Becoming Soviet Jews: The Bolshevik Experiment in Minsk

Introduction

1 introduction “This is my revolution.”1 Becoming Soviet Jews is a study of the acculturation process into the Soviet system as experienced by the Jewish population of minsk during the interwar period, from the Bolshevik revolution of 1917 to the eve of the Hitler-Stalin pact of 1939. The book examines the dynamic encounter between pre-revolutionary Jewish life and the new communist agencies and organizations that the Bolsheviks set up in the city. By focusing on issues of continuity and change in the lives of minsk’s Jews, it analyzes the modernization and social integration of one cultural-ethnic group within an intensely ideological state-system, which wielded on each and every individual an almost inescapable pressure to conform to its tenets, much more than other modern systems did at the time. The exploration of Jewish social, cultural, and daily life under the Bolsheviks reveals the intricacies and inconsistencies of the sovietization process and the patterns of Jewish accommodation. This process was far from linear and hardly ever uniform. it depended on a variety of factors, ranging from the social settings in which the individual operated and interacted with others, to the different views held by the individual and the options that Soviet society proffered to him or her. These factors included enthusiasm for communist ideology, ambition to succeed, quest for employment , anxiety to fit in, necessity to survive, fear of marginalization and punishment, as well as pressures from family, friends, and fellow city-residents. notwithstanding the variety of settings, views, and options, the ways in which all members of the Jewish group experienced their path to sovietization in minsk was shaped by the character of the city itself. minsk was a historic Jewish center long before the establishment of the Soviet union. it was located in the heart of the pale of Settlement , densely populated by Jews, the area where the majority of Soviet Jews lived until the eve of world war ii. The setting of minsk, a historic Jewish city since the sixteenth 2 | introduction century that was transformed into the capital of a Soviet republic (the Belorussian Soviet Socialist republic, or BSSr) by the Bolshevik revolution, influenced the complicated process of give-and-take between Jewish particularity and Soviet universal ideas that characterizes the process of becoming Soviet Jews. in spite of lenin’s violent rhetoric, and the quick tempo with which the Bolsheviks hoped to revolutionize russian society and bring Socialism to the world—or at least to one country—the transformation of the core of Jewish life occurred at a slower pace in historic Jewish centers in the pale of Settlement than it did in the russian interior, in particular the russian metropolises of moscow and leningrad. Geography curbed the intended radical consequences of the Bolshevik experiment (complete assimilation of the Jewish minority group into the Soviet family of peoples), impinged on the intensity with which the communist project took hold of the Jewish street, and facilitated the preservation of lines of continuity with pre-revolutionary Jewish life. As this study of sovietization in the pale indicates, Jewishness in the Soviet union varied according to local and regional traditions and conditions. From russian to Soviet Jews with a population of more than three million, the Jews who lived in the territories of the Soviet union constituted in the interwar period the second-largest Jewish community in europe after polish Jewry. Beginning with the revolutions of February and october 1917, a small but fiercely committed and highly organized group of Social-democrats gradually took over the core of the tsarist dominion, including most of the pale of Settlement. under the leadership of lenin, the revolutionary vanguard of the Bolshevik party began to create a one-party political system, a state-controlled economy and an official atheistic culture wherever it extended its power. in doing so, it brought about many changes in the lives of everyone, including the Jews. Before the Bolsheviks came to power, russian society had largely excluded Jews from positions of prominence. while social emancipation existed for some middle -class Jews during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, legal restrictions affected the lives of most. official curtailments on the admission of Jews into the military and state services, education and local administration complemented compulsory Jewish residence within the boundaries of the pale.2 Similar restrictions existed for many subjects of the empire who belonged to national minority groups. But because of their higher level of education and politicization, as well as...