSSR, 1941–1948, 316–7.
60. Naumov, Nepravednyi sud, 23.
61. See Alexander Nakhimovsky’s “Transcripts of the JAFC Trial as an Extended Conversation: Words, Sentences and Speech Acts” in this cluster.
62. Naumov, Nepravednyi sud, 33.
63. Naumov, Nepravednyi sud, 86, 87.
64. Naumov, Nepravednyi sud, 313.
65. Naumov, Nepravednyi sud, 315.
66. On the 1930s as a period of intensifying Russocentrism, see Brandenberger, National Bolshevism, especially ch. 3. On the post-war cultural politics, seemingly torn, as Bradenberger argues, between the Russo-centric and Soviet foundations of the “myth of the war,” see ch. 11.
67. Stalin, Sochineniia, 16:93.
68. Suny, The Revenge of the Past, 106.
69. Suny, The Revenge of the Past, 106–7.
70. Weiner, “Nature, Nurture, and Memory in a Socialist Utopia 5, quotation at 1149.
71. Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire, 312.
72. See Slezkine, “The USSR as a Communal Apartment, or How a Socialist State Promoted Ethnic Particularism,” especially 445–9. On the transformation of Soviet Jewry into a “diaspora nationality” and the role this transformation played in post-war official anti-Jewish persecution, see Veidlinger, “Soviet Jewry as a Diaspora Nationality.”
73. Slezkine, “The USSR as a Communal Apartment,” 448.
74. Naumov, Nepravednyi sud, 23.
75. See Kostyrchenko, Tainaia politika, 293–6. The project was never carried out.
76. Naumov, Nepravednyi sud, 315. In the 1913 article that was later retitled “Marxism and the National Question,” Stalin put forth a definition of nation that among other components included commonality of territory. Stalin, Sochineniia, 2:294, 296. The territorial principle was important to Stalin’s view that the Jews of the Russian empire could not have a future as a nation and to his polemic with the Bund with regard to the Jewish national autonomy (2:333, 336, 343).
77. Naumov, Nepravednyi sud, 315.
78. Naumov, Nepravednyi sud, 314–5. Kostyrchenko and Redlich, Evreiskii antifashitskii komitet v SSSR, 1941–1948, 317.
79. Naumov, Nepravednyi sud, 159.
80. Naumov, Nepravednyi sud, 166.
81. Naumov, Nepravednyi sud, 150.
82. Naumov, Nepravednyi sud, 150, 176.
83. Naumov, Nepravednyi sud, 176.
84. Borshchagovsky, Obviniaetsia krov’, 63.
85. For a discussion of Hofshteyn’s oscillations on this point during the trial, see Borshchagovsky, Obviniaetsia krov’, 63–4.
86. As, for instance, Andrey Siniavsky would do 18 years later.
87. Naumov, Nepravednyi sud, 319.
88. Naumov, Nepravednyi sud, 94.
89. Naumov, Nepravednyi sud, 120. Compare, for example to Gorky’s, “For the word is equivalent to the deed – essentially, it is also a deed and therefore it is crucial to show how it affects and influences men.” Pis’mo k Slonimskomu. Quoted in Sasse, “‘Words Are No Deeds’: Trials against Literature in the Soviet Union,” 123–37, quotation on 125.
90. Naumov, Nepravednyi sud, 111.
91. Naumov, Nepravednyi sud, 105.
92. For a helpful discussion of how national difference, which was regarded as a type of backwardness, was to serve as a path to unity, regarded as “development,” see Slezkine, “The USSR as a Communal Apartment.” In the same vein, Gennady Estraikh notes that some Jewish intellectuals saw Yiddish literature as “interim literature, which would serve its purpose only until all Jews learned to speak and read Russian.” Estraikh, Soviet Yiddish, 10.
93. Naumov, Nepravednyi sud, 107.
94. Naumov, Nepravednyi sud, 102.
95. Naumov, Nepravednyi sud, 338.
96. Naumov, Nepravednyi sud, 367.
97. Bergelson complained about Yiddish literature’s inability to describe certain phenomena of life in the 1937 essay “Lexical Problems of Yiddish Literature.” See Sherman, “David Bergelson (1884–1952), 55. Estraikh, Soviet Yiddish, 94–5.
98. Naumov, Nepravednyi sud, 350.
99. See Harriet Murav, “The Judgments of David Bergelson” in this special section.
100. Naumov, Nepravednyi sud, 76. In her article in this special section, Alice Nakhimovsky reads this passage as an especially striking example of a slippage between ideological and religious languages in the defendants’ testimony. Nakhimovsky disagrees (note 23) with Joseph Sherman’s reading of this passage as an instance of an Aesopian language that encodes an analogy between the Bolshevik and Roman oppression in “A Note on Bergelson’s Obsolescence,” especially 38. Also see, Sherman, “David Bergelson (1884–1952),” 68.
101. On Bergelson as a mourner, see Murav, “Memory and Monument in Baym Dnyepr (1932–1940),” 248–68.
102. Yerushalmi, Zakhor, ch. 1, especially 16–18. I am grateful to Harriet Murav for discussing this point with me.
103. Yerushalmi, Zakhor, 17.
104. Yerushalmi, Zakhor, 38–39, 50, 51, and passim.
105. Naumov, Nepravednyi sud, 370.
106. Bergelson’s phrase appears in “Why I Am in Favor of Birobidzhan.” Quoted in Kotlerman, “‘Why I Am in Favor of Birobidzhan’: Bergelson’s Fateful Decision,” 222–35, quotation 225.
107. See Brooks, Thank You, Comrade Stalin, 77–82. Brooks points to Lenin’s Mausoleum, where the living and the dead were commingling, as it were, at the times of state celebrations, as an expression of the Stalinist conception of time that welded idolized past and idealized future. Brooks, Thank you, Comrade Stalin, 79.
108. Bergelson, “Three Centers (Characteristics),” 347–55, quotation at 347.
109. Bergelson, “Obsolescence.”
110. For helpful overviews of this literature, see Krylova, “The Tenacious Liberal Subject in Soviet Studies” and Chatterjee and Petrone, “Models of Selfhood and Subjectivity.” For a recent discussion of the debate between the “totalitarian” school and the revisionists, see Fitzpatrick, “Revisionism in Retrospect.” Jochen Hellbeck uses the term “revolutionary subjectivity” in “Working, Struggling, Becoming: Stalin-Era Autobiographical Texts,” 136. For a fuller elaboration of Hellbeck’s thesis see Revolution on My Mind. Also see Halfin, From Darkness to Lighta.
111. Alexander Etkind points to a similar multiplicity but not at the micro level of individual subjectivity but at the macro level of the society: “There was a mix of public support and hidden protest that escapes any attempt at straightforward description.” Etkind, “Soviet Subjectivity,” quotation at 180.
112. In one of the more memorable invocations of this theme, Kvitko compared his pre-revolutionary life to that of “an abused dog” and praised the revolution for “thirty years of a wonderful, inspired, life of work.” Naumov, Nepravednyi sud, 89.
113. Naumov, Nepravednyi sud, 270.
114. Naumov, Nepravednyi sud, 279.
115. As these historians’ framework does not allow for the possibility of an “outside,” of any horizon of meaning alternative to the totalizing discourse of Soviet power, for them, alternative identities, or the possibility of non-belief, or even “half-belief,” are also an impossibility. Or rather, they are mere projections of other, misguided historians’ unconscious biases. See, for instance, Halfin and Hellbeck, “Rethinking the Stalinist Subject,” especially 459–60; Hellbeck, “Speaking Out,” especially 73–4, 81–2; Halfin, Class, Consciousness, and Salvation in Revolutionary Russia, ch. 4.
116. Naiman, “On the Soviet Subjects and Scholars Who Make Them,” quotation at 312.
117. These multifaceted identities align better with the expectations of historians like Anna Krylova who have been looking to replace the static Stalinist self with a more multifarious, “unsettled,” even “fragmented” subject. Krylova, “The Tenacious Liberal Subject in Soviet Studies,” 145. Chatterjee and Petrone make a similar point in “Models of Selfhood and Subjectivity,” 985–6.
118. Naumov, Nepravednyi sud, 313, 315, 318.
119. Naumov, Nepravednyi sud, 82.
120. For a discussion of possible reasons behind this verdict, see footnote 1.
121. Naumov, Nepravednyi sud, 137.