Exiled in Palestine: The Emigration of Zionist Convicts from the Soviet Union, 1924-1934 by Ziva Galili and Boris Morozov (review)

This slender volume deals with a minor but interesting episode in the history of Zionism, the expulsion from the Soviet Union to Palestine of more than 1,000 Zionist activists. Ziva Galili teaches Russian and Soviet history at Rutgers University, and Boris Morozov is a research fellow at the Cummings Center for Russian and East European Studies at the University of Tel Aviv.

On the eve of the Bolshevik Revolution, Russia had the largest number of Jewish citizens of any country, more than 5 million. Despite the Jews’ reputation for espousing socialism and Communism, the majority of them favored Zionism. Thus in elections held in 1917 to the All-Russian Congress, Zionist candidates won 60 percent of the votes. This book informs us that “the Zionist parties received more than two-thirds of the votes given to Jewish parties in the elections to the Constituent Assembly. In these elections, the provinces of the so-called Pale of Settlement, which had large Jewish minorities, gave a considerably smaller vote to the Bolsheviks than [did] the Russian provinces.”

The Bolsheviks, under Vladimir Lenin’s influence, were fiercely anti-Zionist. In 1903, Lenin described the “Zionist idea” as “entirely false and reactionary in its essence.” In 1905 he wrote of Jewish nationalism in general and of Zionism in particular: “the idea of Jewish “nationality” bears a clearly reactionary character. … The idea of a Jewish nationality contradicts the interests of the Jewish proletariat, creating in it, directly and indirectly a mood hostile to assimilation, the mood of a ‘ghetto.’” Not surprisingly, soon after seizing power in Russia, the Bolsheviks began to harass and arrest Zionists. This despite the fact, documented in this volume, that Feliks Dzerzhinskii, the head of the secret police, opposed the persecution of Zionists. In a letter of March 1924, addressed to his deputies, he wrote, “I do not understand at all why [Zionists] are persecuted. … The majority of their attacks on us are based on our persecution of them. Persecuted, they are a thousand times more dangerous for us than they would be not persecuted.” Nevertheless, persecuted they were, and more with each year.

As this book tells us, conditions for Zionist activity in Soviet Russia worsened appreciably in the mid-1920s. In 1924 thousands of Zionists were arrested, 3,000 in a single day. At this point, a prominent pianist who was friendly with Lev Kamenev, David Shor, proposed that instead of being imprisoned or exiled, active Zionists be allowed to emigrate. There was a precedent for such a solution. In 1922, several imprisoned Mensheviks were permitted to leave Soviet Russia. In July of that year, Lenin told Iosif Stalin that he wanted the leaders of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party expelled from the country. Later that year, the state security organs arrested and deported 120 anti-Soviet intellectuals who were forced to sign vouchers in which they acknowledged that if they refused to leave or tried to return they would be subject to execution.

Shor’s proposal was for voluntary exile abroad instead of confinement. Under his influence, beginning in 1924 and through the early 1930s, some arrested Zionists were given the opportunity to emigrate to Palestine. Thanks to British cooperation, described in detail in this book, the would-be immigrants reached their goal. Ziva Galili estimates their number at 1,200-1,300. This trickle would become a flood: a few decades later. After the dissolution of the USSR, more than a million Russian Jews emigrated to Israel, and today they constitute some 15 percent of that country’s population.