Until the 1980s, the title above had no meaning in the USSR: like the rest of the population, the intellectuals had been efficiently sovietized. They participated in various capacities in collective life, whether or not they had had the mention “Jew” entered on their internal passport, and they often bore an easily recognizable patronymic. A number of them, some eminent, had been the object of suspicions and persecutions in the last years of Stalin’s life, accused first of nationalism (dissolution of the “Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee” and elimination of a number of its members between 1948 and 1952), then, as moreover in the “people’s democracies,” of “cosmopolitanism,” of “Zionism,” and thus of plotting criminally (the so-called “white coats” affair, namely the Jewish doctors of the Kremlin, at the end of 1952) with foreign powers. It must be recalled that the Zionist, Bundist, or indeed religious organizations had obviously been banned, as in general all organizations other than the Communist Party. There remained a few synagogues and a few rabbis, surviving silently. But a Jewish consciousness subsisted faintly, as had been noticed when Golda Meir, then ambassador of the new State of Israel to the USSR, went for the holidays to a synagogue in Moscow, where thousands of Soviets came to chant her name, at the end of the year 1948.
Following the Helsinki Accords of 1975, signed by the Soviet Union under pressure from the Western powers, and which included a section concerning human rights; following above all the emotion caused among them by the Six-Day War of 1967, a number of Jews (and half-Jews or non-Jews) wishing to emigrate to Israel or simply to leave the USSR filed visa applications, often refused on the pretext that the most competent among them, especially scientists, had had access to secrets bearing on the country’s security. The situation of these “refused ones” (otkazniki in Russian, “refuseniks” in Russo-English) was painful: excluded from their university departments or their research laboratories, they gathered to hold clandestine seminars, in which Western scientists came to participate in order to support them. It was in these seminars, and around them, that a new Jewish consciousness developed, in the wake of which there emerged individuals, and groups, who once again considered themselves “Jews.”
This was, for example, the case of Anatoly (later Natan) Shcharansky (later Sharansky), a graduate in applied mathematics, who was refused a visa in 1973. Having become the spokesman of the Moscow group for the observance of the Helsinki Accords, he was arrested in 1977 and sentenced to 13 years in the camps. Freed in 1986, under Gorbachev, following pressures exerted by Reagan’s USA, he emigrated to Israel and appeared as an ardent Zionist, a radical one even. This evolution is fairly characteristic.
In the refusenik groups, other aspirations came to light. For example, the desire to know what the reality of the extermination of the Jews on Soviet territory had been, in particular through the clandestine circulation of the “Black Book on the Villainous Extermination of the Jews by the German Fascist Invaders,” elaborated under the aegis of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, and whose publication had been halted in the USSR in 1947. Composed of testimonies gathered by the writers Ilya Ehrenburg and Vasily Grossman, published in Israel, this book broke the silence imposed by Stalin on the specificity of Jewish sufferings. To speak of it, to read it, to circulate it, was to revive the idea and the reality of a Jewish people that was not a mere “nationality” within the Soviet whole, but the name of a community of destiny.
In the course of the 1980s there also manifested a religious renewal, as well as the desire to reconnect with Hebrew (and no longer only with Yiddish, considered the “national” language of the Soviet Jews). This was the case, for example, with Iosif Begun, a refusenik scientist who was sentenced in 1983 to 12 years in the camps for his activities as a teacher and propagandist of Hebrew, but freed in 1987, following an international campaign in his favor.
Being a Jewish intellectual in the USSR
A glimpse of this uncomfortable and strange psychological situation was given to me one day by Efim Etkind, former professor of literature in Leningrad until 1974, when he was stripped of his titles for having supported Solzhenitsyn and Joseph Brodsky, and forced into exile in France, where he became, according to the title of one of his books, an Unwilling Dissident. “A Jewish intellectual in the USSR,” he told me, not without humor, “is someone in whose library one immediately notices all the great classics of Russian literature.” How better to express this love of the host country (Egypt, Spain, Germany, France), which was characteristic of exile for so many Jews, whose fidelity to their destiny and to their heritage was marked by a paradoxical and burning desire to adapt, and even to adapt to the extreme?