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World Jewish News
Doctoral Thesis on the subject "Political Leadership of the USSR and the Intellectuals of Jewish Origin (1936-1953)" D
11.01.2009
As the candidate for a degree G. Kostyrchenko pointed out in his speech, the subject he has been working on since 1991 is still relevant.
"Discussions on the role of Jews in Russian revolutions, their participation in the leadership of the Bolshevik Party and the management of the country, their contribution to the victory in the Great Patriotic War, on the extent of the Holocaust and on other related issues are still in progress, and not only among professionals.
Meanwhile, a significant gap in Russian history - a consequence of former political taboo on this range of problems - has not yet been filled up, and therefore our knowledge of the Soviet era can be hardly called comprehensive or totally scientifically correct," underscored G. Kostyrchenko.
He noted that the contribution of Jewish intellectuals in the critical areas of the country's development - from scientific and technical to cultural and educational - was quite extensive.
In the late 1930s. the proportion of Jews among researchers and university professors in the Soviet Union was almost 16% (more than 15 thousand specialists), and the same percentage - among doctors (21 thousand), 10% - among the engineers and architects (25 thousand), more than 10% - among the workers of culture and artists (47 thousand).
According to G.V. Kostyrchenko, the relations of the Soviet state with the Jewry in general and its intellectual elite in particular, can be divided into three periods: 1. 1917-1935; 2. 1936-1953; 3.1953-1991.
The thesis, built primarily on archival materials found by the author, covers the second, perhaps the most dramatic of these periods.
As the candidate for a degree pointed out, since the Bolsheviks came to power and until the early 1940's, two fundamentally different periods can be traced in the Bolshevists "Jewish policies". Their socio-political and ethno-cultural parameters were determined by a common vector of the evolution of the state and society in the USSR.
During the first period (1917-1935) the authorities mostly patronized Jews – both as discriminated by the Tsarist government ethnic minority, and supporters of the country’s sovietization. However, the authorities supported not all Jews, but only those who repudiated the "bourgeois" and cultural and traditional background (Judaism, the Hebrew language, etc.), engaged in the "new life" as a "Soviet servant," "people's intellectual," or "worker." Although impetuous assimilation processes were totally supported by power, they were not forced by its hand, moreover, the government sponsored the development of "proletarian" Yiddish culture as a stage on the way to denationalization. The second period of "Jewish Policy" (from 1936) was characterized by Stalin's monocracy - a psychologically complicated personality, prone to Judaeophobia (Gennadij Kostyrchenko specifically noted the tremendous impact of Stalin on the emergence of anti-Semitism in power institutions) and against the backdrop of the regime's reorientation from the internationalist paradigm by Lenin to an emphasis on national authorities, accompanied by massive repressions against ethnic minorities.
It was during this period that the genesis of state anti-Semitism took place, which became fully evident in the years 1949-1953 and constitutes the subject matter of the research.
This phenomenon was based on Stalin's monocracy, and such components of his political regime as the ideology of a "besieged fortress", isolationism, and political xenophobia.
Foreign policy factors also played their provocative role: the post-war "cold" confrontation between the Soviet and Western military and political blocs, divided by the "iron curtain"; creation of the State of Israel in 1948, which went along with the USA in political and military spheres.
However, if anti-Semitism in Nazi Germany was a self-sufficient part of the official ideology and caused the Holocaust tragedy, in the Soviet Union it was latent and limited, used primarily as a means of manipulating the nomenclature and putting pressure on the intellectual layer, while creating noisy propaganda actions (like the fight against cosmopolitanism), many lay-offs because of the so-called fifth paragraph, several other administrative restrictions.
At the same time, the concealed and well-dosed character of Stalin's anti-Semitism precluded the possibility of large-scale repressive anti-Jewish actions.
Due to the fact that the post-war repressions in the Soviet Union were considerably less bloody than the purge of 1937-1938, during the culmination of anti-Semitism a relatively small number of Jews suffered from the political terror of the authorities. A total of 1 thousand Jews were repressed for "nationalistic activities" in the years 1948-1953, no more than a hundred of which were shot. The proportion of Jews in the total number of non-Russian Soviet citizens, repressed after the war on this charge, did not exceed 3%.
The Soviet regime almost until the very end (at least until the years 1988-1989) also carried the stamp of Stalin's "Jewish Policy", although that was severely restricted, which precluded the repetition of large-scale propaganda and repressive actions in the late 1940s - early 1950s.
It was under the influence of repressions that the process of differentiation of Jewish intellectuals began, many if not most of which were mentally straying from the former unconditional support of the regime, gradually acquiring oppositional opinions.
This was significantly enhanced by the growing emphasis on ethnicity in the minds of the Jewish population, due to the Holocaust experience and the same anti-Jewish repressions, restrictions and propaganda actions of the authorities, and as a result of the ever-increasing Western (primarily Zionist) influence.
The Dean of the Philological Department of the Maimonides State Classical Academy prof. M. Chlenov (who gave a speech), co-chairman of the scientific and educational Holocaust Centre I. Altman and other experts on Jewish history were present at the defense.
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