Even at the height of summer, Moscow would have been a pretty forbidding place in the early nineteen-fifties. Joseph Stalin’s dictatorship continued to fill the gulag with its political enemies, real and imagined. The economy had yet to recover from its wartime privations, with shortages of basic consumer goods, including housing. The winter of 1953, however, was especially dark and ominous, especially for the city’s Jews. On January 13th, Pravda announced the discovery of the Doctors’ Plot, a supposed conspiracy by high-ranking Jewish physicians to murder important Kremlin officials. The report launched a vicious anti-Semitic media campaign that played on long-standing Russian fears and hatreds. By the end of February, Jews across the country believed in the imminence of a pogrom that would murder thousands of them and exile the survivors to concentration camps in the Soviet Far East.
“The Yid,” a new novel by the Soviet-born American writer Paul Goldberg, opens in Moscow just days before the coming genocide. Several aging Jewish veterans of the Red Army and Moscow’s once vibrant Jewish theatre realize that they’re about to be arrested. They band together to stop the pogrom. Goldberg’s tale incorporates comedy, some of it of the Borscht Belt kind, and fantasy, some of it of the wishful-thinking variety: the alter kockers intend to penetrate the security around Stalin’s dacha and kill him. As they gather their forces, they move through a tensely expectant capital that’s preparing for the Jews’ extermination. The depiction of a city bent on wholesale slaughter and expulsion may be historically accurate—or it may be fiction. Or, more precisely, it may be based on a grim, enduring myth.
While historians agree that state-sponsored anti-Semitism intensified in Russia in February, 1953, they have not yet found evidence that further actions against the nation’s roughly 2.2 million Jews were contemplated. The dictator did, in fact, die at his dacha at the height of the anti-Semitic campaign, in the first week of March. A generation of Soviet Jews would come to believe that they were saved by Stalin’s sudden stroke.
The mercurial, paranoid seventy-four-year-old tyrant was certainly capable of ordering the mass deportations. During the Second World War, he removed Kalmyks, Chechens, Ingush, Karachays, Balkars, ethnic Germans, and Crimean Tatars from their homelands—more than two million Soviet citizens in all. He was no novice, either, when it came to purges and show trials. In the Pravda report, most of the accused “murderers in white smocks” were identified as Jewish and agents of the U.S. and Israel. There were further arrests of Soviet Jews, exemplars of “national and racist chauvinism.” Jews were dismissed from their jobs. They were insulted on the streets, in shops, and on public transportation, according to Arno Lustiger, author of “Stalin and the Jews.”
In “The Yid,” preparations for the pogrom are described with persuasive vividness. Empty cattle cars wait in rail yards outside the city, in Bykovo, Ramenskoye, and Lyubertsy. Lists are being drawn up in apartment houses, distinguishing between residents with two Jewish parents and those with one. Some anti-Semites jump the gun, murdering Jews for the dollars they believe are hidden in their tefillin, the small leather boxes that actually contain passages from the Torah. Goldberg’s Jewish rebels steal one of the fearsome Black Maria vans used to transport political prisoners to secret-police headquarters. Posing as K.G.B. officers themselves, they encounter real K.G.B. men. The officers assume that the impostors know what they mean when they ask, “Has it begun yet?” One adds ruefully, “Hitler didn't finish them off.” “The phrase comes up frequently in casual conversation in February 1953,” Goldberg writes.
I recently spoke with Goldberg, who immigrated to the United States with his family in 1973, when he was fourteen. He told me that this element of the novel is based on anecdotal testimony and that stories about the impending violence were so widespread that it became “a shared memory” for his parents’ generation of Soviet Jews. After the Soviet collapse, the anecdotes made their way into the new histories. In “Stalin’s Last Crime,” Jonathan Brent and Vladimir P. Naumov explain that the Jews believed the pogroms would begin on a day designated by the letter x. “The legend of day ‘X’ … traveled from Jewish household to Jewish household like cholera.” Brent and Naumov add that the legend has never been verified. According to sources interviewed by Roman Brackman for “The Secret File of Joseph Stalin,” prison barracks were being constructed in Siberia, the frozen island of Novaya Zemlya, and Birobidzhan, a Jewish “autonomous region” on the border with China that was established in the nineteen-twenties.
The accounts of the era are rich with sinister, detailed hearsay that gives the pogrom story weight and form. The Ministry of Internal Affairs was said to have printed a million copies of a pamphlet called “Why the Jews Must be Resettled from the Industrial Regions of the Country.” A letter to Pravda was supposedly circulated among Jewish intellectuals, asking for deportation to protect their people from the “understandable rage that has been stirred up by the treacherous physicians.” After making their confessions, the plotting doctors were to be hanged in Red Square, either in late March or early April—just in time for Easter, a season hoarily associated with Jewish treachery.
None of this is far-fetched. In “The Yid,” Goldberg painfully evokes the anti-Semitic atmosphere in which Stalin’s pogrom would have been conducted. One of the book’s casual Jew-haters thinks of his fellow Russians “as strong, passive, good-natured dupes perpetually outwitted by conniving outsiders.” He, too, is mystified by what’s inside the tefillin. “The Jews are trying to get a free ride to Communism, without working up a sweat,” he says. “They strap themselves to Russia, then strap black boxes to their bodies and summon the powers of the Evil One to defeat us.” According to not just Goldberg but several historical sources, the middle of the twentieth century saw the continued durability of the blood libel, the peculiar canard about Jews using the blood of murdered Christian children to make matzo (which makes you wonder, of course, whether anti-Semites have ever even seen matzo).
The testimony of what observers saw and what they believed is a key tool in our understanding of the past. There is little in “The Yid,” at least in regard to the plans for the pogrom, that doesn’t show up in the accounts of what Soviet Jews feared. Goldberg said, “If I were applying the standards of oral history, this would be glatt kosher.” He added that he wanted to "rise above the stilted historical memory." By putting these apprehensions and rumors, bland official announcements readable only between the lines, and whispered retellings of overheard conversations into a novel, Goldberg forges a coherent narrative that makes Stalin's pogrom seem almost inevitable.
Historians, though, have been more circumspect about the pogrom, unable to find documentary evidence for it. The deportations would have required sizable numbers of troops. The rerouting of the empty freight cars to Moscow would have disrupted the country’s rail traffic. Labor and material would have had to be assembled to construct camps in the Far East. The bureaucratic machinery presumably put into gear for such a massive project generated no documents that have turned up in government archives.
Despite the supposedly huge press run, copies of the Ministry of the Interior’s incendiary tract haven’t been found either. The letter to Pravda was never published and its text has been reconstructed only from the memories of those who said that they saw it. None of the barracks built for the Jews appear to have survived. The British historian Robert Service writes, in his 2004 biography of the dictator, “Whether Stalin really intended the universal deportation of Jews in the early 1950s remains unknown, though this is widely treated as a fact; and no conclusive proof has come to light.” What happened in Moscow in February of 1953 and what was going to happen the following month are troubling open questions. Also open is the question of what the Soviet people, mesmerized by state-controlled mass media, were capable of doing to their fellow-citizens.
The announcement of Stalin’s death shocked them. There were extravagant, spontaneous displays of public grief. Prisoners in the gulag wept. Goldberg's father, Boris, a student at Moscow University, wrote a poem. Thousands of mourners died in a stampede on the day of Stalin's funeral. While Soviet anti-Semitism did not disappear once his body was installed in the Red Square mausoleum, the accused doctors were exonerated weeks later, suggesting that Stalin’s henchmen, including Khrushchev, Molotov, and Beria, hadn’t supported the Doctors’ Plot campaign. But Soviet Jews didn’t forget their fear. Whether or not it was the unlikely heroes of “The Yid” who removed Stalin from the scene on March 5, 1953, the Jews were entitled to believe in a story authored by centuries of prejudice and a dictator's deathbed whims.
