Stalin and the Jews: The Red Book: The Tragedy of the Soviet Jews and the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (review)

Vladimir Lenin and Iosif Stalin were not the first leaders in Russia to regard the Jews as "uncontrollable" (p. 32). Tsar Nicholas I, who ruled from 1825 to 1855, issued some 600 decrees that tightly regulated Jewish life. At a time when the vast majority of Jews in the Russian empire were confined to the Pale of Settlements (an enormous area covering parts of present-day Lithuania, Ukraine, Belarus, and eastern Poland), they were still permitted to organize religious and cultural institutions independent of imperial authorities. Although the conventional image of life in the Pale revolves around the isolated, impoverished residents of shtetls (small market towns with a predominantly Jewish population), Russian Jewry in the final decades of the nineteenth century initiated developments in culture and politics that profoundly influenced Jewish and European history of the twentieth century. Modern Yiddish and Hebrew literature emerged in the Russian Empire; Zionism as a modern political force first took hold among masses of Jews in Russia and Poland; and the Bund attracted tens of thousands of loyal followers with its call for Jewish cultural and national autonomy within a socialist society. Jews were also becoming prominent in Russia's emerging civil society, joining the ranks of teachers, lawyers, doctors, pharmacists, journalists, and businessmen. According to the census of 1897, the Jews were the most urbanized of the empire's major ethnic groups. At the same time, more than two million Jews managed to emigrate to the United States. On the eve of the Russian Revolution in 1917, Jews made up a quarter of the leading activists of the revolutionary parties.

This dynamic community, with all its simmering thirst for change, was inherited by the Bolsheviks in 1917. Tragically, the regime had neither the patience nor the understanding to deal properly with the Jews. Lenin himself expressed nothing but contempt for pogroms launched by the tsarist regime, calling them a "shame and disgrace on damned tsarism, which has harassed and persecuted the Jews" (p. 46). But in reality, Lenin was suspicious of any specific Jewish national claims. When the Communist movement began and Lenin's Bolsheviks had to compete with the Bund, he repeatedly denounced the Bund's support for Jewish cultural autonomy: "Only a Jewish reactionary middle class, strongly interested in turning back the wheel of history can rail against 'assimilation activities.'" (cited in Gennadii Kostyrchenko, Out of the Red Shadows: Anti-Semitism in Stalin's Russia, Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1995, p. 14). In Lenin's view, once the Jews were freed of discrimination and racist violence, they would abandon their religious traditions and the use of Yiddish and then conveniently disappear.

An abrupt dose of modernization was supposed to reinforce this process. The Jews experienced a dramatic social revolution in the first decade after the revolution, a development that Arno Lustiger fails to describe. Eight months before the Bolshevik takeover, the provisional government granted Jews equal rights under law. Under Lenin and Stalin, hundreds of thousands of Jews fled the former Pale of Settlements seeking secular education, professional opportunities, and life in the country's major cities. The urbanization of the Jewish population that had begun in the late Tsarist period accelerated under Bolshevik rule. The Jews, being overwhelmingly literate, rapidly advanced in the 1920s and 1930s, gaining prominent roles in Soviet cultural institutions, industrial plants, and scientific enterprises. By 1939, Jews were visible enough within Soviet society that Stalin felt it necessary to assure German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop that "as soon as he had adequate cadres of gentiles, he would remove all Jews from leading positions" (cited in Richard Pipes, Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime, New York, Vintage Books, 1995, p. 281).

World War II and the Holocaust were the greatest catastrophes to befall Soviet Jewry. Now that some of the...