The Devil in History

by Vladimir Tismaneanu

  Timothy Snyder argues that the anti-Semitism in postwar Stalinism was tightly connected to the affirmation of Russians as the “safe base” of the regime after 1945. The starting point of this process was, of course, Stalin's famous victory toast to “the Great Russian nation” just after the end of the war. However, as Snyder stressed, “war on the Soviet territory was fought and won chiefly in Soviet Belarus and Soviet Ukraine, rather than in Soviet Russia.” But “Soviet Russia was much less marked by the Holocaust than Soviet Ukraine or Soviet Belarus, simply because the Germans arrived later and were able to kill fewer Jews (about sixty thousand, or about one percent of the Holocaust). In this way, too, Soviet Russia was more distant from the experience of the war.” In the operation of insulating “the Russian nation, and of course all of the other nations, from cultural infection … [o]ne of the most dangerous intellectual plagues would be interpretations of the war that differed from Stalin's own.”74 The tragedy of the Jews in the Soviet Union

  could not be enclosed within the Soviet experience, and was thus a threat to postwar Soviet mythmaking. About 5.7 million Jewish civilians had been murdered by the Germans and Romanians, of whom some 2.6 million were Soviet citizens in 1941. This meant not only that more Jewish civilians were murdered in absolute terms than members of any other Soviet nationality. It also meant that more than half of the cataclysm took place beyond the postwar boundaries of the Soviet Union. From a Stalinist perspective, even the experience of the mass murder of one's peoples was a worrying example of exposure to the outside world…. Precisely because extermination was a fate common to Jews across borders, its recollection could not be reduced to that of an element in the Great Patriotic War.75

  The outcome of the new founding myth of Stalin's Soviet Union had an ominous impact upon the memory and role of the Jews in the new polity: “The murder of the Jews was not only an undesirable memory in and of itself; it called forth other undesirable memories. It had to be forgotten.”76 Under the circumstances, the Soviet Jews rapidly became enemies “masquerading in the guise of Soviet people.”77

  Chief ideologue Andrei Zhdanov played a major role in the campaign, including the notorious Central Committee resolutions regarding literary journals, philosophy, and music. Initially a supporter of the formation of the State of Israel, Stalin developed strong misgivings regarding the presumed “divided loyalty” of Soviet Jewish citizens to their homeland. Members of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (a Soviet propaganda arm during the war) were arrested under hallucinating charges of conspiracy to disband the Soviet Union and to create “a Jewish state in Crimea.” Among the victims of this anti-Semitic witch hunt were major Yiddish language poets (among them Peretz Markisch and David Bergelson), Old Bolshevik intellectuals, a former member of the Central Committee and deputy minister of foreign affairs, Solomon Lozovsky, and academician Lina Shtern, a prominent physician who had come to the USSR as a political refugee from Nazi Germany. The defendants, including Lozovsky, refused to confess. With several exceptions recruited among secret political police informers, they were sentenced to death and executed in the summer of 1952 (Lina Shtern was the exception, probably because of her prestige among German Communists).78

  Stalin's final paranoia consisted in the designation of Jews—i n the USSR as well as in East Central Europe—as the new “enemies of the people,” as treacherously villainous as the Trotskyists in the 1930s. No one was spared suspicion: even the most loyal Communists could be spies and renegades, double-dealers and wreckers, especially those who might nourish hidden Zionist propensities. This Judeophobic cosmology included real and imagined Zionists but no real enemy of the Soviet Union. During the last month of Stalin's life, the anti-Semitic campaign reached its climax with thousands of layoffs of Jews in major Soviet institutions and the arrest of Kremlin doctors, mostly Jewish, who were accused of having poisoned or deliberately applied wrong treatments to such Stalinist luminaries as Andrei Zhdanov, Aleksander Scherbakov, and Marshall Ivan Konev.79 The propaganda department was instructed to obtain public endorsements from highly recognized Jewish personalities in support of imminent decisions to punish those suspected of disloyalty and treason. Among those approached by Central Committee emissaries were writer Ilya Ehrenburg and historian Isaac Mints, a member of the Soviet Academy of Science. Although a flamboyant supporter of Stalinist peace campaigns, the former refused to sign a letter meant to be published in the party daily, Pravda.80 The latter did it, probably after heartbreaking agony:

  Mints's daughter said that her father was deeply frightened and troubled by the accusations against him, and news of the Doctor's Plot only exacerbated his fears. She still remembers how pale he was when, after Stalin's death, he brought her the newspaper announcing that the so-called plot had been a fabrication. He spoke not a word, just showed her the headline. But Mints may also have felt that he was acting within the prescribed norms of Bolshevik academic culture. Mints could accept his public denunciation and participate in an obvious fabrication of Jewish sentiments because these were part of a cultural process and lexicon that he knew well. It was part of the standard public ritual that one had to go through to be a Bolshevik and to show one's commitment and loyalty.81

  While the specter of a massive pogrom loomed over the Soviet Jewish population, in the people's democracies, the struggle against “rootless cosmopolitanism” allowed certain local leaders to engage in an elite purge against the “Muscovite” factions dominated by Communists of Jewish extraction (many of whom had fled Fascism and had sought refuge in the Soviet Union between the two wars).82 The elimination of those otherwise totally loyal Stalinists reached a spectacular level in Czechoslovakia, where the chief defendant was Rudolf Slánský, who until September 1951 had been the general secretary of the ruling Communist Party and in that capacity had presided over the ruthless persecution of Communists and non-Communists. Since the trial had to confirm Stalin's conviction about the existence of a worldwide conspiracy threatening the Communist bloc, there was no way to exonerate any of the defendants. Furthermore, the anti-Semitic charges were bound to appeal to pro-Communist chauvinistic prejudices in the whole region. The numerous instances of anti-Semitism under so-called state socialism cannot be simply disregarded as aberrations. As Vassily Grossman rightly pointed out, since under totalitarian regimes there is no civil society, “there can only be state anti-Semitism.”83 Under Communism, the Jews became a target of policies of exclusion, isolation, and punishment on the basis of their ethnicity, were deemed potentially disloyal (“enemies of the people”) and inherently bourgeois (“class enemies”). Jewish identity turned at times under Communism into an innate, invariable, and even hereditary source of otherness that called for state-engineered excision.

  In addition, postwar Stalinist anti-Semitism forced Jewish Communists to persevere in the denial of their own identity. Very few maintained their Jewish names (Ana Pauker, Jakub Berman), while most adopted names attuned to ethnic majorities (Mátyás Rákosi, Roman Zambrowski, Leonte Răutu). Generally speaking, Jewish Communists abjured their background, proudly severed all links with their ancestors’ traditions, and engaged in vitriolic attacks on “Jewish bourgeois nationalism.” They were, to use Isaac Deutscher's term, “non-Jewish Jews.” After 1945, though, “Jewish Stalinists … were caught between Stalinist anti-Semitism in Moscow and popular anti-Semitism in their own country.” For example, Timothy Snyder remarks that in Poland “Jewish communists had to stress that their political identification with the Polish nation was so strong that it erased their Jewish origins and removed any possibility of distinct Jewish policies.”84 Under the circumstances, Stalinist anti-Semitism was both criminal and conducive to an entire community's erasure from the recognized grand narratives of the postwar order under Communism.

  A direct consequence of the Slánský events in Czechoslovakia was the purge trial of Paul Merker, a member of the Central Committee of the Socialist Unity Party (SED) since 1946. His initial downfall came about because of his relat
ionship during the Second World War with Noel Field and Otto Katz (part of the group tried and executed in Prague in 1951). However, the crux of the accusations against Merker concerned his opinions and positions on the Jewish question in post-194 5 Germany. In 1952, the SED's Central Party Control Commission produced a document that detailed Merker's errors. Unsurprisingly, it was entitled “Lessons of the Trial against the Slánský Conspiracy Centre.” The commission insisted that Merker was involved in “the criminal activity of Zionist organizations,” which, allied with “American agents,” aimed to destroy the “people's democracies” in Eastern Europe. Additionally, it claimed that Merker tried “winning over SED comrades of Jewish descent.”85 During interrogation (both by the Stasi and the People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs), Merker was stamped as a Judenknecht (“servant of the Jews”). In an interesting twist, even after the 1954 resolution of the Noel Field case, Merker was not released. On the contrary, now his whole trial was focused on his alleged collaboration with Jewish capitalist and cosmopolitan circles. He was sentenced in 1955 to eight years in prison but was released in 1956 without ever being fully rehabilitated. Nevertheless, Merker and his spouse never attempted to flee to West Germany. Taking an exemplarily Rubashov-like approach, Merker stated, “In the trial against me, I did without a defense lawyer in order to help keep the proceedings absolutely secret.” Again, the (il) logic of Stalinism was at work: “He had made efforts to prevent ‘enemies of the DDR’ from using his case, and he and his wife had been and would remain silent about the case.”86 His trial, sentence, and interrogation minutes were indeed kept secret, emerging only after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

  In May 1952 the Romanian media announced the elimination of three members of the Politburo, two of whom had been the leaders of the party's Moscow émigré center during World War II. All three had been party secretaries and had shared absolute power with the leader of the domestic faction, Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej. Ana Pauker, a veteran Communist leader who long had been lionized by international propaganda as an impeccable Communist fighter, lost her job as minister of foreign affairs and was put under house arrest. Her Muscovite ally, the Hungarian-born Vasile Luca, was accused of economic sabotage during his tenure as minister of finance and of collaboration with the bourgeois police during the party's underground activity. Luca was arrested and died in prison in the early 1960s. The third member of the group, Teohari Georgescu, a home Communist and former minister of internal affairs whose principal fault consisted in his close association with the Pauker-Luca faction, was also jailed but soon released, though never reinstated in party positions. The Romanian case is a perfect example of country dynamics determined by party factionalism and sectarianism. It can be said that the more marginal and less historically representative a Communist party was, the more profound its sectarianism was. The Romanian Communist Party (RCP), torn apart by internal struggles among its three centers87 during the underground period, preserved a besieged fortress mentality even after World War II. Given that in the pre-1945 period mutual accusations had usually resulted in the expulsion of the members of the defeated faction, once the party was in power, the effects of the continued struggles were catastrophic. Once established as a ruling party, the RCP projected a vision based on exclusiveness, fierce dogmatism, and universal suspicion at the national level.

  The mystique of the party called for complete abrogation of its members’ critical faculties. As Franz Borkenau put it, Communism, “a Utopia based upon the belief in the omnipotence of the ‘vanguard,’ cannot live without a scapegoat, and the procedures applied to detect them, invent them, become only more cruel and reckless.”88 For all practical purposes, the political history of the international Communist movement is the history of continual purges of different factions branded by the victors as “anti-party deviations.” Those defeated in party power struggles were labeled factionalists, whereas the winners were lionized as champions of the “holy cause” of party unity.

  Whereas the Slánský trial and the “doctor's plot” seem to represent the limits of the Stalinist system's irrationality, the purge of the Pauker-Luca-Georgescu group is primarily an expression of domestic revolutionary pragmatism. This process involved massive purges of the Jewish Democratic Committee and the Hungarian Committee, suggesting a concerted campaign of weakening the Moscow faction. In the Byzantine schemes that devoured the Romanian Communist elite, the mystical internationalism of the Comintern period was gradually replaced by a cynical position embellished with nationalist, even xenophobic, motifs. Gheorghiu-Dej and his acolytes not only speculated about Stalin's anti-Semitism but did not hesitate to play the same card.89 The stakes were absolute power, and the Jewishness of rivals was an argument that could be used with the Soviet dictator. If the national Stalinists were the prime beneficiaries of Stalin's warning not to transform the party from a “social and class party into a race party,”90 they were neither its initiators nor its architects. No less caught up in the same perverse mechanism of self-humiliation than their Polish and Hungarian colleagues, the Romanian Stalinists—Gheorghiu-Dej, Chișinevschi, and Ceaușescu as much as Ana Pauker and Vasile Luca—were willing perpetrators of Stalin's designs. They were allowed by the Soviet dictator to gain autonomy not from the center but from another generation of the center's agents. It was indeed a sort of moment of emancipation, but one that signaled Moscow's sanctioning of the coming of age of a new Stalinist elite in Romania. The history of the Stalinist ruling group in other East-Central European countries is strikingly similar. There is the same sense of political predestination, the same lack of interest in national values, the same obsequiousness vis-à-vis the Kremlin.

  An indicator of the continuous Stalinist nature of the Romanian regime, of its permanent purge mentalité, is Leonte Răutu's fateful longevity in the highest power echelons as the high priest of a cultural revolution à la roumaine.91 A prominent party veteran of Bessarabian-Jewish origin, perfectly fluent in Russian, he was the architect of anticultural politics of Stalinism in Romania. Until his removal from the Political Executive Committee in the summer of 1981, he epitomized a perinde ac cadaver commitment to the Marxist-Leninist cause. He was the most significant figure of the “party intellectuals,” who produced, reproduced and instrumentalized ideological orthodoxy. A professional survivor prone to the most surreal dialectical acrobatics, Leonte Răutu adjusted and took advantage of the regime's gradual systemic degeneration, making a successful transition from professional revolutionary to cunning and slippery bureaucrat always ready to hunt down heretics among party ranks and within society as whole. Born in 1910, Răutu joined the RCP in 1929 (while a student in mathematics at Bucharest University) and in the 1930s became head of the propaganda and agitation department. In Doftana Prison he came in contact with Gheorghiu-Dej and Nicolae Ceaușescu. In the following years he became the editor of Scînteia, the party's illegal newspaper. In 1940 he left Romania and took refuge in the USSR, becoming the director of the Romanian section of Radio Moscow. He returned to the country with Ana Pauker, Vasile Luca, and Valter Roman, and initiated a domestic version of Zhdanovism. In one of his most vehemently Zhdanovite speeches, “Against Cosmopolitanism and Objectivism in Social Sciences,”92 Răutu declared war on everything that was worthy in the national culture: “The channels by which cosmopolitan views become pervasive, especially among intellectuals, are well known: servility to and kowtowing to bourgeois culture, the empty talk of the so-called community of progressive scientists and the representatives of reactionary, bourgeois science, national nihilism, meaning the negation of all that is valuable and progressive for each people in his culture and history, the contempt for the people's language, hatred of the building of socialism, the defamation of all that is new and developing, replacing the partiinost with bourgeois objectivism, which ignores the fundamental difference between socialist, progressivist culture and bourgeois, reactionary culture.”93

  After 1953, he pursued a seemingly more balanced approach, as a defe
nse mechanism in the context of de-Stalinization. His main weapon in these changing times was that of manipulation. The individual was always a tool with no distinct personality (rather being a complex of acquired or ascribed features); when s/he displayed the will for autonomous action, s/he became a victim of the diabolical logic of the purge (an excellent example is the career of Mihai Beniuc, the “little tyrant from the Writers’ Union,” as veteran Communist poet Miron Radu Paraschivescu once called him). Răutu's cynicism and opportunism were flagrant in 1964, when the same individual who had directed the Sovietization of Romanian culture initiated a strident campaign against academia, which he unmasked and accused of “having forgotten true national values” and of “shamelessly showing fealty to even the slightest Soviet achievement.” Leonte Răutu's career was fundamentally characterized by an extraordinary capacity for siding with those in power within the RCP. He first became a favorite of Ana Pauker and Vasile Luca, obtaining his position at Radio Moscow and his initial nominations in Romania because of this connection. By 1952, he jumped into Dej's boat, being, along with Miron Constantinescu, the author of the May-June Plenary Session resolution, the text on which the purge proceedings were based (what came to be known as “the June nights”). His inquisitorial contribution to the Pauker case was not the first (see his involvement in unmasking Pătrășcanu's intellectual “crimes”) and wouldn't be the last such activity. In 1957, he was again on the prosecutor's bench during the party action against Chișinevschi-Constantinescu (these events are often labeled in Romanian historiography “a failed de-Stalinization”). After the downfall of these two, who had been direct competitors in the struggle to administer the cultural front, Răutu became the unchallenged patriarch of the Communist politics of culture. With the exception of the period when he shared power with Grigore Preoteasa, Răutu created an apparatus manned by mediocre individuals, whose ego equaled their incompetence (e.g., Mihail Roller and Pavel Țugui). The biography of Leonte Răutu is the perfect expression of the perverse game of Stalinist masks. Dissimulation, ethical promiscuity, and hypocrisy were the only constants of the apparatchik's existence, a full-blown retreat from any moral imperative. Răutu was the incarnation of the diabolical antilogic of Stalinism: an individual experiencing an irresistible process of personal decline based upon unswerving subordination to the party leader beyond considerations such as reason, honor, and dignity.