Russian Jews Between the Reds and the Whites, 1917-1920. Oleg Budnitskii
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who had completed two years at a religious school, joined the Bolsheviks in 1920 and became the assistant to the Special Plenipotentiary of the Nikolaev Cheka the same year, at the age of 18. He had transferred to the Cheka from his position as a typesetter for the political division of the Navy on the Southwest front. Abram Sapir (b. 1900) was the son of a train dispatcher and had never gone to school. His qualifications consisted of having worked at a train station as an unskilled laborer. He joined the Cheka in March 1919 as an investigator specializing in transportation matters in the Baranovichi Cheka. He joined the Bolsheviks in August 1919, and from March 1920 worked as the secretary of the Cheka section overseeing shipping in Odessa.
Mikhail Volkov (Vainer), the son of a tailor of unknown education, had worked as a clerk for a mine shopkeeper when he was a boy. He joined the Red Guard in October 1917, and joined the Bolsheviks in January 1918. He began working for the Cheka in May 1918 at the age of 18. He worked as an instructor in the Operations Section of the Kursk Cheka until June 1919, and then served in a number of Cheka organizations in the Red Army, heading the Cheka of the Thirty-second Rifle Division from 1919 to 1920, and the Eighteenth Cavalry Division in 1920.
Iakov Veinshtok, the son of a petty merchant, had finished four years at a local school (during the party purges of 1921, he was expelled for being part of the intelligentsia—apparently four years of schooling was too much for the party). Before joining the Bolsheviks in July 1919, he worked as a clerk in a trade office. He joined the Red Army in December 1919, and by the following May had joined the Cheka, serving in a number of leadership positions in a variety of military units. By September 1920 he was head of the Cheka organization attached to the Forty-first Rifle Division.
Some of the Jewish Chekists were more educated. Semen Gendin, the son of a doctor, apparently had managed to complete his courses at a gimnazium. He joined the Red Army in 1918 at the age of 16, and by 1921 was working as an investigator for the Moscow Cheka. Mark Gai (Shtokliand), the son of a hatter, finished the Kiev Art Academy and two years at the Law Faculty of Kiev University. He joined the ranks of the Red Army in October 1918, and engaged in political and managerial work with the military. He joined the Bolsheviks in March 1919, and the Cheka by May 1920. At just under 22 years of age, he was serving as the head of the Cheka Political Section attached to the Fifty-ninth Division.
The infamous brothers Berman were born to the proprietor of a brick factory in the Transbaikal oblast. Fortunately for them, their father's factory had failed early on, thus giving them a less suspicious social background. The elder, Mattvei, completed trade school, joined the army as a common soldier, graduated from the military academy in Irkutsk, and was promoted to the rank ofpraporshchik (ensign). In August of 1920 he became the chair of the Cheka in the Glazov uezd. Throughout the Civil War he served in a number of positions in the Ekaterinburg, Omsk, Tomsk, Verkhneudinsk, Eniseisk, and Semipalatinsk Chekas. The peak of his career saw him overseeing a gulag and the construction of the Moscow Canal, which was built mostly with prison labor. He eventually became the deputy to the People's Commissar for Internal Affairs, and served briefly as the People's Commissar of Communication before his arrest and execution in 1939.
Mattvei's younger brother, Boris, completed four years of schooling, and worked in a shop as a boy. He served in the Red Guard, and was able to hide from the Whites thanks to a false passport. He was later mobilized by White forces and worked as a security guard for the Chinese Eastern Railway. He joined the Irkutsk Cheka in February 1921, still under the age of 20. Later, Boris would serve as the People's Commissar of Internal Affairs for the Belorussian SSR. He was shot two weeks before his older brother.
Semen Mirkin's story is perhaps the most bizarre of all. The son of a cobbler, he completed two years at a Jewish school before going to work as a tailor's apprentice (and later as a tailor) in numerous villages in the Pale of Settlement. In June 1915 he was in Orel, probably as a refugee. Despite being only 16 years old, he somehow ended up in the army (either freely or by conscription). On leaving the army in March 1918, he returned to his tailoring pursuits, but by July of the same year he once again found himself in the army. He continued his profession for the Red Army Cavalry School in Orel, and then as a tailor for the Ninth Infantry Division. By November 1919 he had joined the Bolsheviks, and he studied at a Party school in Rostov from April to December 1920. By January 1921, he was weaving a different kind of web as a military investigator for the Revolutionary Tribunal attached to the Thirty-first Division. He joined the Cheka in June of 1921, and was put in charge of combating banditry in the Twenty-second Infantry Division. This graduate of a heder and a Bolshevik school eventually became the People's Commissar of Internal Affairs of the Northern Ossetian ASSR. In 1939 the former tailor was arrested, and he was executed in January of 1940.
It is not too difficult to imagine the kind of “investigations” carried out by these former tailors and typesetters, most of whom had only finished the fourth grade. Praskovia Semenovna Ivanovskaia (the daughter-i n-l aw of V. G. Korolenko and an old revolutionary) once rebuked a young female Cheka investigator, a seamstress by the name of “Comrade Rosa,” for terrorizing her charges by threatening to shoot them. Rosa replied to the charge “with heartfelt simplicity”: “But what am I to do if they don't confess?”172 In Kharkov, a former hairdresser by the name of Miroshnichenko and the 18-year-old Iesel Mankin constantly threatened their victims with death. On one occasion, Mankin leveled a Browning at the accused and said, “Your life depends on the correct answer.”173 In all likelihood, there were much worse instances of abuse as well.
In the 1920s the number of Jews serving in the OGPU (the predecessor of the NKVD) increased. They also continued to serve in the upper levels of the OGPU in approximately the same proportion as they had during the Civil War. This increase was due at least in part to the large number of Jews who moved to major cities. Among the Jewish population it was easier to find workers with an education, knowledge of foreign languages and other skills in demand. The number of Jews in the OGPU-NKVD continued to grow in the first half of the 1930s as well, reaching a peak of 39 percent (forty-three individuals) in the upper levels of the NKVD in 1936. By 1941 only ten remained (5.5 percent).174 The repressions of the second half of the 1930s drastically changed the ethnic makeup of the organization. By 1940 Russian comprised 84 percent of the central NKVD organization, followed by Ukrainians (6 percent) and Jews (5 percent, 189 individuals). By the end of the 1940s Jews were largely gone from the organization.175
Soviet authorities did not discriminate against Jews on the basis of their ethnic heritage. When “excesses” did occur, they ran counter to the party line. However, ethnic heritage was not the only means of discrimination. Sometimes local authorities or requisition units would treat the entire local Jewish population as bourgeois, speculators, smugglers, or counterrevolutionaries.
In the spring of 1919, in the Klimovichi uezd in the Mogilev gubernia, a Soviet canteen was distributing apples in honor of the upcoming holidays. The man in charge of the distribution announced that all Russians should get in line, while “the Jews aren't to get any. They're all speculators.” The Jewish population of Kivichi, a village in the Chernigov uezd were ordered by requisition troops to pay a tax of 500,000 rubles, while the peasant population of the entire volost' was ordered to pay only 90,000. In Roslavl (Smolensk gubernia) an emergency tax of 800,000 rubles was placed on a Christian population of 45,000. The local Jewish population (of 2,000 people!) was to pay 3.2 million.176
A Red Army soldier working for the ChON 177 wrote home in June of 1919 that he was currently stationed in the village of Krasnopole, where he and his comrades had “driven out the deserters and conscripts” and had searched the homes of the local Jews, where they found “lots of goods, salt, bread, footwear, and a lot of silk.” Although the soldier in question had a monthly salary of 350 rubles, there is little doubt that his job had its perks: “there are a lot of speculators; you can take 1000 rubles worth of goods off of a single one depending on what they're carrying, sometimes more if you're lucky, and then you can sell [the goods] or exchange [them] in the village for bread and lard” (Orsha, Gomel gubernia, June 28, 1919).178 Such looting was done almost in an official manner. On one occasion the writer Korolenko was on his way to