Full Equality for Jews As Race Found in Russia

In this, the fifth of the series of articles by Eugene Lyons, noted correspondent who is now touring Europe for the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Mr. Lyons reviews the position of the Jews in Russia in comparison with that of the general population and in relation to the Russian government.

MOSCOW. If absolute equality with all other peoples is any consolation, Jews in the Soviet Union have it in all their troubles. The economic burdens and political pressures under which so many of them are half-crushed are not bigger not heavier than those imposed on their non-Jewish neighbors.

Certainly there are specifically Jewish problems in the new Russia, problems growing out of the unique history and the unique racial make-up of the 3,000,000 Jews within the Soviet frontiers. But other racial minorities, whether Georgians or Tartars, also have specific problems. The point is that the Soviet regime makes no distinction of race or creed in distributing blows or blessings.

EQUALITY OF PERSECUTION

The Jewish and the Armenian and the Great Russian "boorz-hoo-ie" are subject to similar persecution, even unto the third generation. Indeed, there is a distinct tendency to treat the former Jewish merchants and small manufacturers slightly more liberally, on the theory that Tsarist restrictions forced them into trade and business by barring them from less shameful pursuits.

Liberty of religious instruction is forbidden to the Jews, but no more strictly than to Christians or Mohammedans. The patriarchal rabbi and the Greek Orthodox "pope" down his street have bitterness against the Godless in common and use the same desperate methods for evading anti-religious laws.

FIGHT NATIONALISM

Nationalist movements or even tendencies of the Zionist order are treated as treason and counter-revolution. But one needs only observe the ruthless extermination of separatist Ukrainian thought or nationalist tendencies in Central Asia to realize that the Zionist has plenty of company in his misery.

Right down the line this parallelism holds true. The Soviet Jew, if he suffers at all, suffers as a full-fledged and equal Soviet citizen. The difficulties of the present epoch–shortage of food and other goods, suppression or every vestige of individual freedom, "liquidation" of bourgeois elements and bourgeois points of view–sometimes rest more heavily on some Jews. Hundreds of thousands of them do not fit so easily into the standardized official mold as their Gentile neighbors. But even the most bitterly anti-Soviet Jew inside Russia cannot charge anti-Semitic discriminations.

NO RACIAL BASIS

It is a fact that Jews form perhaps over fifty per cent of the victims of the G.P.U. drive for hidden "valuta," that is to say gold, foreign currency, diamonds and the like. The attempt of certain well-meaning people abroad, however, to picture it as anti-Semitic in character is silly. I have talked to enough men and women who have passed through that ordeal to know that their sufferings are not due to their race.

The Jews were in large measure a people of tradesmen under the old regime. They naturally tended to trade again when the New Economic Policy was introduced and thus became hated "Nepmen." Pre-war emigration has bound their closely with the outside world, especially with America. All these circumstances, and many others, gives them an undue prominence among the pet enemies of the revolution.

COMPLAINTS UNIVERSAL

The Jewish colonists would complain bitterly–if they dared–against their collectivization, against the prices paid by the State for their products, against the impositions by the machine-tractor stations. They could say nothing, however, which would not be said just as bitterly by their non-Jewish peasant neighbors.

"Declassed" Jews by the tens of thousands–disfranchised because of their capitalistic past–live the lives of hunted creatures. They, and usually their children as well, are barred from the best jobs, excluded from the schools, denied food, books and generally treated as outlaws. But that again is a status which they share with former aristocrats, Gentile merchants, landowners, priests. They are the victims of class rather than race hatred.

On the other side of the picture, long suppressed Jewish strivings have at last been satisfied. National autonomy in both the cultural and administrative sense is enjoyed by the Jewish population where it makes up the predominant racial element. Yiddish is recognized as an official language, used in State documents, in courts, everywhere.

YIDDISHISTS ACTIVE

There are passionate propagandists of Jewish (or more accurately, Yiddish) culture who under the Soviet system have unlimited scope of activity. Yiddish literature, theatre, education have equal rights with Russian. The contents of that culture must be distinctly Soviet, with ardent Communists in dictatorial places. But the accent is Jewish. The age-long sense of inferiority, the psychology of the "pale," are fast disappearing.

The Jews, in brief, are coming more and more to share the life of the whole Soviet nation, which at the present juncture is a life of hardships and exacting sacrifices. Like the rest of the population, they are being splintered into classes and categories: proletarians and peasants, politically elite groups and outlawed groups. Jews in posts of power who are as overbearingly bureaucratic as any Tsarist "chinovnik" and Jews who have failed to adjust themselves to the new order and are as meekly self-effacing as denizens of ancient ghettos.

These new categories have far more in common with non-Jews of the same status than with one another. The racial unity enforced upon them in the past by legal discriminations and pogroms has been lost. The deeply-rooted anti-Semitism in some sections of the population–which I shall deal with in the next article–is about the only unifying factor still remaining.

If this is assimilation–Jewish Communists reject such a label-it is assimilation of a brand never before known. The Russian Jews are adjusting themselves to a brand-new way of life, and in that sense the other races, including the Russians themselves, are also being "assimilated."

All races in the vast Soviet empire are obliged to give up their old feeling of separateness whether they like it or not. In compensation they receive unrestricted rights to their own language and their own culture insofar only as these do not conflict with the interests of the Soviet government and the ideology of the Communist faith.

Whether the exchange is worth while is something that is being seriously questioned by some Ukrainians and Georgians and Tadjiks. It is also being questioned by some Jews, both inside and outside the Soviet Union.