“The Soviet Union’s destruction of Jewish culture commenced, in a calculated move, with Jews positioned as the destroyers. It began with Yevsektsiya, committees of Jewish Bolsheviks whose paid government jobs from 1918 through 1930 were to persecute, imprison, and occasionally murder Jews who participated in religious or Zionist institutions - categories that included everything from synagogues to sports clubs, all of which were shut down and their leaders either exiled or “purged.” This went on, of course, until the regime purged the Yevsektsiya members themselves. The pattern repeated in the 1940s. As sordid as the Yevsektsiya chapter was, I found myself more intrigued by the undoing of the Jewish Antifascist Committee, a board of prominent Soviet Jewish artists and intellectuals established by Joseph Stalin in 1942 to drum up financial support from Jews overseas for the Soviet war effort. Two of the more prominent names on the JAC’s roster of talent were Solomon Mikhoels, the director of the Moscow State Yiddish Theater, and Ala’s father Benjamin Zuskin, the theater’s leading actor. After promoting these people during the war, Stalin decided these loyal Soviet Jews were no longer useful, and charged them all with treason. He had decided that this committee he himself had created was in fact a secret Zionist cabal, designed to bring down the Soviet state. Mikhoels was murdered first, in a 1948 hit staged to look like a traffic accident. Nearly all of the others - Zuskin and twelve more Jewish luminaries, including the novelist Dovid Bergelson, who had proclaimed Moscow as the center of the Yiddish future - were executed by firing squad on August 12, 1952. Just as the regime accused these Jewish artists and intellectuals of being too “nationalist” (read: Jewish), today’s long hindsight makes it strangely tempting to read this history and accuse them of not being “nationalist” enough - that is, of being so foolishly committed to the Soviet regime that they were unable to see the writing on the wall. Many works on this subject have said as much. In Stalin’s Secret Pogroms, the indispensable English translation of transcripts from the JAC “trial,” Russia scholar Joshua Rubenstein concludes his lengthy introduction with the following: ‘As for the defendants at the trial, it is not clear what they believed about the system they each served. Their lives darkly embodied the tragedy of Soviet Jewry. A combination of revolutionary commitment and naïve idealism had tied them to a system they could not renounce. Whatever doubts or misgivings they had, they kept to themselves, and served the Kremlin with the required enthusiasm. They were not dissidents. They were Jewish martyrs. They were also Soviet patriots. Stalin repaid their loyalty by destroying them.’ This is completely true, and also completely unfair. The tragedy - even the term seems unjust, with its implied blaming of the victim - was not that these Soviet Jews sold their souls to the devil, though many clearly did. The tragedy was that integrity was never an option in the first place.”
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