Review of The Dream of Social Justice and Bad Moral Luck: Eight Jewish Lives Under Stalin by Alice Nakhimovsky

• In 1920, a fighter on an armored train presented his 17-year-old bride with food ration cards and a brand-named pistol. She followed him, leaving behind her family, who soon died of typhus, and the couple was quickly commissioned to the USA as intelligence agents.
• A revolutionary, who had served time as a convict in a Tsarist prison, emigrated to Europe, where he became acquainted with Lenin. He became so close to the Soviet leadership that his daughter later became Lenin’s widow’s secretary. He went on to lead the Sovinformburo, which directed the work of the Jewish Antifascist Committee (JAFC). Years later, when the JAFC was investigated during the Stalinist purges, the revolutionary’s grandson was forced to divorce his wife, the daughter of Soviet politician Georgy Malenkov, in an effort to save Malenkov’s career.
• A world-renowned scientist of Russian-Jewish origin, the first-ever female professor at the University of Geneva, accepted an invitation to lead a university department in Moscow and arrived in the USSR in 1925. Eighteen years later, serving as an editor-in-chief of a medical journal, she received an order to fire two Jewish employees. Instead, she addressed Stalin with a letter claiming this order would contradict the principles of Marxism and her moral values.
• A young Jewish girl, brought by her parents from California to Birobidzhan, later moved to Moscow and enjoyed her aunt’s and uncle’s hospitality. One day in 1937, she showed up at their home to find out that their younger relative, who also lived in their apartment, had been arrested. In fact, all the inhabitants of their house, which belonged to the Society of Old Bolsheviks, had their bags packed, knowing they could be taken anytime.

These are parts of some life accounts outlined in Alice Nakhimovsky’s book The Dream of Social Justice and Bad Moral Luck. Eight Jewish Lives under Stalin (2018), devoted to the moral problems of Jewish life in the USSR during the time of Stalin’s dictatorship. All her protagonists or their parents began as either anarchists or Marxists; they moved to the USSR or joined the revolutionary movement for ideological reasons. Later, having experienced the pressure of the brutal Soviet state, they started asking questions.

Nakhimovsky begins with a clear and well-structured historical overview, which not only serves as a perfect introduction for those new to this material, but will also be of interest to readers well-versed in Soviet history: Nakhimovsky concisely and precisely tells of the Soviet economic hierarchies (99), Jewish agricultural projects in the Soviet Union (72-73), gold mining in USSR (84-85), etc. She also offers insightful remarks about the Soviet style of personal communication and political trials.

The author outlines the stages of Soviet political history essential for Soviet society in general and Soviet Jewish society in particular. The February Revolution freed Russian Jews from all official forms of discrimination, but it was the October Revolution that granted them full-scale involvement in political life. “The Soviet language of universal justice was always one of binary division, with some groups regarded as us and others as them,” writes Nakhimovsky (4). With the Soviet focus on “revolutionary justice,” “we” were those allowed to enjoy some civic rights, whereas “they” could lose any (or all) rights at any time. In the 1920-30s, following the Marxist approach, Russian Jews were regarded as “us,” but the postwar period brought a radical change of attitude. The Stalinist regime became increasingly nationalist and antisemitic. A new round of repressions took place, resulting in the clearly Judeophobic Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee trial, which, preceded by the murder of the Committee leader, the famous actor and the Soviet State Yiddish Theater director, Solomon Mikhoels, the liquidation of the Committee, the closing of its newspaper Eynikayt (Unity), and the shutdown of the SSYT, is a central event for Nakhimovsky’s book. The JAFC trial was followed by the so-called “doctors’ plot”. There were also persistent rumors that Jews would be deported to Siberia. Luckily, this threat never came to pass and, apparently, was never even planned or prepared (180).

This abrupt switch of state policy affected broad swaths of the Jewish population. For most of them, the change was not only appalling, it was unpredictable. After the Jews had undergone profound assimilation, the “most internationalist” State suddenly reminded them of their being the “other.” As Nakhimovsky puts it, “even Jews who saw the Soviet state as liberating them from being Jewish could be targeted as Jewish” (3). The book discusses several of the most blatant cases of this so-called “justice“: people who became famous, praised, and even decorated for being active in the field of Jewish culture were incarcerated or executed for the same reason.

“Justice” – with all its transformations and many faces – is a key notion for understanding Soviet history. It was social justice that the Bolshevik Revolution was after. It was “the dream of social justice” that attracted so many people, including numerous Jews, to join the revolution or to immigrate to Soviet Russia. And the stronger the belief in social justice the new order brought, the stronger was the shock caused by the injustice of the selective enforcement of Soviet laws. Nakhimovsky uncovers the discrepancy between the proclaimed principles and their Soviet implementation and shows what room for maneuver a private person really had. To do so, she incorporates a moral framework into her narrative. Nakhimovsky notes that most of the choices made by the characters in her story “would never have presented themselves in a more ordinary environment” (p. 9). To describe their situation, Nakhimovsky uses the expression “bad moral luck”: people cannot be blamed for having limited options and acting with cowardice under unbearable pressure, when “it took heroism to remain a decent person” (Ibid). The author becomes an advocate for the people she is writing about as she explores the freedom of action that was left to them.

Nakhimovsky focuses on several personalities, most of them well-known. The main protagonists in her story are: Lina Shtern (1875-1968) – a distinguished scientist (a student of biochemistry and physiology) and the only defendant at the JAFC trial who was not executed; Solomon Lozovsky (born Dridzo, 1878-1952) – the head of the Sovinformburo, the organization which directed the activity of the JAFC; Leyb Kvitko (1890(?)-1952) – a famous Yiddish poet, mostly known as a children’s poet; Doba-Mera Medvedeva (1892-1986) – a shtetl girl who sympathized with Marxism, moved to a bigger town and then to Leningrad; Nadezhda Ulanovskaya (1903-1986) – a Soviet spy; Vasily Grossman (1905-1964) – a famous Soviet author writing in Russian; Mary Leder (1916- before 2001) – a daughter of American Jewish socialists who immigrated to Birobidzhan in 1931; and Lilianna Lungina (1920-1998) – a famous Soviet literary translator, who spent her childhood in Europe and was brought to Moscow by her parents in 1934.

Among these people who, led by their dream of a better life, took risks and were elevated to the highest positions, one person – Doba-Mera Medvedeva, who lived a private life and wrote her memoirs addressed to her grandchildren (one of whom later became a well-known historian, Michael Beizer) – is an outlier, though her story is representative of a large number of women of her background whose historical record is not always as fully laid out. Her presence in this book counterbalances the success stories of the other characters, who are all public figures. In addition to Michael Beizer, it was Nakhimovsky herself who decided to share Medvedeva’s story with a wider audience: In 2018, she translated Medvedeva’s memoirs into English.

As in her earlier book, Russian-Jewish Literature and Identity. Jabotinsky, Babel, Grossman, Galich, Roziner, Markish (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), Nakhimovsky is particularly interested in Grossman’s writings. The Dream of Social Justice and Bad Moral Luck is organized not only around a historical event, but also around a literary text, that is, Grossman’s Life and Fate – the novel Nakhimovsky has taught to “generations of her students” (202). According to Nakhimovsky, it “comprises a social and moral evaluation of its age. Its particular focus is on the way in which characters get absorbed into the state machine, either through conviction, or sheer amoral careerism” (ibid.) She argues Life and Fate has a systematic structure. Like her own book, Grossman’s novel is an account of several life stories, “held together thematically … by its focus on how individuals succumb to the state and how, in isolated cases, they extricate themselves” (ibid.).

Through Nakhimovsky’s narration, as well as through her direct quotation, we can hear these peoples’ voices. All of them left memoirs, wrote literary texts or scientific books. Mass literacy was a sign of the time and a characteristic of Soviet culture. It’s not a coincidence that memoir texts as a genre were so popular in the Soviet Union: they were written in large amounts and eagerly read.

One could ask why Nakhimovsky chose these protagonists rather than other figures. Why did she choose Kvitko and not, say, Markish or Der Nister? Why Grossman and not Ehrenburg? Why Mary Leder? But we cannot argue with the fact that the author’s choice shows a wide panorama of Jewish life and personal fates in the “first-ever socialist state” with its constantly changing agenda during a cruel and irrational time, with unprecedented violence and chaos, wars, famine, typhus, and mass migrations, along with movements in support of gender equality and free love and the struggle for the world revolution. Feeling that the world is undergoing tectonic shifts, but not knowing what lurks behind the corner and what place is safe, Nakhimovsky’s characters are on the move. They cross political and cultural borders, they abandon their traditional families and give up religion, they move from shtetls to towns and cities, they escape from Siberian prisons. Some of them emigrate from Russia to Europe or the USA, others move out of California and settle in Birobidzhan, in the far reaches of the Soviet Union. They carry out bizarre missions in Europe, America, and Asia: The Ulanovskys tried to bring about revolution in China, photographed technical documentation about Sikorsky helicopters in New York, and did naval espionage in Denmark not knowing any Danish or Chinese; Lozovsky, when sent to France, organized electric wiring courses for Russian socialist emigres; Leyb Kvitko, when living in Hamburg, had to pack up weapons (“in crates labeled Fragile dishes”) and send them to Chiang Kai-Shek’s army in China.

Willingly or reluctantly, the book’s protagonists change their surroundings, friends, languages, and names – which causes some of them to lose their roots and their identities. It’s no accident that one of the most exciting stories told in the book (p. 47) has to do with identity spoofing. It features Solomon Lozovsky, then an illegal party worker, sent on a mission to France. Trying to escape the police, he cuts his beard short and dyes his beard and mustache brown. But then his facial hair turns green, so the future high-ranking Soviet “apparatchik” must wrap a handkerchief around his face, pretending to have a toothache.

At some point, each of the protagonists of this book begin to identify themselves with the Jewish people. The most striking case is that of Nadezhda Ulanovskaya. She went along with the official propaganda and, when interviewed by an American journalist, denied the existence of state antisemitism in the USSR, but then felt remorse. After her arrest, she told her interrogator: “was it Jews that I betrayed? … I didn’t betray my homeland, but my people” (185).

Nakhimovsky notes that all of the book’s characters “were either party members or lived in harmony with party directives for many years” (p. 4) until the Soviet utopia became no longer attractive for them, and Nakhimovsky tries to trace when and under what circumstances this disillusionment happened. She also researches the mechanism of self-affirmation and self-adjustment to fit the Soviet agenda. The book’s protagonists witnessed their family members and friends arrested and asked themselves whether the arrests were justified, and if not – whether Stalin knew what was going on. They had to rewrite their literary works (e.g., Leyb Kvitko, who composed a poem called “Yoyne” featuring the general Iona Yakir and had to rework it completely after Yakir was arrested and executed). When told about outrageous things that were happening (the Ukrainian Holodomor, arrests and their repercussions, etc.), they had to choose whether to believe or ignore the news.

The author sympathizes with her protagonists and speculates what could have been their life-saving strategies. “Occupying a high position was hardly protective by definition” – she admits (155). But being an ordinary citizen was not safe either. What could save a defendant’s life at a trial? Feigning naiveté? Framing top-ranking people who had commissioned you?

Under Stalin, both people “from the bottom” and high-ranking members of the elite had limited scope for action. Yet Nakhimovsky is interested in the choices her protagonists made. She praises Kvitko for trying to save Tsvetaeva at the beginning of the war, even though his attempts failed: he did all he could (125). She also notes Vasily Grossman’s morally questionable behavior when he did not allow his mother to join him in Moscow and instead made her stay in Berdichev, which was soon occupied by the Nazis (137). He did not intercede for his arrested cousin, although she had protected and promoted him before (111). And he signed two “open letters” condemning new victims of the regime (113, 180-181): in 1937, he took part at the public denunciation of the Soviet generals Yakir and Tukhachevsky, in January 1952 he had to blame “the band of doctor-murderers”.

One of the central notions discussed in Nakhimovsky’s book is courage – which looked different under Stalin than it might in other circumstances. For instance, it was courageous to mention at a staged trial, as Kvitko, Lozovsky, and Shtern did, that your testimony had been coerced, that you had been humiliated, threatened, and beaten up. Or to refuse to condemn your teacher, as Shtern’s students did. To sabotage assignments to report on other students (Leder). To write a novel about the Holocaust knowing you would not see it published (Grossman). Or to become fearless during interrogations (Ulanovskaya, Lozovsky).

“Courage, in this postwar period, was not the rule, but it was not impossible,” - Nakhimovsky concludes (170). Not the most comforting claim, but definitely a motivating one.