Soviet Crimes Against the Jewish People

Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Irina Tsukerman, the coordinator for Soviet Crimes Against the Jewish People, a new initiative which focuses on the digital documentation of sites and narratives connected to Soviet persecution of Jews, as well as sites and stories associated with acts of resistance.

I would like to talk to you today about your new initiative, Soviet Crimes Against the Jewish People.

But let’s begin with you telling us a bit about your background and what inspired you to start this effort.

Tsukerman: I was born in Ukraine, when it was still part of the Soviet Union. I grew up seeing many of the things associated with Communism – bread lines/food shortages, expectation of conformity in every aspect of one’s thinking and behavior, poor quality of services and whatever products we had, envy of the West, coupled with abject hatred towards it. I was also acutely aware of my Jewish identity. On the one hand, my family has always been proudly Jewish; on the other hand, my parents had the “Fifth Paragraph” in their passports, which divided the population by ethnicity by the State and allowed for official discrimination under the quota system. We moved to the United States in 1995, and, growing up, I continued to maintain my interest in both my Jewish heritage and the culture of my country of origin. I heard many stories from my grandmother, parents, and many others about what life was like through the decades.

I also read many books and watched movies which exposed and poked fun at the Soviet system. Those issues were on my mind as I went through the public school system in New York, and to my horror, realized that the history of the Soviet Union was presented in a very distorted, dismissive, and apologetic way and most people really did not have much of an idea of what had actually gone on.

As I grew up, I watched how social policy increasingly leaned towards political correctness and superficial multiculturalism. The Soviet Union was also supposed to be a very internationalist state, yet one of the most popular accusation against Jews was “cosmopolitanism and Zionism.” It became clear to me that when you purport to be accepting of everything, you end up becoming increasingly intolerant, and my prediction eventually came true.

Being very active in social networking sites, I noted that many people were willing to give up the marketplace of ideas and report each other to the website domain for comments and articles which offended their sensibilities. Having gone to law school and having assumed that at least people who are trained to think critically would see through collectivist mentality and embrace an individualist way of thinking, I eventually realized that nothing could be farther from the truth. Lack of basic education on life in Communist states and idealization of collectivism in school and other programming has brought both the general community and much of the secular Jewish community in New York to the point that such mentality has come to be welcomed and embraced without much questioning. Having more degrees did not make anyone more individualistic. When I was approached by Jason Guberman and asked to coordinate this project, I saw it as an opportunity to show to the public at large, and the left-wing (and often quite illiberal) Jewish community, the real story behind the idealized socialist veneer.

FP: So what is the project all about and what is your main aim?

Tsukerman: The project seeks to peel away the false notion that the Soviet Union was somehow preferable to Nazi Germany, and further, that it was certainly better for the Jews. Through digital documentation of personal narratives and sites, connected to the persecution of Jews on the basis of their ethnic and religious identities, we will show that the Soviet Union was actually the equivalent of Nazi Germany in terms of its motivations.

The fact that it was less efficient should not take away from the evil intent with regard to both a “Final Solution” for the Jews, that was in the works but interrupted by Stalin’s death, and the way it has treated its Jewish population throughout the 72 years of its existence. In addition to showing that the National Socialist state and the Internationalist Socialist States were flip sides of the same coin, we will show that collectivist mentality anywhere can lead to similar results. We will memorialize the victims, survivors, dissidents, and their supporters through the creation of a digital museum/database. None of the Soviet perpetrators ever stood trial for their atrocities. At least, this project will preserve history and expose the truth.

FP: What is the relevance of this issue today?

Tsukerman: The issue is universal, and the project can serve as a model for any oppressed minority under any collectivist and anti-humanitarian regime at any point in time. The dangers of collectivism have shown themselves again and again through the ages, Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, Mao’s Cultural Revolution, Castro’s Cuba being only some of the examples that one could site as evidence. Today, the world is facing just as many dangers from collectivism as it did in the 20th century. Russia itself is attempting to reemerge as a global force, by wielding influence over its former states, such as its intervention in the Ukrainian elections in recent years, as well as its invasion of George, and by lending support to such regimes as Assad’s Syria and the now-deceased Hugo Chavez, and their ilk. Islamism (however you want to call it… extremism/jihadism/fundamentalism) is nothing if not collectivist and anti-humanitarian at its core.

If you look at the Iranian regime, under the religious guise, it espouses the same collectivist, totalitarian principles that the Soviet Union professed under the name of communism/socialism. Even in the United States, there is a growing tendency towards collectivist mentality – from the ever-present political correctness, to the dissolution of our basic economic principles. Obamacare, which few people really understand, is but one example. Mayor Bloomberg’s thankfully failed attempt to ban large sodas for the benefit of humanity is another issue. Federal regulation of such minutiae as food in school, and the general tendency to try to fit everyone in the same box regardless of his individual needs, is very disturbing. I think it is natural and easier to lean towards collectivism, without thinking about the evil of such ideology and the results it brings about.

FP: Share with us the tactics and techniques you are employing to achieve your goal.

Tsukerman: Our first exhibit is scheduled for August. We will digitally document 25 sites and stories connected to Soviet Crimes against Jews, using photography, video, Google Earth technology, and 3D panoramas to capture the places that may otherwise become extinct to history. We will also present oral narratives by survivors and dissidents, which will hopefully memorialize their stories as well as inspire individuals facing the dangers of collectivist regimes elsewhere today. We are also interviewing the supporters of dissidents abroad, such as those who worked on the passage of the Jackson-Vannick amendment, and individuals who smuggled in Jewish prayer books and subversive literature to the underground meeting places, such as apartments where the dissidents met and underground synagogues.

In addition, our website will feature an extensive database linking to books, articles, and other projects, and resources that contains more detailed historical information on these events. We are seeking to collaborate with heritage organizations to create digital and heritage trails of sites connected to dissidents, that visitors could follow if they wish, whether they are in the area, or from the comfort of their own desk. Our goal is to make this project very much a collaborative effort with other organizations that are working on similar projects in other countries, such as former Soviet satellite states. Ultimately, we aim to be as informative and educational as possible and to have a very broad base of support and audience.

FP: You are also looking for assistance right?

Tsukerman: Absolutely. We are looking for:

Sources of information: Witness accounts, anyone with a relevant story about persecution by the state on the basis of their Jewish ethnicity, religion, or identity, and/or acts of attempted resistance/dissent. Anyone with access to archives, such as KGB documents or trial transcripts, photographs, video images of any sort, who would be willing to share those documents with us, would be great.

Anyone, who would be able to identify important sites, such as prison cells, location of psychiatric hospitals, gulag barracks, underground synagogues or apartments or other places where secret meetings by dissidents would be held, would be very helpful. And of course, any connections to other individuals, whether survivors, relatives of victims, dissidents, or their active supporters in the United States, would be great to interview for the project.

Sources of advice: Academics with a background in Soviet or Soviet Jewish or Communist history, who would be willing give us occasional feedback or serve on our advisory board, as well as individuals in the broader community, such as those who were active in the political community or major Jewish organizations, or anyone else, who has relevant knowledge and background and who could give us suggestions as our project develops.

Interns and volunteers: We are already getting many great interviews, documents, and research material. We need fluent Russian and English speakers, preferably with document translation experience, who could help us translate and transmit the archive documents, as well as write up site summaries for the exhibit we are launching in August.

Additionally, volunteers both in the United States and abroad, who could help with interviewing our subjects on video, taking photos of sites, and helping with relevant archival research are a priority right now. We have many great leads and hope to see many enthusiastic volunteers, interested in helping to bring this information to the public. Other volunteers with skills such as website design would also be very helpful.

Sources of support: Digital Heritage Mapping is the 501(c)(3) fiscal sponsor of SCAJP, and all donations can be made out to Digital Heritage Mapping for Soviet Crimes Against the Jewish People.

Website: heritagemapping.org
Address: 304 Newbury Street, No. 311, Boston, MA., 02115

All inquiries can be sent to scajpinfo@gmail.com and will be answered promptly. I am coordinating the project and will be happy to answer any questions, provide additional information, and listen to any feedback, suggestions, and advice. We have a detailed brief to distribute to anyone who is interested.

Our website, scajp.org, is currently in development and we are hoping to launch it shortly. It will feature our first exhibit, information about the project, and link to many relevant resources.

FP: Irina Tsukerman, thank you so much for joining Frontpage Interview and we wish you the best of luck in your project.

I think Stalin did go after Jews for being Jews...see the Doctors Plot.....he pretty much blamed most Jewish party members by name for being Bolshie rivals and Trotskyites

This rivalry between Jewish revolutionaries started with their preponderance with Menshies and then Lenin’s cliques and later Trotsky

And Stalin and Beria....Molotov too I guess even though his Jewish wife was imprisoned....all blamed Jewish commies as Jews of a conspiracy against the state....some party member Jews survived but likely renounced anything to do with the religion of their birth

They purged most of them as such...

Russian fellow commies turned on them

Then Fascists blamed them as communists even as commies purged them via that special Stalin disappearing photo technique

It was a severe double whammy for continental Jewry....ironically the Iberian peninsula..... fascist too....was even though not totally innocent....a rare refuge for Jews.....not sure Franco’s reasons for resisting Nazis calls for railcars

Cronos you meant Trotsky

SC, I think CF is just trying to recount some of the deep history of eastern European Polish/Ukrainian anti-semitism. It’s not familiar to even most educated Americans and western Europeans, whose knowledge of anti-semitism tends to skip from medieval Crusade pogroms to Spanish Inquisition to Dreyfuss to Hitler.

But the vast majority of European Jews lived in eastern Europe, particularly in the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth, as mentioned. The entire eastern part of this empire was for several centuries inhabited by recently re-enslaved or re-enserfed Ruthenian (Ukrainian) peasants and Cossacks who were harshly oppressed by their Polish overlords.

The overlords generally didn’t want to do the icky work of actually forcing the serfs to work themselves, so they hired Jewish (mostly) managers to run their estates, known as arendators. These guys operated on a fixed price to the landlord, getting to keep whatever they could squeeze or cheat from the peasants above this amount. The landlords obviously had an incentive to keep raising the “rent” to the arendator, who had to squeeze harder to keep afloat himself. The landlord lived elsewhere and didn’t have to see the consequences of his decisions.

This was basically the same system as the tax farming by the Romans in Judea, and it is a recipe for oppression and hatred to develop. See how well tax collectors were viewed by the Jews in the Gospels.

Similar mechanisms played out in Ukraine and eventually led to a massive revolt in 1648 that targeted Jews and Poles, with massive loss of life. The revolutionaries were understandably, though not rightly, uninterested in drawing fine distinctions between those Jews and Poles who had personally oppressed them and Jews and Poles in general.

As CF says, pretty much this whole area was eventually taken over by Russia, which by doing so acquired huge populations of Jews, and imbibed in the process the attitudes of the local Christians towards those Jews.

IOW, it’s not as simple as innocent Jews like Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof just trying to mind their own business. It’s a tangled mess of oppression, revolution and revenge created by an oppressive system that desperately needed to be overthrown. In this country we never had anything remotely similar except for slavery, and we are still dealing with the aftershocks of that system and its destruction over 150 years later.

You said in your original post that Jews were not targeted as Jews in Communist Russia and then in response to my reply stated they were “sometimes used as scapegoats.

Well, if they were Scapegoats then they were certainly scapegoats because they were Jews...hence...they were purged for being Jews and enemies of the state as such for being precisely that

and at times associated with Stalin’s enemies rightly or wrongly

There are reams of writings of Soviet purges of Jews

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stalin_and_antisemitism

http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/125203/surviving-stalins-purges

http://globalfire.tv/nj/03en/history/stalin.htm

I know you. Your main thing here is fingering what you think is racism...and I having been a target of that know well enough.

I can only surmise you wish to believe the Nazis whom you see as Uber Nationalist white racists were worse to Jews than the Commies of whom at first at least counted many Jews in the revolutions.

Well...I agree...the Nazis were worse but just barely..and some would argue maybe not.

But that logic that Jews were not persecuted by the powers in the Soviet Union after Lenin died is just poppycock frankly and given you write lucid enough should know better.

Jews suffered under the Tsars and then allied with the new collectivist powers largely and damn if they didn’t get chewed up again...and all for being Jewish or like you said to some degree....scapegoats as Jews...being guilty of association with other Jewish segments like those under Trotsky.

Stalin had a real thing against Jews...maybe as a Georgian...but he feared any influence they could gain distinctly as Jews and authorized the killing of many many indiscriminately.

He spoke to his confidants of the “Jewish Menace” to his power consolidation as well as any Final Solution sort to his west

Methinks you have a difficult time understanding the concept of degree.

My original comment was on the author's statement that he was attempting to refute "the false notion that the Soviet Union was somehow preferable to Nazi Germany."

I'm about the last person you could possibly call a fan or apologist for communism or USSR or Stalin, but the Soviet Union was indeed "preferable to Nazi Germany" for many groups, notably Russians, Ukrainians and Jews.

Here's an analogy. There are 10M people in group A. Government B will, given the chance, kill 6M of Group A simply because of who they are. Government C will oppress Group A (along with everyone else in its power), but will kill probably at most under 1M of them, and then (mostly) for other reasons than their membership in Group A. I think Government C, while being no picnic, is by any objective standard preferable for Group A than is Government B.

When the Germans invaded Ukraine, they were greeted with flowers and cheering crowds. Within weeks or months the people of these regions had discovered Stalin, even as horrible as he was, was indeed "preferable" to Hitler, and they switched sides back.

I do not claim that Jews were not persecuted in USSR, only that they were not a primary focus of Stalin. A great many Jews who died were killed in the Great Purge, and were killed not because they were Jews but because they were longtime commies and Stalin was killing off anybody who might potentially be a political threat. IOW, they were killed because they lost a factional fight within communism, not for being (racial) Jews. This group had obviously abandoned religious Judaism long before.

You could get killed in Stalin's Russia for a host of reasons, and those reasons probably sometimes included being Jewish. But it is just silly to therefore claim that USSR was "not somehow preferable" to Nazi Germany for Jews. Of course it was, as sad as it is that they were given such a horrible choice of evils.

I do indeed see Nazis "as Uber Nationalist white racists." That is because that is precisely what they were, and damn proud of it. Though "Aryan/Germanic racists" is more accurate than "white racists," since they excluded large segments of the "white race," notably the Jews and Slavs (which is very odd, since the Slavs are one sub-group of Aryans).

If you're trying to lump me in with those who consider American conservatives to be white racists or right-wing in the European original sense of the term, you're barking up a very wrong tree. American conservatism, properly understood, has nothing at all to do with either the European left or the European right, aspects of which were combined to form Fascism and Nazism.

Doctors’ plot was a culmination of Stalin’s anti-Jewish campaign. It has actually started with the cases of “Jewish antifascist counsil” and “ Zionist conspiracy within (M)KGB”.
Both cases were retaliation on people supporting Israel (primarily within Czech communist party, KGB and Soviet air forces), thus second case was also another Stalin’s paranoid purge in the first place.
It is not heavily advertised fact but Soviets did a lot of work to make Israel happen. An idea was heavily opposed by UK, FDR was against it as well in terms of solidarity with Churchill, but Soviets has pulled it backed by Jewish intellectuals in US.
“Jewish antifascist counsil” were community organizers working for Soviet cause in the West during WWII. Their mission was fundraising, pushing for lend-lease, providing good press for the Soviets etc. In return Soviets promised them to help in establishing a Jewish state in Palestine.
Under pressure from inside US government has finally backed it too.
Both British authorities and Arabs were unimpressed to say the least but Soviets has started pouring captured German weapons via Czechs and provided training like they do in 3rd world now.
The problem is Israel hasn’t come further kibbutz with socialism and started to lean towards the West since the very beginning.
Stalin thought it was a betrayal and went mad. Everyone involved was declared a pro-US conspirator. Jewish counsil was first to get purged, next came the Czech government used as cover for Soviet support of Israel, next came Air Force and KGB training Israel’s airmen, intelligence and special forces.
It was actually a start of blatant Soviet antisemitism, before 1947 you could probably have a death sentence for an antisemitic joke in Moscow.
I also firmly believe it was what finally killed Stalin. It was one thing to purge Soviet military before WWII but absolutely different with “Zionist KGB” and Jewish doctors. These groups certainly had teeth to bite back.

Actually, Zionism had been outlawed by the Soviet government almost immediately on the grounds of it being a form of "bourgeois nationalism." Then the hypocritical Commies supported Irish nationalists. The original Palestine Communist Party was also anti-Zionist.

The USSR's pro-Zionist position was created in the late 1940's in part as a way of driving the British out of the Middle East. Soviet propaganda even called for Israeli and Arab armies to join together to defeat "British imperialism." And while the USA recognized Israel first, it was only de facto The USSR gave actual de jure recognition. And yes, the Russians gave the Czech Communists the go-ahead to supply Israel during the arms embargo (though it must be noted that the Zionists had begun negotiations with non-Communist Czechoslovakia, though that country fell to Communism in 2/'48, three months before the War of Independence.

However, for whatever reason, the Soviets turned against Israel after just a few years, this time ordering their Czech underlings to supply the Arabs. Soviet propaganda became anti-Israel and pro-Arab in the early '50's, even though the Israelis themselves at this time took a position of neutrality and refused to take sides in the Cold War. Israeli leaders at the time stated that they were unaware of any anti-Soviet Bloc activity on their part and could not understand Russia's hostility. But Russia had definitely become hostile and took the side of leftist Arabs like Nasser, though apart from a few days in the '50's they didn't break diplomatic relations with Israel until 1967 (and Cuba didn't until 1973).

The Six Day War is often considered the watershed event that caused the Communist bloc to become anti-Israel, but it had already long done that, despite helping Israel to come into existence.

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