There is an institutionalized tradition in the related historiography which states the existence of systemic antisemitism in the Soviet Union, and later on in other Communist states. This tradition is the product of the anti-Soviet, anti-Communist political propaganda of the 1960s and 1970s based on the misunderstanding of Hannah Arendt’s thesis on totalitarianism. As everybody knows, institutionalized political antisemitism in the 20^th century was an extreme form of racism. No doubt that it is hard to talk seriously about the presence of institutionalized racism in the Soviet Union. Despite its difficulties it still seems nowadays to be tempting not only to compare Nazism with Communism, but even to identify them on the basis of the alleged Soviet systemic antisemitism.

Political antisemitism in the 20^th century, and especially in the 1940s was institutionalized racism. What were the historical forms (institutions) of the political and not at last institutionalized racism in the 1940s, and the 1950s? And let us not to mention here such extreme institutions of the institutionalized racism as the gas chambers, the ghettos, mass murders, colonial wars, the institutionalized robbery called aryanization. Let me just mention a few “minor” institutions of the contemporary and historical racism: all kinds of segregation in schooling, in the army, on the buses, racist legislation, racist press and propaganda not to mention lynchings and pogroms etc. If one looks for a real historical context of the alleged racism of the USSR, he/she must take a look at the contemporary American, French, or British history. The only historical comparative figure of the mythical Stalinist antisemite is Jim Crow. But instead of Jim Crow, the traditional experts of the subject compare (often identify) with Hitler the mythical Stalinist antisemite. Just like the most outstanding representative of this identity-centered historiographical school, Gennady Kostyrchenko does in his works which are still considered by many academicians as the embodiment of the sophisticated contemporary scientific discussion.

During WWII the massive evacuation and re-evacuation hit most heavily the liberated Western territories of the USSR. From the cities of these territories many Jews could be evacuated at the beginning of the war, and tried to regain their legal rights for their previous apartments. The conflicts around the re-evacuation culminated in September 1945 in a quasi-pogrom. A Jewish NKVD officer was insulted in Kiev by Ukrainian Red Army soldiers on leave, trying to settle their right for accommodation, just recently suspended by the Soviet authorities. The insulted NKVD officer killed his attackers, thus causing a short spontaneous mass disturbance in the neighbourhood. I won’t describe the very case. Let me just mention a few conditions. Josif Rozenshtein was a senior officer of the NKVD. His attackers whom he later shot down were Red Army servicemen. This is one frontline. Rozenshtein before the war lived in Odessa, spent the whole war in Baku, while his attackers and victims were Red Army soldiers. Even twice since they went through German occupation after being caught as POWs. That is another frontline. And Rozenshtein had an apartment, while his attackers were just evicted by the Soviet law on the day they insulted the NKVD officer. Rozenshtein belonged to the nomenklatura, while his attackers did not.

My intention is to look behind those incidents which were interpreted as anti-Semitic ones, to disclose those inner frontlines within the Soviet society that were constructed during and right after the war. These contemporary frontlines have been usually neglected by historians or have been superficially interpreted along the phenomenon of Anti-Semitism. According to my hypothesis, while using the “Jewish window”, we can detect that the unified military barrack of the USSR in fact was divided rather between ‘we’ and ‘them’, the ‘haves’ and the ‘have nots’, the system and its critics, than between Jews and Gentiles. Jews, like Gentiles could have been found on both sides of the inner frontlines.

Evacuation and signals on Anti-Semitism

During and right after the second world war, the Soviet state and party institutions received numerous reports on anti-Semitic incidents from the hinterland. These reports have retrospectively formed the basic sources for the Geistesgeschichte of Soviet anti-Semitism. Although all the framing conditions for ‘classic’ anti-Jewish pogroms that the literature normally lists were by hand in war-time Soviet Union. no classic anti-Jewish pogroms took place on Soviet soil during the war. We are talking about a period when all-out war was fought for the very survival of the Soviet system and of its subjects, when temporary and spontaneous social groups have been constructed in Soviet cities by others, among whom the Jews may well have constituted a relative majority.

Evacuees and refugees must have represented a burden for the local urban communities.

One can assume that until the very existence of the inter-national Bolshevik system had been jeopardized during the war, the authorities carefully watched the signs of anti-Semitism on the home front.

According to Kostyrchenko, the authorities did not always combat the rising anti-Semitism. He  quotes a collective letter from the Siberian Rubtsovsk.[1] This famous letter is a cry for help, complaining about the ‘unbearable anti-Semitism’ in the town. No central measures were taken in the summer of 1945 to combat incidents that caused an ‘incredible moral depression which brought (the authors) to extreme limits’. What is more interesting is the part of the letter which states that in 1941 and early 1942 there were no signs of anti-Semitism in Rubtsovsk.

The complainants brought up concrete cases to illustrate the unbearable conditions of the evacuated Jews.  The last pogrom-like case mentioned in the Rubtsovsk letter was a well-known quasi-pogrom in the stadium during a football match in which factory managers were beaten up by a group of drunken workers.

In the summer of 1945, and also in the first half of 1946, the ‘anti-social’ hooligan-like incidents reported from Rubtsovsk were rather the rule than the exception. Hooliganism, the lack of public order, and the authorities’ loss of control are the repetitive motifs from the contemporary reports of the party or the security organs,  and also of the readers’ letters sent to the Pravda or Izvestiya. Hooliganism and crime make up a considerable part of the Soviet population’s experience in the aftermath of the war.

From Dnepropetrovsk a cry for help reached the Pravda, saying ‘(t)he workers of the hinterland, and soldiers returning from the front, the best people of the city, desire a peaceful and cultured rest and fruitful work. They are deprived of these.’

The Dnepropetrovsk situation may interest us more intensely, since in May 1944 a very dangerous situation had been generated by the coincidences of various social problems that were general in the whole Soviet Union. The chain of local events had nearly ended in an anti-Jewish pogrom. An airman called Fridzon visited his hometown, Krivoi Rog, where during the Nazi occupation his family and other Jews had been killed. He visited his former apartment. This sudden visit turned into the Jewish airman on leave being beaten up by local women.

The report on the Fridzon-affair concluded that although the victim had made a mistake by entering his former apartment without the presence of the police. The report’s next important information on the current dangerous phenomena is more than interesting: ‘In the Stalinodorf district incidents have taken place when re-evacuated Jews from the Eastern oblasts have carried out self-initiated unsanctioned evictions of inhabitants coming from the Zhitomir and Vinnitsa regions.’ Also interesting is the wider background of the anti-social phenomena described in the quoted report, saying that ‘labourers of towns and districts of the oblast (…) live under the most difficult living conditions’. The report also mentions the unreliable supply of the most basic foodstuff.

But let us go back to Rubtsovsk. The 1945 collective letter complained of anti-Semitism and anti-Jewish threats of revenge by locals returning from the front. The NKGB reports on the district’s situation from 1943 contain striking data on the local social discontent and the threats mentioned by the letter of 1945. In the late summer of 1943, unprecedented spontaneous protests and even a demonstration of working women, mothers of hungry children took place in the ALTEJSEL’MASH factory.[2] In the NKGB reports we can read the threat of taking revenge on the bosses by the husbands returning from the front for the sufferings of their wives and children.[3] The 1943 reports disclosed a dangerous situation in the hinterland but no anti-Semitism was mentioned. At least in the second part of 1943 the frontlines in Rubtsovsk ran between the haves and the have nots, between the representatives of the power and the harshly exploited (mostly female) labourers.

In 1941-1942 not only entire factories and Soviet institutions were evacuated to hinterland but also millions of workers, specialists, and all kinds of cadres as well.  The appearance of the evacuated exacerbated the already difficult situation of food supplies. Especially in the Ural and Siberian industrial cities, hunger became an everyday phenomenon. The all-out struggle for housing (zhil’ploshad’) and the everyday scanty food rations turned the Soviet citizens against each other. Countless local social conflicts were consequences of the evacuation. From historiography we know that the years of war in the Soviet Union precipitated the rise of anti-Semitism.[4]

The evacuation, on top of a massive migration of millions, was also a story about the reproduction of the Soviet hierarchy in the hinterland in an extreme situation. There were privileged people and privileged places.[5] The ‘cities of bread’ in Central-Asia (Tashkent, Alma-Ata, Samarkand, Frunze) were the most desirable places for evacuees. Until the outbreak of the war, Alma-Ata had been a quiet provincial city with a microscopically small Jewish population. According to estimations, about 35-40 per cent of the registered evacuees were Jews by May 1942.[6] Estimates of the proportion of Jews in Uzbekistan are even higher: ‘Jews constituted a clear majority among the newcomers (…) they accounted for 63 percent of the total number of evacuees.’[7] The fact that the central propaganda tried to paint a rosy image of the evacuation, without social and inter-ethnic conflicts, suggests that the masters of the propagandists knew the socially explosive potential of the evacuation in the hinterland.[8]

The housing problem has been one of the most serious burdens of the USSR. The housing ‘ordeal’ is one of the most general parts of the (post-) Soviet memoirs. Poverty and housing problems in the pre-war period appear in non-nomenclature party members’ memoirs. This basic social problem of the Soviet society occurred especially sharply with the reintegration of the liberated territories. The cities of these territories with their housing stock and urban infrastructure had been damaged so badly that the very Soviet order was in danger. Local leaders looked for local solutions to the increasing housing problem. All the proposals remained inside the administrative-command system of Stalinism and aimed at the administrative and legal follow-up of the worsening realities. In fact, these proposals were intended to change those legal regulations that on the one hand ought to have secured the right to old apartments for soldiers of the Red Army, and/or the evacuated, while on the other hand principally strict sanitation norms should have provided a minimal living space in towns. Under an enormous social pressure, the local authorities have often appealed to the Soviet government for exoneration from the regulations.

In Smolensk the local authorities had been unable to accommodate even the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 1945.[9]

In July 1944 the Dnepropetrovsk city party committee signalled that not only the families of Red Army servicemen and invalids of the Patriotic War, but even Soviet and party apparatchiks ‘commanded for special works’ to the city could not be given proper dwellings.[10]

The reconstruction and renovation of the war-damaged Kiev housing stock had fallen behind the otherwise not very ambitious plans in 1945 by 39-41 per cent.[11] Most of the complaints about the housing shortage had come from Moscow, Kiev, Odessa and Kharkov., all with huge numbers of re-evacuated Jews.  The office of the State Prosecutor had become one of the battlefields of the housing war at the end of the world war and remained as such after the victory.

The housing war, as well as the general ‘civil war’, which had started during the Great Patriotic War and continued after its end, had been an all-out war in which more than two groups of adversaries were fighting. This war was fought not between Jews and Gentiles, or Jews and the authorities. It was an overall war in which even Soviet authorities were fighting on different sides of the actual front.

Personal experiences of the evacuation differed not on the basis of nationality but depended on the social status of the persons involved. Valentin Beilinson, a Jewish ‘child of the Arbat’ gives a very vivid picture of his personal experiences,  suffering an almost constant hunger during the war and in the post-war period.  Beilinson was evacuated to Sverdlovsk where he became a worker, an exemplary representative of the Soviet working class. Writing about his Sverdlovsk period, the basic subjects were hunger and cold.[12]  The constantly hungry Leia Trakhtman-Palkhan noticed the injustices not only in housing but also in the redistribution of the scarce food supplies. She remembered clearly Muscovites who brought valuables and money with them to Siberia and speculated with it instead of working hard. She denounced them as responsible for the anti-Semitism of the hinterland. Decades later she remembered Jews from the state food supply redistribution. The daily fight for survival and against hunger is the subject of other memoirs describing the war years in Siberia. The evacuated Jews could be seen as a burden even by other Jews living in the place to which they were evacuated before their arrival.

The figure of the rich evacuees who were responsible for the rise of the otherwise high prices of the scarce food on the market turn up in other memoirs.  In the war-time non-nomenclatura Jewish memories the ultimate ‘others’ were the Muscovite (or Odessa etc.) evacuees who on the one hand caused the rise of the market prices and on the other took away the best jobs.

We know this story from the other side as well. The great Jewish scholar Saul Borovoi made a whole odyssey from Odessa to Samarkand in 1941. He soon found a workplace, which was necessary for getting food rations and the right to accommodation.  Borovoi was given a job in a teacher training institute and a room in one of his colleagues’ apartment. He was not welcome in his new ‘zhilploshad’ but Borovoi attained his right to stay (and later on to occupy more ‘zhilploshad’’). Even with his newly acquired food rationing cards he had to listen to the insults of the locals as an evacuated sponger. According to Borovoi the evacuated and the locals lived rather separated lives, and they could meet only in the queues in front of the shops or in the offices. But even the local offices had been taken over by evacuated Jews.

The contrast between  ‘us’ and ‘them’ can be detected in the early entries of Vladimir Gelfand’s famous wartime diaries. Gelfand was a very Soviet Jew with a strong Soviet and Jewish self-esteem. He was evacuated from his native Dnepropetrovsk to Essentuki, where he lived in the apartment of an aunt of his. Gelfand wrote with a decisive distance and with a certain contempt about those Jewish refugees who had visited his aunt’s flat and stayed there for a while. The refugee-evacuees in Gelfand’s narrative could not have been Soviets since they seemed to him to be aliens. Gelfand, who was on the spot detected the sudden rise of anti-Semitism in the hinterland after the massive appearance of Jewish evacuees-refugees, but he explains this phenomenon as deriving from the alien (i.e. non-Soviet) nature of the newcomers. By every sign Gelfand was disturbed by the ‘them Jews’.  The difference between ‘them’ and ‘us’ in Gelfand’s interpretation was not an inter-ethnic issue. ‘We’ and ‘they’ as groups were context-dependent: temporary and actual. Gelfand as an organized evacuee felt sharply different from the unorganized refugees. Thus, the temporary hostility between  ‘them’ and ‘us’ were not necessarily constructed along ‘traditional’ differences such as between Jews and Gentiles.

Of course, it would be a serious mistake to generalize from the personal experiences of Borovoi, Gitterman, Gelfand or others. But the possible conflicts caused by the massive evacuation cannot be reduced to the rebirth of an allegedly traditional anti-Semitism. The conflicts and contradictions in certain cases could temporarily take the forms of anti-Semitism. Even in wartime and/or the post-war Soviet Union, anti-Semitism could be a ‘cultural code’, a language through which certain taboos could be named. The unified ‘military barracks’ was in fact divided between the actual ‘us’ and ‘them’.

This ‘we’ and ‘they’ divide is more sharply contrasted in the memoirs of Valentin Beilinson. When visited by a high-ranking uncle of his in Sverdlovsk, he spoke about a ‘second front in everyday life which was more difficult, more varied and even more dangerous than the obvious external (front).’[13] Beilinson, in his evacuation, shared the fate of his fellow workers. He also shared their sentiments towards the class (of “them”) he personally came from. The visit of his uncle made a deep impression on Beilinson. He was entertained by uncle Yasha (Yakov Gol’din) in a heated house where he was given delicious food. While consuming the long-forgotten food and drinks, he was the eyewitness to how his ministerial relative was being bribed by certain locals. He became aware that his own uncle Yasha belonged to ‘them’. According to him, the ‘we’ to whom he belonged worked and fought selflessly even while hungry and living and working in a constant cold in bad clothes and shoes.

Beilinson’s ‘we’ and Beilinson’s ‘they’ did not have national or confessional characteristics. ‘We’ and ‘they’ were members of two antagonistic classes. ‘They’ were the privileged ones who did not fight on the front. ‘How many able-bodied men buried themselves (hid) in commerce, institutions and artels (cooperatives) of re-distribution? And all of them had protection. Their wives did not stand in the production lines and did not till the land. And even if they worked they did it for the appearance, in order to receive dispensation from the mobilization of the workers or  were listed as imbeciles just like their grown up children. (…) In our factory there was not a single relative of a commercial-re-distributive worker…’[14]

Beilinsosn listed himself among the losing ‘we’ instead of the winning ‘they’. Beilinson tried to generalize his Sverdlovsk experiences to the whole of war-time Soviet Union: Perm was a relatively small and pure place in the world of ‘them’, the bosses, the speculators, black marketers. In Sverdlovsk, where there were more bosses and all kinds of evacuees from Moscow, ‘they’ paraded more openly. Omsk was under the oppression of dark ‘businessmen’. ‘But Tashkent had become their kingdom. There was the thieves’ paradise. The whole city was a big black market.’ For Beilinson the real inner front  lay between the hungry and the satiated, the workers and the speculators, the workers and the bosses, but first of all between those who fought in the army and those who, because of their ‘cover’, were released from the military service.

The experiences of the evacuees and locals, ‘us’ and ‘them’ could represent a serious set of problems of interpretation, even among the most conscious Soviet citizens. These interpretational problems as well as the conflicts generated by the hardships of everyday life could take the form of short-term inter-ethnic feuds. But we should not overestimate the sporadic formal embodiments of interethnic feuds  in relation to the underlying structural content. The sudden appearance of massive ‘hordes’ of evacuees and refugees in the Central Asian and Siberian parts of the Soviet Union not only caused an economic but also a cultural shock for both sides. In most of the cases even the Soviet evacuees could remain strangers in their temporary evacuation. In some cases, evacuees could be seen as aliens by the locals because of their improper Sovietness, whereas in other cases for their too demonstrative Sovietness.

Valentin Beilinson’s memoirs disclose the sharpness of the front along which the haves and the have nots, the ‘we’ and ‘they’, were fighting a war for survival. The ‘they’s’ survival, according to Beilinson, was achieved by oppression and the have nots’ self-sacrifice. In Beilinson’s view, between them existed an antagonism which could be ethnicised in extreme situations. But there were more antagonisms between the ‘we’ and ‘they’ than just ethnic conflicts. The constant tension appears in other retrospective accounts of the evacuation.

The contemporary reports on the alleged anti-Semitism, as well as the Jewish memoirs, provide us with more addenda to the social history of the war-time and post-war urban conflicts, than the Geistesgeschichte of the so-called anti-Semitism of the Soviet state.

There is an institutionalized tradition in the related historiography which states the existence of a systemic antisemitism in the Soviet Union, and later on in other Communist states. This tradition is the product of the anti-Soviet, anti-Communist political propaganda of the 1960s and 1970s based on the misunderstanding of Hannah Arendt’s thesis on the totalitarianism. As everybody knows, institutionalized political antisemitism in the 20^th century was an extreme form of racism. No doubt that it is hard to talk seriously about the presence of institutionalized racism in the Soviet Union. Despite its difficulties it seems still nowadays to be tempting not only to compare the Nazism with Communism, but even to identify them on the base of the alleged Soviet systemic antisemitism.

Political antisemitism in the 20^th century, and especially in the 1940s was institutionalized racism. What were the historical forms (institutions) of the political and not at last institutionalized racism in the 1940s, and the 1950s? And let us not to mention here such extreme institutions of the institutionalized racism as the gas chambers, the ghettos, mass murders, colonial wars, the institutionalized robbery called aryanization. Let me just mention a few “minor”  institutions of the contemporary and historical racism: all kinds of segregation in schooling, in the army, on the buses, racist legislation, racist press and propaganda not to mention lynchings and pogroms etc.. If one looks for a real historical context of the alleged racism of the USSR, he/she must take a look at the contemporary American, French, or British history. The only historical comparative figure of the mythical Stalinist antisemite is Jim Crow. But instead of Jim Crow, the traditional experts of the subject compare (often identify) with Hitler the mythical Stalinist antisemite. Just like the most outstanding representative of this identity-centered historiographical school, Gennady Kostyrchenko does in his works which are still considered by many academicians as the embodiment of the sophisticated contemporary scientific discussion.

During WWII the massive evacuation and re-evacuation hit most heavily the liberated Western territories of the USSR. From the cities of these territories many Jews could be evacuated at the beginning of the war, and tried to regain their legal rights for their previous apartments. The conflicts around the re-evacuation culminated in September 1945 in a quasi-pogrom. A Jewish NKVD officer was insulted in Kiev by Ukrainian Red Army soldiers on leave, trying to settle their right for accommodation, just recently suspended by the Soviet authorities. The insulted NKVD officer killed his attackers, thus causing a short spontaneous mass disturbance in the neighbourhood. I won’t describe the very case. Let me just mention a few conditions. Josif Rozenshtein was a senior officer of the NKVD. His attackers whom he later shot down were Red Army servicemen. This is one  frontline. Rozenshtein before the war lived in Odessa, spent the whole war in Baku, while his attackers and victims were Red Army soldiers. Even twice since they went through German occupation after being caught as POWs. That is another frontline. And Rozenshtein had an apartment, while his attackers were just evicted by the Soviet law on the day they insulted the NKVD officer. Rozenshtein belonged to the nomencaltura, while his attackers did not.

After this incident four former Jewish frontoviks from Kiev addressed Stalin in a desperate letter. The letter was a comradely report on the Ukrainian party leadership’s anti-Semitism. The emphatically Soviet and partisan language of the letter was used to make the authors’ complaints more than understandable, and rightfully so. The letter of the Jewish frontoviks stated that the overall and pronounced Ukrainian anti-Semitism led to an anti-Jewish pogrom in Kiev in early September 1945.  Although the event described in the letter actually took place in a far more different way, it still has to be accepted as authentic for its reflections containing unwittingly. The letter has in fact reflected to rather realistic conflicts of the post-war period’s Soviet Union. These conflicts have been generated during the war period, and could form varied issues of actual front-lines in a society which according to its leaders, and its retrospective critics had to have been totalitarian, and monolithic.

Behind the Kiev incident we could detect grave social conflicts that sharply endangered the public and social order of the Soviet Union during and right after the war. Although victorious, the Soviet system has been weakened during the war. The weakening’s signs were, among others those compromises, concessions that the system was forced to make with, for instance, the Orthodox Church, or with the rising Jewish national self-esteem. The very system’s survival depended not only on the outcome of the actual battles fought on the German front, but on its capability to make certain concessions inside, in advance to ensure the order in the home front. And it was not actually confessions, or nationalities that could have gain compromises from the system. The fighting soldiers, as well as the evacuated laborers have been promised to keep their dearest right for their pre-war apartments. This promise had to be kept on legal bases by the authorities.

The housing stock of the cities was heavily damaged what made the countless and endless domestic and legal conflicts over the housing even tenser. It was the case of Kiev also, from where many Jews could be evacuated at the beginning of the war, and tried to regain their legal rights for their previous, occupied by war-time inner migrants’ apartments. In many cases the fight for the zhilploshad’, or the fight for the scanty food supply, not to mention the Western aid, could have been seemed as acts of anti-Semitism. Or contrary. The general historical memory tempts to define this actual everyday battles as battles of a millennia old war against the Jews.

Tensions between the representatives of the nachal’stvo and the population, especially among the Red Army’s soldiers have been detected during, and right after the war. And no doubt, signs of anti-Semitism have been detected also in the fighting Red Army. But as in the home front, on the Great Patriotic War’s front-lines anti-Semitism had to be fought against. Especially until the very survival of the Soviet Union was at stake.

The signs of the anti-Semitism were the signs of the regime’s  weakening. And at the same time the signals on the anti-Semitism were in most of the cases the signs of the rising Jewish national self-esteem in the inter-national Soviet Union. It may sound paradoxically, but this above phenomenon was rather precisely perceived by the uncritical, in most of the cases anti-Communist followers of the anti-anti-Semitic historiographical tradition.,

Although the latent tensions and social-political conflicts during and right after the war within the Soviet society could take the form of anti-Semitic incidents, the reduction of the processes to anti-Semitism seems to me an oversimplification. My intention was to look behind the anti-Semitic incidents, or those incidents which were interpreted as anti-Semitic ones, in advance to disclose those inner front-lines within the Soviet society that were constructed during and right after the war.

The conflicts and contradictions in certain cases could temporarily take the forms of anti-Semitism but even in these cases the form does not necessarily equal with the possible historical content. Even in the war-time and/or postwar Soviet Union the anti-Semitism could be a “cultural code”, a language through which certain taboos could be named. The unified military barrack in fact was divided between the actual “We” and “Them”, the Haves and the Have Nots, the system and its actual critics.

Personal experiences of the evacuation differed not on the basis of nationality but depended on the social status of the persons involved. Valentin Beilinson, a Jewish ‘child of the Arbat’ gives a very vivid picture of his personal experiences, suffering an almost constant hunger during the war and in the post-war period.  Beilinson was evacuated to Sverdlovsk where he became a worker, an exemplary representative of the Soviet working class. Writing about his Sverdlovsk period, the basic subjects were hunger and cold.[15]  The constantly hungry Leia Trakhtman-Palkhan noticed the injustices not only in housing but also in the redistribution of the scarce food supplies. She remembered clearly Muscovites who brought valuables and money with them to Siberia and speculated with it instead of working hard. She denounced them as responsible for the anti-Semitism of the hinterland. Decades later she remembered Jews from the state food supply redistribution. The daily fight for survival and against hunger is the subject of other memoirs describing the war years in Siberia. The evacuated Jews could be seen as a burden even by other Jews living in the place to which they were evacuated before their arrival.

The figure of the rich evacuees who were responsible for the rise of the otherwise high prices of the scarce food on the market turn up in other memoirs.  In the war-time non-nomenclatura Jewish memories the ultimate ‘others’ were the Muscovite (or Odessa etc.) evacuees who on the one hand caused the rise of the market prices and on the other took away the best jobs.

The contrast between  ‘us’ and ‘them’ can be detected in the early entries of Vladimir Gelfand’s famous wartime diaries. Gelfand was a very Soviet Jew with a strong Soviet and Jewish self-esteem. He was evacuated from his native Dnepropetrovsk to Essentuki, where he lived in the apartment of an aunt of his. Gelfand wrote with a decisive distance and with a certain contempt about those Jewish refugees who had visited his aunt’s flat and stayed there for a while. The refugee-evacuees in Gelfand’s narrative could not have been Soviets since they seemed to him to be aliens. Gelfand, who was on the spot detected the sudden rise of anti-Semitism in the hinterland after the massive appearance of Jewish evacuees-refugees, but he explains this phenomenon as deriving from the alien (i.e. non-Soviet) nature of the newcomers. By every sign Gelfand was disturbed by the ‘them Jews’.  The difference between ‘them’ and ‘us’ in Gelfand’s interpretation was not an inter-ethnic issue. ‘We’ and ‘they’ as groups were context-dependent: temporary and actual. Gelfand as an organized evacuee felt sharply different from the unorganized refugees. Thus, the temporary hostility between  ‘them’ and ‘us’ were not necessarily constructed along ‘traditional’ differences such as between Jews and Gentiles.

This ‘we’ and ‘they’ divide is more sharply contrasted in the memoirs of Valentin Beilinson. When visited by a high-ranking uncle of his in Sverdlovsk, he spoke about a ‘second front in everyday life which was more difficult, more varied and even more dangerous than the obvious external (front).’[16] Beilinson, in his evacuation,  shared the fate of his fellow workers. He also shared their sentiments towards the class (of “them”) he personally came from. The visit of his uncle made a deep impression on Beilinson. He was entertained by uncle Yasha (Yakov Gol’din) in a heated house where he was given delicious food. While consuming the long-forgotten food and drinks, he was the eyewitness to how his ministerial relative was being bribed by certain locals. He became aware that his own uncle Yasha belonged to ‘them’. According to him, the ‘we’ to whom he belonged worked and fought selflessly even while hungry and living and working in a constant cold in bad clothes and shoes.

Beilinson’s ‘we’ and Beilinson’s ‘they’ did not have national or confessional characteristics. ‘We’ and ‘they’ were members of two antagonistic classes. ‘They’ were the privileged ones who did not fight on the front. ‘How many able-bodied men buried themselves (hid) in commerce, institutions and artels (cooperatives) of re-distribution? And all of them had protection. Their wives did not stand in the production lines and did not till the land. And even if they worked they did it for the appearance, in order to receive dispensation from the mobilization of the workers or  were listed as imbeciles just like their grown up children. (…) In our factory there was not a single relative of a commercial-re-distributive worker…’[17]

Beilinsosn listed himself among the losing ‘we’ instead of the winning ‘they’. Beilinson tried to generalize his Sverdlovsk experiences to the whole of war-time Soviet Union: Perm was a relatively small and pure place in the world of ‘them’, the bosses, the speculators, black marketers. In Sverdlovsk, where there were more bosses and all kinds of evacuees from Moscow, ‘they’ paraded more openly. Omsk was under the oppression of dark ‘businessmen’. ‘But Tashkent had become their kingdom. There was the thieves’ paradise. The whole city was a big black market.’ For Beilinson the real inner front  lay between the hungry and the satiated, the workers and the speculators, the workers and the bosses, but first of all between those who fought in the army and those who, because of their ‘cover’, were released from the military service.

The experiences of the evacuees and locals, ‘us’ and ‘them’ could represent a serious set of problems of interpretation, even among the most conscious Soviet citizens. These interpretational problems as well as the conflicts generated by the hardships of everyday life could take the form of short-term inter-ethnic feuds. But we should not overestimate the sporadic formal embodiments of interethnic feuds  in relation to the underlying structural content. The sudden appearance of massive ‘hordes’ of evacuees and refugees in the Central Asian and Siberian parts of the Soviet Union not only caused an economic but also a cultural shock for both sides. In most of the cases even the Soviet evacuees could remain strangers in their temporary evacuation. In some cases, evacuees could be seen as aliens by the locals because of their improper Sovietness, whereas in other cases for their too demonstrative Sovietness.

This cultural code has often been used by those authors of various contemporary sources, who claimed for the disturbing phenomena of anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union. In this cultural code the word of pogrom appeared quite often in the contemporary sources. The perception of the pogroms, as well as of the very anti-Semitism should have been understood within this contemporary (and originally Soviet, and/or socialist) cultural code. It is rather characteristic, that the first public signals on this coded anti-Semitism came from the internationalist, socialist, but at the same time anti-Bolshevik emigrant paper, the Sotsialisticheskii Vestnik, whose editor wrote the first book on the Soviet systematic anti-Semitism in New York, in 1951.  For the pioneering in this genre work’s author, Solomon Schwarz, the cultural code was relatively simple: in the (real) socialism there can not exist any anti-Semitism. And we can have no doubt about the authenticity of the signals on anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union, reaching the New York based editorial staff of the emigrant Russian socialists’ paper. These signals were just as much authentic than the letter of the four Jewish frontoviks complaining the wild anti-Semitism, and the pogrom in Kiev, in September 1945.

For the four former frontoviks, who not by last were manifest Jews, and Bolsheviks, anti-Semitism was a cultural code to denote counterrevolutionary, anti-Soviet, anti-socialist phenomena detected by many of the Jewish inhabitants of Kiev, of the Ukraine, and the whole Soviet Union during the war, and right after of its end.

Anti-anti-Semitism as a cultural code was not invented by the anti-Bolshevik internationalist Russian-Jewish socialists in New York on the eve, and during the Cold War. It was neither invented by the NKVD, or other Soviet authorities. It was used already in February 1937 by Leon Trotsky while describing the contemporary Moscow trials. In his Stalinism and anti-Semitism he tried, without much success to describe the Stalinist Thermidor in the Bolshevik party’s leadership, and the purges with the help of the cultural code of the traditional (Russian) anti-Semitism.[18] The case of Trotsky shows the narrow limits to use anti-Semitism in the description of the social, political processes, phenomena of the Soviet Union.

At the same time, while acknowledging the existence of anti-Semitism even in the Soviet Union, despite its anti-anti-Semitic politics, and policies, the readers of Trotsky can use anti-Semitism as a special window, through which we can have a special look into the often covered, and often neglected social, political, cultural conflicts of an allegedly totalitarian, monolithic society.

 

[1] Kostyrchenko: Tajnaya politika Stalina. I. 442.

[2] RGASPI Fond 17. Opis’ 121 Delo 210. 70-73.

[3] RGASPI Fond 17. Opis’ 121 Delo 210.. 76.

[4] Kostyrchenko,: The Genesis of Establihment Anti-Semitism in the USSR:  Kostyrchenko: Tajnaya politika Stalina.; Kostyrchenko, G. V.: Tajnaya politika Khruscheva.. Kostyrchenko has edited a major source publications on the Soviet state anti-Semitism: Gosudarstvennyi antisemitizm v SSSR.

[5] Manley To the Tashkent Station. 32-41. Stronski: Tashkent. Forging a Soviet City, 84-89.

[6] Grinberg, Isaak: Evrei v Al’ma-Ate. 82.

[7] Manley: To the Tashkent Station. 229-230.

[8] V. Makhonin: Gorod, stavshij rodnym. Pravda, 1944. July 26. As the article suggested the evacuation meant a streghtening of the Soviet inter-nationalism. „The capital of Kazakhstan has never senn so many people. There have been no houses where Ukrainian or Belorussian languages were not heard.’

[9] RGASPI Fond 82. Op. 2. Delo 419. 3.

[10] RGASPI Fond 17. Op. 44. Ed. Chr. 1968. 11-22.

[11] RGASPI Fond 17. Op. 88. Ed. Chr. 449. 8-17.

[12] Beilinson, Valentin: Sovetskoe vremya v lyudyakh. Moskva, Novyj Khronograf, 2009. 140-172.

[13] Beilinson: Sovetskoe vremya v lyudyakh. 132.

[14] Beilinson: Sovetskoe vremya v lyudyakh. 140.

[15] Beilinson, Valentin: Sovetskoe vremya v lyudyakh. Moskva, Novyj Khronograf, 2009. 140-172.

[16] Beilinson: Sovetskoe vremya v lyudyakh. 132.

[17] Beilinson: Sovetskoe vremya v lyudyakh. 140.

[18] http://www.workersliberty.org/story/2013/12/06/stalinism-and-anti-semitism.