We Are Jews Again: Jewish Activism in the Soviet Union

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On the cover: Refuseniks celebrate Succot with Israeli sportsmen in Lunts Meadow outside Moscow, 1975. First row, seated, from left: Anatoly Sharansky, Zeev Shakhnovsky, Ephraim Rosenstein (child), Yuli Kosharovsky. Second row: Isakhar Aharoni, Michael Bronstein, Menachem Berkowitz, Shlomo Fried. Back row, standing: Rami Miron, unidentified, Solomon Stoliar, Zeev Rom, Vladimir Slepak, Maria Slepak, Vitaly Rubin, Lev Gendin, Oksana Iablonsky. Collection of Inna and Yuli Kosharovsky.

Copyright © 2017 by Syracuse University Press

Syracuse, New York 13244-5290

All Rights Reserved

First Edition 2017

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∞ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.

ISBN: 978-0-8156-3500-0 (hardcover)978-0-8156-3519-2 (paperback)978-0-8156-5400-1 (e-book)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Kosharovskiĭ, author. | Hoffman, Stefani, translator. | Komaromi, Ann, editor.

Title: We are Jews again : Jewish activism in the Soviet Union / Yuli Kosharovsky ; translated by Stefani Hoffman; edited and with an introduction by Ann Komaromi ; with a foreword by Joshua Rubenstein.

Description: First edition 2017. | Syracuse, New York : Syracuse University Press, [2017] | Series: Modern Jewish history | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Description based on print version record and CIP data provided by publisher; resource not viewed.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017014308 (print) | LCCN 2017014992 (ebook) | ISBN 9780815654001 (e-book) | ISBN 9780815635000 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780815635192 (pbk. : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Zionism—Soviet Union. | Jews—Soviet Union—Biography. | Refuseniks—Biography. | Political prisoners—Soviet Union—Biography. | Dissenters—Soviet Union—Biography. | Civil rights—Soviet Union. | Kosharovskiĭ, .

Classification: LCC DS149.5.S6 (ebook) | LCC DS149.5.S6 K68 2017 (print) | DDC 305.892/40470904—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017014308

Manufactured in the United States of America

This book is dedicated to those who devoted their lives to our freedom:

Enid Wurtman, Stuart Wurtman, Glenn Richter, Michael Sherbourne, Adele and Joel Sandberg, Pamela Cohen, Connie and Joseph Smukler, Shirley Goldstein, Lynn Singer, Irene Manekofsky, Barbara Stern, Lana and Bernie Dishler, Sir Martin Gilbert, Jeffrey Tigay, Shirley and Alan Molod, Marvin Verman, Frank Brodsky . . . and hundreds of others.

Contents

List of Illustrations

Foreword, JOSHUA RUBENSTEIN

Author’s Acknowledgments

Editor’s Acknowledgments

Note on the Text and Russian Names

PART ONE: History from the Ground Up

1. Soviet Jews: Making History

ANN KOMAROMI

PART TWO: Voices of the Movement

2. Beginnings

3. Context and Strategies

4. Developments and Divisions

5. Legalization and Mass Aliya

Appendix A

Soviet and Post-Soviet Jewish Emigration

Appendix B

Major Events and Anti-Zionist Trials

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Illustrations

1. Early Prisoners of Zion, Dubrovlag labor camp, Mordovia

2. Refuseniks in Sverdlovsk

3. Yuli Kosharovsky, 1973

4. At the Summer Universiade, refuseniks hold up a sign to welcome the Israeli delegation

5. Hebrew teachers, Moscow

6. Seeing off Marianna and Boris (Baruch) Ainbinder, along with Valentina and Dan Roginsky

7. Refuseniks celebrate Yom Ha’atzmaut, Israel Independence Day

8. Aliya activists in Moscow, 1975

9. Refuseniks meet with Israeli sportsmen

10. Refuseniks and Israeli sportsmen celebrate Succot together

11. Avital Sharansky and Elie Wiesel address a Soviet Jewry program in a Montreal synagogue

12. Yuli Kosharovsky, Inna Kosharovsky, and Leonid (Ari) Volvovsky with musicians and refuseniks

13. Ida Nudel and Dina Beilin wearing necklaces with hidden Jewish symbols

14. Yuli Kosharovsky and Igor Abramovich

15. Inna Kosharovsky, Enid Wurtman, and Yuli Kosharovsky with Yuli’s Hebrew teaching aids

16. Aliya activists in Moscow, October 1976

17. Refuseniks celebrating Simhat Torah

18. Professor Alexander Lerner, former Prisoner of Zion Yuri Berkovsky, and Anatoly Sharansky

19. Inna and Yuli Kosharovsky celebrate Simhat Torah with a crowd near the Choral Synagogue

20. Enid Wurtman, Leonid (Ari) Volvovsky, and Veniamin Fain discuss the planned international cultural symposium

21. Press conference prior to planned international symposium on Jewish culture

22. International symposium of refusenik scientists

23. Refuseniks celebrate Hanukah

24. Leningrad activists Ida and Aba Taratuta

25. Leonid (Ari), Kira, and Mila Volvovsky

26. Refusenik children celebrate Purim

27. Refuseniks celebrate a Pesach Seder

28. Refuseniks and rights activists bid farewell to former Prisoners of Zion from the Leningrad hijacking trial

29. Second Jewish Song Festival for refuseniks in Ovrazhki during Succot

30. Yuli Kosharovsky, 1981

31. Inna and Yuli Kosharovsky with son Moty

32. Evgeny Lein next to a sign for the museum commemorating V. I. Lenin’s Siberian exile

33. Refuseniks meet with British historian and Soviet Jewry advocate Martin Gilbert

34. Wives of Prisoners of Zion

35. Refuseniks meet with American TV talk-show host Phil Donahue

36. JEWAR (Jewish Women against Refusal) in the home of Inna and Igor Uspensky

37. JEWAR in Kiev to honor the memory of Jews murdered in the ravine at Babii Yar

38. Refusenik symposium on denial of exit visas

39. Inna and Yuli Kosharovsky on a seventeen-day hunger strike

40. Reunion of Yuli Kosharovsky and Yuli Edelstein

41. Former Prisoner of Zion Vladimir Kislik and his wife, Bella Gulko, arrive in Israel

42. Zeev Dashevsky and Stuart Wurtman in the Steinsaltz Yeshiva in Moscow

43. Reunion of Martin Gilbert and Yuli Kosharovsky in Jerusalem

44. Alexander Smukler and Inna and Igor Uspensky waiting to meet with Leon Uris

45. Alexander Smukler presents a samizdat copy of Exodus in Russian to author Leon Uris

Foreword

DURING THE LATE 1960s, when Leonid Brezhnev was the preeminent leader of the Soviet Union, the Kremlin repudiated the more relaxed policies of Nikita Khrushchev, who had been deposed in October 1964. Brezhnev tightened censorship over cultural expression and historical inquiry, and moved away from criticism of Joseph Stalin and his murderous regime. And when Warsaw Pact forces invaded Czechoslovakia in August 1968, the crushing of the Prague Spring ended any hope that Communist Party officials were open to reforming the system from within. Disheartened by the regime’s harsher policies, several grassroots movements arose among disparate groups of Soviet citizens who were determined to press for their rights. Crimean Tatars wanted to return to their traditional homelands from where Stalin had forcibly removed them in 1944. Ukrainian nationalists tried to defend their cultural legacy and national rights against a system of enforced Russification. Liberal-minded activists challenged the regime’s monopoly of information control, exposing both the abusive kangaroo courts that failed to follow the country’s constitution and criminal codes and the difficult conditions in the labor camps for convicted political prisoners. At the same time a network of Jewish activists began to demand the right to emigrate to Israel, eventually becoming the best organized and most successful movement among the various streams of dissent. By the time Leonid Brezhnev died in November 1982, the regime, in spite of its repressive instincts, had permitted more than a quarter million Jews to leave. And when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the Soviet Jewish emigration movement had already triumphed: nearly eight hundred thousand Jews had emigrated, an astonishing and altogether unforeseen result of their struggle.

Soviet Jews lived a paradoxical life. A half century after the revolution that brought the Bolsheviks to power in 1917, a significant majority of Soviet Jews had cultivated a profound devotion to the Russian language. Cut off from access to books on Jewish history or religion, they made Russian culture the source of their cultural and moral education. In her essay Do I Feel I Belong to the Russian People? the human rights activist Larisa Bogoraz, who had been born and raised by Jewish parents, expressed a common dilemma among Soviet Jews:

Who am I now? Who do I feel myself to be? Unfortunately, I do not feel like a Jew. I understand that I have an unquestionable genetic tie with Jewry. I also assume that this is reflected in my mentality, in my mode of thinking, and in my behavior. But this common quality is as little help to me in feeling my Jewish identity as similarity of external features—evidently a more profound, or more general, common bond is lacking, such as community of language, culture, history, tradition; perhaps, even, of impressions, unconsciously absorbed by the senses: what the eye sees, the ear hears, the skin feels. By all these characteristics, I am Russian.

I am accustomed to the color, smell, rustle of the Russian landscape, as I am to the Russian language, the rhythm of Russian poetry. I react to everything else as alien.¹

But even as the country’s Jews assimilated into Russian culture, history and the regime itself never allowed them to forget their origins. The Holocaust, during which the Nazis killed as many as two and a half million Jews throughout German-occupied Soviet territory, destroyed almost half of the country’s Jewish population, leaving a traumatic burden that the survivors were barely permitted to publicly mourn once victory was achieved. Educated to accept assimilation yet not permitted to forget their origins, they could not mourn the Nazis’ Jewish victims as Jews. And during the postwar years, the Black Years of Soviet Jewry, Stalin targeted the leading voices of Yiddish culture, executing writers, poets, and journalists or shipping them off to labor camps. Soviet Jews came to believe that they had no future as Jews in Soviet society. While they could work, often in prestigious positions within the country’s cultural, scientific, and industrial institutions, they had to live with the discomfort related to the effects of an identity they could not shed, however much they appeared to assimilate. As for leaving the country and making a life elsewhere, the very idea seemed unimaginable.

Several events in the late 1960s, however, prompted a shift in their attitudes. The Six-Day War of 1967 generated a broad and deeply felt identification with Israel’s fate. And when Israel defeated Arab armies that had been supplied by the Kremlin, Soviet leaders launched a hysterical, anti-Zionist campaign whose sharp, ugly, anti-Jewish images reinforced discrimination against Soviet Jews in areas of education and employment. A half century after the revolution, in which many Jews had sided with revolutionary forces to create a new, promising, utopian order for Russia, a new generation of Jews considered that the Jews had spilled enough of their blood on alien fields and altars in return for which they had received stark ingratitude and renewed antisemitism.² As the refusenik Boris Ainbinder recalled, I was completely disillusioned with the Soviet Union. I understood that it was almost impossible to change anything here and that it was not my task to try. They didn’t want us there, we were alien, let them deal with it.³

As We Are Jews Again makes clear, for almost all the Jewish activists the demand to leave was the culmination of a process of self-renewal. They always knew their internal passports recognized that they were of Jewish nationality, but once individual Jews decided they would apply to emigrate, the process led them to explore Jewish history and Jewish linguistic and religious traditions. Now they insisted on their right to mourn their martyrs, whether they rested among the millions of Hitler’s victims on Soviet soil or suffered as bearers of Yiddish culture and therefore Jewish identity who had disappeared among the hundreds of literary, artistic, and cultural figures in Stalin’s last years.

The emigration activists pursued a single, seemingly achievable demand—to leave the country—along with the associated goal of developing Jewish national culture within the constraints of Soviet society. These goals were still limited in contrast to the human rights movement’s sweeping goal of wide-ranging civic and legal reforms. While the demand to emigrate may have seemed less threatening to Soviet officials in a superficial sense, for a regime that had always refused to acknowledge its mistakes the dream of leaving was a contagious threat that the Kremlin could not be expected to tolerate. That it eventually did and allowed hundreds of thousands of Jews to leave for Israel and the West—even as it singled out an unpredictable proportion of would-be emigrants for reprisal, refusing their applications to leave and forcing them into a form of legal and civic purgatory—was a testament to the movement’s defiance and the regime’s surprisingly flexible response.

We Are Jews Again vividly describes how they managed to live as Jews independent of how the Kremlin preferred them to behave. Even as tens of thousands would emigrate in a given year, there were always families who faced refusal. These refuseniks, as they came to be called, found themselves thrust into a civil no-man’s-land. Deprived of their professional work, socially isolated, increasingly dependent on the solidarity of other refuseniks and their dissident allies, along with foreign tourists, they set off on a journey of self-discovery. To pursue the right to leave as Jews, the emigration activists found themselves initiating several related activities. Organizing Hebrew classes, scientific seminars, meetings with foreign tourists and dignitaries, demonstrations on the streets and in Communist Party and government offices, and insisting on fair trials for arrested colleagues and solidarity with Prisoners of Zion⁴—all required the exercise of rights that the regime was not going to willingly recognize. Yuli Kosharovsky was one of those refuseniks. Trained in radio-electronics engineering, at one point in his career he found work in a highly sensitive field: developing a guidance system for missiles with nuclear warheads. After he applied for an exit visa in 1971, he spent the next eighteen years in refusal, giving him the opportunity to be an active participant in the Jewish emigration movement. As he conducted these detailed interviews in Israel with other former refuseniks, he compiled a remarkable, intimate account of their common struggle: how they organized a wide array of activities under the noses of a repressive and ever-suspicious regime. Their creativity continues to astonish. My favorite was the time they pulled together Hebrew classes on a beach in the Crimea, inviting families to vacation together as if they were doing nothing more than enjoying the sunny weather at the seashore. The regime thought it could stifle them forever. These Jewish activists gathered their strength. By standing up to the regime, they regained their voices and their history.

Joshua Rubenstein

Author’s Acknowledgments

I WOULD LIKE TO EXPRESS my profound appreciation to the people and organizations who helped me write this book. I am grateful to all those who shared their memories and thoughts with me and who gave me access to their personal archives, including those whose interviews are excerpted in the text: Pavel Abramovich, Mark Azbel, Boris (Baruch) Ainbinder, Vladimir Aks, Mikhail Babel, Yosif Begun, Dina Beilin, Mikhail Beizer, Irina Brailovsky, Viktor Brailovsky, Mikhail Chlenov, Vladimir Dashevsky, David Drabkin, Yuli Edelstein, Eliyahu Essas, Veniamin Fain, Evgeny Finkelberg, Roza Finkelberg, Sara Frenkel, Viktor Fulmakht, Zeev Geizel, Mikhail Grinberg, Lev Gorodetsky, Alexander Ioffe, Grigory Kanovich, Yakov Kedmi, Mikhail Khanin, David Khavkin, Anatoly Khazanov, Alexander Kholmyansky, Vladimir Kislik, Boris Kochubievsky, Dov Kontorer, Valery Krizhak, Mark Kupovetsky, Edward Kuznetsov, Alexander Lerner, Alexander Lunts, David Maayan (Chernoglaz), Ida Nudel, Mikhail Nudler, Israel Palhan, Moshe Palhan, Pinhas Polonsky, Viktor Polsky, Vladimir Prestin, Dan Roginsky, Inna Rubin, Zeev Shakhnovsky, Maria Slepak, Vladimir Slepak, Natan Sharansky, Aron (Arkady) Shpilberg, Lea Slovin, Alexander Smukler, Vitaly Svechinsky, Aba Taratuta, Lev Ulanovsky, Igor Uspensky, Inna Uspensky, Ilia Voitovetsky, Leonid Volvovsky, Alexander Voronel, Nina Voronel, Shmuel Zilberg, and Yosif Zisels.

I thank the organizations who made available important documents and other materials: Nativ (Israel); Vaad (Russia); the Association Remember and Save (Israel); the National Coalition Supporting Eurasian Jewry, formerly National Conference for Soviet Jewry (USA); the Union of Councils for Soviet Jews (USA); the Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry (USA); the Central Archive of the History of the Jewish People (Israel); and the Public Council for Soviet Jewry (Israel).

I would like to express my sincere thanks to Israel and Ann Shenkar for their invaluable help in research and for making available their wide collection of materials.

I thank the organizations, foundations, and private individuals who provided or helped secure grants for this research and for the writing of the book over many years: the Legacy Heritage Fund, Israel Shenkar, Shirley and Leonard Goldstein, Adele and Joel Sandberg, Dan Mariaschin and Irving Silver of B’nai B’rith, the Shtraks-Smukler Family Foundation, the National Coalition Supporting Eurasian Jewry, Bernie Dishler, Enid Wurtman, Glenn Richter, Henry Gerber, Connie and Joe Smukler, and Marvin Verman.

I want to express my gratitude to my first readers and critics, the members of my family: Inna Kosharovsky, Leonid, Anna, Galina, and Michal Kosharovsky.

I acknowledge with gratitude Dina Beilin, Mikhail Chlenov, Elena Dubiansky, Yakov Kedmi, Vladimir Mushinsky, Vladimir Prestin, Inna Rubin, Natalia Segev, Alexander Smukler, Vitaly Svechinsky, and Ilia Voitovetsky for valuable comments and help with the manuscript.

My special thanks go to Enid Wurtman, who provided invaluable help with research and mobilization of support for the project. Without her faithful and selfless assistance, the book would not have been written.

Yuli Kosharovsky

Editor’s Acknowledgments

IT WAS MY GREAT HONOR to become acquainted with Yuli Kosharovsky while he was finishing work on his monumental four-volume history of the Jewish movement in the Soviet Union, My snova evrei (We Are Jews Again). I had come to Israel for research on Soviet Jewish activism, documenting the uncensored press known as samizdat and interviewing activists who had been involved with the journals. Yuli was not directly involved with producing samizdat journals, but he had been a leader in other areas and he was working on a history of the movement. Yuli and his collaborator Enid Wurtman opened my eyes to aspects of the Jewish movement in the Soviet Union I had not heard about elsewhere: in particular, they helped me to appreciate the relatively high level of organization characterizing much of the activity. Yuli convinced me of how important Hebrew study was to the movement. Practically every person who became active in the Jewish movement in the 1970s or later started with Hebrew study. For most, Hebrew classes provided an introduction to Jewish studies and an opportunity for entry-level engagement for those who felt drawn to Jewish activities. Some came to Hebrew classes with a simple desire to spend some of their time in refusal among people who would not treat them like second-class citizens. Through study and the socializing that went along with it, many of them came to view Israel as their future home.

The personalities of successful Hebrew teachers in the movement were legendary. Yuli had been one of those popular teachers, infecting students with his enthusiasm and boundless energy. Yuli worked at the center of the Jewish movement for many years, sharing his passion with Hebrew students and teachers and helping realize initiatives developed by others. Beginning with his teaching in the USSR and through many years of work up to his publication of a history of the movement, Yuli never stopped seeing his mission in terms of consciousness-raising among Jews.

Yuli’s collaborator Enid Wurtman exemplified similar qualities, although she started from a different place. Enid and her husband, Stuart Wurtman, became engaged with the issue of Soviet Jewry in the United States. Their lives were changed by traveling to the Soviet Union and meeting Yuli and other refuseniks, whom they first encountered in November 1973. In 1977 Enid and her family pulled up roots and made aliya like the Soviet Jews they sought to help. After moving, Enid continued to help refuseniks as part of the Public Council for Soviet Jewry in Israel. Yuli and his family were finally able to make aliya in 1989, approximately twelve years after the Wurtmans’ aliya, and in Israel the two continued working together. I had a chance to see them in their shared office. Yuli worked on his seemingly endless interviews, fueled by his natural energy and benefiting from the large network of friends and acquaintances among former refuseniks and highly placed Israeli officials. Enid patiently tracked down dates, names, and documents, drawing on her own rich set of connections, developed over many years of activism. Enid shared her extensive knowledge and contacts with all kinds of scholars. It was humbling to learn that I came to her for help and advice after people such as Yuli and the eminent historian Martin Gilbert, who had also asked Enid for research support. I am one of many who are not only indebted to Yuli and Enid, but profoundly inspired by their generosity. They helped me understand what a commitment to "Klal Yisrael" means.

Yuli died in an accident on the first day of Passover in 2014, and his unexpected loss came as a tremendous blow to all who knew and loved him. Yet his work continued thanks to a number of scholars and friends who believed in its unique value. I was privileged to be asked to join the work after Stefani Hoffman had translated materials selected by Yuli for an English edition. Yaacov Ro’i also brought his years of expertise in the field to bear on this project. Both of them shared significant help and advice. They read the entire edited manuscript and provided detailed comments and suggestions. Stefani Hoffman shared valuable thoughts about the ordinary heroes of the movement, and she edited my often-awkward formulations, the result of shortening segments and condensing information into one volume. Yaacov Ro’i had further observations and insights about facts and sources that no one else could have provided.

In addition, my other debts to historians and former activists are many. I owe thanks to people including Pavel Abramovich, Mordechai Altshuler, Gal Beckerman, Yosif Begun, Mikhail Beizer, Irina and Viktor Brailovsky, Mikhail Chlenov, Zakhar Davydov, Jonathan Dekel-Chen, Avital Ezer, Veniamin Fain, Alexander Frenkel, Viktor Fulmakht, Anatoly Khazanov, Anna and Boris Lifshits, Yosef Mendelevich, Benjamin Nathans, Vladimir Prestin, Yosef Radomyslsky, Joshua Rubenstein, Anna Shternshis, Liudmila Tsigelman, Elie Valk, Alexander and Nina Voronel, Sima Ycikas, Leonid and Mira Zeliger, Natasha and Shmuel Zilberg, Dina Zisserman, the Euro-Asian Jewish Congress staff including Leonid Raitsen and Pavel Zhuravel at the Archive, Veniamin Lukin and the staff at the Central Archive for the History of the Jewish People, and Aba and Ida Taratuta and Edward Markov with the Association Remember and Save, which has done a tremendous amount to document this history.

I benefited from funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Victoria College Research Grant program for work on this project.

Throughout the long period of work on sources, biographical notes, and edits, Enid Wurtman continued to be supportive with the reams of material she and Yuli had collected. Alexander Smukler demonstrated his appreciation of Yuli and his work by supporting this project in moral and practical ways. Joshua Rubenstein kindly agreed to lend his voice to the project. If this edition succeeds in conveying to the English reader the tremendous scope and careful detail of Yuli’s massive and marvelous history, thanks are due to these people and others who worked on the project, including all the remarkable men and women represented in Yuli’s interviews.

Ann Komaromi

Note on the Text and Russian Names

YULI KOSHAROVSKY wrote the main text of chapters 2–5, drawing on the extensive interviews he conducted with former activists. For this edition, the editor has condensed the text in those chapters from the original and slightly adapted the language to create consistent third-person narration, apart from the quoted interviews and Kosharovsky’s personal recollections. The editor has expanded footnotes and provided sidebar notes with the English reader in mind.

Russian names have been transliterated according to a modified Library of Congress system (e.g., –ii is rendered –y; and Ia-, Io-, and Iu- at the beginning of first names are Ya-, Yo-, and Yu-). Women’s last names ending in a feminine form—Badanova, Beilina, Kosharovskaia—have been normalized in this text to the masculine form—Badanov, Beilin, Kosharovsky—for ease of identification. A few well-known names have been adopted in their accepted English form: these include Sharansky (not Shcharansky); Edelstein (not Edelshtein). In some cases the transliteration from Hebrew has been adopted, including Hava (not Khava); Eliyahu (not Eliagu); Mordecai (not Mordekhai); Pinhas (not Pinkhas); Palhan (not Palkhan).

Diminutive forms of names appear frequently because of the informal and friendly tone of interviews and reminiscences. Occasionally, people who are older or occupy a position of some significance are referred to more formally by name and patronymic, for example, Inna Moiseevna or Ester Isaakovna. Following is a list of some names appearing in the text, beginning with the standard spelling, followed by their diminutive or informal forms:

Alexander – Alik, Sasha

Anatoly – Tolia, Tolik

Andrei – Andriusha

Anna – Ania

Arkady – Arik

Boris – Boria

Efim – Fima, Fimka

Elena – Lena

Evgeny/Evgenia – Zhenia

Galina – Galia

Gennady – Gena

Grigory – Grisha

Ilia – Iliusha

Leonid – Lyonia

Lev – Lyova

Liubov – Liuba

Mikhail – Misha, Mika

Natalia – Natasha

Olga – Olia

Pavel – Pasha

Petr – Petia

Semyon – Syoma

Sergei – Seryozha

Valentin – Valia

Valery – Valera

Veniamin – Venia

Viacheslav – Slava, Slavik

Viktor – Vitia

Vitaly – Vilia

Vladimir – Volodia, Vlad, Vladik

Yakov – Yasha

Yisrael – Srolik

Yuli – Yulik

Yuri – Yura

Some activists took a Hebrew name in refusal, and some adopted a Hebrew name in Israel. These activists include:

Mark Blum = Mordecai Lapid

David Chernoglaz = David Maayan

Vladimir Dashevsky = Zeev Dashevsky

Vladimir Geizel = Zeev Geizel

Yakov Kazakov = Yakov Kedmi

Leib Khnokh = Arye Khnokh

Anatoly Sharansky = Natan Sharansky

Arkady Shpilberg = Aron Shpilberg

Ernst Trakhtenberg = Moshe Palhan

Leonid Volvovsky = Ari Volvovsky

PART ONE

History from the Ground Up

1

Soviet Jews

Making History

ANN KOMAROMI

THE LIBERATION OF SOVIET JEWS is a gratifyingly heroic phase of Jewish history in the late twentieth century. Soviet Jews accomplished something remarkable: they resurrected their Jewish identity from what had been a valley of dry bones after the destruction of Jewish life under Stalin. External factors facilitated this renaissance. Foremost among them, Israel’s Six-Day War in 1967 provided a powerful impulse for the revival of a Jewish national identity in the Soviet Union. Soviet Jews described Israel’s victory as a decisive event for the transformation of their consciousness.¹ Moreover, the post-Holocaust cry of "Am Yisrael Chai! (The Jewish people lives) resounded around the world as a rallying cry for the cause of Soviet Jewry,² who faced discrimination and potential spiritual—though rarely physical—death as Jews in the post-Stalin USSR.³ Jews abroad could with good reason feel proud of their role as midwives assisting the rebirth of Soviet Jews. Many Western Jews, burdened by the memory of the Holocaust and facing the more subtle challenges of affluence and assimilation in the 1960s, were seeking means for attaining their own spiritual renewal. As a result, in Western countries Jewish students, housewives, and other community members flocked to the streets to contest the power of the Red Pharaoh and demand that Soviet authorities Let my people go."⁴ This new struggle for liberation differed from the fights for revolution and Zionism that had mobilized Jewish communities in the early twentieth century.⁵ The postwar struggle was not less dramatic, however. Moreover, its achievements were undeniable. By 1991 almost a million Soviet Jews had immigrated to Israel.

As we look back, however, the drama of the struggle for Soviet Jewry that gripped Western imagination should not obscure the more prosaic desires and day-to-day struggles of the refuseniks and activists in the Soviet Union.⁶ In addition, that drama should not prevent us from acknowledging the complexity of the forces that came together to make the mass emigration of Soviet Jews possible. In Western countries, and particularly in the United States and Great Britain, the cause of Soviet Jewry fit into Cold War narratives as a fight against the Soviet Union and the revolution’s failed promises. It thus helped American Jewish communities demonstrate their pro-American loyalties. Nevertheless, most Soviet activists and their supporters resisted overtly anti-Soviet rhetoric, because it was not strategically effective for dealing with Soviet authorities.⁷ The cause of Soviet Jewry appealed to Western Jews in another way: it allowed them to support Israel’s growth by promoting the aliya (emigration to Israel) of Soviet Jews, without in most cases undertaking aliya themselves. Beginning in the late 1990s, Nehemiah Levanon’s publications revealed the extensive and mostly clandestine efforts of the Israeli Nativ Bureau to mobilize and guide Western efforts to put pressure on the Soviet government to ameliorate their treatment of Jews and allow free emigration.⁸ The tensions between grassroots and establishment Jewish organizations over how best to aid Soviet Jews are relatively well known by now. Far less widely known is the story of the Soviet Jewish activists themselves. This is why Yuli Kosharovsky’s work is so valuable: his memoirs and interviews provide a series of firsthand accounts of how the Soviet Jewish refuseniks bravely faced many challenges and how the Soviet Jewish movement developed. These accounts abound in personality, drama, and prosaic yet telling details. Kosharovsky led the effort to remember and record this history by initiating and coordinating the collective efforts of a huge range of fellow refuseniks and activists, whom he interviewed. In this way he continued playing the role he filled as an important behind-the-scenes coordinator of the Jewish movement in the Soviet Union.⁹ Kosharovsky’s history sheds significant light on the internal organization of the Soviet Jewish movement, including formerly secret initiatives such as the coordinating committee Mashka and the Cities Project to support Hebrew teaching in various provincial cities around the USSR.¹⁰ He gives us a view from the inside. Kosharovsky’s interviews bring to life the voices of those Elie Wiesel had once famously called the Jews of Silence. By the 1970s and 1980s, these Jews were decidedly Silent No More.¹¹

Many of those familiar external factors from Israel and the West facilitating the Soviet Jewish movement and push for aliya appear meaningfully integrated into the lives and efforts of Soviet Jewish activists in Kosharovsky’s history. There were also internal Soviet factors that include but are hardly limited to the pressure exerted by Soviet authorities on the refuseniks and activists. This introduction aims to provide additional context for the struggle of Soviet Jews by highlighting the view from among the Soviet grassroots activists. As in Kosharovsky’s history, here the government leaders remain present, but they yield center stage to the activists, and it is the activists’ voices we hear.

Making history in the late Soviet period had to do with becoming active citizens and developing alternative forms of historical imagination. This became possible following Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin’s crimes in 1956; after that event, and with momentum building in the mid- to late 1960s, groups began to connect with one another and to disseminate their independent views relatively widely.¹² Like the activists of the Jewish movement, the rights activists (also referred to as the democrats), many unofficial Baptists, Crimean Tatars, and independent poets of Leningrad, among others, became part of a growing, pluralized network of dissidence and independent culture. There was some overlap among groups, and occasional pooling of resources and strategies. The groups remained distinct, however, with cultural and educational activities particular to each community and relatively separate channels for spreading information. Each group conceived of an alternative history appropriate to its particular public. These groups changed history, not because Soviet Jews or rights activists brought down the Soviet Union, but because they helped create new historical models within the minds and hearts of people. Soviet Jewish activists were heroic because they wrote their own alternative history.

The highly publicized rights movement in the Soviet Union forms one significant backdrop for the development of the Jewish movement and other forms of dissidence and independent culture around this time. The rights movement got its start with the case of writers Yuli Daniel and Andrei Siniavsky.¹³ Arrested in the fall of 1965, the two writers were put on trial in February 1966 for publishing works abroad without permission and under pseudonyms. Siniavsky published under the very Jewish name Abram Terts (Tertz), although he had no Jewish roots.¹⁴ Yuli Daniel was of Jewish origin, although his satirical short stories, published under the name Nikolai Arzhak, did not feature specifically Jewish themes.¹⁵ Daniel’s wife, Larisa Bogoraz, became active with Siniavsky’s wife, Maria Rozanov, on behalf of the imprisoned authors, pioneering the strategy of writing open letters to Soviet officials that were circulated in the uncensored Soviet self-publishing system known as samizdat. Samizdat entailed the informal production and circulation of texts, usually in typescript form, and it included works from abroad that one could not obtain in the USSR: poetry by modernist-era greats such as Osip Mandelshtam, Boris Pasternak, and others, which had never been published or had gone out of print in the Soviet Union; open letters, petitions, and appeals; original essays and literary works; and bulletins and extracts from the émigré press began to be shared among people in the Soviet Union and between foreigners and Soviet citizens. Rights activist Vladimir Bukovsky, who helped organize a demonstration demanding openness in the proceedings against Daniel and Siniavsky, described the transformation this way:

Throughout Moscow, office typewriters worked overtime, clicking out—for the pleasure of the typists or for their friends—the poetry of Gumilyov, Mandelstam, Akhmatova, and Pasternak. It felt as if everyone were gingerly straightening numbed limbs after ages of sitting still, of people trying to twiddle their fingers and toes and shift position as their bodies pricked with pins and needles. It seemed there was nothing to keep them sitting still any longer, but they had lost the habit of moving and had forgotten how to stand on their own two legs.

The rebirth of culture in the Soviet Union after half a century of plague recapitulated all the stages in the development of world culture: folklore, epic, tales passed from mouth to mouth and from generation to generation, songs by troubadours and minstrels, and finally prose—novels, dissertations, philosophical treatises, topical articles, open letters and appeals, journalism.¹⁶

Bukovsky’s memoirs demonstrate that the Jewish national revival occurred in the midst of what many perceived as a rebirth of culture and a renewal of Soviet public life more generally. It also makes clear the basic conceptual model for history employed by Soviet rights activists. Bukovsky adapted the Hegelian philosophy of history with its stages of world culture from the official Marxist-Leninist philosophy of the Soviet Union. He turned that official version on its head: his half a century of plague and rapid post-Stalin recapitulation of the stages of progress represent a dissident history.¹⁷ Bukovsky’s account generalized the model that had been used by Soviet citizens for decades as they repurposed Hegelian and Marxist philosophy and metaphors in their own private accounts of lives overrun by history and the Soviet state.¹⁸

Other dissidents and activists developed more specific alternative histories. For the Jewish movement, Israel replaced the Soviet state as the subject of their history, one that infused the struggle for repatriation to Israel with profound meaning. This particular orientation shaped a distinct Soviet Jewish public identity and a historical narrative that was not (like the Hegelian narrative) supposed to be shared by all Soviet citizens alike. Alexander Voronel exemplified the choice some Jewish activists made. In his samizdat memoirs, Voronel traced his trajectory from youthful member of an opposition group, one of many that—as his memoirs helped reveal—existed even under Stalin, in the period 1945–52. At that time, these student groups, inspired by tales of the revolutionary underground preceding the establishment of the Soviet Union, did not know of the existence of other groups and were quickly suppressed.¹⁹ In the prison camps, Voronel benefited from the special care extended to him by fellow Jewish prisoners. Back in Moscow in the late 1960s, Voronel, a physicist, became close to the circles to which Siniavsky and Daniel belonged. Despite the respect and friendly affection he had for his friends among the rights activists, including Andrei Sakharov, Voronel chose a different path. Around 1971, he read the story of Yosef Mendelevich’s efforts to produce the Jewish samizdat journal Iton (two issues, 1970) and the repression he subsequently endured, and for Voronel this proved to be the call of destiny, the word from heaven.²⁰ He founded the samizdat journal Evrei v SSSR (Jews in the USSR, 1972–79). This highly regarded journal employed personal accounts and other means to address Soviet Jews where they were—many were not yet ready for aliya. They were groping for a Jewish identity in the midst of a Soviet culture that often marked that identity as negative and offered no support for its development.²¹ Thus personal histories, featured in the journal’s rubric Who Am I? served in this context as a springboard for a national Jewish consciousness.²² Voronel counted on the fact that fellow Soviet Jews’ reflections on the topic would help readers gain insight and make the choice between Russian and Jewish identity. Indeed, he claimed, the journal legalized for the ‘Soviet’ Jew the very concept of Jewishness.²³ This and other Jewish educational materials and activities initiated by activists (as illustrated by the description of the cultural movement in Kosharovsky’s account)²⁴ were designed to help more Soviet Jews become prepared for aliya.

Voronel’s samizdat journal filled a niche with those Soviet Jews in the center of the Soviet empire who were more assimilated than Jews in the recently annexed western territories or in the southern and southeastern areas.²⁵ However, the most broadly effective samizdat publication for creating an alternative Jewish consciousness centered on the history of modern Israel was surely Leon Uris’s novel Exodus (1958). Exodus circulated in several different samizdat translations and adaptations, and it had a bombshell effect on Soviet Jews, transforming them overnight into Zionists.²⁶ The novel’s appeal certainly had something to do with its portrayal of muscular Jews building a country and defending it. This depiction directly countered negative Soviet stereotypes of cowardly Jews who shirked military service.²⁷ It also resonated with the surge of pride among Soviet Jews associated with the victory of the Six-Day War. Uris’s novel was kitschy, to be sure, but it was also extremely effective at capturing the minds and hearts of Soviet Jewish readers and helping them imagine a national alternative to the Soviet state.

In their attempts to conceive of their own national alternative to the Soviet state, Jews of the post-Stalin era were like other groups in the Soviet Union. Lithuanian dissidents similarly developed their own alternative history and identity. The occupation of Lithuania and the history of resistance formed part of their alternative history.²⁸ So did local geography and folklore for clubs like Ramuva, which put out an unofficial journal of the same name for a short while from 1969 to 1971. Similar youth clubs formed in the late 1960s no longer stressed Lithuania’s occupation, but rather sought to revive and restore to life old traditions, festivals and songs, encourag[ing] interest in the country’s history, the cultural heritage and the language.²⁹ Such clubs exploited the possibility for organizing in universities and becoming semi-independent. In addition, the Catholic Church in Lithuania served as a source of alternative authority and identity, as well as a supporting unofficial infrastructure for producing and circulating samizdat publications. For many Lithuanians, an alternative history (and possible future) depended on the preservation of ties to its past, with religion playing a central role.³⁰

Samizdat journals and other periodical editions provide a good indication of the maturity of alternative public groups in the Soviet Union in this period.³¹ By this measure, the Lithuanians and the Jews had highly developed dissident publics, with thirty-two Lithuanian periodicals attested and twenty Jewish editions of this type—significantly more than other groups.³² Jewish activists and Lithuanians had strong ties to the rights activists in Moscow. Even while they developed their own distinctive identity, they borrowed tactics from the rights activists and benefited from amplification of their demands in rights activist publications such as the samizdat bulletin Chronicle of Current Events. However, there were other factors at play in the success of these groups.

While its initial impulse and constant guiding light came from Israel, the Jewish dissident public had a multifaceted identity that—as in the Lithuanian case—drew significant sources of strength from tradition and religion. For example, in the first Jewish samizdat journal, Iton (Newspaper), no. 1, 1970, published like practically all Soviet Jewish samizdat in Russian, an item on the New Prime Minister of Israel (Golda Meir) shared the pages with an essay on Purim and Pesach by Yosef Mendelevich.³³ Mendelevich linked the two holidays through the trajectory of the Jewish people from slavery to freedom. Mendelevich discussed biblical texts and traditional holidays to reveal their resonance for the present audience. At the end of the piece he provided readers with the dates in the secular calendar for Purim and Pesach in 1970.³⁴ The journal Tarbut (Culture), nos. 1–13, 1975–79, also regularly provided the dates for Jewish holidays in the back of its pages. Tarbut featured more articles than Evrei v SSSR on Jewish religious traditions and observance.

The desire for another way of organizing time according to a different sacred calendar and history appeared in various ways throughout Soviet dissident and alternative culture. Tatiana Goricheva and Viktor Krivulin led a religious and philosophical seminar in Leningrad, beginning in 1976. Goricheva wrote about the potential of the Orthodox Church calendar to create an alternative to the homogeneous monotonous grey of unsanctified time.³⁵ The samizdat journal that came out of their seminar, 37 (nos. 1–21, 1976–81), featured important poetry by independent Leningrad writers who looked back to the repressed heritage of Modernist poetry and its ties to biblical culture. Poems by Elena Shvarts, such as Moses and the Bush in which God Appeared, and by Viktor Krivulin, including The Approach of the Visage with its opening phrase The one who navigated across the Egyptian darkness . . ., indicate the highly serious interest in using biblical themes to gain a new perspective on history among members of the so-called Petersburg school.³⁶ The destruction of culture associated with the establishment of a postrevolutionary order constituted an important theme for Leningrad literati writing for samizdat.³⁷ However, martyrdom and a struggle with the Soviet state mattered less than the independent renewal of culture in the contemporary moment. Original writing in 37 and the chronicle of alternative cultural events found at the back of most of its issues testified to that renewal. Krivulin wrote about Joseph Brodsky and another Leningrad poet of this generation, Leonid Aronzon (like Brodsky, also of Jewish origin), as important predecessors for the revival of an independent literary culture. Aronzon, although he was not as well known internationally as Brodsky, and despite his tragic early death, exerted more of an influence on contemporary poetic development, as Krivulin and many of his milieu believed.³⁸

Those involved with the Petersburg school of unofficial poetry had few if any ties to the Jewish national movement, but they shared with the Jewish movement a creative relationship to local history and geography, including the highly significant Leningrad/Petersburg cityscape, which forms an important topos of Russian literature.³⁹ Among the Jewish activists of Leningrad, Mikhail Beizer led excursions devoted to local Jewish history and brought to life lost aspects of the city’s past. Apropos of a building on Dzerzhinsky Street that had housed the early revolutionary police (the Cheka) from late 1917 to spring 1918, Beizer recalled Isaac Babel’s story The Road (Doroga). In that autobiographical story, Babel described arriving, frozen and hungry, in Petrograd in December 1917 and being welcomed by the Cheka, with whom he was given work.⁴⁰ Beizer demonstrated how Soviet history, literature, and architecture could be decoded to tell alternative Jewish stories.

As part of his excursions, Beizer also talked about the Preobrazhensky (Transfiguration) Cemetery near Leningrad, with its important Jewish section.⁴¹ He described Abram Varshavsky’s burial vault combining Moorish and pseudo-Russian elements. To provide context for this person, Beizer cited Osip Mandelshtam’s recollection of a childhood visit to the synagogue in his memoirs The Noise of Time. Mandelshtam remembered "two top-hatted gentlemen, splendidly dressed and glossy with wealth, with the refined movements of men of the world, touch the heavy book, step out of the circle and on