attempts to stamp out anti-Semitism as a relic of the tsarist past, and Soviet Jews were relatively untroubled by discrimination or hostility. All this changed with the German occupation of the Soviet Union. Nazi propaganda released the latent force of anti-Semitism in Ukraine and Belarus, where a significant proportion of the non-Jewish population silently supported the destruction of the Jews and took part as auxiliaries in rounding up the Jews for execution or deportation to the camps. Even in the remote eastern regions of the Soviet rear there was an explosion of anti-Semitism, as soldiers and civilians evacuated from the western regions of the Soviet Union stirred up hatred of the Jews.84
With the post-war adoption of Russian nationalism as the ruling ideology of the Stalinist regime, the Jews were recast as ‘alien outsiders’ and potential ‘spies’ and ‘enemies’, allies of Israel and the USA. Borshchagovsky recalls the atmosphere of ‘Kill the Yids!’ which developed under cover of the ‘anti-cosmopolitan’ campaign:
‘Rootless’, ‘cosmopolitan’, ‘anti-patriot’ were useful words for the Black Hundreds* – masks behind which the old term ‘Yid’ could hide. To take away the mask and speak that sweet primeval word was full of risks: the Black Hundred was a coward, and anti-Semitism is strictly punished by the Criminal Code.85
The language of officials who broadened the campaign against the Jews was similarly masked. Between 1948 and 1953, tens of thousands of Soviet Jews were arrested, dismissed from their jobs, expelled from their universities or forcibly evicted from their homes, yet they were never told (and it was never mentioned in the paperwork) that the reason for these actions had to do with their ethnic origins. Officially, at least, such discrimination was illegal in the Soviet Union.
Before the war most of the Jews of Russia’s major cities were only partly conscious of themselves as Jews. They came from families that had left behind the traditional Jewish life of the shtetl and embraced the urban culture of the Soviet Union. They had exchanged their Judaism and their Jewish ethnicity for a new identity based upon the principles of Soviet internationalism. They thought of themselves as ‘Soviet citizens’, and immersed themselves in Soviet society, rising to positions that had been closed to Jews before 1917, even if they retained Jewish customs, habits and beliefs in the privacy of their own homes. The anti-Jewish campaigns of the post-war years compelled these Jews to see themselves as Jews again.
The Gaister family was typical of those Jews who had left the Pale of Settlement and found a new home in the Soviet Union. Before his arrest in 1937, Aron Gaister was a leading member of the Soviet government, the Deputy Commissar of Agriculture; his wife, Rakhil Kaplan, was a senior economist in the Commissariat of Heavy Industry. Their daughters Inna and Natalia were brought up as Soviet citizens, immersed in the universal culture and ideas of Russian literature and barely conscious of the Jewish elements that remained in their Moscow home – from the food they ate to the family rituals on Soviet holidays and the tales of the pogroms which their grandmother told. In 1944, Inna enrolled as a student in the Physics Faculty of Moscow University. She worked in the evenings at the laboratory of one of her professors to support herself and help her mother, who, after her release from the ALZhIR labour camp in 1945, had settled in Kolchugino, 100 kilometres north-east of Moscow. In 1948, Inna’s younger sister was refused entry to Moscow University. When Inna went to find out why, she was told by the secretary of the Party committee that she should look at her sister’s questionnaire: Natalia had entered ‘Jewish’ under nationality.* This was the first time Inna was made conscious of her Jewishness, she says. A Russian boy with lower grades was admitted to the university instead of Natalia. He went on to become a professor.
In April 1949, Inna was arrested during her defence of her diploma at the university. Convicted as ‘the daughter of an enemy of the people’, she was sentenced to five years of exile in Kazakhstan, where she found a job as a schoolteacher in Borovoe, a bleak and remote steppeland town. Two months later, Natalia was arrested too: she had failed to record the arrest of her parents in the questionnaire she had filled out to join the Komsomol at the Moscow Pedagogical Institute, where she was accepted as a student in 1948. The fact that she had kept a photograph of her father, instead of renouncing him, was taken by her interrogators as an admission of her guilt as a ‘socially dangerous element’. Natalia was also sentenced to five years of exile in Kazakhstan. She ended up in Borovoe with Inna and her mother, who joined them there.86
Vera Bronshtein was born in 1893 to a Jewish family in western Ukraine. She joined the Bolsheviks as a schoolgirl in Odessa in 1907 and became an active member of the revolutionary underground, taking part in the Bolshevik seizure of power in Moscow in October 1917. She married a Russian factory worker, had a daughter, Svetlana, born in 1926, and then left her husband (who turned out to be an anti-Semite) when he threatened to denounce her as a ‘Trotskyist’ in 1928. Vera worked in the administration of the State Archives. She studied history at the Institute of Red Professors and went on to become a history professor, handing down the certainties of Stalin’s
Olga Loputina-Epshtein was born in 1913 to a Jewish family that left the Pale of Settlement for Poltava after 1917. She moved to Leningrad in the early 1930s when she married Boris Epshtein, another Jew from the Pale, and became an accountant in the Lenin Factory. Their son Mark was born in 1937. During the war, Olga and her son were evacuated to Cheliabinsk. Boris was killed on the Belorussian Front in 1944. Olga remarried and returned with her new husband and Mark to Leningrad in 1945. The city had a chronic housing shortage and, even with the help of Olga’s brother, who worked in the MVD, they could only find a tiny room in a communal apartment. Among their neighbours, who were mostly workers, anti-Semitic attitudes were strongly held, and they frequently surfaced during arguments. ‘The apartment was a tinderbox of ethnic hatred waiting to explode,’ recalls Mark.
The neighbours, who were often drunk, would swear at us, curse and threaten us, tell us we should go to Palestine, whenever they had some complaint, and then my mother would say to my stepfather, who was a pure Russian: ‘Kolia, why don’t you deal with your fellow tribalists?’ The atmosphere was poisonous. Sometimes the threats became so serious that my mother would run to the Party headquarters [in the Smolny building opposite the apartment], but nothing ever came of her complaints.
At school Mark was bullied by the other children, who refused to sit next to ‘the dirty Yid’. They painted ‘Yid’ on the door of the building where he lived. Olga complained many times to the school authorities. She even wrote to the Party leadership, but without effect. Nor was there any point in taking her complaint to the MVD, because her brother had been arrested, along with many other Jewish officers of the MVD, in connection with the Leningrad Affair. Olga became ill with anxiety and suffered several heart attacks between 1949 and 1953 which left her practically an invalid. After the death of her second husband, in 1955, she became wholly dependent on her son. They continued living in the same apartment, with the same anti-Semitic neighbours, until Olga died in 1987. At the age of sixty-five, Mark got married and moved out.88
The anti-Jewish campaigns also took their toll on the Laskin family. In 1943, the Laskins had returned to Moscow from Cheliabinsk, where they had been evacuated in the war. Samuil and Berta lived in the apartment of their eldest daughter, Fania, in the Arbat, where Zhenia’s son Aleksei and her sister Sonia also lived (Zhenia lived at the family apartment on Zubov Square). Samuil returned to the world of trade, supplying salted fish to Gastronom, the state’s network of food stores. Fania continued working in the administration of the tractor industry, while Sonia went to work at the Stalin Factory, the huge car plant in Moscow, where she soon rose to become the head of metal and technical supply. It was an important job because in the post-war years the Stalin Factory was introducing new technology and higher grades of steel for the mass production of lighter cars and lorries. Sonia was devoted to her work. Her husband, Ernst Zaidler, a Hungarian Communist working for the Comintern, had been arrested and shot in December 1937, and they did not have children. Zhenia worked as a radio editor and coped as
