One by One by One by Judith Miller

Author:Judith Miller
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

While the United States takes pride in its ability to integrate peoples from more than one hundred nations in one vast melting pot, that concept has been anathema to many in the Soviet Union. And this has served to complicate the already complex status of Soviet Jews.

From the revolution on, Soviet governments have grappled with the problem of how to subdue, co-opt, and control the more than one hundred distinct nationalities that now comprise the Soviet empire—only twenty-two of which have more than a million people, but each of which boasts a separate language, culture, and historical memory.18

Gorbachev has removed the nationalities question from the list of banned political subjects. The reform program encouraged demands for greater autonomy and independence from Moscow by the Baltic states, Armenia, and even Georgia, Stalin’s native republic.

Until the 1988 conflict over the territory of Nagorno-Karabakh between Armenia and Azerbaijan and the mass protests in the Baltics, no nationality had proven as problematic for the Soviet government as the country’s nearly two million Jews. Russian anti-Semitism has run so deep, for so long, and antipathy to Jews has been so widespread that Jews have been the country’s traditional scapegoats, the brunt of jokes in good times and vicious pogroms in the bad. Resented by officials in Moscow, they have been discriminated against in most of the country’s republics.

But, above all, Jews have been robbed of a major component of their identity by the Soviet Union’s unwillingness to acknowledge that, apart from the Nazi war against the USSR, the Germans and their collaborators waged a genocidal campaign against the Jews that nearly resulted in their extermination in Europe. With rare exceptions, Jews have been all but written out of Soviet versions of the Great Patriotic War.

The official Soviet version of the war barely mentions the Nazi genocide inflicted on Europe’s Jews. Six million were relatively few, they say, when compared with the twenty million Soviet war dead. Since the war, Soviet officials and citizens have been deeply resentful of what they have described as an effort by Jews to monopolize wartime suffering. As a result, the Soviet government has conducted what many Western analysts regard as a calculated campaign to erase a Jewish past.

Not a single book devoted to anti-Semitism has been published officially in the USSR in more than fifty years, William Korey, an expert on Soviet Jewish history, wrote recently.19 The famous Black Book, in which Soviet writers Vasily Grossman and Ilya Ehrenburg meticulously documented the struggles of Soviet Jews against the Nazis, and their fate, has been suppressed in the Soviet Union for more than forty years. The silence surrounding the destruction of Europe’s Jews was broken before Gorbachev on rare occasions in the ’50s and ’60s, first when The Diary of Anne Frank was published in Russian translation, and later when a similar story appeared about the life of a young girl in the Vilna ghetto.

Because knowledge of the Holocaust is absent from Soviet life, Soviet citizens have by and large been

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