Exiled to Palestine

The Emigration of Soviet Zionist Convicts, 1924-1934

Ziva Galili, Boris Morozov

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781135296179
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

This is the unknown story of how Zionists imprisoned by Soviet authorities were allowed to choose sentences of permanent departure to Palestine, where they helped build Jewish society, the backbone of left-wing parties, and the powerful trade union movement.

These leading authors bring to light undiscovered documents from archives opened after the collapse of the Soviet Union and go on to revise fundamental assumptions about these events. They examine the means by which internal power struggles and personal interventions in the uppermost echelons of the Soviet leadership allowed the Zionists to disseminate their message and recruit thousands of members before the massive arrests of the mid-1920s; demonstrate the extent to which personal contacts between Zionists and those who aided them, Soviet leaders and members of the security services, were vital to initiating and sustaining the practice of substitution; and using a broad array of British and Zionist documents, they reveal the crucial role of Anglo-Zionist co-operation in facilitating the immigration of Zionist convicts.

This book will of great interest to all students and scholars of Jewish and Israeli, Russian and Soviet and European and British history.

1 Introduction

Zionism in Soviet Russia

Ziva Galili

At the present time we face quite a serious situation: our means of administrative struggle against the Zionist movement are not attaining their goal since active Zionist forces are arising with frightening alacrity from the depths of the Jewish masses and the predominant majority of these forces are the youth....

It would be no exaggeration to say that there is not a single Jewishly-inhabited location of any size in Ukraine without a Zionist cell or group that is active in all spheres of life of that location and even prevails in terms of its influence and leadership role among local masses over Communist cells and public or government organizations.¹

(From a secret memorandum by Eduard Karlson, deputy chairman of the Ukrainian State Political Directorate to Secretary of the Central Committee, CP Ukraine, Lazar’ Kaganovich, 1925)

The proliferation of Zionist activity described in this internal Soviet document lies at the base of a unique and intriguing episode in Soviet history involving the exit of over a thousand Zionists from Soviet Russia during the decade from 1924 to 1934. Jews, arrested for carrying out Zionist activity, were permitted by the Soviet authorities to opt for ‘deportation’ to Palestine in place of prison or exile to remote reaches of the Soviet imperium. The ‘substitution’ emigration allowed a small but committed minority from among the many thousands of active Zionists in Soviet Russia to reach the shores of Palestine, where they participated in the building of a new Jewish society and polity. Their story is significant, both for the early history of Soviet rule in Russia, and for the shaping of Israeli society and culture. Yet, it has never been told or documented beyond the memoirs and oral legends passed down by veteran Zionists as they looked back with wonder and some sorrow at the ‘miracle’ that saved them but left many of their friends and comrades in Soviet Russia.

This volume aims to fill the void and reconstruct, based on Israeli, British and Soviet sources, an account of how the escape route was opened by the Soviet authorities and turned into a channel for pioneering immigration into Palestine. On the Soviet side, this was made possible through the policies towards nationalities in general and the Jewish question in particular, as well as through the political considerations born out of the struggle within the Soviet leadership, and the tireless efforts of Ekaterina Peshkova, the indomitable head of the Committee to Aid Political Prisoners (Pompolit). Outside Soviet Russia, the substitution immigration into Palestine was furthered by close cooperation between representatives of the British government, the World Zionist Organization and its Executive in Palestine, the Federation of Jewish Labour in Palestine, and representatives of the Zionist movements still active in Soviet Russia. The present volume explores the motives and modes of operation of these many actors, dividing the discussion into two sections: one exploring the arrangements and mechanisms that enabled Zionist prisoners to leave Soviet Russia; the second surveying the often shaky cooperation that made possible their immigration into Palestine. To introduce the accounts of the substitution immigration, it is necessary to understand the history of Zionism during the early years of Soviet rule in Russia – its immense popularity among young Jews, surprising ability to survive and expand during the early years of Bolshevik dictatorship, and the organizational and ideological forms it adopted in these unusual circumstances.

The Zionist movements of the 1920s owed their vitality, in part, to events and developments in the years and decades preceding the establishment of Bolshevik rule and the crisis of Jewish life in Soviet Russia. In the early 1880s, prior Jewish hopes for gradual acceptance into a modernizing Russian society were brutally disappointed when the assassination of Tsar Alexander II led to a dramatic increase in anti-Jewish sentiment and the first wave of pogroms in two centuries. From that time, Russia became the site of mass Zionist and proto-Zionist sympathies, which served to catalyze the bulk of immigration into Palestine in the 1880s and in 1903–1914. Zionist influence became dominant among Russian Jews following the democratic revolution that swept away the tsarist regime in February 1917. The revolution relieved the Jews of the legal restrictions imposed on them by the tsarist regime, thus enabling them to participate in public life, to organize and publish. Yet, Russian Jewry continued to suffer from dislocation and poverty brought on by the mass expulsions of Jews from the western border provinces during the First World War. For Jews, the revolution’s promise of universal democracy could not obliterate the message of national salvation, which took on a messianic fervour after the Balfour Declaration (November 9) and its promise of British support for a Jewish ‘national home’ in Palestine. At the end of 1917, membership in the Organization of Russian Zionists stood at 300,000, organized in 1,200 local branches.² The Zionist parties received more than two-thirds of the votes given to Jewish parties in the elections to the Russian Constituent Assembly.³ Zionist associations, publications and cultural institutions appeared in every city, town and village, thus laying the organizational and emotive foundations for the persistence of Zionism over the coming decade.

The Bolshevik seizure of power in October 1917 in the name of a ‘proletarian revolution’ marked the beginning of a transition from the open political arena of 1917 to a dictatorship. The next few years were dominated by a bloody Civil War and foreign intervention, with disastrous consequences for every facet of life. The disruption of transportation and communications and the Bolshevik policies of nationalization, prohibition on commerce and requisitions caused endemic suffering and poverty. Moreover, the effects of the autarchic subsistence economy of the Civil War period were especially severe on the traditional Jewish occupations in trade and crafts. Some 70 or 80 per cent of Jews were without any source of livelihood, many engaging in speculation and black marketeering.⁴ Worse yet, Jews were subject to the most horrific violence: more than two thousand pogroms took place in Ukraine and Belorussia between 1918 and 1920, most of them perpetrated by the anti-Bolshevik forces, leaving some 150,000 dead from direct violence and disease, another 500,000 homeless and 300,000 orphaned.⁵ The pogroms put in doubt the physical survival of the Jews in Russia, whereas Bolshevik abolition of Jewish communal institutions (kehillot) and the attack on Hebrew language education and organized religion threatened their national and religious existence.⁶ The situation paralyzed the Zionist Organization and its affiliates, but Jewish despair about survival in Russia and the search for salvation elsewhere only increased.

The end of the Civil War and the foreign intervention brought some relief to the Jewish communities in the western and southern reaches of Soviet Russia, but was slow to alleviate the burden of homelessness, hunger and unemployment. The New Economic Policy (NEP), established by the Soviet leadership in the early 1920s, removed many of the wartime restrictions and allowed private initiative in small scale production of consumer goods and in commerce. Many Jews used the new freedom of movement to leave their small towns and villages for the big cities of the former Pale of Settlement and the metropolises of southern and central Russia, finding work in the bureaucratic structures erected by the Soviet regime or entering institutions of higher education. But millions continued to live in the traditional small towns and were dependent on crafts and commerce, and these small Jewish operators were undermined by the high taxes imposed on their trades. Moreover, as ‘exploiters’ of the labour of others, they were labelled lishentsy, that is, deprived of the right to vote as well as several other crucial rights, including access to post-elementary education and to medical services and membership in the trade unions and their employment bureaus.

At the height of the relatively comfortable years of NEP in the mid-1920s, roughly one million Jews had no steady source of livelihood.⁷ Policies launched in 1925 by the authorities to ease the economic plight of poor Jews through ‘productivization’ and ‘agrarization’ (i.e. through transition to work in crafts and industries as well as settlement on the land) had some salutary effect among the Jewish population; by the early 1930s, about a quarter-million Jews had moved into agricultural settlements in Crimea, Ukraine and Belorussia.⁸ Yet, in the late 1920s, as NEP reached its end, approximately one-half to three-quarters of the Jewish youth in towns and cities with dense Jewish populations remained outside all existing educational and occupational frameworks.⁹

Zionism drew much of its appeal from the widespread sense of despair and marginality among Jews in the traditional Jewish regions, a feeling that was reinforced by the evolving policies of the Soviet government towards the nationalities making up the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics formally established in 1923. The high measure of national–cultural autonomy given to the ‘territorial’ nationalities within that union had practical and symbolic repercussions for the Jews. In Ukraine and Belorussia, the preference given to the national élites in governmental, educational and cultural institutions deprived some Jews of their earlier occupational and educational gains. More broadly, it highlighted the problematic status of the Jews as a ‘non-territorial’ nationality and undermined their confidence in a possible Communist solution to the persistent ‘Jewish question’.

Two organizational forms predominated in Zionist activity during the 1920s: the youth movements and Hechalutz (Pioneer or Vanguard), an organization dedicated to training young Jews in physical labour, especially in agriculture, and in preparation for settlement in Palestine. The success of these organizations rested on their capacity to meet the needs of young Jews, to make adjustments to the norms of public activity in Soviet Russia, and to take advantage of the organizational opportunities opened up under NEP.¹⁰

The popularity of the youth movements resulted to a large extent from the failure of Communism to offer a satisfactory outlet for the needs and aspirations of many young Jews – those who could neither take advantage of new educational opportunities nor find employment, or were barred by their status of lishentsy from entering Communist youth organizations. True, the organizers of the youth movements came usually from among the growing numbers of Jewish students and many of them had been active in Jewish societies of university and gymnasium students during the World War and 1917. But the crisis of Jewish life in the years following October 1917 and the attack on established Jewish organizations propelled some among the educated youth into increased activism. Perceiving themselves as a new national leadership, their rhetoric and activity expressed deep empathy for the less fortunate among their fellow young Jews and the belief that true ‘productivization’ of the Jews could happen only through national rebirth in Palestine. To their young members (ages 17–23), the Zionist youth organizations offered opportunities for fellowship, ideological self-definition, and social commitment – as well as labour organization of working youth – that is, modes of being and acting that were promoted in the Soviet public arena of the time. Both the youth organizations and the children’s movements they created (ages 10–16) emphasized educational activity including Jewish history, Hebrew culture and information about the Land of Israel, thus serving as something of a substitute for outlawed Hebrew language education and gaining the support of many Jewish parents. More than any other form of Zionist organization, the youth movements were protected from the Soviet system of political control since, by law, those under 18 could not be held in prison.

Hechalutz drew its inspiration from notions developed during the decade before the First World War by young Russian immigrants who came to Palestine as pioneers of Jewish labour and the would-be builders of a new Jewish society. Their experience taught them the need for thorough training (hakhshara) of future immigrants in physical labour and agriculture. This was the aim of the farms and workshops established by Hechalutz from its inception in 1918. But at that time and in coming years, the training enterprises also answered a practical need of many young Jews who lacked a livelihood or a roof over their heads. Membership in these communal farms and workshops (whose numbers grew fast during the years of NEP) also promised a sense of belonging and the hope of collective national betterment. Like the youth movements, these communal enterprises were in step with the current policies and initiatives of the Soviet government – a coincidence that helped them survive and diminished the inner conflict experienced by those of their members who saw themselves as socialist or were otherwise sympathetic to the Soviet project. An additional measure of protection from Soviet censure as well as direct financial aid came from the US-based Joint Distribution Committee (JDC), which supported all forms of Jewish agricultural settlement in Soviet Russia.¹¹

Politically and ideologically, all of the Zionist organizations of the 1920s issued from the populist, ‘democratic’ wing of the Russian Zionist movement. Difficult living conditions, Soviet intolerance towards alternative political organizations and the attack on religion, all contributed to the decline of both religious Zionism and the ‘General Zionists’ who had dominated the movement in 1917. By 1920, the democratic wing itself, known as the ‘Popular Faction – Tze’irei Tziyon’, split into two parties: the Zionist–Socialist Party (TzS – an acronym from the Yiddish) and the Zionist Toilers’ Party (STP in the Russian acronym, Tze’irei Tziyon-Hitachdut in Hebrew).¹² The parties disagreed bitterly over their respective attitudes towards the Soviet revolution and the role of socialism in the national revival of the Jews, though neither party developed a clear, inclusive doctrine. TzS viewed Zionism and socialism as inseparable. Theirs was an eclectic brand of socialism, coloured by their admiration for the voluntarism of the Bolsheviks. They rejected the Marxist doctrine held by the Bolsheviks and condemned Bolshevik dictatorship, yet accepted the ‘Soviet platform’, that is, the right of the workers and their councils (or soviets) to establish a dictatorshi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• List of documents
• 1 Introduction: Zionism in Soviet Russia
• 2 Out of the Soviet Union: the exiles and Pompolit
• 3 Into Palestine: the Zionists and the British
• 4 Postscript: two fates
• 5 Documents
• Glossary
• Index