Soviet Jews Are a Non-people During the 24th Communist Party Congress

The most incredible feature of the 24th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party was that the Jews were a non-people during the 10-day conclave. The Congress ended with no indication that the Kremlin leaders allowed even so much as a whisper to be heard about the condition and demands of its Jewish citizens. The absence of any reference to the top priority demand of many Soviet Jews that they be permitted to emigrate -a demand supported by Jews and non-Jews throughout the world and by leading segments of many western Communist Party spokesmen notably the British, French, Italian and Australian-casts a long dark shadow over the future of emigration. The total silence indicates that the Kremlin bureaucrats may now feel they have a freer hand in determining their policy toward the Jews, undeterred by the criticism of foreign Communist Parties. The Soviet leaders can now point out that no one – at least publicly – deviated from the official Soviet policy toward the Jews and that, therefore, there is now tacit agreement to limit, if not halt, future emigration. The absence of any references to emigration, the pending trials and Zionism per se, was all the more incredible since these issues created widespread debate in many western Communist Party circles in the months proceeding the opening of the Congress. It was also incredible in view of the measures the Soviet authorities took to try to counter the conference on world Jewry in Brussels just two months before and the precautionary measures taken by Soviet officials throughout the 10 days to prevent Jews from staging protest demonstrations in Moscow.

An implicit policy on the Jewish question was developed by a number of speakers which, while avoiding any mention of the Jewish question, emigration rights, the trials and Zionism, emerged as the official line of the Congress. This policy was developed around a major issue: the denunciation of bourgeois nationalist ideas. Very early in the Congress sessions, Leonid I. Brezhnev, Communist Party secretary, launched an attack on dissidents in the field of the creative arts. “The party and the people,” he affirmed, “have never and will never reconcile themselves to attempts, no matter who makes them, to blunt our ideological weapon and cast a stain on our banner. If a writer slanders Soviet reality and helps our ideological adversaries in their fight against socialism he deserves only one thing – public scorn.” Brezhnev’s warning, milder than had been expected, was enough to indicate that the Kremlin would not permit intellectuals and scientists to complain about the limitations on artistic and scientific freedom or to speak out, as some did, on be half of Jews who want to emigrate. Pyotr Y. Shelest, a member of the 11-man ruling Politburo and Ukrainian party chief, warned that “any fuzziness in ideology” must be fought and rebuked “the ideologists of imperialism” who are “waging an anti-Soviet, anti-Communist campaign.” Viktor V. Grishin, appointed in 1967 by Brezhnev as Moscow city party leader, charged that “imperialist propaganda” was trying to undermine the Soviet people, especially the youth, with “bourgeois ideology and morals.” Interestingly, Grishin was handpicked by Brezhnev to succeed Nikolai G. Yegorychev as Moscow city leader when Yegorychev was dismissed over differences with the Kremlin on Middle East policy.

DELEGATES SAY THERE IS NO NATIONALITY PROBLEM; KOSYGIN’S DOWNGRADING OMINOUS

Many speakers at the Congress also expressed the view that there is no nationality problem in the Soviet Union except for abortive attempts at stimulation from abroad. Alkesandr Chakovsky, the Jewish editor of Literaturnaya Gazeta, and a member of the Party’s Central Committee, told the Congress: “We can understand the opposition of an honest artist to a bourgeois society and state based on violence, oppression and lies, but we cannot tolerate the attempts of anti-Communists to spread this fraudulent view equally to the opposing system, on the basis of which social justice exists.” The word Zionism wasn’t mentioned once in the attacks against bourgeois ideas, but in the lexicon of the Kremlin, Zionism is identified with all these terms. Delegates old enough to recall earlier exhortations against bourgeois ideas could probably still hear Andrei Zhdanov, the former Communist Party chief hatchet man who was given the job in the early 1950’s to project the official line on art, philosophy and science, assail “homeless cosmopolitans,” “rootless cosmopolitans,” “bourgeois ideologists,” and “western cosmopolites.” Those terms, in those days, was a signal attack on Zionism and Jews in the Soviet Union. There were other signs at the Congress that the Soviet leadership was taking a harder line against emigration in downgrading of Soviet Premier Alexsei Kosygin. Aside from the inner party squabbles and machinations that played a role in making the number two leader number three in the new hierarchy, Kosygin was also the official who, in 1968 in Paris, pledged that any Jew wishing to leave the USSR would be permitted to do so. Can one discount that this indiscreet pledge might have played a role in his downgrading?

Kosygin’s demotion can play a two-fold role in the Soviet emigration policy: a warning that his pledge can no longer be binding on Soviet policy and as a form of intimidation of those Jews who utilized his promise as a basis on which they could campaign for emigration rights by appealing to his authority. The Congress however, did make a concession – actually a sop – to Soviet Jews by appointing two Jewish apologists for the Soviet Union to posts on the 81-member Central Auditing Commission, a watchdog group of less prestige than the Party’s Central Committee. The appointees were Col. Gen. David Dragunsky and Vladimir J. Peller, a collective farm chairman from the Republic of Birobidjan where some 15,000 of a total population of 160,000 are Jewish. Named to full membership to the Central Committee was Nikolai V. Goldin, a name usually Jewish in the Soviet Union but about whom there is no information. The only other known Jewish members on the Central Committee are Veniamin E. Dymshits and Chakovsky. Neither have been identified with Jewish causes. But the most ominous development emerging from the Congress was not merely the routine attack by Brezhnev on Israel and his pledge to aid Russia’s “Arab friends,” but the timing of the shipment by the Soviet Union of its most advanced MIG fighter planes to Egypt.