During 2015, several books were published about the various diaspora campaigns for Soviet Jewry, which culminated in the emigration of a million people from the former USSR to Israel during the 1990s. The French academic Pauline Peretz has documented the American campaign while the journalist Sam Lipski and Professor Suzanne Rutland have produced a fine … Read more
During the summer of 1970 while working as the political secretary of the World Union of Jewish Students, I received a telephone call from an irate caller who told me that the spelling of the organisation’s name in Russian on its headed notepaper was incorrect. I tried to explain that this was none of my … Read more
On December 30th 1988, the writer and translator, Yuli Daniel died in Moscow at the age of sixty-three. A few days later, Andrei Sinyavsky was allowed to return from self-exile in Paris to pay homage at his graveside at Vagavanskoye cemetery. For a whole generation, the names of Daniel and Sinyavsky were synonymous with the … Read more
At the end of last year, BBC 2’s “Timewatch” series screened a programme on the life and times of Nikolai Bukharin, a leading Bolshevik revolutionary and a central figure in the early Soviet state—in Lenin’s words “the favourite of us all”. 1988 marked both the fiftieth anniversary of his execution after a Stalinist show-trial and … Read more
When the Soviet composer Dmitri Shostakovich died in the summer of 1975, The Times labelled him “one of the greatest twentieth century composers and a committed believer in Communism and Soviet power”. This was far from the truth. Although he never made ringing declarations against Stalinist terrors, Shostakovich quietly attempted to retain his independence of … Read more
On 12 August 1952, Peretz Markish, Dovid Berge!son and some others were executed in the dungeons of the Lubianka. Even today, thirty-ive years on, it is uncertain how many were killed or precisely when. Last month, family and Friends of the murdered Soviet-Jewish writers gathered in Jerusalem to commemorate them and to recall the manner … Read more
Since the Revolution, there have always been Soviet Jews wishing to repatriate to Israel. The trauma of the Holocaust spiritually created small groups of young assimilated Jews blindly searching for an explanation. The establishment of the state of Israel provided an interpretation and a visible goal. Such clandestine groups evolved with the political thaw that … Read more
The trial of Iosif Begun is scheduled to begin tomorrow (Friday) in Moscow. He is charged with parasitism and could receive one year’s imprisonment. He has been on hunger strike in his cell in protest against the charge. Begun ‘was arrested the day before the publication of the Izvestia article in which seven Jewish activists … Read more
This week marks the seventh anniversary of the start of the first Leningrad trial which culminated in the death sentences for Mark Dymshits and Edward Kuznetsov and lengthy prison terms for the other defendants. After protests from the west, those death sentences were commuted to 15 years in strict regime labour camps. The Leningrad prisoners … Read more
SIXTY years ago, one of the most momentous events to influence the destiny of the Jewish people took place in Petrograd. The Russian Revolution occurred within a few days of the Balfour Declaration, and both events have, in hindsight, deeply permeated Jewish consciousness and caused many to flock to either one of the utopian … Read more