Washington Jewish Week - 08.15.2002

 

 

 

 

Washington Jewish Week

Event Shrouded in 'Myth, Misunderstanding' Recalled

By Paula Amann, News Editor

In a sign of changing times, Russian Federation Ambassador Yuri Ushakov had a front row seat Monday at a ceremony that recalled a Soviet pogrom a half century ago. 

The event, hosted by NCSJ: Advocates on behalf Jews in Russia, Ukraine, the Baltic States and Eurasia, marked the Night of the Murdered Poets. It drew some 50 audience members, including area resident Vladimir Talmy, son of Yiddish journalist Leon Talmy, a victim of that pogrom. 

Fifty years ago on Aug. 12, some 13 Jewish intellectuals were slain at Moscow's Lubyanka Prison, on orders from Soviet leader Joseph Stalin. They included some of Russian Jewry's most well-known writers and loyal Marxists. 

As part of Monday's commemoration, NCSJ chair Harold Luks presented Ushakov with a booklet of poetry, translated from Yiddish into English, by some of the slain, including Itzik Feffer, David Hofsteyn, Leyb Kvitko and Peretz Markish. A brief letter of greeting from President George W. Bush also was read aloud. 

Asked why his government was looking back at this dark chapter in Soviet history, the ambassador highlighted a break with a past. 

"It shows that we live in a new Russia, a new period of our history," said Ushakov in an interview before the program. "To understand that and build a democratic Russia, we have to know even not very happy pages of our history. That's why this ceremony has significance." 

The writers' story has long been shrouded in "myth and misinformation," scholar Joshua Rubenstein told the audience of about 50 on Monday. 

Once counted at 24, the number of victims has been whittled down by historians such as Rubenstein, who co-edited with Vladimir Naumov, Stalin's Secret Pogrom: The Postwar Inquisition of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee. 

Those jailed, tried, convicted by a three-judge panel and executed had belonged to this committee, formed in 1942 at Stalin's bidding. The group served to drum up goodwill for the Soviet alliance with the West against Nazi Germany, Rubenstein said. 

But the committee's downfall would come as it took on its own momentum, raising aid for Jewish survivors of the German Holocaust that took place on Soviet soil during the 1940s. Its victims included, for example, the parents and siblings of poet David Hofsteyn, who died in the 1941 massacre at Babi Yar in the Ukraine. 

"The committee was not only learning about the broader dimensions of the Holocaust that took place on Soviet territory," said Rubenstein. "They were learning about the fate of their own relatives." 

Hofsteyn himself would be among those shot in the Lubyanka on Aug. 12, 1952, roughly a decade later. He and others with the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee drew Stalin's ire as their Jewish concerns came to outweigh their role as Marxist foot soldiers. 

"It was the fact that this group of Jews responded to the war not only as Soviet patriots, as they should have, but also as Jews, that made them vulnerable," Rubenstein concluded. 

And he added, ironically, "What they did during the war, which was so applauded by the Soviet government and found to be so useful to the Soviet government, was later held against them."