Russian Jews Between the Reds and the Whites, 1917-1920. Oleg Budnitskii
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of his own home.62
In Odessa, the Zionist leaders V. I. Temkin, S. S. Pen, Ia. Ia. Vasserman, Kh. Sh. Rosental and Sh. P. Galperin were arrested on suspicion of fraternizing with the Volunteer Army and the Entente. The Zionists M. D. Elik, E. A. Bogorov, and M. L. Manoszon were shot by the Cheka.63
Dimanshtein provided ideological support for these repressions, claiming that the Zionists were “closely connected to the Entente” and were guilty of counterrevolutionary activities. “The pogroms do not bother them at all,” wrote Dimanshtein. “For them they are just another means by which they can try to force the Jews to strive for their ‘own state’…the documents we have discovered during these searches and arrests confirm this.” This was a concerted disinformation campaign, which included reports that V. E. Zhabotinskii had been proclaimed Governor General of Palestine, and was playing the role of “Muraviev in Poland and Lithuania.”64 Subsequently Dimanshtein would attempt to portray Zionists as being in league with the White movement. One example: his publication of an accusatory invective on the trial of a certain Turkeltraub, publisher of Dawn in Kharkov, which was then under Denikin's control, under the heading, “White Zionists in the Seat of the Accused.”
A new blow was struck against the Zionists in the spring of 1920. On April 20, a conference of Zionists gathered at the Polytechnical Museum in Moscow, the first conference since the congress of 1917. On April 23, seventy-five delegates and guests were arrested (two, the elderly rabbi Ia. Muze and the ailing E. Cherikover, were immediately released). At the Lubyanka, Iu. Brutskus made reference to the VTsIK directive that cleared the Zionist Party of counterrevolutionary status. At this point one of the Chekists replied that the organization had not received permission to hold a conference. Brutskus took the opportunity to remind them that according to Soviet law, legal organizations did not need to request permission in order to hold gatherings. The answer he received: “You know the law, but you don't know how things are done in the Cheka. Sit in prison and get to know them.” The Zionist was sent to the Butyrka prison. The Chekists, for their part, strengthened the accusations against the Zionists by claiming that they had seized explosives from the accused. Later Izvestia would go on to publish a refutation of that claim, which had undoubtedly been sanctioned from above.65
On June 29, 1920, six of the Zionist leaders (Iu. D. Brutskus, G. I. Gitelson, A. I. Idelson, R. B. Rubinshtein, E. M. Steimatsky, and N. A. Shakhnovich) were sentenced to five years in prison, while one (E. M. Barbel) was sentenced to six months of forced labor without imprisonment. They were all immediately amnestied. The rest had been freed earlier. Despite the fairly lenient sentencing, it was now clear that the Soviet state was holding its course in its attempt to liquidate the Zionist movement, though it was doing so with a minimum of noise. The head of the Secret Section of the Cheka, M. I. Latsis, made the following point in arguing the need to combat Zionism:
If Zionism, which is seizing nearly all of the Jewish intelligentsia, were to fulfill its goals, we would lose a great number of very skilled people who are very much needed for our own administration and organization.66
The Central Committee of the RKP (b) allowed Zionists to be targeted in the press. M. Rafes, a former Bund member, was particularly active in this enterprise. After the pogrom carried out by Arabs against the Jews in Jerusalem on April 4, 1920, and the Entente's declaration on April 24 that Palestine was to fall under British control, Rafes published a major article entitled “The Palestinian Pogrom and the Palestinian Idea” (“Palestinskii pogrom and palestinskaia ideia”) in Zhizn' natsional'nostei (The Life of Nationalities). The article was later published as a separate pamphlet. The British Mandate had included the conditions for the creation of a Jewish homeland in Palestine:
Instead of liberating the Jewish people, as the English imperialists and Zionists would claim, we get instead the blatant enslavement of Arab peasants under the yoke of Anglo-Jewish capital, along with the enslavement of the small number of Jewish workers and farmers. Instead of a land “flowing with the milk and honey” of national freedom and ideology, we get a simple three-day Jewish pogrom!
What could be more deeply morally bankrupt?
…Zionism is still destined to serve its shameful role as the lackey of English imperialism…[The] complete rejection of Zionism—that is the ultimate demand of life, now being announced to all left-Socialist Jewish groups, one that will be repeated by the Third Communist International.67
The second congress of the Comintern, which took place in July and August of 1920, called “the Zionists' Enterprise in Palestine,” “a shining example of the deception of the working masses of an oppressed people that was carried out by the forces of imperialism, in conjunction with the Entente powers, and their bourgeoisie.”68
By the end of 1920, the Zionist movement had been forced to move underground, thanks to the efforts of the Evsektsiia and the Cheka. In the years that followed, nearly all of the Zionist leaders were compelled to leave the country.
At the suggestion of Jewish Communists, the People's Commissariat for Enlightenment included an addendum to the directive entitled “On the schools of national minorities.” Added on June 26, 1919, it said, “The Jewish working masses living in the territory of Soviet Russia are to consider their native language Yiddish and not Hebrew.” The directive was signed by M. N. Pokrovskii, who was also the head of the Soviet school of historical science. It was likewise signed by the head of the Department for the Enlightenment of National Minorities, P. M. Makintsian.69
As part of the struggle against Zionism, the All-Ukrainian Committee for Assistance to Pogrom Victims was shut down. The committee had been formed during the period of the Directorate, when pogroms were at their peak. First headed by the well-known lawyer M. N. Kreinin, it would later be run by M. L. Goldstein, also a lawyer. The chairman of the legal commission of the committee was one of the few Jewish lawyers to have served the state under the imperial regime, Ia. L. Teitel. The “pogrom committee” was transformed into a commission under the jurisdiction of the Commissariat of Social Services, which strictly enforced the rule that the funds collected by the Committee would go towards restoring labor infrastructure, but that they should in no way fall into the hands of “exploiters.” It could be claimed that this stolen money was redistributed according to clear class principles.70
The Bund, the largest Jewish socialist party, did not approve of the Bolshevik coup, as was mentioned in the previous chapter. M. Liber, the leader of the right wing of the party, and his supporters were in favor of military action against the Bolsheviks.
When Bolshevik forces seized Kiev in February of 1918, the Ukrainian Bundists condemned their actions, and their leader M. G. Rafes even wrote that “the Bolsheviks, with their ‘socialist’ artillery have done Shulgin's work for him. They have managed to destroy everything the revolution had achieved in building up Ukraine.” The Kiev Bundists voted against recognizing Bolshevik power in Ukraine, to the count of 762 against, ii in favor, and 7 abstentions.71 Responding to M. A. Muraviev's claim that the Red Army “had brought in the ideals of socialism on the points of their bayonets,” Rafes composed a pointedly anti-Bolshevik article entitled, “Bayonacracy. 72
According to one of his political opponents, Rafes, the Chairman of the Central Provisional Committee of the Bund in Ukraine, was the brightest star of all the politicians in Kiev at the time: “He was a compelling orator, in both Russian and Yiddish. A talented polemicist, and a dangerous critic. And, what is most important, he had limitless reserves of energy and true strength.”73 Despite the numerous incidents that Rafes was involved in from 1918 to 1920, he always managed to record what had happened and almost immediately publish it. On November 14, 1918 he was arrested by the Ukrainian authorities in Kiev while attending a meeting with other politic al and social activists. A total of twenty-eight people were arrested, among them SRs, SDs, Bundists, and others. They were held in the Lukianov prison.74
“The reader should note,” Rafes wrote, “that among those arrested on November 14 there was nary a communist or Bolshevik to be found. The inhabitants of cell 1, corridor 6, had been fighting against the Bolsheviks for a year. Even the left-wing Bundists had no Bolshevik sympathies whatsoever.