My earliest memories are of visiting the countryside for summer vacation when I was three and four years old. I was born in 1948 in Stalino, Ukraine’s coal-mining and industrial center. When any of our city’s five hundred thousand inhabitants glanced toward the horizon, it looked like we were surrounded by mass-produced mountains. Up close, just blocks from my home and scattered throughout the city, we could see that these hills were mounds of garbage. These terrikons—cone-shaped coal waste dumps—looked like they were breathing as they pulsated with noxious gases. They so blended into the landscape that people often climbed the ones near the stadium to watch soccer games for free. Whenever we walked outside, our white shirts blackened with a thin dusting of soot from the pollution piles on the ground and the smoke that so many factories belched into the air.
For me and my older brother, Leonid, our country getaway was magical. This suited the village’s Russian name, Neskuchnoye, which means “not boring” or “delightful.” We didn’t have a dacha, a summer house. Only the elite of the elites enjoyed such luxuries. My parents scratched together a few extra rubles to rent one room in the small house of a peasant, who displaced his family to accommodate us. My parents took back-to-back vacations, with some overlap, so we kids could spend more time breathing freely, away from the city.
I loved every moment of this larger-than-life life. I delighted in waking up early and feeding the squawking chickens. I marveled as the cock started shouting mysteriously, sending the chickens diving under their coop for protection whenever a hawk hovered above, threatening to swoop down and snatch one of the brood. I enjoyed slurping down a cup of hot milk in the mornings, fresh from the cow the old lady had just milked, and, in the evenings, watching the cows return from pasture, wondering how each one knew precisely which stall to lumber into for the night. I loved drifting on a boat with my brother and parents, reaching over to tap the huge lily pads. I was fascinated, as the weeks went by, to see the apple trees bloom, and then, as the delicate flowers faded, to see the hearty, fragrant pieces of fruit appear.
Yet, even in this romantic setting, as young as I was, as little as I understood, I sensed some sadness. Gradually, my parents’ occasional comments helped me realize what was happening. The peasants we rented from were among the tens of millions of Soviets living on a kolkhoz, one of the massive collective farms the Soviet Union created, violently, starting in 1928. The farmers were desperately poor and hopelessly unfree. When a calf was born, they had to decide whether to slaughter it for meat—and pay steep taxes on it—or give it to the kolkhoz, as each family was allowed only one cow. What looked to us like the lovely, pastoral sight of peasants dragging carts by hand—even when filled with backbreakingly heavy items—reflected the fact that the kolkhoz owned all the horses. Farmers needed special permission to use them. And as soon as those apple trees blossomed, the tax authorities arrived. The taxes reflected the peasants’ estimated crop output. Even if nature refused to cooperate and spoiled the harvest, they had to pay.
I vaguely remember a long, hushed conversation one summer, deep into the night, that ended with grim faces. Eventually, my father explained to me that our host had asked if my parents had the right connections to take his daughter to the city to serve as our nanny. It seemed to be her only shot at leaving their life of virtual slavery.
The biggest obstacle the teenager faced was getting access to her identity papers, which the kolkhoz held. Every Soviet citizen above the age of sixteen needed an identity certificate to travel. Without it, you couldn’t register once you reached your destination, which we all had to do whenever we visited anywhere—for business or pleasure, for a few days or a few months—or risk arrest.
In the cities, we always carried our internal passports. We faced other restrictions as well, such as not being able to relocate to a popular location like Moscow. The Soviet authorities understood that Moscow could not become the Communist showcase to the world—full of special goods—that they wanted it to be if they didn’t restrict access to most Soviet citizens. But the Soviet Union was big enough to offer us city folk alternatives. Members of these collective farms, which made up almost half the country, had no such options. Without easy access to their IDs, they were like serfs, bound to the kolkhoz.
My father, sympathetic but powerless, sighed, “Those poor people. We’re so much luckier than they are.” It’s always good to feel you have more freedom than someone else.
Although the restrictions on physical movement varied, the restrictions on traveling through time—by learning history—were imposed uniformly. The Soviets collectivized the past, treating it as state property to be shaped at will.
I was born one hundred years after Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels published the Communist Manifesto in 1848, dreaming the socialist dream of mass equality imposed through class struggle, and thirty years after the October Revolution of 1917, when the Bolsheviks started implementing this Marxist dream mercilessly. My parents, Ida Milgrom and Boris Shcharansky, were born before the revolution—he in 1904, she in 1908. Married in 1929, they were childless when my father went to fight the Nazis for what ended up being four years of war, from 1941 to 1945. My older brother Leonid was born in 1946. I arrived two years later.
My father had a big library housing a few thousand books. Almost every payday he purchased another volume or two to squeeze into our small two-room apartment, hemming us in more and more. My mother never knew how expensive these books would be. Even with a father working as a journalist and a mother working as a senior economist, we ran out of money most months—as did almost everyone we knew.
Like most of the Russian intelligentsia, and especially the Russian Jewish intelligentsia, we enjoyed escaping into the Russian, French, German, and English classics the censors didn’t ban. These books allowed for more intellectual latitude, especially those that were written centuries before the Industrial and the Bolshevik Revolutions. My first favorites were Robinson Crusoe and Gulliver’s Travels.
In addition to the proliferating classics, the beautifully bound, majestically dark-blue volumes of the second edition of The Great Soviet Encyclopedia began arriving in our home as early as I can remember.
The authorities touted this achievement loudly. From 1950 to 1958, fifty volumes, with one hundred thousand entries, would be published to “show the superiority of socialist culture over the culture of the capitalist world.” These big, thick volumes—our Encyclopaedia Britannica, or perhaps, for today’s readers, our Wikipedia—impressed me as a boy, brimming as they were with entries explaining history and geography, mathematics and science. I knew that if I was patient enough, eventually the right volumes would arrive and teach me everything I wanted to know. Meanwhile, I learned what I could while appreciating the books themselves. They were very fat and I was very short. I often used one or two volumes to prop myself up in my chair so I could reach our table to do my homework more comfortably.
Alas, the Soviet publishers—aware that the authorities used education to develop “the Communist morality, ideology, and Soviet patriotism” and “inspire unshakable love toward the Soviet fatherland, the Communist Party, and its leaders”—had a problem. In reducing history to propaganda, officials kept changing it to fit the ever-evolving party line. Overnight, leaders could be flipped from progressive socialists to sectarian lackeys of imperialism. People long dead could be boosted or downgraded, depending on the latest twist in some doctrinal debate. Whole branches of knowledge, from cybernetics to genetics, could go from illegal “bourgeois false sciences” to exemplary subjects with the flick of a bureaucrat’s pen—or the shift of an autocrat’s whim. Living politicians’ reputations, of course, were particularly volatile.
As the Communist leaders purged people and shifted tactics, the harried editors kept updating these printed bricks. Especially challenging were people whose last names began with letters early in the alphabet. As the encyclopedia’s production slowed, names further down the alphabetical order could have their roles in history changed numerous times without requiring any reprints.
One of the first corrections I remember came after 1953, when Nikita Khrushchev rose to power and purged Lavrentiy Beria, Stalin’s brutal head of the NKVD, the secret police. My father soon received a publisher’s letter addressed to every subscriber, instructing him to cut out the three-page article praising Beria in the B volume, destroy it, and replace it with some new B entries sent along to fill the space. My father smiled, shrugged, and followed the orders. Subsequently, as politicians rose or fell out of favor, as scientists were exiled or rehabilitated, every reader had to scramble to keep up with the shifting official line.
To those of us living in democracies today, the image of my father sitting at home and razor blading out a page to glue in the newly updated replacement might seem ridiculous. Officials were not going to knock on the door and check. Still, he figured, why take a chance?
Early on, my father taught us that “the walls have ears.” The secret police recruited millions of people as informers. Only after Communism fell did we realize just how extensive the network of informants was. During the never-ending winter of the Soviet regime, you never knew who might report you: it could be a neighbor in the cramped communal apartments, a jealous colleague, even a desperate friend. You didn’t know who might visit and open a volume mistakenly—or intentionally.
So, not wanting to take chances, my father played the role of true believer, treating history like putty.
Beyond these fears were the irritations, big and small, of day-to-day life. We were one of three families sharing two rooms apiece in a communal apartment, each room no larger than fifteen square meters. Seventeen of us shared one kitchen uncomfortably. We waited in line endlessly for the one toilet. Each family was assigned one day for bathing. This weekly ritual included boiling water on the stove, then ferrying it quickly to the bathtub.
Squabbling about nonsense, from who cleaned what to who used that, was inevitable. Applying her organizational skills as the Ukrainian coal ministry’s senior economist, my mother created a chart distributing the errands proportionally. Then, predictably, arguments erupted over just how her schedule should be followed.
Outside our little home, there was plenty of waiting and frustration. The typical day began with one family member dashing out at 6 a.m. to wait in the first of many lines, this one for milk. Within the first hour, the day’s milk supply would vanish. We continued, often securing one consumer item at a time—eggs, cabbage, soap—from one endless line after another. Fashionable clothes or a baby carriage required elite connections. In this world of constant waiting, line management itself became a science.
Yet, despite the cramping, the quibbling, and the waiting, we knew we were in paradise—or at least we acted as if we knew that whenever anyone was watching. We grew up on perpetual official propaganda, in school and on the street. Party slogans, feeding us the lines we were supposed to mouth, were as ever present as the soot. We should “thank Comrade Stalin” for our happy childhoods. We were not just lucky but the luckiest people in history, to be born in the Soviet Union.
Then, under Joseph Stalin’s successor, Nikita Khrushchev, the Communist Party Congress introduced fresh slogans boosting its “New Program” to accelerate the revolution. Now we parroted the line that we were the luckiest ever, because “THE CURRENT GENERATION OF SOVIET PEOPLE WILL LIVE UNDER COMMUNISM.” Posters proclaiming that slogan followed us everywhere, seemingly as tall as those toxic terrikons enveloping our city.
We were approaching the end of history, the party proclaimed, the culmination of humanity’s long struggle for justice and proletarian bliss. Communism was now ready to bring us to the final stage of the centuries-long class struggle, guaranteeing “from each according to his means, to each according to his needs.”
Communism was a mass-produced dream, a quick ticket to paradise that captured the imaginations of millions of people suffering as their ancestors had. The socialist promise of equality was seductive. But, unavoidably, Communism implemented this utopian idea heavy-handedly, from “the brotherhood of the people” to “the dictatorship of the proletariat”—at KGB gunpoint.
Although a peculiarly godless religion, Communism had its own apostles: Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin. We fused their sacred names together: MarxEngelsLeninStalin. Their four faces seemed to blur into one another in so many of the supersized propaganda posters surrounding us. It was as if all four were watching, all the time.
The romantic-sounding idea of mass equality and of Communism as the final stage of redemption came wrapped in a package of violence directly from Marx. Contrary to the false nostalgia surrounding him and his socialist ideas today, Marx emphasized that paradise had to be built using all means necessary, no matter how vile or violent. There “is only one way in which the murderous death agonies of the old society and the bloody birth throes of the new society can be shortened, simplified, and concentrated,” he wrote in 1848, “and that way is revolutionary terror.”
While Marx imagined the proletarian revolution that would create a classless society, Lenin and Stalin brought it to life—by putting people to death. For people to be equal, the state had to remove all differences, be they material, religious, or national. So the state squelched all individualism and creativity. It nationalized all property, controlled the economy, owned everything, and distributed it in a supposedly just way. The party mocked religion as the opiate of the masses as the state destroyed many churches, mosques, and synagogues, all while confiscating their property. The state prohibited any “deviant” nationalist expressions.
People naturally resisted. They wanted their own businesses and their own identities, both religious and national. In response, the machinery of repression blossomed. Lenin initially expected to kill a few hundred capitalists. The death toll escalated quickly to thousands, then millions.
When Stalin rose to power in the mid-1920s, the regime’s totalitarian assault on freedom intensified. It stripped some identities particularly brutally. Stalin insisted there could be no diversity, no individuality, no classes. He sought to turn everyone into the “New Soviet Man,” cleansed of any loyalties except to the Communist Party. Soviet citizens were expected to echo, with great pride, variations of Stalin’s favorite line about “how happy we are to serve as cogs in one big Communist machine.”
The town where I was born was abruptly renamed Stalino in the 1920s. In 1961, when I was thirteen, Khrushchev’s people purged the town’s name, just as abruptly, of any link to that mass murderer. We were told to call our town Donetsk.
By the time I was born, the Soviet dictatorship had asserted its absolute power over us. It had destroyed traditional institutions, having nationalized and collectivized them. It had mass murdered, imprisoned in the Gulag, or exiled to Siberia the bourgeoisie and other “class enemies,” along with those belonging to “reactionary nations” like Crimean Tatars or Chechens, by the millions. Industrialists, engineers, clerics, intellectuals, local politicians—anyone suspected of disloyalty or belonging to the wrong class or nation—had disappeared. Historians estimate that under Stalin as many as twenty-five million people were swallowed into the Gulag. This chilling word, the acronym for the Russian phrase “the main administration of camps,” described the Soviets’ suffocating web of forced-labor camps, prison camps, and prisons.
A repressive regime needs external enemies, not just internal traitors, to justify its control. The Soviet Union had a constantly evolving rationale for war: defending the proletariat from capitalist countries and advancing the worldwide Communist Revolution. Eventually, they called this “the struggle of progressive forces for peace” against the capitalist world, led by the United States of America.
I grew up knowing the United States as a big bad brute. A typical cartoon would show a power-hungry, greedy, grotesque Uncle Sam holding a baton in one hand (for beating African Americans) and grasping a handful of missiles in the other (for targeting progressive nations like North Korea, the People’s Republic of China, the East German Democratic Republic, and the Soviet motherland).
In this propagandistic Cold War between the Soviet Union and the United States, the Soviet people living in “Communist paradise” had to be protected from capitalist influence. That’s why the authorities closed borders, prohibited immigration, banned contact with foreigners, and electronically jammed foreign radio broadcasts in Russian. The Iron Curtain divided the free world from the Communist world.
Dictators don’t need to use terror, purges, and mass murders forever. After seizing power, the regime’s main mission became keeping control. It turned life into a permanent loyalty test. You had to express your devotion constantly, loudly, and ostentatiously. Every speech that was scheduled, every parade organized, every class taken, every exam administered, and every conversation initiated provided an opportunity to prove your loyalty. Every state goody, large or small, was at stake. It could be an extra day off from your boss or a resort getaway provided by your union. Or it could be your career, your status, your future, or your freedom.
The KGB—the secret police—maintained control through fear. You feared deviating from the party line. You feared the mysterious network of informers. You feared not demonstrating enough loyalty. You feared something you believed might slip out. You feared hearing someone else’s slip of the tongue and being asked about it. You feared not showing up to the right meeting, not saying the right thing, not demonstrating the right amount of loyalty.
Fueling the fear was the unsettling awareness of a parallel world you could fall into instantly. Just say the wrong thing, discuss the wrong topic, make the wrong gesture, break the wrong rule, and you, too, could vanish, as people on our block had, as people in our family had.
We called it casually, even flippantly, mesta-nyestol-odalyonniye: “The place that is not too far.” You didn’t need to see anyone disappear or know victims personally. Like the smog hanging over the city, you just knew that the world of camps and prisons, though actually thousands of kilometers removed, was just one misstep away. You could find yourself there any minute, for any reason, without understanding why.
Growing up Jewish in the Soviet Union offered nothing positive. No Jewish tradition. No Jewish institutions. No Jewish culture. No Jewish history. No Jewish holidays. No Jewish books. No circumcision. No bar mitzvah. No Jewish language. My parents sometimes used Yiddish as a secret code in front of the kids but never tried to teach us. The only real Jewish experience I had was facing anti-Semitism.
I could have had a Jewish name. My grandfather wanted me to be Natan, in memory of his father. But burdening a child with the Hebrew name of a biblical prophet at the height of Stalin’s anti-Semitism was too provocative. Instead, my parents gave me the neutral name Anatoly. Still, Grandpa Moshe called me Natanchik.
As good doublethinkers, my parents had made one big gesture to remind us and our relatives that we were Jewish. They possessed a one-and-a-half-foot-tall replica of Hermann Prell’s 1899 sculpture of David, standing triumphantly, with his slingshot in hand and one foot on Goliath’s severed head. (We recently discovered it’s often misnamed “Prometheus.”)
This statue was far too large for our small apartment, far fancier than anything else we owned, and far too explicit for us as young boys. I woke up every morning to the sight of David’s nakedness.
My mother’s somewhat better-off sister had bought the sculpture in a local market and given it to us; we imagined it had been looted somewhere in Europe as World War II ended. In the 1440s, the original Donatello was the first freestanding bronze nude an artist had made since Greco-Roman days.
The embarrassing, lifeless relic represented my first exposure to Jewish history. My father tried. He told us stories of biblical heroes, saying, “You have nothing to be ashamed of—we are not cowards—but be careful, don’t talk much about it.”
I certainly didn’t, especially because the rare reminders that I was Jewish usually made me cringe. At school, when the teachers periodically had a formal roll call, they would read each pupil’s name, surname, date of birth, and nationality—that dreaded designation from the fifth line of our identity cards. True, cosmopolitan Communism at its purest dismissed nationality, but during World War II Stalin discovered that national pride was a useful motivator.
Most kids in the class were Russian or Ukrainian. Being Russian meant belonging to the most progressive nation. Russia united us all on the journey toward Communism. Russia’s heroic soldiers had defeated Hitler in the Great Patriotic War. Being Ukrainian meant having local pride and being the Russians’ closest brothers. In Ukraine, we were constantly toasting what the authorities insisted was a voluntary partnership with Russia, three centuries strong. If someone had told me that in six decades a brutal war would hit my hometown, I would have predicted a clash between Earth and Mars as more likely than one between Russia and Ukraine.
Other nationalities were rarely mentioned and usually overlooked—Armenians, Lithuanians, Kazakhs. But when the word “Jew” was uttered, after my name and that of two or three other students during roll call, it prompted an awkward silence, a grimace from the teacher, and a mean joke about sniveling Jews from the class clown. Occasionally a teacher might intervene, claiming, “We Soviets don’t discriminate.” But, usually, being outed as Jewish was like being diagnosed with some debilitating disease.
Similarly, we were most frequently the butt of the many ethnic jokes kids lobbed around the schoolyard. Russians might have been naive and drunk, but they were noble. Ukrainians might have been stupid and drunk, but they were sincere. Jews, while sober, were cunning, greedy, cowardly parasites. Even close friends sometimes remarked, “You’re such a good guy. It’s a pity you’re a Jew.”
All I got from being Jewish was discomfort and vulnerability, fed by the crude anti-Semitism of the street and the systemic anti-Semitism of the state. The street continued the old Russian prejudice against Jews as Christ killers and money-grubbers. The state superimposed onto that tradition a new Communist hatred of Jews as cosmopolites whose loyalty to the Soviet regime was always in question. We could not discuss the prejudice we faced because, in our worker’s paradise, anti-Semitism officially didn’t exist.
One of my earliest memories is proudly walking with my father, hand in hand, in the streets of our city. It’s Victory Day, celebrating the Soviets’ World War II triumph. I’m proud because my father’s chest is covered with the medals and decorations he earned during four years of fighting for the Red Army, from the Caucasus to Budapest to Vienna.
“Hey, kike, where did you buy those medals?” some passerby yells. “In Tashkent?” The meaning is clear, even to my five-year-old self: when we Russians were defending you against Hitler, you Jews were cowering behind our backs in safe faraway places like Uzbekistan.
“He’s only a drunk hooligan,” Dad says, squeezing my hand harder as we hurry away.
Not all the stereotypes about Jews were negative, although we always felt caricatured. Once, the father of a high school friend told me, “I often tell my son, ‘Stick to your Jewish classmates and their families.’” He explained, “Their fathers are not drunkards, they don’t beat their wives, and their kids study all the time.”
There was some truth there. On the evenings after paydays, which came twice a month, you saw many drunken men lying on park benches or snoring away on the sidewalks. Others hurried to drink as much vodka as they could on the way home, before their wives took the remaining cash for household necessities. The police ran extra patrols on those days, gathering many men to sleep it off in the drunk tank.
Of course, not all Jews were sober and not all non-Jews were drunk. But their tendency to exaggerate about us publicly fed our tendency to exaggerate about them privately.
Like most Jewish families we knew, the outside world’s pressures bonded us together. In our family we grew up missing many things, but certainly not love. Even the financial tensions, or the outbursts we hadn’t specifically expected but always kind of knew were coming, didn’t take away from the deep love filling our small apartment.
Although they never talked about it, my parents were grieving. The Nazis had killed many relatives and friends. The years of Stalin’s purges—when they went to sleep at night unsure whether they would wake up at home or on the way to prison—left their mark on my parents’ faces, although I only comprehended this years later.
All these silent scars only reinforced the central message: work doubly hard to succeed. People hear that today and think we were under pressure to make our parents look good. That wasn’t it. Succeeding professionally—especially in science—was the only possible protection against constant uncertainty. Political careers were impossible. Military careers were impossible. The Jewish path to respectability involved more objective subjects, like engineering and medicine.
My parents’ love didn’t depend on my performance. I was expected to excel, but I knew that love was guaranteed from them, regardless of how well I did.
In stripping away Jewish identity, Jewish history, and Jewish literacy, the state also deprived us of knowledge about the Holocaust, which had occurred only a few years before, precisely where we lived.
I was born two and a half years after the war ended, in the heart of one of the Germans’ main killing fields. From 1941 to 1944, Nazi Einsatzgruppen, working with their Ukrainian collaborators, murdered nearly one million Jews, usually by spraying them with machine-gun fire. Even though many of my relatives died in Kiev, Odessa, and right in our town, we never heard anything about it.
As children, signs of the Great Patriotic War were all around us. There were constant references at home, at school, on the radio, and on the street to the Soviet Union’s long, painful, bloody victory over Adolf Hitler and the Nazis. We often attended ceremonies celebrating Communism’s heroic 1945 defeat of fascism. We romped on abandoned, rusting tanks that hung around our town for many years. We constantly played war games, competing for the honor of “belonging” to the noble Red Army, the forces of light who defeated the Nazi forces of darkness. We often compared childish versions of our fathers’ war stories, arguing about who faced the greatest danger and who won the most medals.
Yet, while talking incessantly about the war, we couldn’t talk about the war against the Jews at all. Official documents mentioned Jews far down the long list of victims, after Soviet soldiers, Soviet partisans, Soviet prisoners of war, innocent Soviet civilians, and Romani. Only decades later did I discover that we were living—and playing—near monstrous proof of the Holocaust that officially never happened. Our playgrounds were some of the bloodiest sites in Jewish history—in human history.
Only a few miles from our apartment building was a shaft in the Rykovskaya mine. After Babi Yar, it is the second largest mass grave in Ukraine of civilians the Nazis murdered. At 365 meters deep and 15 meters wide, it may be the deepest pile of corpses the Nazis left behind.
The Nazis and their local sympathizers often marched people to that pit in groups, then shot them at the edge, so the bodies would fall in without the killers’ hands getting dirty. They threw most children into the pit alive—screaming and crying and dying a slow death as other bodies piled on and suffocated them. Many believe the majority of the seventy-five thousand civilians buried there were Jewish.
The Soviet Union, however, didn’t recognize the Nazis’ systematic slaughter of the Jews. Therefore, it didn’t exist, just like anti-Semitism itself. Our parents didn’t want to talk about all those friends and relatives who had disappeared. It was too painful to remember the truth, and too ridiculous to participate in the self-censorship the Soviets’ new Big Lie demanded.
In the same neighborhood where we played so innocently, seventy-five thousand people—possibly more—had been murdered most brutally. German soldiers had poured in caustic soda to disinfect, seal, and mask this pit of death just outside where we lived. The Nazis had made the corpses disappear, reducing their bodies to biomass. The Soviets furthered the cover-up, making the memories of who the victims were and why they died disappear too.
The cover-up was intentional. When the Red Army first freed territory from Nazi rule in 1943—after two years of cruel occupation—the victorious Soviets arrested Nazi collaborators, collected evidence, and brought several killers to justice. The initial trials were very emotional. Onlookers screamed in agony, and some fainted, as they heard witnesses’ incomprehensible tales of the Nazi hell that had incinerated their loved ones. Yet, even while prosecuting Nazis and their collaborators, the Soviets increasingly obscured the Jewish dimension of the Nazi war crimes.
Stalin blocked the publication of The Black Book of Soviet Jewry, filled with eyewitness testimonies, which Ilya Ehrenburg and Vasily Grossman compiled in 1944. Their witnesses emphasized the Nazis’ anti-Jewish obsession. The KGB also seized archives detailing the war against the Jews, burying any related documents behind top-secret labels. Special community memorial books chronicling the Holocaust, town by town, were outlawed. Like Beria’s biography in our Soviet encyclopedia, the Holocaust had to be cut from the pages of history and replaced.
By the time I was frolicking in those killing fields, the totalitarian regime had nearly wiped the Nazi mass murder of Jews from the collective memory banks. The Soviet power to shape public opinion—or at least public conversation—was astonishing. Month after month, the government erected war monument after war monument. As a Young Pioneer, I regularly attended solemn ceremonies commemorating a partisan’s heroism, an officer’s sacrifice, this Nazi mass murder, that site of civilian suffering. Such plaques proliferated without mentioning the approximately 1.3 million Jews murdered in those same places throughout the Soviet Union.
What happened?
One day, Stalin decided it was the Jews’ turn to become the target. Historians argue about what motivated him. The global solidarity Jews felt as a people clearly infuriated him. Communist ideology belittled any ties beyond its version of intersectionality: that all workers shared similar stories of oppression and an overriding loyalty to the Soviet state.
Still, during the war, Stalin exploited Jews’ sense of peoplehood. Shortly after the Nazis invaded Russia in 1941, Stalin launched the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee. He hoped that emphasizing Nazi atrocities against Jews would solidify his awkward new alliance with Western democracies. The committee’s success in raising more than $30 million, mostly from American and British Jews, ultimately made him suspicious. The committee’s chairman, the actor and director Solomon Mikhoels, addressed huge crowds in the West. He claimed the Soviet Union was not anti-Semitic, only to be murdered during Stalin’s anti-Semitic purge in 1948.
In October 1948, Stalin seethed when the Jews of Moscow shouted “Am Yisrael Chai”—the Jewish people live—in their euphoric welcome to the first ambassador from the new state of Israel, Golda Meyerson, later Golda Meir. Hostile to particularistic identities, committed to demolishing Jewish pride, and seeking to prove that the Jews were not a nation, Stalin set out to reduce Jewish “influence.” He deployed whatever pretexts he could. In a depressingly time-honored tale, he used Nazi propaganda while denazifying liberated areas. As a well-connected journalist, my father saw a Communist Party directive from higher-ups shortly after the war insisting that, because the Nazis had demonized the Soviet regime as Jew dominated, Jews should not return to powerful positions.
Especially after the winter of 1948–1949, Stalin targeted Jewish cultural leaders aggressively. As the government persecuted Jewish actors, writers, intellectuals, and doctors, mention of the Jewish dimension of the Holocaust became inconvenient. Officially, Stalin’s propaganda couldn’t target the Jews, because the Soviet Union was too progressive to be anti-Semitic. He simply attacked “rootless cosmopolitans” and “bourgeois nationalist Zionists,” Communist code for the Jews.
Anti-Semitism is the most plastic hatred—flexible, shapeable, but durable. Just as Jew-haters traditionally attacked Jews as Rothschilds and Marxists, capitalists and Communists, Stalin attacked Jews as universalistic and particularistic.
Stalin was a pioneer in using anti-Zionist rhetoric to spread anti-Semitism. When he and his propagandists attacked “Zionist agents,” Soviet citizens understood their Jewish neighbors were targeted, despite most Soviet Jews having no connection to Israel and no idea what Zionism meant. Fifty years later, as anti-Zionism went global, I would develop specific criteria distinguishing legitimate criticism of Israel from the kind of anti-Semitic shorthand Stalin’s modern successors used so cleverly.
When Joseph Stalin died in 1953, I was five. The seventy-four-year-old despot was at the peak of his anti-Semitic campaign, torturing Jewish physicians falsely accused of trying to assassinate Soviet leaders in the “Doctor’s Plot.” The resulting show trial was intended to launch a broader crusade, with some insiders proposing mass firings of Jews and even mass deportations from major cities.
We had no inkling of these plots. Nor did I know that the day Stalin died was already a Jewish holiday, Purim. Like many Jewish festivals, it celebrates our deliverance from an evil politician with mass murder on his mind, in this case Haman. My father would never mention a cosmic coincidence like that to me. Perhaps he didn’t know. Even if he had linked the two salvations, it wouldn’t have meant anything to me.
On that March day, out of any neighbor’s earshot, my father told my older brother and me, “Today is a great day that you should always remember. This is good news for us Jews. This man was very dangerous to us. Remember all your life that this miracle happened when we were endangered. But,” he added, “don’t tell this to anybody. Do what everybody else does.” In kindergarten the next day, as we sang songs honoring Stalin, “the hope of all the people,” and mourned his death, I had no idea how many children were crying sincerely, and how many were only following their fathers’ instructions.
The end of Stalin’s life, therefore, marked the beginning of my conscious life as a doublethinker. This round-the-clock public charade would define my life for the next fifteen years. That didn’t make me special. Most Soviet citizens eventually entered this deceptive order of doublethinkers.
My father’s main distraction from this double life was listening to Voice of America in Russian and other free world radio stations. The Soviets responded by trying to jam the frequency. In October 1956, he was listening so intensely to the radio—with his ear to the speaker and the volume high, but not so loud as to attract the neighbors’ attention—that he was practically inside the receiver.
He wasn’t listening to learn about Israel’s Sinai War against Egypt that month. He wanted to hear about Hungarians resisting Soviet power. “Ach,” he said, quietly. “If they could only succeed.” Later, when our neighbor came by, my father repeated, “Ach, if they could only succeed.” But the “they” my father now meant was the Soviet tanks.
In this web of lies, your main job is to fit in. At the age of ten you join the Pioneers, proclaiming your patriotism. Then you join the Komsomol, the All-Union Leninist Young Communist League, proclaiming your patriotism. You mouth their platitudes, you play the good citizen, to get ahead.
My father guessed correctly that the pressure would lessen after Stalin. By 1956, the new leader, Nikita Khrushchev, denounced the old dictator’s “cult of personality.” Launching the historical moment known as the Thaw, the new regime released prisoners. It rehabilitated the reputations of many executed innocents. It acknowledged historical “mistakes.” The level of fear declined.
Gradually, as the Thaw loosened tongues, some family secrets emerged. Names I had never heard before, pictures I had never seen, resurfaced. A surprising photograph of my grandfather with four sons, not three, introduced me to an uncle my father never mentioned who was living abroad. His older brother Shamai had moved to Palestine during the revolution’s early years, fulfilling my grandfather’s dream for all his children.
When his brother moved away, my father wasn’t buying the Zionist dream. Attracted by the promise of full equality, trusting that Communist universalism would eliminate anti-Semitism, he couldn’t imagine escaping from this newly welcoming Eastern European experiment into a Middle Eastern ghetto. Within a few years, however, my father had buried his illusions along with his purged friends. (When, in the late 1970s, my wife, Avital, was traveling the world to free me and finally met my uncle Shamai Sharon, he was proud of his nephew, the Zionist.)
As more memories flowed, things that had never made sense to me suddenly did. I discovered why my father had left his promising screenwriting career in an Odessa studio for an under-the-radar journalism job covering mining in a backwater town. When professional rivals placed an article in his hometown Odessa newspaper denouncing him as a petit-bourgeois intellectual with a Zionist brother, he feared being purged. I discovered that my mother’s unnaturally silent brother-in-law, Matvei Isaiahyevich, had spent a year in a KGB prison in 1937 and still couldn’t talk about what he had endured. I discovered that another uncle, my mother’s brother Munya, who died abruptly in 1953, had killed himself. Serving during the war on a troika (a special military tribunal that signed death sentences without due process) had left this once successful lawyer guilt ridden and despondent. My mother considered her brother yet another victim of Stalin and his purges. I even discovered relatives killed in the Holocaust, and relatives still suffering in the aftermath. The arrested uncle’s sister, Paulina, never recovered from seeing most of her family shot to death in front of her, having escaped their fate by sheer luck.
Like my parents telling our family secrets, many citizens started spilling the hidden truths of the Soviet Union. When leaders start speaking more openly about past abuses, it bubbles over. Suddenly, people start speaking more openly about present problems too. As self-censorship weakens, the desire to speak up grows.
The long-suppressed Russian intelligentsia stirred. Artists, poets, playwrights, novelists, journalists, and students tested the new boundaries of debate with particular zeal. Authorities quickly recognized the growing danger. Even if criticizing yesterday’s mistakes was OK, the regime could not tolerate public disagreement with the party line.
The most dangerous moment for any totalitarian regime is when the masses lose their fear and individuals cross from doublethinking privately to dissenting publicly. However, the terror lingered, and the authorities had no need to replicate Stalin’s mass repression. They simply reminded citizens that dissent would not be tolerated. Red lines remained in a post-Stalin, still-totalitarian Soviet Union.
The end of Stalin’s most violent anti-Jewish persecutions had tipped off my family that the Thaw was beginning, and in the same way we saw that the Thaw was ending through a Jewish lens. Had Yevgeny Yevtushenko’s 1961 poem, “Babi Yar,” stuck to the Nazis’ 1941 massacre of the Jews, the Soviet leaders probably would have tolerated his reintegrating Jews into the World War II story. But, emboldened to tell the truth, Yevtushenko condemned Russian anti-Semitism, from the czars to the Soviets. The poem begins bitterly: “No monument stands over Babi Yar.”
Only in a regime that could tolerate no criticism could a 311-word poem become so volatile and influential. Its honesty led many Jews to believe that, finally, the truth about anti-Semitism—and other truths—could be told. But its categorical rawness helped doom the Thaw. Within days, state flunkies wrote their own poems and journalistic lackeys wrote their own editorials, all defending Communism absolutely. Who are these cosmopolitan poets to teach us? the party hacks asked indignantly. How dare you accuse the great Soviet state of anti-Semitism? We defeated the anti-Semitic Nazis and saved the world!
So, just as some finally started speaking about the Holocaust in Jewish terms, the authorities panicked and counterattacked. They cracked down on Yevtushenko and other former doublethinkers who were inching down that inevitable highway toward free thought, free speech, and dissent. Honest history was too volatile; exposing the crimes of the past risked exposing the lies of the present.
By the time I was fifteen years old, the fear had returned. We were all doublethinking again. When the Soviets eventually erected a monument at Babi Yar, the word “Jew” still didn’t appear. Having tasted some freedom made this step backward especially embittering. We now felt our slavery more keenly. The more imprisoned you feel by totalitarian thought, the more you feel compelled to escape. But some effects of the Thaw lingered. The line had moved. Now to be targeted, you actually had to dissent, and, bit by bit, a dissident movement would emerge.
Even though Stalin’s harshest anti-Jewish persecutions had petered out, the regime’s baseline anti-Semitism persisted. By high school, I was excruciatingly familiar with the phrase “he has a fifth line problem.” It meant you were being discriminated against because that fifth line, defining nationality, on your Soviet identity papers identified you as a Jew—meaning traitorous, incorrigible, unassimilable, disloyal, other. It meant my brother Leonid could pass his written exams but hear in an interview, “Why are you so happy you passed? I won’t let Jews into my school.” Despite being stripped of our freedom and our identity, Jews remained the convenient scapegoats. Every dictatorship needs an enemy, and Jews were a favorite target.
The hatred, however, fostered Jewish solidarity. Many of us trusted one another with our deep secret: we hated the regime privately while loving it publicly. We rarely mentioned such matters outside of our inner circles; informers were everywhere. We would ask “Yid?” or “Nostrum est?” (Is he one of us?), our code for figuring out who was Jewish and possibly trustworthy. We used the Latin phrase so often I thought it was Yiddish.
The older I got, the more I confronted the sophisticated anti-Semitism of the system rather than the thuggish anti-Semitism of the street. Family discussions constantly turned to talk about discrimination, restrictions, insults, and unfair burdens. We learned where you could go to study, as well as which institutions never accepted Jews, no matter how qualified. We learned which positions were impossible for a Jew to get and which careers paths were possible. We learned about promotions earned by Jews, yet not granted, or promotions won by non-Jews, yet not deserved. I got the message: You are a Jew, so you have to be the best in physics, or mathematics, or chess, or whatever you do, to have a shot at succeeding in this system. And you will have to twist and turn in all kinds of ways just to survive.
Once a year, the newspaper published the list of laureates for the Stalin Prize, later called the Lenin Prize, for excellence in science, literature, arts, architecture, and technology. The whole family scrutinized the list. Whenever someone recognized a Jewish name, we cheered. It meant that one more Jew had succeeded despite all the discrimination. It encouraged us to work harder, because we, too, might progress. This is how we got used to surviving that disorder we were born with, the one called being Jewish.
When I was five, my mother taught me to play chess. “Here you can think freely,” she said. “In chess, you can fly.” I tried playing and fell in love immediately: thoughts soar, risks are taken, wits and courage are prized, not punished. Chess became my first passport into the world of free thought, my first great escape.
I loved the game because I could win, even defeating people who were much older or bigger than me. My theory was, the taller the guy, the quicker I beat him. I loved playing blind, without looking at the board. I loved playing simultaneously with many grown-ups. And I loved believing that I could one day be the world champion. In fact, when I understood, after competing on a national level, that I probably wouldn’t make it that far, I started looking for another career where I could shine—and that’s how I became a political prisoner.
But I’m jumping ahead of the story.
Growing up in the Soviet Union in the 1950s and 1960s, many non-Jewish Jews like me escaped into the chess world. We were stripped of our identities. We didn’t know what being Jewish meant, beyond offering another reason to fear the authorities and providing one more set of restrictions in this unfree world.
We had heard estimates that Jews were limited to 5 percent of the student body in a provincial university, no more than 2 percent in a place like Moscow, and barely 1 percent in the best universities. But in a chess club, it seemed the quotas limited non-Jews: 70, 80, 90 percent of the chess players were Jewish.
Only decades later did I realize how deeply programmed Jews were to love these chess clubs. I was already living in Israel when I first visited a yeshiva, a rabbinic seminary, with its massive bet midrash, or study hall. The room was filled with hundreds of chevrutot, pairs of students learning together, arguing together, trying to outwit one another, and mastering a system of thought, the Talmud and Jewish law.
As I heard the familiar buzzing throughout the bet midrash, I realized how similar the two institutions looked, with people paired up, debating back and forth. In competitive chess, there are few openings and endgames, but innumerable ways in between; the arguments never end. In the yeshiva world, there are 613 commandments and a few defining texts, but similarly innumerable interpretations, explanations, ambiguities, and positions, along with endless on-the-one-hands and on-the-other-hands.
In both worlds, as the duos compete against one another intensely, they also work together, seeking a chidush, a breakthrough, a new move, an innovative gambit. When the Soviet Union outlawed the traditional dialogue that energized Jews for centuries, we shifted gears. We started on-the-one-handing about chess instead of Halachah, Jewish law.
Alas, while chess could free my mind and sharpen my wits, it was only a game. It lacked Judaism’s depth and moral majesty. It offered no wisdom, no ideological worldview, no way of life, nothing greater than myself and my skills. It was a great diversion, freeing me from doublethink for a few hours every day, but it wasn’t real. It was an escape into a parallel black-and-white world of thirty-two pieces on an eight-by-eight board.
Science and mathematics seemed to promise a better escape from the smothering Soviet reality. While as objective and creative as chess, the scientific method illuminated the real world. A scientist applied whatever talents he had to understand how the universe worked.
Mastering these fields also seemed to offer the best path to a better life. To pass every exam, no matter how difficult, with the highest marks and to be accepted to one of the best universities, became my great ambition. It was the dream driving every Jewish mother.
When I was accepted to the MFTI, the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, the Soviet MIT, in 1966, I felt like I had arrived. I had reached the doublethinker’s summit, the greatest success I could hope for. This world represented as far as I could go as a Jew. I was lucky; I was one of the last Jews accepted to study there.
Now, I could start enjoying the great payoff after years of beefing up my portfolio to prove myself academically capable and ideologically pure. In high school, I studied extra hard for test after test, overcompensating for my Jewish handicap. Drowning in problem sets, working around the clock to amass five out of fives in every subject I took during the last three years of high school, I won the Gold Medal in academics. For extracurricular activities, I participated in the math and physics olympics on the city, provincial, and “all-Union” levels, sharpening my skills while showing off to potential recruiters. I mastered chess, winning local and national championships. I also followed the script to get the character reference I needed from the local Komsomol authorities. I spouted the right slogans, participated in the right youth activities, and sang the right songs.
Finally, I was in. I had crossed “the Pale of Settlement.” I imagine that I experienced the same joy the rare, lucky Jews felt centuries earlier if they secured permission to live in Moscow, thereby escaping the massive half-million-square-mile western region that czarist Russia had turned into the world’s largest ghetto from 1791 to 1917.
Wandering around Moscow, a city of more than five million, I experienced my own personal thaw. By concentrating on science at the institute, I was now an insider on a fast track to success. I expected to be able to think about pure truth more, while playing the doublethinker’s demoralizing games less. Sampling life beyond our wunderkind hothouse, some of us students enjoyed exploring the booming metropolis, which was freer and edgier than our sleepy, suffocating hometowns.
Month after month, I ran through most of my living stipend buying tickets to shows in the three Moscow theaters, out of dozens, that gently but stubbornly tested Communism’s reimposed cultural and political boundaries. It was two years after Khrushchev’s fall, and some in the Soviet intelligentsia were still trying to preserve some hints of the Thaw’s short-lived openness. Sometimes the institute hosted great artists, profound poets, and leading intellectuals. Clever but cowed performers resisted subtly, indirectly. Their plays, poems, jokes, and songs often carried “a fig in the pocket”—the Russian equivalent of flipping the middle finger while seeming to salute.
Studying early versions of artificial intelligence, teaching what are now considered to be primitive computers to play endgames in chess, I dived into the republic of science. This world seemed insulated from the doublethink I had mastered at home. My world-famous professors were telling the students what we wanted to hear: With our smarts and our work habits, we could live a full intellectual life. We could succeed. All we had to do was stay focused on our orderly inner world of scientific theories and mathematical theorems. These world-class teachers urged us to ignore the ever-changing pseudo-truths of politics, which was full of ambiguities and deceptions. Stick to science’s eternal knowledge, they advised, and ignore the rest. The laws of Newton and Einstein, of Euclid and Galileo, are forever; today’s ideological winds are fickle.
We continued paying lip service to the Soviet gods, like everyone else. We kept taking tests on Marxist doctrine every semester, even when studying at the postdoctoral level. Decades later, I would be amused when, during my interrogations, I spied my KGB tormentors studying their Communist handbooks whenever they could, knowing that these never-ending trials kept tormenting them.
Encouraged by our professors, we brushed such annoyances aside. We were the elite, they kept telling us, racing toward a golden future. I felt particularly good, having overcome the extra obstacles of anti-Semitism. Now it was all worth it. I was luxuriating in the sanctuary of science, an asylum protected from the daily insanity the Soviets imposed on nearly everyone else.
It didn’t take very long, however, before groundbreaking outside events shook my illusory internal fortress.