by Masha Gessen
More than six hundred families were delivered to Birobidzhan that year, and only forty-one people among the new settlers had any experience working the land. The others—the eighty-one unskilled laborers, forty-three cobblers, thirty-two sales clerks, and the rest—tried to secure jobs in the city and were, for the most part, forcibly removed to the collective farms. A fair number would then be released back to the city for health reasons—tuberculosis was a common diagnosis—while others ran away on their own. As long as they settled in the city of Birobidzhan, the local authorities made little effort to return them to the farms, but warrants were issued for those who fled the region altogether. Without being tried, sentenced, or even accused of a crime—as other ethnic groups exiled by Stalin had been, as the Chechens and the Ingush, for example, had been accused of having cooperated with the German occupiers—the Jews were effectively exiled and tied to this land at the end of the earth.
The land had nothing to offer them. In 1952, a staff member of the resettlement office was sent to investigate settlers’ reasons for wanting to leave Birobidzhan. His report was contained in a handwritten note I found in the archives: “They mostly answer not things like the climate or the mosquitoes or illness or it is too far to buy things. Many of them say right out that they have no desire to live here because even if you make enough to have something to eat even then there is no mill on which to grind the grain and so they are forced to eat the kind of bread that is half made up of sand and anyway they would want to see at least one grain mill for each district and there isn’t even that.”
A 1949 resolution of the Central Committee that called for the resettlement of Jews in Birobidzhan—thereby dashing any hopes anyone still might have held for a Crimean resettlement project—specified that every settler family upon arrival must receive a modest sum of spending money, a housing construction loan, a loan for purchasing a cow, and fifty kilograms of grain per family member, with an additional fifty for the head of household. But grain was in short supply—another epidemic killed the crops of 1949—as were cows. A shipment of goats was promised by another region, but months went by and no livestock arrived; archival documents tell the heartbreakingly tedious story of delegation after delegation being dispatched to secure the goats and returning empty-handed. Instead of dispensing cows, the resettlement authorities issued the families “certificates of cowlessness,” which, in some imaginary Birobidzhan, might have entitled them to aid. The housing construction credit was insufficient to finance housing construction, which was one of many reasons—others included lack of building supplies and shortage of skilled labor—that housing construction kept falling further and further behind the plans, which were modest to begin with. In 1949, for example, only 63 houses were constructed, out of 755 that had been planned.
As for Iosif Bekerman, like thousands of others, he had no place left to return to, so he stayed, and he saw the trainload of refugees come in, the ones who had been turned back from Odessa, “and there was this Jewish girl there, oh, she was so beautiful, a real Jewish girl, and I thought, This must be my destiny.” He married her and they lived together in Birobidzhan for nearly half a century and had three children together. For decades he dreamed of being able to send for his aunt—the one who had survived the war and had stayed back in Ukraine and who had by now married the only other Jew from their shtetl who had survived—but the Bekerman family only ever had the one room in the barracks, so he never did write to her asking her to come to Birobidzhan.
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The Black Book would not be published in the Soviet Union. The Ministry of State Security, the MGB (the precursor to the KGB), was filing reports with the Central Committee, recommending that the JAC be shut down. At least one report was signed by Mikhail Suslov, an up-and-coming ideologue who would remain a top Soviet official until his death, in 1982. Suslov’s report acknowledged that the JAC had made a positive contribution during the war, but following the Soviet victory the committee’s activities were, he wrote, “acquiring an increasingly nationalist, Zionist character and [the JAC] was objectively empowering a Jewish reactionary bourgeois nationalist movement abroad and heating up nationalist Zionist attitudes among some parts of the Jewish population of the USSR.”1
The Jews were becoming the main enemy within. In January 1948, Mikhoels was reported to have died in a car accident while on a trip to Minsk. Thirty years later, when I was a child, I first heard about Mikhoels from my great-grandmother, who talked about him as a Jewish martyr; she said he was murdered. It was another two decades before the documents were published. She had been right: the legendary Yiddish actor and director was shot dead and left by the side of a highway, for road workers to discover his body in the January snow and to report it as a traffic accident.2 His funeral in Moscow turned into an unsanctioned public gathering, equal parts outpouring of grief and acknowledgment of dread.
Eynikayt was shut down in November 1948. The Central Committee of the Communist Party ordered the closure of the JAC, which, the decree stated, had become “a center of anti-Soviet propaganda” that “regularly supplies anti-Soviet information to foreign intelligence organizations.”3 Over the course of two weeks, starting on the first anniversary of Mikhoels’s murder, everyone in the JAC leadership was arrested; the sixty-four-year-old Bergelson was taken to jail on the last day of the sweep, which means he had been waiting for the arrest for two excruciating and hopeless weeks, with no place left to run. In February, the Politburo took three separate decisions disbanding Jewish writers’ associations in Moscow, Kyiv, and Minsk and shutting down Yiddish-language literary journals.4
Over the next two years, Bergelson was subjected to several forms of torture. He was beaten; he was occasionally placed in solitary confinement in an unheated six-by-six-foot cell. But more painful than anything else, he was interrogated, often nightly. The interrogations, which would last sleepless night after sleepless night, always ended with the ritual of his reviewing and signing the transcript, which sometimes included some of the things he had actually said—some of them under threat of immediate execution, some of them in a state of hopeless exhaustion, all of them in fear—and many things he’d never said. Occasionally, he found the strength to object. Sometimes he made his own marks on the page.
Once he found the scene comical even while it was taking place. The investigator said that the American Yiddish journalist Ben Zion Goldberg was a spy. “Goldberg was an American spy. Really?” responded Bergelson. It seems to have been the kind of mock-surprised, highly disbelieving “Really?” that in American English is more accurately rendered as “Oh, really?” In Russian, this intonation is marked by double punctuation: “Really?!” At the end of the session, as Bergelson reviewed the transcript, he discovered that his “Really” was followed with a period: “Goldberg was an American spy. Really.” Bergelson asked for a correction, but the transcribing secretary said, “We do not have the custom of using double punctuation.” Bergelson raised the issue again at trial, months later. It was useless.5
The lead investigator in the JAC case was a man named Vladimir Komarov, a state security veteran who would himself be arrested a few years later. He would write the following letter in his own defense:
Defendants literally trembled before me. They feared me like the plague, feared me more than they did the other investigators. Even the minister [of state security] did not evoke the terror that they showed when I personally interrogated them. Enemies under arrest fully knew and sensed my hatred of them. They saw me as an investigator who had a harsh punitive attitude toward them and therefore, as other investigators told me, they tried in every way to avoid meeting me or having me interrogate them….I especially hated and was merciless toward the Jewish nationalists, whom I saw as the most dangerous and evil enemies. Because of my hatred of them, I was considered an anti-Semite not only by the defendants but by former employees of the MGB who were of Jewish nationality.6
Still, the fifteen people under investig
ation—all of them middle-aged or older, all of them Jews who had seen great sorrow and experienced extreme fear—managed to make the process of fabricating a case against them quite difficult. Two refused to cooperate altogether, signing none of the transcripts and, most important, refusing to libel any of the other defendants. Several people signed their transcripts but recanted in court; they appear to have felt that by signing the transcripts they would ensure that they lived to see the trial. Bergelson was not one of the more difficult defendants, but even his mild-mannered insistence on examining and occasionally correcting the interrogation transcripts was unlike anything most of the Stalinist investigators had ever seen. So it was not until late March 1952, more than three years after the arrests, that the fifteen defendants were given access to the forty-two thick binders that constituted the case against the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee. They had eight days to read the files and prepare for trial.
The indictment read, in part:
…Bergelson’s nationalist ideology was formed back in the years of the Civil War, when Bergelson wrote for the reactionary Jewish newspaper Die neue zeit, where he published anti-Soviet articles.
As a convinced nationalist, in 1918 Bergelson joined the central committee of the Culture League, an organization that existed on Ukrainian territory, where he carried out work of sabotage against the Soviet state. In 1921, aided by enemies of the people Frumkina and Litvakov (previously sentenced), he deserted the Soviet Union and proceeded to publish anti-Soviet articles in the bourgeois reactionary press for a number of years. In 1934 Bergelson used his enemy connections to return to the Soviet Union, inserted himself into the steering committee of the Jewish section of the Writers Union and continued his enemy activities against the Communist Party.
…The investigation has thus established that at the time of the formation of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee the accused Bergelson [and twelve other names listed] were enemies of the Soviet regime, ready at any opportunity to increase their work of sabotage against the Party and the Soviet state.
The document went on to say that leaders of the JAC had conspired with American Jews to seize the Crimea and populate it with Jews. In addition, those American Jewish spies had used the JAC to gather information about other parts of the Soviet Union, including Birobidzhan. But worst of all, the JAC had planned to go ahead with the Crimea plan and had even dispatched Kvitko on a reconnaissance trip.
Certain that the Crimea issue would be resolved in their favor and entertaining the illusion that they were now “men of state,” Mikhoels, Fefer, Epshteyn, and Bergelson distributed ministerial portfolios among themselves and the most active Jewish nationalists ahead of time.
Every one of the men and women on trial was accused of having met with American Jews in the Soviet Union in order to hand over intelligence information.
The accused Bergelson in 1945–1946 had repeated meetings in Moscow with [American Jewish activists] Goldberg and Novik, to whom he conveyed some amount of information that interested them about the life of Jews in the USSR and about Birobidzhan.
More insidious than pure fiction, the case contained exhaustive descriptions of things Bergelson actually did, interpreted and presented in a way that doomed him.
The investigation has established that in addition to their spying, [all of the accused], acting on assignment from reactionary Jewish American circles…engaged in broad-based propaganda of bourgeois nationalism among the Jewish population of the USSR. In an attempt to forestall the natural process of assimilation of the Jews and set them up to oppose the Communist Party and the Soviet government, [the accused] used the Eynikayt newspaper, Jewish literary journals, the Der emes publishing house, [other Yiddish-language media outlets], and the State Jewish Theater to inflame nationalist sentiment among the Jewish population.
On page 231 of volume 18, Bergelson admitted to doing the work to which he had devoted most of his adult life: creating a Jewish cultural hub. He told the investigator,
“As a result of nationalist work, the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee was essentially transformed into…a nationalist center of the USSR and was able to undertake work to consolidate Jewish nationalist elements and awaken among the Jewish population the desire for nationalist separation. JAC became the sort of place where many Jews came for any reason that may not have had a direct or indirect connection to the committee’s work.”
The indictment ended with summaries of the defendants’ lives and crimes:
David Rafailovich Bergelson, born 1882 in the shtetl of Sarny in Ukraine, of Jewish nationality, descendant from the family of a wealthy trader, a citizen of the USSR, lacking secondary education, a practicing Jewish writer before his arrest, stands accused of engaging in enemy activity against the Communist Party and the Soviet state dating back to the establishment of the Soviet regime. As a member of the presidium of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, he took an active part in collecting information about the Soviet Union on behalf of the Americans, traveled to Kiev with the goal of spying in 1947, and during the visit to the USSR of American intelligence officers Goldberg and Novik handed over information on Birobidzhan, thereby violating articles 58-1a, 58-10 part 2, and 58-11 of the Penal Code.7
These Soviet investigators had managed to get Bergelson’s birth year and his birthplace wrong, but it was the numbers at the end of the paragraph that mattered. They stood for high treason (punishable by death), seditious propaganda with the use of religious or national prejudice (punishable by death), and conspiracy (punishable by death).8
On April 3, 1952, State Security Minister Semyon Ignatyev sent the indictment to Stalin, with a cover letter:
To: Comrade Stalin
I hereby present a copy of the indictment in the case of the Jewish nationalists, American spies Lozovsky, Fefer, and the others. I report that the case has been forwarded for review to the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR with the proposal of sentencing Lozovsky, Fefer, and all of their accomplices, with the exception of Shtern, to death by firing squad.
Shtern should be exiled to a distant region for a ten-year term.
S. Ignatyev9
Lina Shtern, one of the great natural scientists of the twentieth century, the discoverer of the blood-brain barrier, was a devout Communist and a member of two anti-fascist committees: the Jewish one and the women’s one. Executing her might have drawn negative attention in the West. She was one of two women who stood trial alongside Bergelson. The Politburo itself—most likely, Stalin personally—made the final sentencing decisions. It was death by firing squad for all of the defendants except Shtern, who would be sentenced to five years’ exile. Only after the sentencing instructions had been conveyed to the MGB could the trial commence. The case was heard by three military judges with neither a prosecutor nor defense attorneys present.10 Only fourteen exhausted elderly Jews appeared in the courtroom; one was by now too ill to leave his cell. The trial began on May 8, 1952, in secret; records remained classified for four decades afterward.
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The crackdown in Birobidzhan began within months of Mikhoels’s murder. In April 1948 the regional party committee met to discuss the work of Birobidzhaner shtern. The newspaper was found to have committed several “mistakes”—there was hardly a more damning word in the Russian language in those days. One of the mistakes was the publication of Emiot’s poem “Symphony,” which was found to be “lacking any sociopolitical content and entirely divorced from reality.” Other sins: 430 of 540 articles examined by a party commission concerned Jews; the newspaper published a list of Jews who had been awarded the Hero of the Soviet Union, the country’s highest military honor. For these mistakes, the editor, Buzi Miller, was removed from his post.1 A year later, he was expelled from the Communist Party “for insincerity and the promotion of bourgeois nationalism.”2
In July 1949 the Communist Party convened a special two-day conference to discuss the Yiddish nationalist conspiracy. The first secretary of the Kh
abarovsk regional party committee arrived in Birobidzhan especially for the occasion. This was an unmistakable sign: the leaders of the Jewish Autonomous Region had clearly made such a mess of things that they could no longer be trusted to clean up for themselves. Before the new purges commenced, higher party authorities would have to shine a merciless light on the failings of the Jews. The first secretary, whose name was Yefimov, listed the crimes:
In his novella Birobidzhan, the writer Miller postulates that Birobidzhan is the only sole center for Soviet Jews, that only Birobidzhan revived the Jewish people and promised a happy future for those people….After Miller cooked up this anti-Soviet mess, Rabinkov, the Birobidzhan literary critic, praised it as an outstanding piece of creative work, hailing Miller’s play He Is from Birobidzhan, which is in fact ideologically harmful, and glossing over mistakes of a nationalistic nature found in the poetry of Emiot, thus demonstrating that he himself holds harmful cosmopolitan views….The Jewish poet Lyubov Vasserman, a former Zionist who came to the Soviet Union from Palestine and who to this day holds Zionist nationalist views, was put in charge of literary programming at the regional radio committee and used her position to select for broadcast works of low artistic and conceptual quality but authored by local writers and poets. Nor did she neglect to air her own so-called work, which was seeped in the spirit of nationalism….The work of Birobidzhan writer [Ber] Slutsky also contained mistakes of a nationalistic nature. In his review of The Birobidzhan Generation, a book by the Jewish poet Vergelis, Slutsky praised its nationalist assertion that Birobidzhan, and not the Soviet Union, is a homeland for Jews.
