The following article originally appeared in The Jewish Voice on August 10, 1984.
Thirty-two years ago today in the dark cellars of Moscow’s Lubyianka Prison, on Aug. 12, 1952, after months of torture and interrogation, 24 of the leading Jewish writers, artists and poets of the USSR were murdered. This was the climax of Stalin’s campaign to eradicate Jewish culture from the Soviet Union. Three decades later, in spite of detente, grain deals, cultural exchanges, Senate resolutions, human-rights petitions, Helsinki and Madrid, Soviet policy has never veered from this relentless quest to reduce Jewish life in the USSR to a footnote in its revisionist history.
This was not always so. Shortly after Lenin signed the 1917 “Declaration of Rights to the People of Russia,” Jewish cultural institutions flourished. At that time, one could choose from 11 Yiddish newspapers or more than 60 periodicals, visit Yiddish theaters in major cities and purchase books from publishing houses offering dozens of editions with copies in the millions. Although such activities were carried out strictly according to party policy, few sizable Jewish population centers were without a cultural establishment employing Yiddish, the language of “the Jewish minority.”
By the 1920s and ’30s, however, Jewish culture began its subsistence on a starvation diet. Government assistance was diminished in stages. Jewish identity was discouraged and assimilation was officially promoted.
In the late 1940s, Stalin began his campaign to systematically dismantle Jewish culture. By 1948, only one school of higher learning remained. It was closed later that year. In 1949, all theaters, including the Yiddish State Theater in Moscow, were denied all state subsidies and subsequently folded. The glorious tradition of Jewish theater in Russia came to an abrupt end.
That same year the campaign against Jewish culture turned brutal. In 1949 and into the 1950s – what had been called “the Black Years” — many writers and poets simply disappeared. Solomon Mikhoels, the great actor and community leader, was lured to Minsk and found decapitated by what was later reported as an “auto accident.” Writers and editors were imprisoned, never to be heard from. In the winter of 1948-49, it was estimated that more than 431 artists, writers and musicians disappeared into the Gulag.
The fate of the most prestigious of the Soviet Jewish writers was reserved for the summer of 1952.
The trial, which resulted in “The Night of the Murdered Poets,” began on July 11, 1952. Among the 25 accused were renowned Jewish academics, physicians and the leading Jewish poets and writers in the USSR. They were charged with being “rebels,” “agents of American imperialism,” who also wanted to separate Crimea from the Soviet Union and to “establish their own Jewish bourgeois national Zionist republic.”
On July 18, the verdict was announced: 24 received the death penalty; only one, a woman, was sentenced to a long prison term.
On Aug. 12, the executions were carried out. They were not acknowledged for years. The bodies of the victims were never discovered. A decade later, during the Khrushchev “thaw,” some writers’ wives were sent a slip of paper telling about their husbands’ “liquidation” – with no explanation other than it had been done “under a bad time.”
In the ’50s, the executions were halted, but the policies set down by Stalin have continued in various guises until the present. Some examples: Jewish learning has been almost totally suppressed. Not one Jewish school has been permitted in the Soviet Union for more than 30 years. Generations of children have grown up ignorant of their Yiddish heritage. The so-called Moscow Yeshiva, 16 years old, consists of a handful of overaged students and has yet to graduate one rabbi. By contrast, other, much smaller, ethnic national groups such as the Germans and the Poles, enjoy a wide network of cultural and educational institutions conducted in their own language.
Despite the official suspension of Jewish culture in the USSR, a thirst for Hebrew and Jewish education persists. Seminars and unofficial classes proliferate — in cramped apartments, under KGB surveillance and harassment, and with the ever-present threat of arrest for “subversive activities.” Study groups and Hebrew language courses – from kindergarten to adult levels – exist in many cities, often using primitive, home-made texts.
Yet, while the flame of hope flickers, the tunnel grows darker. During the last year, several changes have been made in Jewish policy:
- An end to immigration: On April 1, 1983, Pravda appealed for, and later won, the establishment of an “Anti- Zionist Committee of the Soviet Republic.” On June 6, the committee – appropriately window-dressed with a Jewish membership – gave a two-hour press conference during which the deputy chairman declared that Jews no longer wished to leave because “family reunification has essentially been completed” and have ceased to succumb to “Zionist lures.” He said nothing of the 300,000 Jews already in refusal waiting for their exit visas.
- The severance of contact between Soviet Jews and Jews abroad: The same committee declared that “citizens who are of the Soviet people” and that Soviet Jews reject with contempt attempts by Zionist propagandists to interfere in their lives.
- Forced assimilation: Hebrew and Jewish history circles — sporadically harassed but comparatively tolerated during the past few years — were formally declared by the committee as antithetical to Soviet law.
- A broadening of anti-Zionist propaganda to include neo- Nazi themes. The chairman of the anti-Zionist committee characterized Zionism as a “man-hating ideology” which is “modeled on the ideas and methods of Hitler.” Much in the propaganda campaign is drawn from a newly published book by Lev Korneyev, the most prolific anti-Semitic author in the USSR, entitled The Class Essence of Zionism. In this and other recent writing, Korneyev declares the Holocaust “a myth of Zionist propaganda” and argues that the figure of six million Jews is a gross exaggeration.
Despite the 32-year span, the repercussions of Aug. 12, 1952, live on in Soviet policy. May this date and the memory of the murdered poets, writers and intellectuals it recalls give pause to those of conscience and human concern everywhere.
JEWISH EMIGRATION FROM THE USSR
STATISTICS
| 1965 -June 1967 | 4,498 | 1975 | 13,221 |
| Oct. 1968 – 1970 | 4,235 | 1976 | 14,261 |
| 1971 | 13,022 | 1977 | 16,736 |
| 1972 | 31,681 | 1978 | 28,864 |
| 1973 | 34,733 | 1979 | 51,320 |
| 1974 | 20,628 | 1980 | 21,471 |
| 1981 | 1982 | 1983 | 1984 | |||||
| January | 850 | (24.9)* | 290 | (26.9)* | 81 | (23.5)* | 88 | (25.0)* |
| February | 1,407 | (15.8) | 283 | (21.9) | 125 | (27.2) | 90 | (54.4) |
| March | 1,249 | (14.3) | 289 | (27.3) | 101 | (32.7) | 51 | (35.2) |
| April | 1,155 | (15.5) | 288 | (29.5) | 114 | (9.6) | 74 | (32.4) |
| May | 1,141 | (15.8) | 205 | (27.8) | 116 | (29.3) | 109 | (45.9) |
| June | 866 | (14.5) | 182 | (27.5) | 102 | (38.2) | 72 | (40.3) |
| July | 779 | (22.2) | 186 | (23.1) | 167 | (22.8) | ||
| August | 430 | (22.3) | 238 | (20.2) | 130 | (22.3) | ||
| September | 405 | (28.6) | 246 | (20.7) | 135 | (40.0) | ||
| October | 368 | (24.2) | 168 | (34.5) | 90 | (46.2) | ||
| November | 363 | (25.0) | 137 | (38.0) | 56 | (42.9) | ||
| December | 434 | (22.8) | 176 | (39.8) | 97 | (32.0) | ||
| 9,447 | (18.6) | 2,688 | (27.3) | 1,314 | (29.5) | |||
From October 1968 – June 1984, 264,105 persons left the Soviet Union with visas. Approximately 163,062 of them went to Israel.
‘Figures represent the percentage of those who proceeded to Israel.
Day Grows Darker
Leyb Kvitko (1893-1952)
Day grows darker
And darker.
Gangs come nearer to the town,
Gangs muddled with blood
From killing children hardened,
Coming closer zealously greedy,
Cutting heads,
Exhausted, terrified heads.
And my head too,
My head that’s yet so young,
And too my heart,
That lullabied deep inside the joy of love.
…A survivor tragic
Will enumerate the slain.
My dead name will he write
Along with many others in letters small
On a lengthy list.
Oh, may he not forget at least
To note on that long list
How old I was!
Let him leastwise note,
That my heart was bloody young
That strong, like fear, was my will to live,
Strong and crazed,
Like my final day.
translated by Herbert H. Paper