The Jewish Meaning of the Czech Purge

​My father's assessment and prediction of the fate of Jews in the Soviet Union and in the bloc of nations in their influence is accurate in that the Jews did become increasingly oppressed and deterred from practicing an open and active Jewish life. The one glimmer of hope that he cannot see in 1952 is that eventually the doors would open to mass Jewish emigration to the United States and Israel.

Once again we face a period of Jewish history when the loss of a large segment of the Jewish people is threatened. There are almost two million Jews in the Soviet Union, and about 600,000 in the satellite countries who seem now to be doomed.
​

A SHORT TIME AGO THE SHOCKING NEWS CAME OUT of Czechoslovakia telling us of the conviction of ranking officials of the communist regime there for treason, and the speedy execution of eleven of the accused, and the sentencing to life imprisonment of three others. The news of communist purges is not particularly new. We have become used to the manner in which communist differences of opinion are settled, and ordinarily do not care much when rivals are eliminated. But this particular purge was different. First of all, because it happened in Czechoslovakia. Here, after the First World War, had been established  under Masaryk and Benesch, the highest standards of freedom and liberty, and it was now sad to think to what extent this small but glorious nation had succumbed to the Soviet pattern.[1][2] And secondly, because of something new that had been introduced into the purge, the very deliberate and open anti-Semitic, anti-Israel propaganda introduced into the so-called trial. The chief charge against the accused, and one to which Rudolph Slansky supposedly confessed, was that of conspiring with Israeli and American officials to use Zionism as a tool of Western imperialism contrary to the interests of the Communist government of Czechoslovakia[3]. And here we see evidence of how quickly the Soviet line can do a turnabout. In 1948 Russia was among the active supporters of the establishment of the Jewish state, and Czechoslovakia openly and officially sold arms to the Israelis that they might defend themselves against the Arabs. At that time Russia presumably wanted to embarrass the British and weaken their position in the Middle East, and so it supported the new state and its satellites sold it arms. But today neither Russia nor the Russian dominated government of Czechoslovakia seems to be concerned about the contradiction involved in condemning some of its past leadership for being pro-Israel. Ironically enough, it may even be pointed out that the Jews now blamed for being pro-Israel were actually anti-Zionist and had put their faith for the future in the new communist order.
 
Although this is the first public outburst of anti-Semitism, let it not be supposed that anti-Semitism is completely new to Russian policy. Russia was, of course, from the very beginning opposed to any religious life among Jews. It opposed Zionist activity and it forbade completely the study of Hebrew and the reading of Hebrew books. It did outlaw anti-Semitism in the sense of discrimination or prejudice against Jews as individuals, and it did pretend to treat Jews on equal terms with any of its other citizens, and conceded the Jews national status within the Soviet Union with Yiddish as the basis of Jewish culture. Gradually, however, even the Yiddish cultural base of the Jews fell into disfavor and Jews as individuals also came to be discriminated against. Jewish writers and artists were deported. Anti-Jewish purges are reported in the Soviet Army, and the Christian Science Monitor published the report that all Jewish officers and most soldiers have been removed from the Soviet occupation zone of Germany. Many Jewish servicemen, when demobilized, were not permitted to go back to former jobs as guaranteed by law, but rather forced to take menial positions. Some who objected were arrested and forced to work in uranium mines or were deported to Arctic slave labor camps. Biro Bidjan, the Jewish autonomous province we heard so much about a few years back, is reported as liquidated. A new Soviet encyclopedia omits all the names of Jewish writers, artists, and thinkers that had been listed in the 1927 edition[4]. On the other hand, the Ukrainian leader Chmielnicki, famous for pogroms which slaughtered thousands of Jews is glorified.[5] A former Hungarian minister in Moscow, named Nyaradi , reports that in high Soviet circles anti-Semitism is rampant.[6] The word Zhid  is outlawed, but every high communist he reported used it, and once when he was introduced to Ilya Ehrenburg , a Soviet writer, who is one of only two Jews who have remained in good standing with the government, the introduction was made with the comment, "you know he is a zhid, but a good communist patriot in spite of it."[7][8] The other Jew in high circles is Lazar Kaganovich, Stalin’s brother-in-law. All others have now been purged as cosmopolitans who are apt to betray the Fatherland. Nyaradi also reported 400,000 Jews deported to Siberia and the far north in 1947.[9]
 
In the satellite countries the process has been similar. Jewish community life had also been completely destroyed, but at first individual Jews who were loyal to the regime still had an opportunity to obtain positions of influence.[10] But the situation now has also changed in the satellites as dramatically evidenced in Czechoslovakia. There has now been a thorough purge and almost all persons of Jewish origin have been expelled from the Communist Party and jailed for treason, in a campaign against so-called Jewish nationalists and rootless cosmopolitan's.
 
For about a year the Czech press has been engaged in a campaign against Jews. The general tenor of their remarks is summed up in the following quotation from the Communist Party paper:
Zionism is the ideology of Jewish bourgeois nationalism. It is in the service of the class enemy, in the pay of American imperialism, that the Zionists have wormed their way into the communist parties in order to disrupt and undermine them from within.
 
Seemingly the problem was only the Zionists, but the accusations were hurled against victims who had nothing to do with Zionism and had been Communists and opponents of Zionism, and it is evident that all Jews are included in the terms Zionists and cosmopolitans.
 
Up to this point, however, there has been an attempt to hide anti-Semitism and to explain away what seemed like anti-Semitism on other grounds, but it has now burst into the open and is undisguised. Two plausible suggestions are advanced by observers for this new trend. First, it may be the expression of a desire to win over the support of the Arab states. The Russians are happy for any political situation which they can create or maintain that will be disturbing to the Western powers. In 1948 it was the creation of Israel which would help bring unrest to the Middle East and rouse the Arabs. But as time has gone by, hopes of achieving an Arab-Israel peace, particularly with the Egyptian revolution, have arisen and this would undoubtedly benefit the Western powers, and so Russia has made its move to keep the waters troubled. By picturing in its trials a conspiracy between Western powers and Israel to dominate the Middle East, by attacking the Jews in their midst for helping in this conspiracy, and by indulging in a bit of anti-Semitism for its own sake, the Arabs would be encouraged in their defiance of Israel, and in their distrust of the Western powers. The Arabs would be deluded into thinking they had found a friend in Russia and whatever possibilities of peace had come into being would be sabotaged.
 
There seems to be another reason for this new anti-Semitism, one which as dark as it may be, perhaps, also offers a ray of hope in the long run. Anti-Semitism has always been a part of a technique whereby dictators distracted the attention of their people away from their own failures. In times of trouble dictators need scapegoats and what better scapegoat could suggest itself to a European dictator than the Jew. The reports are that there is a great deal of discontent in Czechoslovakia. The Czechs were accustomed to a high standard of living, but under the new regime much of the country’s industry has been diverted to the support of the Soviet’s armed might rather than to provide the needs of the Czech people. By making the self-confessed traitors responsible, and by identifying them with Western imperialism and Jewish conspiracies, the anger of the people is diverted, as so often has happened in other lands at other times.
 
Not only does there seem to be discontent in Czechoslovakia, but in the Soviet Union itself. In the magazine United Nations World there is a most interesting article entitled Stalin is a Failure. It is written by a Bulgarian now living in Yugoslavia, where the Tito regime refuses to be dominated by Russia. In this article the writer analyzes the Bolshevik Congress held this past fall and the speeches and writings of Stalin in connection with this Congress. He points out how Stalin made some serious miscalculations with regard to the collapse of capitalism, and his ability to control all of his satellites, and how he was forced to change some of his line because of these errors. What is more significant for us at the moment, however, are the references that are made to the dissatisfaction of the peoples of the Soviet Union. Russia is referred to as a land of shamefully low standard of culture, material as well as spiritual. Instead of an earthly paradise, Russia remains gray and impoverished and has not even provided the workers and peasants with enough bread. The Soviet leaders, we are told, have sensed the mistrust of their own people and therefore have sought to strengthen their bureaucratic controls and the party apparatus. This article does not tell us anything on the subject of anti-Semitism, but the report of failures and difficulties that is presented, added to the story of the completely undisguised anti-Semitic character of the Czech purge make it seem quite possible that anti-Semitism is now the technique used by the Russian government to cover up for its own failures and its own crimes.
 
The fact that Russia may need anti-Semitism to cover up its weaknesses is in a sense encouraging, for perhaps it forebodes the disintegration of the Soviet system. Unfortunately, that is something that is not likely to happen anytime soon.[11] For the Jews involved, there can be little comfort in such a far-off possibility. Once again we face a period of Jewish history when the loss of a large segment of the Jewish people is threatened. There are almost two million Jews in the Soviet Union, and about 600,000 in the satellite countries who seem now to be doomed. Although they may not be as dramatically put to death as the victims of Nazism were, nevertheless, culturally and economically they will be crushed. The prediction has long ago been made that the eventual disappearance of the Jews in the Soviet Union as a distinct people seems inevitable. This prediction was made, however, only with regard to the Jews as a cultural entity. It was thought that physically they would suffer comparatively little. Now, however, it seems that the destruction of the Jew may be physical as well. We shall probably see more purge trials, and Jews generally are being cut off from gainful employment. Numerous suicides are being reported, and the escape path to Israel is blocked. In the New York Post several days ago a columnist quoted the prediction that “It will take time, but the Jews will be annihilated. They cannot survive."[12]
 
The trials of Prague are the shadow of things to come, and unfortunately no one knows how the Iron Curtain ​ can be pierced to prevent the tragedy.[13] Only if the Russian system collapses can there be much hope, but even with the Russian collapse, if it is too long delayed, even if Jews survive physically, they will be so spiritually pulverized that it will be too late to reclaim them. The consciousness of being Jewish and the desire to be Jewish will have been beaten out of them. The outlook for Jews behind the Iron Curtain for the immediate future is indeed a very dark one.


[1] Jan Garrigue Masaryk (1886 –1948) was a Czech diplomat and politician and Foreign Minister of Czechoslovakia from 1940 to 1948.

[2] Edvard Beneš (1884 – 1948) was a Czechoslovak politician who served as the President of Czechoslovakia twice, from 1935–1938 and 1939–1948. He was also the President of Czechoslovakia in exile (1939–1945).

[3] The Slánský trial was a show trial against elements of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (KSČ) who were thought to have adopted the line of the maverick Yugoslav leader Josip Broz Tito (later first President of Yugoslavia). On 20 November 1952, Rudolf Slánský, General Secretary of the KSČ, and 13 other leading party members, 11 of them Jews, were accused of participating in a Trotskyite-Titoite-Zionist conspiracy and convicted: 11 including Slánský were hanged in Prague on December 3, and three were sentenced to life imprisonment.

[4] Birobidzhan is a town and the administrative center of the Jewish Autonomous Oblast, Russia, located on the Trans-Siberian Railway, close to the border with China.

[5] Bohdan Zynoviy Mykhailovych Khmelnytsky (c. 1595 – 1657) was the military commander in the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth (now part of Ukraine). Jewish history's assessement of Khmelnytsky is overwhelmingly negative because he used Jews as scapegoats and sought to eradicate Jews from the Ukraine. Between 1648–1656, Khmelnytsky's rebels murdered tens of thousands of Jews. Atrocity stories about massacre victims who had been buried alive, cut to pieces or forced to kill one another spread throughout Europe and beyond. The pogroms contributed to a revival of the ideas of Isaac Luria, who revered the Kabbalah, and the identification of Sabbatai Zevi as the Messiah.

[6] Miklós Nyárádi (1905 - 1976) was a Hungarian politician, who served as Minister of Finance between 1947 and 1948. On November 1948 he did not return to home from his official visit. He settled down in the United States around 1949.

[7] The word “Zhid” (the insulting form of the word Jew) has been expunged from the Russian dictionary.

[8] Ilya Grigoryevich Ehrenburg (1891 –1967) was among the most prolific and notable authors of the Soviet Union; he published around one hundred titles. The Black Book, edited by him and Vassily Grossman, the first great documentary work on the Holocaust, detailed the genocide on Soviet citizens of Jewish ancestry.

[9] Rootless cosmopolitan was a term used during the anti-cosmopolitan campaign in the Soviet Union after WWII. Cosmopolitans were intellectuals who were accused of expressing pro-Western feelings and lack of patriotism. The term "rootless cosmopolitan" is considered to specifically refer to Jewish intellectuals.

[10] The political term satellite state designates a country that is formally independent in the world, but under heavy political, economic and military influence or control from another country. The term is used mainly to refer to Central and Eastern European countries of the Warsaw Pact during the Cold War. As used for Central and Eastern European countries it implies that the countries in question were "satellites" under the hegemony of the Soviet Union.

[11] Sidney Ballon was quite correct in this assessment. The dissolution of the Soviet Union was formally enacted in 1991 after Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, the eighth and last leader of the Soviet Union, resigned, declared his office extinct, and handed over its powers – including control of the Soviet nuclear missile launching codes – to Russian President Boris Yeltsin.

[12] Between 1970 and 1988, some 291,000 Soviet Jews were granted exit visas, of whom 165,000 immigrated to Israel, and 126,000 immigrated to the United States. More than 1.6 million Jews left the former Soviet Union after 1988, and another 300,000 - 500,000 are still there in 2016, depending how one counts.

[13] The Iron Curtain was the physical boundary dividing Europe into two separate areas from the end of World War II in 1945 until the end of the Cold War in 1991. The term symbolized efforts by the Soviet Union to block itself and its satellite states from open contact with the west and non-Soviet-controlled areas. On the east side of the Iron Curtain were the countries that were connected to or influenced by the Soviet Union. The term's use as a Cold War symbol is attributed to its use in a speech Winston Churchill gave in March 1946 in Fulton, Missouri.