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Soviet Jews: Barometer of Gorbachev's Strength
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16300 |
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CURRENT ISSUES
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3 / 1989 |
3,346 Words |
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Adam M. Garfinkle
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Mikhail Gorbachev is, among other things, a gambling man. Over the past few years he has attempted to revamp Soviet society and economy in ways that most Western observers thought impossible as recently as 1983. Many doubt that Gorbachev will succeed in all that he aspires to change and feel that this will lead to his being reduced in stature or ousted altogether before many more years have passed. Yet, as time goes by, Gorbachev's staying power seems to grow as he meets and survives challenge after challenge.
Clearly, for Gorbachev to succeed--whatever that may mean by his own lights--he will need to manage the various forces that are working against him and his reformist programs. He needs to marshal all possible allies to do this. One factor in this equation--not the most important, to be sure, but not a trivial one either--concerns Soviet Jews. How does "the Jewish Question" in the Soviet Union relate to the vortex of political struggles that will determine Gorbachev's fate and the fate of his program? What does Gorbachev want from the Jews? To answer this question one must examine the relative significance of the Jewish Question in Soviet politics.
Not all Russians are anti-Semites, but historically many Russians have been and still are anti-Semitic. This is not because Russians are especially evil people, but is derived from the historical role of Jews in Russian political culture. An example closer to home may help elucidate this.
Most Americans grasp the importance of Negroes in U.S. political history. Since Negroes have been the largest and most distinctive minority group in American society for more than two centuries, U.S. history has often revolved around their role. A civil war was fought largely over their status and future. Today it is impossible to intelligently discuss questions about civil liberties, economic justice, crime, drugs, the family, education, and the state of American cities without reference to them. The critical role that Negroes played the American history for two centuries and that Negroes (renamed blacks) still play today is similar in some ways to the role that Jews have played in European and specifically Russian history for a much longer time.
As blacks define a prominent "other" in American society, Jews have defined the "other" in Russian society. Of course, there are other minorities in the Soviet Union. But only the Jews live dispersed among the Russians in the major cities of Russia itself, and they have done so for centuries. Thus, how any Soviet government deals with the Jews is therefore not a marginal issue but a central, symbolic focus of enormous importance.
Jews represent fears and forces deeply embedded in the Russian psyche, so that it is not an exaggeration to say that Jews in the Soviet Union are like puppets in some else's passion play. What Jews "mean" within the internal struggle for the Russian soul is far more important than what Jews are or what Jews do. Russians have a deeply ambivalent attitude toward the West; they envy it and they fear it. The contest between West-looking reformers and narrow, often xenophobic, Slavophiles in Russia's past has defined the very pendulum of Russian history ever since Peter the Great, if not before. Much of what we are witnessing in the Soviet Union today can be seen as just another scene in this struggle, with Gorbachev representing the outward looking and his opposition the inward Slavophilic, somewhat xenophobic
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