The abbreviation GULAG stands for Main Directorate of Correctional Labor Camps. The GULAG is recognized as a major instrument of political repression in the Soviet Union.
Encyclopedias date the beginning of the policy of state anti-Semitism to November 1948, when the authorities defeated the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee. This organization, founded in April 1942, helped the USSR raise funds to fight Nazi Germany. On August 12, 1952, 13 members of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee were executed by a Soviet court.
My father and my mother’s sister were repressed in 1949 in another case organized under the policy of state anti-Semitism. They and other members of the Jewish creative intelligentsia were accused of cosmopolitanism and propaganda of Western culture. They were fired from their jobs, publicly denounced in newspapers and meetings, and forced to leave Kiev, where they had lived for decades and where they had worked at the university and music academy on the eve of this anti-Semitic campaign. For a long time, I thought that I knew everything about the manifestations of state anti-Semitism and its victims in our family. But it turned out that I was wrong about the date of the beginning of the policy of Soviet state anti-Semitism, nor about the number of its victims among my relatives.
Quite recently I read an article by the Russian historian and literary scholar Efim Melamed about the closure of the Institute of Jewish Proletarian Culture in Kiev and the repression of its staff, among whom I found the name of my maternal grandfather’s cousin Jonah Hinchin. I knew nothing about the existence of this Institute, and the fate of this man was unknown to his nieces, my mother and her sister, repressed in the case of cosmopolitanism. Therefore, I did not include the story of the Institute and my grandfather’s cousin Yakov Hinchin in my book published in 2024 in Hebrew My Dear Dissonances: Kiev Stories. In the book, I recounted the fates of my family members in pre-Soviet and Soviet Ukraine.
The Institute of Jewish Proletarian Culture was established in 1926. It was a center of Jewish studies of international level. It had six specialized departments (historical, philological, ethnographic, literary, socio-economic and pedagogical). In addition, the Institute included a number of auxiliary institutions: the Central Archive of the Jewish Press, which received hundreds of publications on Jewish studies from all over the world; the Jewish Library had a collection of more than 60,000 volumes; and the Museum of Jewish Modernity. After its closure in 1936, the Institute was reopened in a greatly reduced form under the name of the Cabinet of Jewish Language, Literature and Folklore at the Academy of Sciences of Soviet Ukraine. The section of musical folklore was headed by my aunt’s colleague Moses Beregovsky, who was repressed together with her in the cosmopolitanism case. A former graduate student of the Institute, American literary scholar, journalist and translator, bibliographer, and publicist Alexander Joshua Pomerantz, later claimed: “The Kiev Institute…. was an educational institution of the highest level in the entire millennial history of the Yiddish language. The Institute was the highest achievement in the scientific field in the ‘Yiddish empire,’ the crown of Jewish culture in Soviet Russia.” Its employees were dismissed from their jobs. Among them was Jonah Hinchin, a researcher in the historical section.
Jonah was accused of anti-Soviet activities and of supporting Trotsky. Investigators claimed that in his practical, editorial work, Hinchin “stood on anti-Soviet positions” and allowed the printing of books “imbued with nationalist interpretations, idealization of counterrevolutionary Trotskyism and the Bund.” The Bund was a Jewish socialist party active in Eastern Europe and banned by the Bolsheviks. Hinchin was a member of the Bund from 1917 to 1919, but joined the Bolshevik Party and served as head of the Jewish department of the Kiev Regional Historical Archive before working at the Institute. The records of the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs showed that in 1923 Hinchin, then a student at Moscow State University, voted in favor of a Trotskyist resolution and was expelled from the Bolshevik Party in 1924. Investigators determined that, “having in his possession the archives of former anti-Soviet parties – Poalei Zion and others – he destroyed a number of documents compromising current members of the Communist Party of Bolsheviks of Ukraine, former figures of these anti-Soviet parties.” One witness testified that Hinchin kept archival documents of the defeated and banned Jewish section of the Bolshevik Party Central Committee, which contained a complaint against Stalin. Evidence of his “counter-revolutionary Trotskyist work” was “a collection for the party school system entitled ‘General Rehearsal of 1905’” in which “in translating into Jewish the writings of Lenin and Stalin, in order to propagandize nationalist-Menshevik and Trotskyist ideas, he deliberately distorted their text.” Jonah Hinchin was sentenced to five years in the camps by the Special Council, an administrative punitive body under the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs, without trial. He died in a camp in Vorkuta on March 7, 1940. He was 48 years old. In 1956 he was rehabilitated. In total, 20 employees of the Institute were repressed, eight of them were shot.
All Jewish organizations in the USSR were completely destroyed already in the 1920s and 1930s. But until 1938, Sovietized Jewish secular culture in Yiddish was still encouraged, since this language was spoken by the majority of the Jews of the USSR in the first decades of Soviet power. In 1938, a campaign to curtail Yiddish culture began. It was expressed primarily in the closure of Jewish schools, colleges and technical schools and the translation of all educational institutions into Russian. There was a degeneration of socialist internationalism into Russian nationalism. The physical extermination of the bearers of Jewish culture began in 1936.
My grandfather Yakov died in 1937, a year after the arrest of his cousin Jonah, about whose fate my grandfather’s daughters, my mother and her sister, never learned anything. He disappeared into the abyss of the Soviet camps, the Gulag. His “fault” was that he had researched the history of the Jewish people and wanted to develop their culture. Two other members of the Institute’s staff died with him in the Gulag. Jewish culture in the USSR had been destroyed by its authorities long before the massacre of the members of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee.