Yuri Slezkine - The Jewish Century, New Edition

The Jewish Century

The Jewish Century

New Edition

With a new preface by the author

Yuri Slezkine

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

PRINCETON AND OXFORD

Copyright 2004 by Princeton University Press

New edition, with a new preface by the author,

2019 by Princeton University Press

Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street,

Princeton, New Jersey 08540

In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press,

6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TR

Cover image courtesy of Shutterstock

All Rights Reserved

First published in 2004

First paperback printing, 2006

New paperback edition, with a new preface by the author, 2019

Paper ISBN: 978-0-691-19282-6

The Library of Congress has cataloged the cloth edition of this book as follows

Slezkine, Yuri, 1956

The Jewish century / Yuri Slezkine.

p.cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-691-11995-3 (alk. paper)

1. JewsEuropeEconomic conditions. 2. JewsEuropeSocial conditions. 3. JewsRussiaEconomic conditions19th century. 4. JewsRussiaEconomic conditions20th century. 5. JewsRussiaSocial conditions19th century. 6. JewsRussiaSocial conditions20th century. 7. RussiaEthnic relations. 8. RussiaCivilizationJewish influences. 9. Civilization, ModernJewish influences. 10. Social integrationRussia. 11. CapitalismSocial aspects. 12. EntrepreneurshipSocial aspects. I. Title.

DS140.5.S592004

940.04924dc222003069322

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

This book has been composed in Galliard text with Bodega Sans Display

Printed on acid-free paper.

press.princeton.edu

Printed in the United States of America

Contents

Preface to the 2019 Paperback Edition

I did not mean to write this book.

In 1994, I wrote an article called The Soviet Union as a Communal Apartment, in which communal apartment was a metaphor for the Soviet state as a multinational federation (with union republics occupying separate rooms while sharing the same kitchen and bathroom). Having exhausted the metaphor, I decided to write a history of an actual communal apartment, in which several families (such as my own, until I was fourteen) occupied separate rooms while sharing the same kitchen and bathroom. After several months of searching for an apartment with a long enough line of consecutive residents, I moved to entire buildingsuntil I ended up in the largest of them all: the House of Government in Moscow.

In the 1930s, the House of Government housed the Soviet government: Peoples commissars, Red Army commanders, Gulag officials, industrial managers, Marxist scholars, socialist-realist writers, and assorted worthies including Lenins bodyguard, Lenins embalmer, and Stalins relatives. There were many things about that building that I found striking. One was the high proportion of Jewish residents (including Lenins bodyguard, Lenins embalmer, and some of Stalins relatives). Another was the degree to which the Jewish residents were more consistently Communist than their neighbors. Polish, Latvian, and Georgian Party officials seemed to assume that proletarian internationalism was compatible with their native tongues, songs, and foods. The Jewish ones equated socialism with rootless cosmopolitanism and made a point of not speaking Yiddish at home or passing on anything they thought of as Jewish to their children. I decided to begin by writing a separate chapter about the Jewish contingent within the Bolshevik elite.

A quick look at their family histories revealed something I had known all along: the most Soviet and most successful of all Soviet communities went on to become the most anti-Sovietand still the most successfulof all Soviet communities. Many of the people I knew growing up thought of themselves as Jews. All of them were members of the anti-Soviet wing of the Russian intelligentsia. Most had Communist (ostensibly non-Jewish) grandparents, and none found that fact interesting or peculiar. Why not? The chapter on the Jewish residents of the House of Government became an article about elite Soviet Jews and their children and grandchildren.

And then I noticed something else I had always known but never thought about. All the Jewish residents of the House of Government were first-generation Muscovites. Most Moscow Jews were immigrants; the Jewish migration to the cities of the Soviet Union was much bigger than the one to Palestine and much more politically charged than the one to America. There were three, not two, great Jewish migrations in the twentieth century. All three were part of the same family history, and each one represented a fundamental existential option: liberal capitalism, ethnic nationalism, and international communism (a world liberated from capitalism and nationalism). The article on the Soviet Jewish elite and their children and grandchildren became an essay about three Promised Lands.

Promised Lands need an Exodus. The story of the three great Jewish migrations seemed incomplete without an account of the demise of the Pale of Settlement and the rebellion of Jewish boys and girls against both the Russian state and the Jewish tradition. But could one trace the story of the Jewish migrations from the Pale of Settlement to Moscow, New York, and Palestine without coming to terms with the story of the Jewish migrations from the ghetto to Berlin, Vienna, and Budapest? The essay about three Promised Lands became a short book about Jews in the modern world.

The modern world is unthinkable without the Jews, who benefited from it, rebelled against it, and suffered from it more than anyone else. The obvious question is why. What are the causes of Jewish success, Jewish radicalism, and Jewish vulnerability? The short book about the peculiar place of Jews in the modern world became a big book about why that place is so peculiar.

It has been twenty years since I decided to write it. The House of Government: A Saga of the Russian Revolution (Princeton University Press, 2017) has been published. The Jewish pilgrimage to Moscow has proved a disappointment. Most Soviet Jews have rejoined their cousins in Israel and the United States. Israel and the United States have remained at the center of the world. The Jewish Century has ended, but the Jewish Age has not.

Preface

Growing up in the Soviet Union, I was close to both my grandmothers. One, Angelina Ivanovna Zhdanovich, was born to a gentry family, attended an institute for noble maidens, graduated from the Maly Theater acting school in Moscow, and was overtaken by the Red Army in Vladikavkaz in 1920. She took great pride in her Cossack ancestors and lost everything she owned in the revolution. At the end of her life, she was a loyal Soviet citizen at peace with her past and at home in her country. The other, Berta (Brokhe) Iosifovna Kostrinskaia, was born in the Pale of Settlement, never graduated from school, went to prison as a Communist, emigrated to Argentina, and returned in 1931 to take part in the building of socialism. In her old age, she took great pride in her Jewish ancestors and considered most of her life to have been a mistake. This book is dedicated to her memory.