The Whisperers

by Orlando Figes

  4

  The ‘anti-cosmopolitan’ campaign opened the floodgates to anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union. Anti-Semitism had a long history in the Russian Empire. After 1917, it continued to exist, especially among the urban lower classes, whose hatred of the Jews in trade was a major factor in the popular resentment of the NEP which Stalin had exploited during his rise to power. The widespread indifference of the lower classes towards the purges of the 1930s was also partly shaped by the perception that the Party leaders, the main victims of the Terror, were all ‘Jews’ in any case. But generally before the war the Soviet government made serious 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 Short Course to the soldiers of the Frunze Military Academy in Moscow, where she taught from 1938. Untouched by the Great Terror, Vera and her daughter enjoyed the comforts of the Soviet elite until 1948, when Vera was arrested on the basis of a denunciation by her ex-husband. Convicted of ‘counter-revolutionary activity’, she was sentenced to five years in the Potma labour camps. At that time Svetlana was a student and an activist in the Komsomol at Moscow University. Threatened with expulsion from the university, she was put under growing pressure to denounce other students and professors as ‘Jewish nationalists’, but she refused, unable to believe the propaganda about ‘Zionist conspiracies’. Naively, she even wrote to Stalin to complain about discrimination against Jewish students at the university, an action which led to her own arrest in 1952 and a sentence of ten years in the Viatka labour camp.87

  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 leade
rship, 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 best she could with Aleksei, who was often ill. She did not want to call on Simonov for help, so her parents took care of the child. Simonov’s parents also helped. In 1947, they took Aleksei on an extended seaside holiday to help him recover from TB.89

  Simonov himself had little time for Aleksei. He saw him only once or twice a year. His mother Aleksandra needed to remind him to write to Aleksei on his birthday. In 1952, on Aleksei’s thirteenth birthday, a telegram from Simonov had failed to reach his son, so he later wrote to him:

  Dear Alyosha!

  I have been feeling unwell, and was not in Moscow, and only today did I realize that, by some misunderstanding, they did not dispatch the telegram which I wrote to you on your birthday… I believe in your future and I hope that with the passing years you will grow up to become a little friend. Another year has brought you closer to that… Twice a week I pass by the new building of Moscow University, and I always think that you will study there some day, and then you’ll start on your working life – going where the state sends you. Think of that with joy, and work joyously towards the happy calling that waits for you and millions of children just like you…90

  Aleksei was not offended by the formality of this letter: all his relations with his father were like that, and since there were so few communications he treasured each one of them. His father’s letters were usually typed, meaning they had been dictated to a secretary. Pedagogical in tone, they were more like the letters of a Party functionary than those of a father to a son. This one was written in the summer of 1948, when Aleksei was eight years old:

  Dear Alyosha, I received your letter and drawing. As far as the drawing is concerned, it is not bad in my opinion, especially the cockerel. But there is no cause for pride. Remember, your father at your age could draw better than you can, so you must work even harder to catch up. I hope that your promise to get top marks will be true not just on paper but in reality as well. I would be very glad of that.91

  Aleksei recalls his father often telling him that ‘ties of blood’ had no special significance for him: it was one of his ‘democratic principles’ to treat his family on the same terms as colleagues and subordinates. Aleksei paid the cost of his father’s principles. He could not understand why his famous father, who was so popular with everybody else, had so little time for him. On the few occasions when his father came to take him out, Aleksei felt awkward, there were long silences, but his father never noticed his unease. In the spring of 1947, Simonov sent his son a suit (brown jacket, brown shorts and a cap) which he had brought back from a trip to the USA. Aleksei did not like the shorts – the boys in the yard would laugh at him and even beat him when he wore them – so he put them in a drawer. Several weeks later a government car turned up at the house on Zubov Square to take Aleksei to visit his father. He had not seen him for a year. Berta, Aleksei’s grandmother, made him wear the brown suit to show his father that he liked the gift. In front of all the other boys, who had gathered in the yard to inspect the limousine, Aleksei walked out and got into the car. He was driven to the Grand Hotel, where Simonov had taken a private dining room to entertain his friends. The seven-year-old boy was presented to the company and called on by his father to give them a ‘report’ on how he had fared during the past year at school. Having been informed of his son’s success at school, Simonov had planned a surprise for him: a cook in a white suit and a big white hat came in carrying a ‘surprise omelette’ (made of ice cream) on a silver dish. Aleksei was left to eat the ‘omelette’ on his own while his father went on talking with his friends. To Aleksei, his father seemed ‘all-powerful and almost magical’. At one point Simonov turned towards his son and asked him if he liked his suit. Aleksei gave him a polite response. Shortly afterwards Aleksei was driven home – ‘to wait’, as he recalls, ‘for the next meeting with my father, maybe in a month, maybe six, depending on how busy he was with his work for the government’.92

  Apart from his mother Aleksandra, Sonia was the only person who

  Samuil and Berta, Sonia, Aleksei and Zhenia, circa 1948

  dared to criticize Simonov for neglecting Aleksei. In October 1947, Sonia wrote to Simonov. Aleksei had been ill and needed food and medicines which the Laskins could not get:

  It is distasteful to have to remind you for a second time (only the second?) of your obligations to your son. You allow yourself to ignore him to a degree that I find astonishing. Believe me, neither I nor Zhenia would approach you if it was not necessary for your child, but it is wrong to make Alyosha suffer because we feel uncomfortable about asking you for a favour – a feeling which is wholly the result of your behaviour. If things were different, I would write you off, I would stop your son from loving a father who cannot even spare two hours for him. I have told you this before.93

  In May 1950, Sonia was arrested and held in solitary confinement in the Lefortovo prison in Moscow, where she was interrogated in connection with the Stalin Factory Affair, in which the Jewish workers of the car plant were accused of spying for the USA. The origins of the affair went back to 1948, when some of the factory’s workers had begun organizing group trips to the Jewish Theatre in Moscow. The Stalin Factory had a large contingent of Jewish workers, mostly engineers and administrators, who were supportive of the JAFC and the foundation of Israel. Their cultural activities were encouraged by the deputy director of the factory, Aleksandr Eidinov, who also gave a tour of the car plant to the American ambassador. This was enough for the MGB to fabricate an ‘anti-Soviet group of bourgeois Jewish nationalists at the Stalin Factory’, which, it claimed, was passing industrial secrets to the USA. The initiative for the investigation came from Nikita Khrushchev, the Moscow Party boss from December 1949, although he was probably following instructions from Stalin, who by this time was seeing ‘Jewish spies’ and ‘plotters’ everywhere. Convicted by a military tribunal, Eidinov was one of fourteen ‘leaders’ who were later shot. More than a hundred other Jewish workers from the factory, and several hundred more from factories across the Soviet Union, were sent to various labour camps.94

  Sonia was sentenced to twenty-five years of hard labour in the camps of Vorkuta in the Far North. Fania and Zhenia concealed the length of her sentence from Samuil and Berta, telling them that she had been given just five years, because they feared the truth would kill them. Sonia was sent to the brick factory in Vorkuta, where she worked with her usual energy and initiative. Even in the Gulag she was entirely dedicated to the caus
e of Soviet industry. Sonia was rewarded with a privileged position as a librarian in the labour camp, but in her letters home she frequently expressed her frustration that she could have served the country better as a senior industrialist than by filing books.

  Sonia’s arrest took a heavy toll on Samuil’s health. Throughout her absence he seemed to be weighed down by an immense sadness, according to Fania. Samuil was seventy-one when Sonia was arrested. He had always been a sprightly man, full of life and energy, but after her arrest he became old and frail. He could no longer work at the same pace he had worked before. Still, traditions continued. Every Sunday for the next five years the family and friends would meet as usual for the famous ‘Laskin suppers’, when Berta would prepare delicious Jewish dishes and Samuil would hold his kitchen parliament. Simonov was never there, but his parents often were. ‘They were different people, from a different class,’ recalls Fania, ‘but they got on well with our parents, and they loved Zhenia and Aleksei.’ The opening toast would always be the same: ‘To the return!’ If a letter from Sonia had arrived during the previous week, it would be read out and the assembled guests would discuss her news. There would always be some tears. Everyone would give their greetings to Sonia for the reply which Zhenia would write.

  By the early 1950s, conditions in many of the camps had begun to improve, as the administrators of the Gulag looked for ways to get the prisoners to make greater efforts, and weekly letters were not unusual for star workers like Sonia. Censors still read the correspondence, but the rules were more relaxed, and it was possible for prisoners and relatives to write with a new openness. There were even occasions when Sonia was allowed to call her family on the telephone – occasions when emotions ran too high for proper talk. ‘My dear girl,’ Zhenia wrote to Sonia after one such call,