As soon as the news of the Israeli commando raid on the Gaza aid flotilla, in which nine people lost their lives, broke on May 31, I started getting e-mails from my contacts in New York’s Russian-Jewish community. I have many such contacts, since I used to work for the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, a refugee relief agency that brought half a million of us to the United States.
It was mostly forwarded mass mailings in English and Russian, explaining why the flotilla was a terrorist provocation, how the blockade runners were al-Qaida and how Israeli soldiers showed exemplary restraint while protecting Israel’s right to exist. As an experiment, I wanted to see whether there was any nuanced view of the situation or sympathy for 1.5 million Palestinians being collectively punished by Israeli actions. Needless to say, I found none.
Israeli writer Amos Oz describes in his memoir, “A Tale of Love and Darkness,” how idealistic Zionists looked forward to the creation of a Jewish state — because after suffering discrimination at the hands of others for 2,000 years, Jews would show the world how fairly they could treat an Arab minority living in their midst. Early Jewish settlers in Palestine felt a responsibility not to do onto others what their oppressors had done to them and be a moral light upon the world.
Soviet Jews had a similar responsibility — and an even greater one. In the 1970s and 1980s, the struggle for Jewish emigration was part of a broader Soviet democracy movement. The opposition not only called for Jews to be allowed to go to Israel but placed Jewish emigration into a broader context of religious freedom, human rights and basic decency for all.
Some Jews were allowed to leave — mostly because the U.S. government put pressure on the Kremlin as part of detente between the two countries, but also because Soviet dissidents such as Andrei Sakharov were vociferous advocates of Jewish emigration. By the time emigration was shut down again in the early 1980s, more than 200,000 had departed for Israel and the United States.
The democratic movement wasn’t as lucky. It was quashed by the KGB, and most of its activists were jailed, killed, silenced or pushed out of the country. Those of us who left were the only visible achievement of the heroic dissident movement.
But our responsibility ran deeper. There were many Jews among the founders of the Soviet state and Bolshevik political elite. Jews were disproportionately represented in the dreaded political police, the Cheka, as well as in Stalin’s repressive apparatus in the 1930s. More broadly, Jews were among the greatest beneficiaries of the Bolshevik regime, migrating to Moscow and Leningrad from the old Pale of Settlement. Since the mid-19th century, Jews in Central and Eastern Europe had experienced a burst of national energy that was unprecedented in history. A large number of them now put their extraordinary talents and achievements to the service of the Soviet state in all aspects of economic, cultural and political life. Jews were also among the most loyal Soviet citizens until Stalin unleashed an overtly anti-Semitic campaign against “rootless cosmopolites” in the late 1940s and accused Jewish doctors of murdering Soviet leaders. Stalin reportedly planned a mass deportation of Jews to the Far East — and only his timely death kept this from being carried out.
But under his successors, the Soviet Union never shook off official anti-Semitism. Jews were kept out of universities, prevented from holding responsible positions and generally regarded with suspicion. Ironically, while Jews were seen as insufficiently communist under Leonid Brezhnev, a new brand of anti-Semitism has emerged in post-Soviet Russia that blames Jews for all the Bolshevik crimes — and thus absolves ethnic Russians of all responsibility.
But whether this fact is de-emphasized, as it was during the Soviet era, or savored as it is now by Russian anti-Semites, it remains true that Leon Trotsky, Yakov Sverdlov, Grigory Zinoviev, Lev Kamenev and so many early Bolsheviks who helped Lenin take power in 1917 and ran his repressive regime were Jewish. And so were some of the bloodiest figures in the political police, such as Yakov Yurovsky, who carried out the execution of Tsar Nicholas II and his family; Rozalia Zamlyachka, under whose political command tens of thousands of White Army officers were drowned in Crimea; and Genrikh Yagoda, the odious head of Stalin’s NKVD in the 1930s.
For the past 65 years, Germany has tried to atone for the crimes of the Nazi regime and to prove that Adolf Hitler, Heinrich Himmler and Adolf Eichmann were not an integral part of the German nation and a natural outgrowth of the German culture, but a colossal aberration.
Russia also has a lot to answer for regarding the 70 years of communism. It has begun to do so — for example, by admitting without usual equivocations that captured Polish officers were murdered at Katyn by the NKVD and recognizing this action as a military crime. Russia still has a long way to go.
While Germany and Russia have much to prove to the world, so do Russian Jews. We could have shown that Bolshevik criminals were not an outgrowth of the Russian Jewry by embracing Western pluralism, democracy and tolerance in the United States and Israel, the two liberal democratic countries where we ended up. Instead, we as a group have retained an us-against-them mentality and have continued to live by the famous Stalin-era dictum: “If the enemy doesn’t give up, he must be destroyed.” All we have done is move from the extreme left to the extreme right of the political spectrum. In Israel, we have created the Yisrael Beitenu party led by Avigdor Lieberman, the current Israeli foreign minister and, arguably, the most radical right-wing figure to hold this post in a Western country since World War II. In the United States, where 85 percent to 90 percent of us invariably vote Republican, it is not the Republican Party that is the problem but the almost North Korean unanimity. We have been put to the test by democracy, and we seem to have failed it.
Alexei Bayer, a native Muscovite, is a New York-based economist.