Documents on Ukrainian Jewish Identity and Emigration 1944-1990 (review)

From the late 1960s on, successive Soviet governments were confronted by Jewish citizens' demands to emigrate—demands supported by many in the West. Perhaps surprisingly, the Soviet regime took these demands seriously. True, Jews had the highest levels of education of any Soviet nationality and were almost completely urbanized, placing them near the levers of power, though few could actually approach them. On the other hand, Jews constituted less than 2 percent of the population in every Soviet republic, and they had long since abandoned or been deprived of all their political, social, and cultural institutions. The documents in this volume demonstrate that in Ukraine, which had well over a third of the Soviet Jewish population, officials in the Communist Party, the State Security Committee (KGB), and government took very seriously the challenge posed by the would-be émigrés. The authorities mobilized the mass media, party and state organs, economic enterprises, and domestic and foreign opinion to try to counter the demands of the Jewish activists. As A. Grigorenko, a secretary of the Chernivtsi oblast party committee, wrote in 1967: "The Party obkoms [provincial committees], gorkoms [city committees], raikoms [district or rural committees], together with the primary [Communist] Party organizations at . . . enterprises . . . and institutions are carefully studying the attitudes and remarks of citizens of Jewish nationality" (p. 156). Because the regime had no intention of satisfying Jewish aspirations or demands, Jews saw this "study" as harassment, and it probably spurred their attempts to emigrate. At times, Soviet officials seemed to believe their own myths and propaganda, but they were fully aware that the movement for emigration could spill over to other Soviet groups and weaken the system as a whole.

In March 1971, Petro Shelest, the first secretary of the Ukrainian Communist Party, wrote to the Soviet Politburo (of which he was a full member) that despite the rejection of two of every three applications to emigrate, the prospective emigrants continued to "send large numbers of letters and complaints and to engage in provocative conversations. These are then used by Zionist elements to incite anti-Soviet sentiments among the Jewish population." Shelest indicated that the "relevant organs" were "reviewing the earlier denials of exit visas for those who are not valuable specialists or privy to state secrets, or who incite on behalf of pro-emigration groups" (p. 186). Essentially, Shelest was admitting that persistence and the campaign for emigration were effective. He was also outlining categories of those who later became known as "refuseniks," though in this period the authorities permitted most of the leaders of the emigration movement to leave for Israel. From this period until 1980, large numbers of Jews were allowed to leave.

Vladimir Khanin has done a commendable service in selecting and transcribing well-translated documents, mainly from the Central State Archive of Public Organizations in Ukraine. The book serves as a companion volume to Boris Morozov's Documents on Soviet Jewish Emigration (London: Frank Cass, 1999), which provided insights into Politburo discussions of emigration and the impact on U.S.-Soviet relations, among other issues. The reader must be cautioned that Khanin's volume is a selection of documents, and therefore a double bias is unavoidable—that introduced by the perceptions of Soviet Ukrainian officials and what they chose to report, and that produced by the editor's selection.

The book comprises three sections, each introduced by a short overview of the period: Jewish responses to the Holocaust and postwar anti-Semitism (1945–1953); the impact of the post-Stalinist "thaw" on Jewish life in Ukraine until the June 1967 Middle East war (1953–1967); and the period in which emigration became the major issue (from 1967). The documents in the first section vividly illustrate Jews' reactions to the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 and to the "anti-cosmopolitan" and other anti-Semitic campaigns in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Open corruption and arbitrary use of power seemed quite widespread among employees of the internal security...