ANTI-SEMITISM AND INVISIBLE ENEMIES
Finally, and unsurprisingly, the study of the Soviet experience requires us to conÂfront the question of the presence of the minority Jewish population and of anti- Semitism.[403] Here again, certain processes are worth considering relative to certain other well-known phenomena that occurred in the Iberian societies of the Ancien Regime.
In order to illustrate this theme, we can turn to Vasily Semyonovich GrossÂman’s monumental novel Life and Fate (1960) for support. This work was banned by Nikita Khrushchev’s administration.[404] One of the main characters, the physicist Viktor Pavlovitch Strum, is based fairly closely on the author. Strum comes from a Jewish family: his mother, as Grossman’s had, lives in the Jewish neighborhood of Berditchev in Ukraine, a city famous for the size of its Jewish community. Yet Strum, as a Soviet citizen, prefers to put “Russian” as his nationality on his identity papers, rather than “Jewish.” He marries a Russian citizen, Lioudmila Chapoch- nikov, and he does not maintain any ties to the customs of traditional Jewish life, the Hebrew religion, or the Yiddish language, and he lives in Moscow. Of course, Strum’s choices are not comparable to the phenomenon of the forced or voluntary conversion of Iberian Jews in the late Medieval period. But they signal that he does not wish to preserve the memory of his family origins, and that he would prefer to adhere himself to the nationality of the majority of the country, doing so within the framework of Soviet citizenship. Yet, beginning in 1943, Strum discovers the inÂsidious and increasingly threatening presence of anti-Semitism within the CommuÂnist Party and the state bureaucracy. This is brought home to him when the authoriÂties give permission for all of the researchers and staff of his physics institute, who have been temporarily placed in safety in Kazan, to return to Moscow, with the exception of two of them, whose common point is their Judaism. Strum understands that the two of them are being punished solely for being Jewish. He protests this decision, but without daring to denounce it as a manifestation of ideological and administrative anti-Semitism. But he soon learns that the bureaucracy, the Party, and his colleagues have interpreted his protests as a sign of his belonging to the Jewish world. Thus this citizen of Russian nationality becomes a Jew in the eyes of his colleagues, despite all of the efforts that he had taken to conceal an origin that he did not wish to recognize. In other words, the invisible (to the eyes of others as well as to his own) Jew is revealed to be quite visible. While taking into account the enormous distance separating a conversion to Christianity in the Iberian world of the late fifteenth century and an integration into Soviet citizenship by the selection of Russian as one’s nationality, the process that Strum endured is not altogether difÂferent from the one suffered by a number of New Christians in the Iberian empires. Despite having consented to undergo the processes of integration into the majoritarÂian Christian society, despite having assiduously followed this process over several generations, at any moment a New Christian subject could be accused of Judaism.The trajectory of Leninism-Stalinism with regards to collective repression was guided by plural logics. The terrifying date of “37,” a year that in Soviet memory has become a proper noun, was a turning point. This was the moment when the most dangerous enemy became the most invisible one, which is to say, the one who passed for and passed himself off as a loyal Party member, but who contained within him a duplicitous nature. Stalin himself offered a description of this quintesÂsential enemy. There was not only the “mole,” hidden within the state apparatus from before the Revolution itself; there was also the citizen who concealed within himself, unknowingly, a certain sort of ambiguity at the very heart of his personalÂity. In a speech given on the occasion of district elections, Stalin presented in the following terms the portrait of these ambiguous men, in an inimitable style that must have sounded like a death threat for all those present:
There are people of whom you cannot say what they are, whether they are good or bad, couraÂgeous or timid, for the people heart and soul, or for the enemies of the people.
There are such people and there are such public figures. They are also to be found among us, the Bolsheviks. You know yourselves, comrades, there are black sheep in every family. (Laughter and apÂplause.) Of people of this indefinite type, people who resemble political philistines rather than political figures, people of this vague, uncertain type, the great Russian writer, Gogol, rather aptly said: “Vague sort of people,” says he, “neither one thing nor the other, you can’t make head or tail of them, they are neither Bogdan in town nor Seliphan in the country.” (Laughter and applause.) There are also some rather apt popular sayings about such indefinite people and public figures: “A middling sort of man - neither fish nor flesh.”[405]The tyrant’s irony consisted in terrorizing his audience all while compelling them to laugh - these laughs were recorded verbatim - thanks to the devastating humor of Nikolai Gogol, a humor for dead souls. The passage from chapter two of his faÂmous “poem” had, if only for those who remembered it, in this context, a particuÂlarly threatening implication:
There are people who are always spoken of as being â€?so-so’, neither one thing nor the other, neither flesh, fowl, nor good red herring, as the saying is. [...] At the first moment of conversaÂtion with him one could not but say, “what a kind and agreeable man!’ The next minute one would say nothing, and the third minute one would say â€?What the devil is one to make of it?’ and would walk away.[406]
The hunt for these two-faced men, for internal enemies, took a tragic turn with the great trials of the Old Bolsheviks, and became worse still during the great purges of �37.’ At the Plenum of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, on March 3, 1937, Stalin indicated the most perverse of all the enemies of the regime: those who carried Party cards in their pockets:
[...] the present-day wreckers, spies, diversionists and assassins who are concealing themselves behind Party membership cards and disguising themselves as Bolsheviks.
[.] the present-day wreckers, with Party cards in their possession, deceive our people by taking advantage of the political confidence shown towards them as Party members, by taking advantage of the politiÂcal carelessness of our people.[407]A key point in this argument was that a lack of political vigilance had made it such that the people could no longer see the “wolves” that had broken into the socialist sheepfold, whereas the most urgent thing was to unmask these wolves. This rhetoric was therefore founded on a dual register of duplicity: the duplicity that was, in cerÂtain sense, involuntary, of the citizens who were not conscious of their own ambiguÂity; and the duplicity of the conspirators who, in true insincerity, hid behind the faÂcade of membership. Terror aimed to introduce conflict and vigilance into the famÂily unit, but also into the heart of the individual. As Alexandre Sumpf wrote: “[...] this self-creation took similar paths to that taken by Soviet power in society - the search within the self for the potential enemy of the Party.”[408]
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More on the topic ANTI-SEMITISM AND INVISIBLE ENEMIES:
- ANTI-SEMITISM AND INVISIBLE ENEMIES
- Ando Clifford (ed.). Citizenship and Empire in Europe, 200-1900: Antonine Constitution after 1800 Years. Franz Steiner Verlag,2016. — 261 p., 2016