Russians

by Gregory Feifer

  By the turn of the century, the Russian Empire held more than five million Jews, most inside the Pale, roughly half the world’s Jewish population. But millions were emigrating, many to the United States. The misery of shtetl life also motivated Jews to become prominent in revolutionary politics, whose promise of “internationalism” offered a path to assimilation through a new, common identity. Many Jews became prominent Bolsheviks. Others were leaders of the rival Menshevik faction of the Social Democratic Labor Party, whose founders of were also Jewish. Life improved very little for most Jews after the Revolution, however. Tens of thousands died in pogroms during the civil war, many in Ukraine. Still, the Pale’s demise prompted the migration of almost half its Jews to locations elsewhere in the Soviet Union, where they were able to attend school and settle in industrializing cities.

  Although Stalin’s repression didn’t overtly target Jews over other groups—the Communist Party ostensibly opposed anti-Semitism—his barely concealed prejudice surfaced near the end of his rule, when he accused a group of predominantly Jewish Moscow doctors of conspiring to assassinate Soviet leaders. Hundreds were arrested for allegedly taking part in the so-called Doctors’ Plot. What would have almost certainly become another mass purge involving arrests and executions, this time directed at Jews, ended with Stalin’s death in March 1953 and was quickly declared a hoax.

  Increasing numbers of Jews tried to emigrate to Israel and elsewhere during the decades that followed. Although the authorities attempted to limit the flow, international pressure, increased by American sanctions under the Jackson-Vanik amendment of 1974, forced Moscow to raise its quotas. In 1989, a record number of Jews—more than seventy thousand—left the Soviet Union, mostly for the United States.

  To his credit, Putin has publicly fought discrimination against Jews and made the opening of a Jewish museum in Moscow a priority. However, hearing otherwise apparently informed people explain their dislike for Jews by assigning them characteristics of the old stereotypes has darkened some of my many days in Russia. Although dark-skinned people bear the brunt of Russian xenophobia today—“black” refers to people from the Caucasus as well as Africans—anti-Semitism remains strong.

  The recent anti-migrant riots have encouraged speculation that Putin’s greatest political threat comes less from the liberal opposition than from nationalists doubting his devotion to their hard-line patriotism. Among them, MP Belov—who would soon thereafter be sentenced to six months in a penal colony for inciting racial hatred—informed a British reporter that “normal societies” boast active civil societies. “But in the period of Vladimir Putin’s rule,” Belov continued, “everything was done to get rid of civil society and revive aspects of Soviet totalitarianism. The elites are corrupt, and not working in the country’s best interests.”13 Large groups of nationalists who joined the 2011 protests against Putin made many other participants, most from the equivalent of the left, uncomfortable.

  Putin responded in one of his election manifestos with contradictory criticisms and prescriptions. His favoring of harsher punishments for internal migrants committing crimes outside their native regions harked back to tsarist laws restricting the movement of Jews. A week later, one month before his reelection, the same Dmitri Rogozin who had briefly headed the Kremlin’s short-lived nationalist Rodina Party sought to portray the candidate’s ramblings as part of a long tradition of grand visions for the country. A savvy young politician, Rogozin had achieved prominence in the 1990s by leading a lobby group called the Congress of Russian Communities, which advocated the rights of Russians abroad. Following his stint with Rodina, Putin named him ambassador to NATO in Brussels, where his saber rattling earned Rogozin a high-powered job back home as deputy prime minister in charge of the defense industry. Some believe Putin is grooming the sharp-tongued politician to succeed him.

  In a newspaper article, Rogozin lauded Putin’s manifesto as an “unprecedented event” that would have “long-term consequences for the development of our statehood.” Russia’s great calamities in history, he wrote, took place when past leaders failed to cater to the needs of ethnic Russians, the country’s “state-forming people.” Although Nicholas II sensed looming catastrophe in 1917, he helped provoke revolution by appealing too late for support “from Russian patriots and conservatives.” “Traitors” led by Gorbachev, Rogozin continued, contributed to the collapse of the USSR seventy years later by allowing the pressure of “ethno-nationalism” in various Soviet republics to tear the union apart. Painting a picture of impending global doom in a tract that could have been written by a nineteenth-century Slavophile, he accused the United States of hatching “hegemonic plans” that would divide the world in a new struggle for resources. A “fifth column” of liberals was doing Washington’s bidding by working to split the “great Russian people.” Rogozin praised Putin as the only European leader “who has not been run over by the steamroller of American hegemonism.”

  Election-season fearmongering, perhaps, but with serious implications. By the end of the year, a presidential commission had proposed a theory of a special Russian “civilization” that is separate from the West. Drawing a distinction between the description for ethnic Russian, russkaya, and the word that pertains to the Russian state, rossiiskaya, it openly derives from nineteenth-century philosopher Nikolai Danilevsky, a highly conservative nationalist who promulgated a theory of “historical cultural types.”14

  The chest thumping that passed for ideology wasn’t really prompted by a fear of Russia’s collapse—which the rabble-rousing rhetoric only encouraged—as much as by worry that what would collapse was Putin’s regime. I have to say that my years of observation cause me to see it very differently from Rogozin, as do most of the relatively small numbers of Russians who think like most educated Westerners. The attempt to co-opt the nationalist vote by legitimizing and glorifying the current authorities with yet another contradictory whitewashing of the past can only encourage the destructive forces that have made Russia a dangerous place to live if you’re not a white Slav.

  Isolating Russia as its own civilization has enabled Putin not only to brand his opponents as traitors but also reinforce his authority over possible rivals within the elite by threatening to accuse them of the same offense. His critics have had a hard time responding partly because Russia lacks a tradition of loyal, constructive opposition. That helps explain why the majority seems to have accepted Putin’s painting of his rivals as radicals together with his seemingly grand, uncompromising visions, cynical and hollow as they may be.

  That’s not to say that advocates of gradual reform have no precedents apart from the towering figure of Alexander Herzen. Among the others was a group of liberal intellectuals whose attack against the intelligentsia in Vekhi (“signposts”), a collection of essays published in 1909, unleashed a storm of controversy. Conceived by a gifted economic historian named Piotr Struve, Vekhi hit a nerve by laying into what the writers believed was the dogmatism and radicalism that were fanning destructive revolutionary activities. After the initial three thousand copies of the succès de scandale sold out almost overnight, four more printings quickly followed, along with a virtual industry of books and articles repudiating its premises.

  It was all about another lasting problem of Russian governance—the obstacles to compromise, the intransigence, that developed under absolutism. The Vekhiists believed the reforms Nicholas II had been forced to adopt after the 1905 revolution obliged the intelligentsia to try working with his regime. That position was more controversial than it may sound because even moderate groups rejected compromise with the otherwise rigid tsar, including the Constitutional Democrats, or Kadets, who would lead the revolutionary provisional government in 1917 before the Bolsheviks hijacked it. The philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev decried revolutionaries’ withering attacks on their rivals as assaults on knowledge. The intelligentsia, he wrote, “did not have an interest in truth itself: it demanded that truth become an instrument of social revolution, of
popular welfare, and of human happiness.”15 Berdyaev charged that the imposition of populist but despotic standards in the name of “love of the people” was subjecting Russian spiritual and cultural values to political interests. Sergei Bulgakov, a former Marxist like Berdyaev who became a controversial Orthodox Christian theologian, contended the intelligentsia’s worship of the people was really self-worship.

  Struve—a brilliant editor and politician who helped found the Marxist movement before going on to help lead its repudiation—accused the intelligentsia of “virulent fanaticism” and a “murderous logic of conclusions and constructs.”16 Another Vekhiist, the legal scholar Bogdan Kistiakovsky, criticized its lack of interest in the basic Enlightenment principles of individual liberty and rule of law, crucial ideas borrowed from the West. “Where is our L’esprit des lois, our Du Contrat social?” he asked about the seminal works by Montesquieu and Rousseau.17 Instead, “supremacy of force and seizure of power” were paramount.

  Needless to say, history vindicated the Vekhi essayists. After helping beget the Revolution, the intelligentsia went on to abet the establishment of a fanatical dictatorship that would quickly become far more murderous than the tsarist regime it had found so oppressive. In other words, the left, in a manner of speaking, shared the psychic and even emotional qualities of the right, both formed by the same absolutism. Vekhi’s metaphoric talk of despotic ideology became reality for the millions who lost their freedom.

  Among them was Zhora Leimer, my grandmother Serafima’s husband, who feared the worst when he wrote his last letter to her in 1940 because he didn’t know he would soon be returned from his Ural Mountains Gulag camp to Moscow. There he was reunited with Tupolev and other aircraft designers in a minimum-security camp called a sharashka. Immortalized in Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s The First Circle, such institutions exploited imprisoned scientists and engineers, many of whom considered themselves lucky to be able to continue conducting research for the military as a form of forced but relatively normal and well-fed labor. Permitted to visit her beloved Zhora, Serafima even hoped for his early release. Although Tupolev and others were indeed soon freed to better help the war effort, however, Zhora disappeared again. His German surname virtually sealed his fate after the Nazi invasion of 1941.

  Thirty years later, Serafima wrote the Moscow city prosecutor to request his rehabilitation, as absolving people of political crimes was called. “They were scheduled to finish working on a project to develop an airplane,” she said of his group, “and were waiting to be released, as he told me during a private meeting.” Instead, she said, “I received a statement from the Moscow city council interior affairs department saying that my husband, Georgy Ludvigovich Leimer, died in 1942 in a prison in the Kirov region.”

  The determined rebelliousness of Serafima’s daughter, my mother, against Soviet restrictions suggests she shared some of the same reactions to despotism. In 1967, Sergei Milovsky, the popular lawyer and man-about-town, took her aside to inform her that George was due to visit the following year. She should marry him, he said. “It’s your chance to leave this godforsaken country, and I doubt he’ll stay unmarried very long.” Tatyana didn’t agree. Common as the fantasy of escaping the Soviet Union was, she’d never seriously considered it. Besides, she’d recently broken off a serious relationship, and starting a new one with someone she’d already dated had little appeal. “Then you’re a fool,” Milovsky said sadly. Both my parents would soon be mourning his early death from cancer.

  But Tatyana didn’t dismiss his advice outright. Although she rarely saw George during his visits, he made certain to meet her at least once, sometimes to give her books he’d brought for her dissertation on nineteenth-century American literature. And just before he arrived in August of 1968, something had changed that encouraged her to reconsider. The Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia that crushed the Prague Spring killed the last chance to possibly make a variety of Soviet socialism work—a terrible irony, some believed—and dashed the remaining hopes of those who had admired it. Some had dreamed the effort to build communism with a human face might become a model for reform. Tatyana and her friends sank into a black mood of futility and helplessness.

  When George invited her to the Aragvi restaurant, where he would sometimes meet his KGB tormentor, her announcement about wanting to leave took him aback. “That’s like a bomb in my lap,” he told her, partly because he’d come on assignment from the Sunday Times of London and knew that what he’d be writing about the country’s retreat toward what was called neo-Stalinism would make trouble for them both if his articles appeared with his byline. But marrying Soviets to get them out was hardly unusual for foreigners, and he promised to do his best. Before his articles and the book they comprised, Message from Moscow, were published (anonymously), and before the biography of Solzhenitsyn, George was still in decent favor with the authorities, who were not beyond believing that granting Tatyana permission to marry might help induce him to write more positively about the Soviet Union. He was also set to return the following year for another assignment, and Milovsky had pledged to use his connections to help.

  After more struggles with the authorities—and after considerable anxiety because Tatyana would have a big black mark against her for wanting to marry an American if their application had been denied—they celebrated good news. Serafima and a handful of relatives and friends, including Milovsky, attended their ceremony in one of Moscow’s palaces of marriages. During the dinner that followed at the Praga restaurant, the husband of one of Tatyana’s childhood friends used his toast to say, regretfully, that “our best things always go for export.” Photographs of the dashing couple carrying a wedding present of a shiny samovar on a traditional visit to Red Square soon appeared on the front page of the British Communist Party’s newspaper The Daily Worker, purporting to show that Russian women could indeed marry Westerners without trouble. Tatyana soon discovered that that issue of the paper had been withdrawn everywhere in Moscow, surely because such mixed marriages were not to be encouraged.

  Since it would have been difficult to arrange a honeymoon afterward, George and Tatyana had already taken theirs: a cruise up the Volga River for an article he would write. Although they were far from strangers, Tatyana was not the girl of sixteen who had met George a decade earlier, so both were delighted to find themselves falling back in love during their two weeks together on the great river. She remembered telling herself she’d marry George soon after they first met, when the taxi materialized to take her to the Bolshoi. “Maybe it was part of some grand plan,” she’d later muse about their long separation. “It let me grow up by leading my own life, to mature in my own way. Nothing good would have happened if we’d stayed together during those early years.”

  She finally joined George in London on the warm, sunny afternoon of May 1, 1970. Despite her friends’ delight at and envy of her departure from Moscow, the fact that she’d left her old life and everything she’d known didn’t register until, halfway to Britain, her plane’s captain announced they were flying over Copenhagen. “Suddenly it seemed unreal. Really? Copenhagen? That’s it, I thought—I’ve actually left! It was an incredible feeling—I was somewhere in the sky and my dream was coming true! I was so lucky, so happy.”

  Tatyana found Moscow transformed almost beyond recognition when she first returned to visit more than two decades later, in the 1990s. “It was night and day. People were no longer afraid. They dressed well, expressed themselves freely and had opportunities. We’d had none of that.”

  But the Russian psyche remains heavily influenced by the Soviet experience. The stultification of the social sciences under communism, cut off from developments in the West for so long, may be partly to blame. Edward Keenan believes the lack of analytical tools that might have enabled people to understand their roles in a changing society helped breed deep cynicism about the contradictions between official ideology and their personal experience. The cynicism encouraged pilfering, alcoholism, violence a
nd other antisocial behavior that served to reinforce the traditionally pessimistic view of human nature.

  Widespread cynicism endures, together with much antisocial behavior. And despite signs that Russian attitudes were again changing with the protests of 2011, a Levada Center poll conducted soon after Putin’s reelection a few months later showed him retaining overwhelming support, chiefly among stay-at-home mothers (69 percent) and workers (55 percent). Among them were gray masses of uniformly older, mostly working-class people who had attended pro-Putin rallies, many paid or coerced to do so by their employers. What they lacked in outward enthusiasm for the candidate who painted himself as their protector they made up in numbers: tens of thousands of representatives of a vast, vulnerable population for which stability remains more important than change, with its possibility of yet more upheaval.

  Still, the growing contradictions between rhetoric and reality will inevitably threaten the president’s ability to dominate the ideological battle for Russians’ hearts and minds. The sweeping prescriptions and grandiose visions have done nothing to stem the soaring corruption, worrisome demographic trends, growing alcoholism and other signs that serious crisis may threaten. My mother, who is among those Russians optimistic that their country will someday join the civilized world, believes the similarities between the Putin and Brezhnev eras make such a transition all but inevitable. She cites a friend who liked to predict in the early 1970s that the then-unsinkable-seeming Soviet empire would eventually collapse under its own weight, “a colossus on clay legs.”