According to the 1970 census, 2,151,000 Jews were living in the Soviet Union. In comparison with the 1959 census this represents a drop of 5.2 percent. The Jews were the only major national group in the USSR whose population constantly declined, a process that began even before the start of the mass exodus.[1]

The majority of the Jews were concentrated in the western regions of Ukraine (500,000) and Belarus’ (148,000), in Moldavia (98,000), the Baltic republics (65,000), Georgia (55,000), in Moscow (250,000), and Leningrad (156,000). Twenty-four percent of the Jewish populaftion had received a higher or specialized middle-level education. This was a far higher percentage than among any other group of the Soviet population—nine times higher than the Russians, twelve times higher than the Ukrainians, and seventeen times higher than the Belarussians.[2]

The Jews were highly urbanized. According to the 1959 census, less than five percent of them lived in rural locations. A considerable Jewish population was concentrated in cities such as Odessa (over 100,000), Kharkov (about 80,000), Dnepropetrovsk and Riga (35,000 each), L’vov, Chernovtsy, Zhitomir, Gomel, Vinnitsa, Rostov, Gor’kii, Kuibyshev, Sverdlovsk,[3] Cheliabinsk, Vitebsk, Bobruisk, and Mogilev. There were over 60 population centers in the Soviet Union with a Jewish population of over 10,000 persons.

Russian was designated as the native language by 1,733,183 Jews (76.4 percent according to the 1959 census). About 23,000 listed Ukrainian as their native tongue, about 25,000—Georgian, and about 20,000—Tajik. Only 403,900 (about 18 percent) called Yiddish their native language; this figure declined to 17.7 percent by 1970 even though many people termed Yiddish their native language not because they truly spoke it but because they wanted to emphasize their national identity. Lithuania (69 percent), Moldavia (50.3), and Latvia (38 percent), led in the percentage of Yiddish speakers, primarily representatives of the older generation.

The Georgian, Bukharan, and Mountain (Tat) Jews, who belonged to the non-Ashkenazi branch of Soviet Jewry, retained more than other groups a traditional family lifestyle and connection to the Jewish community and synagogue.

The overwhelming majority of Jews, like the rest of the Soviet population, was not religious. Cut off from the Jewish tradition and community life, they had successfully adapted to Russian culture and did not have an opportunity to learn about their own. In this situation many ceased to attach any meaning to their Jewishness aside from their ethnic origin and the corresponding entry in the Soviet internal passport (in the first years after the start of emigration they were called “Jews without Jewishness” in Israel).

A fundamental difference existed in the definition of who is a Jew in the West and in the Soviet Union. In the West one’s nationality corresponds to one’s citizenship: in America a Jew, like all the other citizens, is an American, in France a Frenchman, and in England an Englishman. He is a Jew by virtue of certain cultural and religious preferences. At the same time official documents do not indicate one’s ethnic origin or religious confession. In the United States, being a Jew is voluntary. One becomes a Jew or ceases to be a Jew by desire. Jewish population figures include persons who identify as Jews by belonging to a synagogue or to any one of hundreds of Jewish organizations or by participating in Jewish communal fund-raising…. But in the Soviet Union, one is a Jew by nationality.[4]

In other words, in the Soviet Union being Jewish was a status that one inherited from one’s parents and was determined by the parents’ ethnic origin. It was an identifying feature all one’s life and it was passed on to one’s children. Unlike most nationalities, the Jews did not live in a compact national entity within the Soviet Union. Nationality was recorded in the notorious fifth line of the Soviet passport. Citizens were obligated to have this passport with them at all times and to present it in various situations and to various authorities. Given the existing governmental and everyday antisemitism, this considerably complicated the Jews’ lives. It is thus not surprising that many made an effort to change this undesirable registration in their own and children’s cases by taking advantage of the anarchy of World War II, by changing residence, or simply by bribery. In the case of mixed marriages, which exceeded 50 percent in the 1970 census, children could legally choose a non-Jewish nationality. It can’t be said, however, that this made their lives that much easier because in many cases the genealogy was traced and, as the Soviet Jews would joke, they beat a person “not according to the passport but the physiognomy.”

Until the Six-Day War, Jewishness had a negative connotation for a significant segment of the population. The war changed the situation and destroyed several myths that had created this negative image. A reverse process thus began in which some of the Jews who had registered as Russians, particularly among the youth, began to fight for the restoration of their Jewish nationality in official documents. Often this move was designed to express a protest against the official policy and also solidarity with Israel, to which many intended to immigrate.

The Jews who were subjected to the revolutionary transformations from the first years of the Soviet regime underwent the greatest changes in the period under discussion. They will be the first group under consideration here. The Jews of Georgia, Dagestan and the Central Asian republics are somewhat exceptional in this category. Because of certain political factors that will be mentioned below, the regime subjected them to less anti-religious and anti-nationality pressure than other groups. They represent the second group under consideration. A third group is comprised of Jews from the western Ukraine, Moldova, and the Baltic states, which were annexed to the Soviet Union as a result of World War II; thus in the period under discussion, only one generation had been under Soviet rule.

The first group constituted eighty-two percent of the Jewish population and represented the most assimilated and highly educated sector. Emigration from this group was relatively insignificant, numbering about 36,000 in the five years from 1971-1975. Half of the emigrants from this group would drop out (immigrate to the West) in Vienna. This means that in five years of relatively massive emigration, about one percent of this group would arrive in Israel and ninety-eight percent would continue to live in the Soviet Union. In addition, about three thousand people in this group later left Israel.[5]

The second group numbered about 120,000 people according to the 1970 census, representing about six percent of the Jewish population. Legends handed down from generation to generation link their origin to the tenth tribe, which was exiled by the Assyrians from the Holy Land about 2700 years ago. In the nineteenth century, Russia annexed the areas in which they lived on the southern and southeastern periphery of the future USSR. Georgian Jews lived among a Christian population that retained strong religious and cultural traditions. The Georgians adopted Christianity much earlier than the Russians, were proud of their ancient culture, and were tolerant of the Jews living in their midst. Two other subgroups, the Mountain and Bukharan Jews lived among Muslim peoples who also retained religious traditions and a rich cultural heritage.

In the first years of the Bolshevik regime, powerful anti-Russian movements arose in these regions with the goal of attaining national independence from Russia. The Soviet regime crushed the protest movements at a cost of heavy military losses. Guided by a fear of continued separatist disorders and a desire to pacify the region, the Bolsheviks formulated a special approach to these areas that was called “The Eastern Policy of the Communist Party.”

The Eastern Policy entailed considerable tolerance for local traditions including religion. The liquidation of religious structures here was thus carried out more slowly and cautiously, without reaching the level of Russia, Ukraine, or Belarus’ even in the second decade of the Soviet regime. This special policy was also applied to the local Jewish population. Attempts to secularize Jewish culture in these regions therefore achieved only very limited success.

It would be an exaggeration to state that this group survived into the present as a religious organism, but unquestionably it adhered to the Jewish religious tradition to a significantly greater degree than the other groups. One of the most important spiritual elements of this tradition was a special attachment to Israel as the Holy Land given to the patriarchs and their descendants. The first document of the Soviet Jewish repatriation movement that attracted widespread attention both inside the Soviet Union and abroad—the Letter of Eighteen Georgian Jewish Families—is permeated with this spirit. Although comprising only six percent of the Soviet Jewish population, in the first five years of the massive emigration of the 1970s, this group provided 37.3 percent of the aliya—41,000 out of 110,000 who arrived then. Practically none of the people in this group dropped out in Vienna en route to a Western country.[6]

The third group numbered 257,000 people in 1970, which constituted twelve percent of the Jewish population.[7] This group maintained important cultural and social centers in the period between the two world wars. From the founding of an independent Latvia in 1919 up until the fascist coup of 1934, a wide spectrum of Jewish organizations operated, including Zionist and non-Zionist, from the ultra-orthodox Agudat Yisrael to the socialist Bund. The Zionist Beitar organization originated in the Latvian capital of Riga. The city possessed a ramified educational network with instruction in Hebrew or in Yiddish. A Yiddish theater, several Jewish clubs, and Jewish newspapers also functioned. After 1934 any form of national activity was prohibited but in practice the greater part of the cultural activity continued until the arrival of the Soviet authorities.

Diverse political organizations also operated in independent Lithuania. After the 1926 nationalist coup, this activity continued under semi-legal conditions, practically on the same scale. Despite the continually growing antisemitism, the school system with instruction in Hebrew and Yiddish functioned actively. Vilnius, then located in Polish territory and returned to Lithuania in 1939 by the Soviet Union, was considered one of the world centers of Yiddish culture. Culture in modern Hebrew also began to develop. Despite the strong religious commitment in the educational system, the greater part of the social, cultural, and educational activity in Lithuania was secular.[8]

In northern Bukovina and Bessarabia, which belonged to Romania in the period between the two world wars, Jewish activism, particularly of a Zionist nature, flourished despite frequent waves of antisemitism. A network of schools with instruction in Hebrew and Yiddish existed and a Jewish press functioned in Yiddish, German, and Romanian. A considerable part of the cultural and social activity was secular. The influence of that national activity was preserved after the war thanks to the Jews who had survived the Holocaust in Soviet exile, the Soviet army, the partisan ranks, the ghettoes, or in Soviet corrective labor camps.[9] Those who survived retained the knowledge of Hebrew and Yiddish; many young people grew up in families that upheld pre-Soviet cultural traditions.

Even the Jews who moved into these regions after the war were influenced by the local Jews and adapted to their views. It is therefore not surprising that by the 1950s, Vilnius became one of the centers of a Jewish cultural revival and Riga became one of the centers of Zionist activity. As a whole this third group was more integrated than the eastern Jews into the surrounding social milieu. Comprising twelve percent of the Jewish population, in the first five years of the 1970s emigration this group provided 46.3 percent of the aliya—51,000 people. The dropout rate in Vienna was quite small—about one percent.[10]

A somewhat unexpected source provides additional touches to this group portrait of Soviet Jewry. In preparation for U.S. President Richard Nixon’s visit to the Soviet Union in 1972, the Soviet leadership sought information about the activity of American Jewish organizations. Indeed, some Soviet leaders personally experienced the effects of this activity, and they were aware that discrimination against the Soviet Jewish population and restrictions on emigration drew constant criticism from the West. In these circumstances, KGB chairman Yuri Andropov[11] sent the Central Committee of the CPSU some reference material “for possible use at press conferences for foreign journalists during US President Nixon’s visit to the Soviet Union.”[12]

This material, which was prepared and delivered in May 1972 by the director of the Fifth Directorate of the KGB, Filipp Bobkov, contained data on the high percentage of Jews who served as economic specialists, scientists, writers, and artists. It mentioned the significant number of Jews who had received various state prizes and awards and listed Jewish journals, newspapers, and theater groups. The KGB data was supposed to give the high-ranking guests and journalists the impression that the Jewish population of the Soviet Union played an important role in the economic, cultural, and scientific life of the country and was not subject to discrimination.[13]

In fact, these statistics clearly illustrate how Soviet propaganda succeeded for so many years in duping Western intellectuals and leftist movements, among whom there was a high percentage of Jews. The reference material says nothing about the national cadres policy, i.e., the forced replacement of Jews with local national cadres and it is silent about the process of pushing Jews out of an entire range of activities. It says nothing about the problems faced by young people who encountered quotas in applying to institutes of higher education, discrimination in applying for work, and enormous pressure from state and everyday antisemitism that after the Six-Day War reached the level of a genuine propagandistic bacchanalia.

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