promoted by the Soviet government, with Yiddish language schools, Yiddish cinema and Yiddish theatres, including the Moscow State Yiddish Theatre, under the direction of Solomon Mikhoels, which became a focal point for many Bolsheviks and left-wing Jewish intellectuals. In most Jewish families in the big cities the attachment to traditional Jewish culture lived side by side with an intellectual commitment to Russian-Soviet literature and art as a means of entry to the wider culture of the international world.108
This complex multiple identity (Jewish-Russian-Soviet) was retained by Samuil and Berta. Neither was religious. They never went to synagogue or observed Jewish rituals and holidays, though Berta always prepared Jewish food on Soviet holidays. Samuil and Berta knew Yiddish, but Russian was the language they spoke at home. Their daughters understood them when they spoke Yiddish, but did not speak it properly and made no effort to learn the language, which they regarded as an ‘exotic relic’ of the past. For the daughters, the question of identity was simpler. ‘We did not want to think of ourselves as Jews,’ recalls Fania. ‘Nor did we want to be Russians, though we lived in Russia and were steeped in its culture. We thought of ourselves as Soviet citizens.’ The family looked to education, industry and culture as the road to personal liberation and equality. Samuil took an active interest in Soviet politics and drew enormous pride from the achievements of prominent Jewish Bolsheviks like Trotsky. Although not an educated man, he filled his house with books and newspapers and loved to discuss political events, especially events abroad, on which he was extremely well informed. He held a ‘kitchen parliament’ with friends and relatives who came on Sundays for the famous ‘Laskin suppers’; Berta’s Jewish cooking was said to be unrivalled in Moscow.109
In some Jewish families the desire to be ‘Soviet’ was reflected in the suppression of any lingering identification with Jewish culture or religion. In the Gaister household, for example, Jewish customs were so minimal, consisting of little more than the odd Jewish dish, or phrase in Yiddish, or family legends about the pogroms in tsarist times, that even as a teenager Inna was not really conscious of herself as a Jew. Rebekka Kogan, born in 1923 to a Jewish family in the Gomel area, where Inna’s parents met, recalls her own childhood in Leningrad as ‘entirely Soviet’. Her parents observed the main Jewish customs and spoke Yiddish on occasion, especially when they did not want Rebekka to understand, but otherwise they brought her up ‘in a modern way’, she says, ‘without religion, or the influence of my grandparents, who still clung to Jewish ways’.110
Ida Slavina had a similar childhood. She was born in Moscow in 1921 to the family of a prominent Soviet jurist, Ilia Slavin, who had played an important role in the emancipation of the Jews in Belorussia. Ilia had been born in a small town near Mogilyov in 1883, the eldest son in a large family of poor Jewish labourers. From the age of twelve, Ilia worked and studied in a local pharmacy. By qualifying as a pharmacist, he was legally entitled to live outside the Pale of Settlement.* In 1905, he enrolled as an external student at the Law Faculty of Kharkov University. Despite his lack of formal education beyond the age of twelve, Ilia came top in the first-year examinations, which allowed him to enrol officially, as one of the 3 per cent of Jewish students permitted by the government’s quota. After he had graduated from the university, Ilia was offered a position in the faculty, provided he converted to Christianity. But he turned the offer down and returned to the Pale of Settlement, where he worked as an assistant to a barrister in Mogilyov. During the First World War, when the Germans occupied the western territories, Ilia moved to Petrograd, where he worked in the headquarters of the Union of Towns, helping Jews from the Pale of Settlement to resettle in Russia. After 1917, Ilia was elected as a judge and worked in the People’s Courts of Mogilyov, Gomel and Vitebsk. He moved to Moscow in 1921 and continued to rise in the Soviet legal establishment. A handsome, brilliant man, kind and gentle-hearted, Ilia had high ideals, which he invested in the Soviet experiment, even to the point of denying his Jewishness.
From 1903, Ilia had been an active Zionist, a well-known member of the Proletarians of Zion Party, which aimed to establish a socialist society in Palestine. Ilia’s Zionism was a product of his life in the Pale of Settlement, where the Proletarians of Zion were mainly based. But once in Petrograd, where he came into contact with Jews who were Europeanized and assimiliationist, Slavin began to move away from Zionism to Social Democracy. Having embraced the Revolution as an international cause, Slavin accepted the need to subordinate Jewish national interests to the class struggle. As the Chairman of the Vitebsk Court, he even defended the perpetrators of a working-class pogrom against the Jews in 1919, on the grounds that it was an expression of their class hatred of the Jewish factory managers.111 In 1920, Ilia left the Zionist movement, briefly joining the Bundists (Jewish Marxists) before moving to the Bolsheviks in 1921. Slavin acknowledged his ‘political mistakes’ (Zionism and Jewish nationalism) in his autobiography, written when he joined the Bolsheviks, and from that moment on he banished Jewish culture from the Slavin home. He taught his wife Esfir to read and write in Russian, forbade her to speak Yiddish and brought up his two children, Isaak (born in 1912) and Ida, to be Soviet people without any Jewish traditions. Ida remembers:
Father tried so hard to be correct, to live the life of the ideal Bolshevik. We had no Jewish customs in our home, and we never spoke Yiddish – we children did not even know it. Once he had become a Bolshevik, my father made an effort to purge from our home everything that reminded him of the ghetto and the Pale of Settlement. As an internationalist, he believed in the equality of nations, in the Soviet Union, and filled our house with Soviet things. His prized possession was a marble miniature of Lenin’s mausoleum that he kept on his desk.112
The Slavin family, 1927. Ida is with her father Ilia (centre), her mother Esfir to his right
Prospects for the new urban Jews, however, shone less brightly as the NEP came under further attack. In 1928, the Moscow Soviet again imposed a special business tax on small traders. For Samuil Laskin, the tax came at an awkward time. The NEP had re-established rights of private and cooperative ownership in housing, and earlier that year he had put money into a building project on Zubov Square: speculative builders were constructing a two- storeyed house in the courtyard of a large apartment block in this fashionable district of Moscow, and with his investment Samuil was set to own a three-room apartment on the upper floor. Samuil had dreams of private property – he wanted to provide for his three daughters while they were still studying – and so he refused to pay the tax in full. He was arrested, imprisoned briefly in Moscow and then sent into exile in Nizhny Novgorod.113 The arrest was part of a nationwide assault on private trade, which began in 1927 and led eventually to the overturning of the NEP. This campaign against the NEP was inextricably linked to the rise of Stalin and the defeat of his two main rivals in the Party leadership, Trotsky and Bukharin, who continued to support the policies of a mixed economy introduced by Lenin in 1921.
The Bolsheviks had always been ambivalent about the NEP, but many of their proletarian supporters, who could not afford the prices charged by private shops, were firmly opposed to it. Their mistrust of the NEP was reinforced by the wild fluctations of the market, which drove up prices whenever shortages of goods in the countryside led the peasants to withhold their foodstuffs from the towns. The first major breakdown of the market had occurred in 1923–4, when the Soviets had launched their initial attack on the NEPmen, largely to appease the grievances of the working class against the price inflation. In the middle of the 1920s the market stabilized, but a second major breakdown took place in 1927 – 8, when a poor harvest coincided with a shortage of consumer goods. As the price of manufactures rose, the peasantry reduced its grain deliveries to the state depots and cooperatives; the fixed procurement prices were far too low for them to buy the household goods they needed. Instead the peasants ate their grain, fed it to their cattle, stored it in their barns or sold it on the private market rather than release it to the state. Supporters of the NEP differed on the correct way to respond to the crisis. Bukharin favoured raising the procurement prices, mainly to preserve the market mechanism and the union with the peasants which Lenin had said was the basis of the NEP, although he acknowledged that the greater state expenditure would slow down the rate of investment in industry. Trotsky, Kamenev and Zinoviev (the United Opposition) were wary of making more concessions to the peasantry, which they feared would only postpone the Soviet goal of socialist industrialization. In their view, the state should resort to temporary requisitioning of the peasants’ grain to secure the stocks of food and capital it needed to boost production of consumer goods, and only then restore the market mechanism with the peasantry. Stalin sided with Bukharin – but just until the defeat of Trotsky and Zinoviev at the Fifteenth Party Congress in December 1927 – after which he turned against Bukharin and the NEP. Denouncing the grain crisis as a ‘kulak strike’, Stalin called for a return to the requisitionings of the Civil War in order to support a Five Year Plan to industrialize the Soviet Union. He spoke in violent terms about
