FIVE ENTRIES
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ANDREI GRIGORENKO (1-2)
[1]
Andrei Grigorenko
“Criminal Prosecution on Ideological Grounds and the Consequent Moral Problems” (February 1975; 9 pages).
The author lists the ‘psychological’ methods used by investigators: persuading the person under investigation (or the witness) to give ‘honest evidence’, as this will ease his lot; threatening people close to the person under investigation; using information obtained from police files; exerting pressure through solitary confinement; obtaining information with the help of a ‘stoolie’; the ‘heart-to-heart talk’ method; the ‘punishment’ method; the use of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ investigators; the use of crude pressures, and so on.
The author describes the situation of someone arrested on ideological grounds:
“Now it is there, on the far side of prison bars, that you have to decide once and for all: whether to refuse to cooperate or to participate in any way in the investigation process, and thus to assert your natural right, or to start cooperating with the investigators and admit that you are a traitor to yourself and the people who trusted you.
“This is a hard choice, and the instinct of self-preservation will prompt you to cooperate just a little with the investigation and then stop in time. No: once you start to fall, you can stop yourself only by a miracle …”
*
[2]
Andrei Grigorenko
“National Egotism and national-democratic Pluralism: the nationalities question in the USSR” (March 1975, 11 pages).
On the existence of various nations and ethnicities in the USSR and the formation of a ‘Soviet nation’.
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PERIODICALS (3-5)
JEWS IN THE USSR, 7
[3]
(Issue 7, June 1974: 178 pages).
A new collection of materials on the history, culture and problems of Jews in the USSR, compiled by Alexander Voronel, Mark Azbel, B. Rubinstein, A. Lunts and Victor Brailovsky.
*
The journal includes the following articles:
- “On the Negative Function of Words in the Problem of Jewish Assimilation”’, by Alexander Voronel;
- “Assimilation and Free Choice” by A. Volin;
- “Motherland. State, and People” by I. Domalsky; and
- “Stereotypes” by E. Lyubov.
The authors of many articles in the collection analyse the problems of the evolution of ‘Hebrew’ and ‘Yiddish’ culture. They consider the evolution of ‘Russian-Jewish’ consciousness, by reference to the chapter ‘The Chaos of Judaism’ from Osip Mandelstam’s book The Egyptian Stamp, which is included in this issue of the journal.
The section ‘Cultural Life’ includes stories by Felix Kandel (Kamov), the play ‘The First of April’ by Nina Voronel, and poems by I. Rubin and N. Korzhavin.
“Who Am I?” is the section of the journal traditionally devoted to authors’ ‘confessions’, in which they try to resolve the complex of problems linked with national consciousness, emigration, and attachment to Russia and her culture.
*
[4]
JEWS IN THE USSR, 8
(Issue 8, November 1974; 226 pages)
Compilers:
Alexander Voronel. Nina Voronel, Mark Azbel, Mikhail Agursky, Victor Brailovsky, I. Rubin and A. Lunts.
The issue begins with M. I. Kagan’s article “Jewry in the Crisis of Culture”, written in 1923.
In the article “Russian Racism as a Mystical Anti-Christian Tendency”, the final formation of which the author dates back to 1905 and links with the decline of ‘Christian civilization in Russia’, M. S. Agursky singles out eight distinctive features of Russian racism, for example:
1. It sees the source of any social crisis in the evil activities of Jews, who are trying to take over the world …
4 Christianity can, from a racist point of view, be useful in the fight against the Jews, but only if it is freed of all its Jewish elements.
Representatives of this tendency, including members of the ‘Union of the Russian People’, are abundantly quoted. References are made to the prevalence of their views and arguments in modem ‘anti-Zionist’ propaganda.
In the article “The Hidden Disease of Anti-semitism in the Modem World” I. Domalsky analyses the development of anti-Semitism and its adaptation to the modem world, particularly in the Soviet Union.
The section ‘Chronicle’ reports events connected with the attempt to hold an “International Seminar on the Use of Physics for Purposes Unconnected with Physics” in Moscow on 1-5 July 1974. It was organized by Mark Azbel, Victor Brailovsky, Alexander Voronel and others, with the support of Tel-Aviv University, and resulted, among other things, in the preventive arrest of its participants.
In the foreword to the section ‘Cultural Life’ the compilers write:
“The extremely complicated theme of cultural and other relations between the Jewish and Russian peoples dominates this whole issue. It was especially difficult to choose material for the section ‘Cultural Life’, as practically the whole cultural life of Jews in Russia is linked with this theme and the choice is far too wide.”
The issue contains an article by E. Lyuboshits, ‘Russian-Jewish Relations from the 8th to the 17th Centuries’.
*
With the probable aim of helping the reader to answer the question, “Who Am I?” the section includes a series of anti-Semitic statements.
In publishing these the compilers note that
“official propaganda does not give a full picture of contemporary anti-Semitism … A much fuller picture is gained by reading anti-Semitic samizdat . . . We have at our disposal many more documents than those presented in this section”.
The poems “Without whom we could live well in Russia” by Sergei Vasilyev, and “To Mezelaitis” by Alexei Markov, are printed in this section.
Also included are
“The Plan for measures to strengthen anti-Zionist propaganda and improve the patriotic and national education of workers and young people”, directives of the CPSU Central Committee sent to the Party’s district committees in autumn 1974; and
a recording of a lecture by V. Yemelyanov, Cand.Sc. (Economics) on “Judaism and Zionism”. The lecture was read on 19 February 1974 at the Rubber Industry Research Institute. It contains a series of interesting assertions, for instance, about the existence of a Jewish-Masonic conspiracy.
*
[5]
JEWS IN THE USSR, 9
(Issue 9, March 1975; 293 pages).
Compilers:
Alexander Voronel & Nina Voronel (Israel), Mikhail Agursky, I. Rubin and Eitan Finkelshtein.
This issue begins with Volin’s article “On Jewishness”.
An article by I. Domalsky (“Nation or Non-nation?”), asserts the right of Jews to consider themselves a nation, an independent people, in spite of Lenin, Stalin and modem Soviet ‘Zionologists’.
In “Homecoming and Absorption: Morality and Politics”, Eitan Finkelshtein writes about the difficulties of acclimatization among the immigrants in Israel, and the necessity of creating a ‘buffer zone’ to facilitate this process.
Vitaly Rubin’s article “The Perspectives for Russian Jewry” makes a pessimistic assessment of a possibile a renaissance of Jewish national life in the USSR through the effort of “the Jews who remain”.
*
The ‘History’ section publishes extracts from a book by the journalist Michael Elkins, Tempered by Fury, on the fate of the Jewish anti-fascist resistance during the war years.
A group of journalists from The Sunday Times, in a book about the October war of 1973, describe the course of the war, the reasons for Israel’s lack of success in the first days of the war, and its later victory. In the opinion of the authors neither the USSR nor the USA could permit the complete defeat of the Arabs in the war; consequently, Kissinger exerted pressure on the Israeli government with the aim of saving the surrounded Third Egyptian army.
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The remaining sections of the volume are devoted to matters of religion.
A. Shoikhet considers that “the ancient Judaic ascetic movement exerted such a strong influence on the development of Christian ascetism … that it would be more correct to speak of Judeo-Christian asceticism than of Christian asceticism”.
The volume includes Agursky’s letter to Pimen, Patriarch of Moscow and all Russia, and to the leaders of the autocephalous Orthodox churches. In it he asks them to re-consider whether it was right “… to canonize the infant Gavriil, an alleged victim of ritual blood sacrifice by the Jews …”
Therfe is also a short section on “Jews in the Modern World”, containing information on the religious life of Jews, and on their numbers, in Turkey, Greece, Albania, Italy, Finland and Canada.
The ‘Literature’ section includes stories by B. Khazanov, I. Rubin and F.Kamov; Vilkovsky’s essay “Yom-Kippur in Moscow”, and B. Yampolsky’s autobiographical “My Last Meeting with Vasily Grossman”.
The final section of the volume publishes letters to the editors from Lev Ovsishcher and S. Rombe and a series of letters that Yefim Davidovich and N. Alshansky exchanged with the political commentator Yu. Zhukov.
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NOTES
A Chronicle of Current Events 