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176 7 Jewish ordinary life in the midst of extraordinary purges 1934–1939 [A people] that was not a people before and that never would have become a people without the lenin-Stalin nationality policy. This is the voice of the Jewish people.1 i didn’t know where my notion of Jewishness came from, but i know it seeped through at home.2 Between 600,000 and 2,000,000 Soviet citizens lost their lives in Stalin’s terror campaign and witch hunt for “enemies, saboteurs, spies, and bourgeois-nationalists.”3 The political repression targeted first of all communist party members, government officials, and red Army leaders who, accused of conspiring with capitalist countries against the Soviet union, were executed by shooting or sent to labor camps. From 1936 to 1939, terror mushroomed across the capitals, towns, villages, and collective farms of the Soviet union, in a system of institutionalized denounciations, in a climate of suspicion and spy mania. Those labeled “enemies of the people” by the nkVd were forced to write confessions naming their conspiratorial associates. They became “‘plague-bearers,’ . . . who . . . infected all around.”4 whether fired, arrested, or killed, most members of the party leadership and the trade and industry management experienced the terror, from the chairman of the committee on physical education of the BSSr, accused of owning a luxurious apartment in minsk and frequently getting drunk, to the supervisor for bread production in Belorussia, personally held accountable for the drop off in bread making and the swelling lines to buy bread across the city. in June 1937, the chairman of the Belorussian Supreme Soviet, A. n. cherviakov, arrested on charges of “right opportunism,” threw himself from the window of the fifth floor of the minsk nkVd building during his interrogation.5 like several other Soviet leaders he chose suicide in a desperate attempt to protect perhaps his family or friends who could become enemies-by-association and be accused of counterrevolutionary actions against the motherland. The attack on the Belorussian political leadership, launched from moscow, opened up a pandora’s box in minsk, as terror Jewish ordinary life in the midst of extraordinary purges | 177 encroached upon all walks of life. in 1937–38, minsk’s cultural, professional, and party elite was largely swept away. Stalin’s terror inevitably affected Jewish life in the city, as the most prominent leaders of minsk’s Jewish cultural organizations and academic institutions were purged. in a uniquely violent fashion—compared to other Soviet centers—leading figures on the Jewish street were killed and Yiddish-language institutions closed down. Accusations against imagined vestiges of “Bundism” resurfaced stubbornly in the form of fierce attacks in the Soviet Jewish schools and in city factories with a large Jewish management and workforce. The charge of “Bundism,” as synonymous of “anti-Soviet counterrevolutionary activity” and “nationalism,” became exceptionally common in minsk, even exceeding charges of alleged zionism. But Soviet Jewish life in the late 1930s, so scantily researched, should not be associated with the brutality of the purges and let alone it should not be portrayed as the utter obliteration of Jewish life and identity. purging the Jewish street from so-called bourgeois-nationalists and enemies of the people, while affecting severely the lives of Jews did not erase altogether ethnic self-identification among the great majority of the Jewish population of minsk. The preservation of overwhelmingly Jewish neighborhoods throughout the city, where Yiddish continued to be spoken and heard, as well as the celebration of new Jewish heroes, such as the Jewish Stakhanovite, influenced the persistence and even revival of Jewish ethnic identity in the second half of the 1930s. Furthermore, and perhaps most importantly, the awareness of thriving anti-Semitism abroad—compared to the official intolerance against anti-Semitism at home—marked a new development in national pride and self-esteem among Soviet Jews in the latter part of the 1930s. ordinary life in the 1930s minsk is no longer the dull gloomy shtetl of the past with its small wooden sidewalks . . . . minsk is now a city with a boisterous lively activity, with a vibrant cultural life at events and institutions, everywhere.6 in his satiric literary masterpiece Zelmenyaner, moshe kulbak described the sovietization of a Jewish family in the Belorussian capital. narrated as a generational struggle between the old uncles and aunts and the young nephews and nieces, the adjustment to Soviet society entailed not only the acceptance of modernity, made of electricity and literacy, but also the systematic rejection...

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