IN 1926, MOISEI GRAN, a Moscow physician and professor of medicine, together with other Jewish doctors of reputation, published the first number of a new scholarly journal they called Problems of the Biology and Pathology of Jews. The journal was a product of the Society for the Study of Social Biology and Psycho-Physics of the Jews, which had convened four years earlier.1 Gran’s own article in the inaugural edition recounted his research into how the “physical and biological appearance of Jews had changed as a result of moving from the city to the [Soviet] countryside” and described what scientists and social planners might learn from the changes. Resettling Jews and replacing their “non-productive” livelihoods with the heartier life of “the expansive green fields” of countryside collective farms, Gran explained, had changed the very nature of Jews.
This observation was not lost on Soviet politicians and planners. Nor did it go unnoticed even by many of the farmers alongside whom Jews had recently begun to work, rough-hewn sorts who had never held Jews in high esteem. Gran and his colleagues hoped, through their journal, to translate what the pols and the peasants had noticed into useful scientific fact.2 Using modern science to elucidate “problems of the biology and pathology of Jews,” Gran and his colleagues proposed, might achieve three salutary aims at once: advancing science, advancing the young Soviet Union, and advancing Jews.
These three aims were linked. For Soviet science, Jews were remarkable subjects of study: they were a great mass of poorly educated provincials who for generations had struggled to make livings through petty crafts, petty labor, or petty trade, and who after the revolution found themselves in new circumstances, some in the countryside, most in the large cities. What better way to gauge the impact of circumstances—of surroundings, education, language, food, work, and other factors—on cognition, perception, intelligence, health, and so many other things than to see how they affected the millions of Jews within Soviet borders? What better way to measure the value of the revolution itself than to document the distance it had taken Jews, from peasant pariahs (by and large) to productive citizens (by and large)? The editors of Problems of the Biology and Pathology of Jews had no doubt that their chosen subject was of importance in a great many realms. They wrote that “questions of demography, statistics, anthropology, questions of racial hygiene and eugenics, questions of physical constitution, inheritance, immunity, the most varied questions of social biology and pathology—all this can be studied most strikingly via the Jewish national organism.”3
Problems of the Biology and Pathology of Jews was part of a larger Soviet scientific movement. Lev Semionovich Vygotsky, a scientist whose father had served as president of the Association for the Enlightenment of the Jews of Russia (Obshchestvo dlia rasprostraneniia prosveshcheniia sredi Evreev Rossii, abbreviated OPE), and who himself pioneered Soviet developmental psychology (what came to be known as “socio-historical psychology”) also saw that the years of rapid change after the revolution offered a unique opportunity for science.4 He sent his most famous student, another Jew named Alexander Luria, on an expedition to study peasants in Uzbekistan, with the aim of observing how Soviet education and collectivization changed the ways they reasoned.5 “Perception and memory, imagination and thought, emotional experience and voluntary action [cannot] be considered natural functions of nervous tissue or simple properties of mental life,” Luria came to conclude. “It [is] obvious that they have a highly complex structure and that this structure has its own socio-historical genesis.”6 Vygotsky, Luria, and their colleagues in what became known as the “Kharkov School” devoted themselves to documenting the plasticity of human character and cognition, developing an approach to psychology that has retained currency to this day.
All this mattered not just to scientists but also, perhaps especially, to the leaders of the young Soviet Union. The sort of research pursued by Gran, Vygotsky, and Luria (and many others as well)7 was of practical importance for those seeking to make a modern nation with an advanced economy using the newest machines in factory and field, manned by the poorly educated sons of petty traders and peasants. “Civilizing” the masses of premodern sorts who made up the majority of the Soviet population after the revolution—and doing so quickly and permanently—was a task upon which the success of the entire revolution depended. It was the only way the new regime could fulfill the ambitious program that historian Francine Hirsch called “state-sponsored evolutionism”: the goal was “to usher the entire population through the Marxist timeline of historical development, to transform feudal-era clans and tribes into nationalities, and nationalities into socialist-era nations—which, at some point in the future, would merge together under communism.”8 Many of the citizens of the new Soviet Union were of such primitive clans and tribes; understanding them, and discerning how they could best be transformed into productive moderns, was one of the greatest challenges facing the leaders of the revolution. Jews had a part to play in this, on both sides of the clipboard. Multitudes of Jews living near penury and illiteracy awaited transformation; growing numbers of Jews with advanced degrees worked to aid and document the change.
Problems of the Biology and Pathology of Jews illustrates in miniature why a great many Jews came to care a great deal about science in the first decades of the Soviet Union. Science offered a way for Jews to bootstrap themselves from the nether edge of society they occupied before the revolution to the center of what promised to be a modern, progressive, industrialized, urbanized Soviet Union. It offered a way for Jews to contribute to the success of their country, which was newly formed and newly willing to find a place for them. And science also offered a way to do well, to succeed and thrive in a new society and new economy that, for all the claims of equality, were proving from the start to produce winners and losers. Self-improvement, assimilation, citizenship, and success—science was a means to all of these for Jews after the Russian Revolution.
There was something deeper, too. Soviet science and Soviet Jews were formed at the same time, and from the very start, each was a part of the other. Problems of the Biology and Pathology of Jews offered an extreme example of a common phenomenon: Soviet Jews fashioning Soviet science in a way that helped fashion Soviet Jews and their place in Soviet society. Sociologists of science speak of the “co-production” of science and social institutions. In the first decades after the Russian Revolution, Soviet Jews and Soviet science took form together. Their stories are inseparable.
The story of how the history of Soviet Jews and that of Soviet science became entwined begins long before the Russian Revolution. In the eyes of those who wrought it and those who fought it, the revolution was an upheaval that set everything on a new course. But matters were more complicated than this. The American abolitionist Wendell Phillips wrote that every revolution grows slowly, like an oak: “It comes out of the past. Its foundations are laid far back.”9 So it was for the new patterns of Jewish life and of scientific practice that evolved together in the first decades of the Soviet Union. In the final decades of the Russian Empire, the circumstances of Jews and those of science had already shifted in ways that set them on a path they would follow after the empire had collapsed.
At the beginning of the twentieth century more than five million Jews lived in the Russian Empire, accounting for 4 percent of the empire’s total population and about 60 percent of Europe’s Jews. Russian Jews were required to live in an area called the Pale of Settlement (including much of what are today Latvia, Lithuania, Ukraine, and Belarus); though some were exempted from this requirement, in the end about nine in ten Russian Jews made their homes there. Within the Pale they lived among themselves, half in small Jewish shtetls (or the country that surrounded them) and half in Jewish neighborhoods in bigger towns and cities. They spoke Yiddish and dressed differently than the Russian peasants and laborers among whom they lived. They stood out.
All this would soon change. Between 1897 and 1910, more than a million Jews moved from the country and small towns to cities. Russia at this time was undergoing rapid modernization and industrialization, and the same might be said for Russia’s Jews. In the second half of the nineteenth century, the number of Russian youths who attended a rigorous secondary school, or gymnasium, grew more than six-fold, while the number of Jewish gymnasium students increased fifty-fold. “All the schools are filled with Jewish students from end to end,” wrote Peretz Smolenskin, editor of the Hebrew-language Vienna journal Ha-Shahar in the early 1870s. “And to be honest, the Jews are always at the head of the class.”10 The change was even greater in universities. The overall number of university students in Russia increased by six times between 1840 and 1886, but the number of Jewish university students grew by more than a hundred times in the same years. One in three students at Odessa University in 1886 was a Jew (and over 40% of the students in the medical school), just as was one in three students at the Women’s Medical Courses in Saint Petersburg.
The conditions that allowed this wave of Jewish enrollment in Russian universities had been set in place earlier. The first paragraph of the 1804 Statute on Jews—a document meant to set out how Jews were to be integrated in the Russian Empire—had declared that Jews were eligible for “all primary schools, gymnasia and universities,” where they could study “medicine, surgery, physics, mathematics and other branches of knowledge” shoulder to shoulder with other subjects of the empire. Such a statute, an admiring journalist wrote at the time, would help “the state create useful citizens [through] moral upbringing.”11 For many reasons—including the suspicion and disinterest of Jews themselves, the reluctance of university sorts to accept Jews into their ranks, and the limited value a degree proved to hold for Jews—this liberal statute did not quickly lead Russian Jews to seek secular education in large numbers. Mordechai Aharon Ginzburg, a maskil, or scholarly devotee of the Jewish Enlightenment, the Haskalah, could still grouse in 1834 that among Jews, men of secular education “must conceal themselves like criminals.” In 1840, of the 2,594 students enrolled in Russian universities, only 15 were Jews, and of these several converted to Christianity before receiving their degree.12 It was not until later in the century, as the vitality of traditional, largely religious Jewish culture began to wane and the possibility arose that educated Jews might find their ways into Russian society, that Jews sought to enter the universities in great numbers and, via the universities, to enter liberal professions and the sciences.
In 1861, a Russian imperial decree accorded Jewish university graduates all the rights and privileges that Christian graduates received, including the rights to live where they chose and work in the profession for which they had trained. (A Minsk rabbi read the decree aloud in Shul, sermonizing to his congregation that “before us lies a bright, joyful future. Behind you—ignorance and death; before you—education and life. Choose!”)13 Following the decree, Jews flocked to universities. In 1865, Jews made up just over 3 percent of Russian university students. By 1876, the number had grown to 5 percent. Ten years later, it was almost 15 percent.
Indeed, by the last decades of the nineteenth century, the number of Jews in universities, and in the professions for which universities prepared them, had grown so rapidly that many of Russia’s bureaucrats, pundits, and hoi polloi concluded that enough was enough. It did not go unnoticed, for instance, that a great many medals of honor and valor had gone to Jewish doctors for their service in the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–78, or that a great number of the physicians in cities like Odessa were Jews, or that even in a city like Saint Petersburg, 9 percent of physicians were Jews, as were 11 percent of the city’s dentists and 20 percent of the pharmacists.14 In the 1880s, quotas were instituted to limit the number of Jews in universities and in liberal professions. In 1882, the War Ministry limited to 5 percent the number of Jews attending the Military Medical Academy in Saint Petersburg. One year later, the Mining and Forestry Institutes of the Ministry of State Domains followed suit.15 By 1886, so too had the Saint Petersburg Institute of Communications Engineering, the Kharkov Technological Institute, and the Dorpat Veterinary Institute. The school of veterinary medicine in Kharkov banned Jews entirely.16 In 1887, the tsar’s Council of Ministers established a quota limiting Jewish enrollment to 10 percent in secondary schools and universities within the Pale, to 5 percent outside the Pale, and to 3 percent in Moscow and Saint Petersburg.
Overall, the number of Jews pursuing secular education declined, though never to the low levels stipulated by the quotas. In some places, it drastically declined; in Vilna, for example, Jews went from 58 percent of the student body in 1888 to 16 percent in 1900. As Chaim Weizmann, who grew up in Pinsk and went on to be a renowned chemist and, eventually, the first president of the state of Israel, remembered, the quotas “produced very curious, tragic-comic results. There were occasions when a rich Jew would hire ten non-Jewish candidates (at times rather oddly selected) to sit for the entrance examination at a local school, and thus make room for one Jewish pupil—needless to say, his own son or a protégé.”17 The quotas remained in force until the Russian Revolution, amounting to what one Jewish newspaper called a “silent, invisible pogrom” in higher education.18
This was a fraught turn of phrase, as the “silent, invisible pogrom” represented by the educational quotas had everything to do with the wave of clamorous and conspicuous pogroms Russian Jews had recently suffered. From 1881 to 1884, 200 Jewish neighborhoods and towns were sacked and pillaged under varied circumstances, a tsunami of violence ostensibly set into motion by rumors and newspaper reports that Jews had played a part in the assassination of Tsar Alexander II.19 Although the attacks were condemned by the Russian government and, in some circumstances at least, the Jews were protected by government troops and by police, the popular sentiment behind the violence led in part to the quotas and sanctions meant to ensure that Jews remained pariahs. Another flood of attacks began in Kishinev the day before Easter 1903. The New York Times reported that the frenzy was premeditated, beginning on the eve of the holiday with
a well laid-out plan for the general massacre of Jews on the day following the Orthodox Easter. The mob was led by priests, and the general cry, “Kill the Jews,” was taken up all over the city. The Jews were taken wholly unaware and were slaughtered like sheep. The dead number 120 and the injured about 500. The scenes of horror attending this massacre are beyond description. Babies were literally torn to pieces by the frenzied and bloodthirsty mob. The local police made no attempt to check the reign of terror. At sunset the streets were piled with corpses and wounded. Those who could make their escape fled in terror, and the city is now practically deserted of Jews.20
For more than three years, pogroms of this sort were reenacted in hundreds of towns and villages, killing thousands, wounding many more, and destroying incalculably much of the property that the generally hardscrabble Jews had accumulated.
It is tempting to see the spasms of violence against Jews in the last decades of the Russian Empire as a continuation of the long history of anti-Semitism in eastern Europe. It would not be wrong to do so. But for all the anti-Jewish violence that had existed in Russia in the past, the violence of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries also represented something new, refracting uneasy changes in the empire itself. Among these changes were halting and ambivalent efforts to better integrate Jews into Russian society. Also playing into these unsettled times was the deterioration of imperial control and imperial rule over the vast holdings of Russia. The pogroms in the final decades of the empire also reflected anxious concern that Russia’s army, its agriculture, its factories, its universities, its cities, and all the rest were falling ever further behind those of Germany and the rest of Europe. Looking back, it is possible to see that it was when Russians were most insecure that Jews suffered the most: after Alexander II’s assassination, for example, and after the hapless Russo-Japanese War in 1904 and 1905.21
Whatever the reason, during the quarter century bracketing the two waves of pogroms, more than a million Jews fled Russia, some to Palestine, some to Britain and most to the United States. Many of those who did not leave Russia tried at least to flee the Jewish towns and villages of the Pale of Settlement and make their way to the cities; here, there would be greater anonymity, which might mean greater safety as well as expanded opportunity.
In the final years of the empire, then, Russian Jews were under tremendous pressures from within and without. They were a population that had changed almost beyond recognition over the course of a generation and that was certain to continue to change rapidly in the future. The last of the tsars had launched a policy that Benjamin Nathans has called “selective integration,” fitfully allowing Jews in great numbers to enter universities, or to hold down jobs in civil service, or to advance—to a point—within the army. As a result of this policy, Nathans writes, “there were in effect two Russian Jewries: the mass of legally and culturally segregated Jews confined to the Pale and a small but growing number in and beyond the Pale whose integration into the upper reaches of the surrounding society (though certainly not into the ruling elites) was proceeding far more rapidly than anyone had expected.”22
The new class of educated, cosmopolitan Jews, living in heartland cities, represented a new ideal for Russia’s Jews. But despite their success relative to those they left behind in the Pale, they were hardly a satisfied lot. They could not overlook the assaults that Jews suffered or avoid contemplating what those attacks said about the place of Jews in Russia.23 Violence aside, the pace of “emancipation” for Jews in Russia remained reliably slower than it was elsewhere in Europe, and Jews looking westward expressed frustration at lagging behind. This was not an idle complaint. The faltering and inconsistent delegation of rights to Jews could produce circumstances of comic irony. In 1906, Shmaryahu Levin was voted into the Duma. But although the law allowed Jews to seek election, it did not allow them to enter the city in which the Duma convened.24 For another thing, by the final gasping years of the empire, a Jew might justly conclude that matters were growing bleaker with every passing year. Because of quotas, universities and the advancement they offered were less accessible than in prior decades. Employment in the civil service grew harder, not easier, to attain. Permission to quit the Pale for cities became harder to acquire.
Some whose fondest wish had earlier been Russification came to conclude that more good would come of trying to modernize Judaism, and especially Yiddish culture, without abandoning it.25 Many other Jews turned to revolutionary movements. Abraham Cahan wrote that it was pogroms that caused Jews to embrace revolution: “The white terror of the knout, the prison cell and the gallows gives birth to the red terror of the pistol and the dynamite bomb.”26 The Algemeyner Yidisher Arbeter Bund in Lite, Poyln un Rusland (General Jewish Workers’ Union in Lithuania, Poland and Russia), or Bund, as it came to be known, was founded in Vilnius in 1897 with the seemingly paradoxical aim of uniting all the empire’s Jews under the red flag of a single socialist party. There, they would gain the class consciousness needed to relinquish their narrow identification as Jews once and for all. The formation of the Bund had become possible because of the changes in the demography of Russia’s Jews in the late nineteenth century. More Jews worked in industry than ever before, more lived in cities, and more lived far from the towns and neighborhoods in which they were born. If the appeal of socialism is most potent to workers whose ties to the traditional culture in which they were born have been stretched or severed and who have little stake in the factories that overwork them, it is no surprise that it found a powerful foothold among Jews in the waning years of the empire. In general, the balkanization, dislocation, secularization, politicization, radicalization, and urbanization experienced by many of Russia’s Jews at this time left them in an excited and volatile state, free radicals waiting for something to bind to. Looking back on this time from the vantage point of 1923, poet Shmuel Halkin wrote:
Russia! If my faith in you were any less great
I might have said something different
I might have complained: You have led us astray,
And seduced us young wandering gypsies.27
Benjamin Nathans’ conclusion about this period is one of dry understatement: “As it entered the twentieth century, Russian-Jewish society was thus the site of extraordinary fractiousness … as well as extraordinary ferment.”28
If Jewish life and livelihood changed in the final decades of the empire, so too, in its way, did Russian science. In 1911, the great plant physiologist and popularizer of Darwin, Kliment Arkadievich Timiryazev, could still lament that primitive Russia kept “all its science concentrated in universities.” This was in contrast to “the entire civilized world,” where science thrived above all in independent research centers (like the Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes) on the one hand, and in industrial and commercial laboratories on the other.29 Timiryazev’s complaint reflected odd anomalies in the way science developed during the final decades of the empire. It was true that Russian science thrived best at government-supported universities and within myriad learned societies, and that the more rarified institutions of pure research that flourished in Germany, Britain, and France and were beginning to take root in the United States (spurred by the Carnegie Foundation, above all) did not evolve in Imperial Russia. And it was true that Russian science failed to find a foothold in Russian factories, which relied heavily on chemicals and dyes trucked in from Germany.
There were many reasons why this was so, some practical, some political, and some philosophical. Practically, the sorts of individuals and institutions who in other places were spending fortunes to promote science were fewer in Russia. Perhaps they were also less intrigued and inspired by the wonders of science than their counterparts in western Europe and North America. Timiryazev had already complained in 1884 that science had not implicated itself into civil society in Russia with the same force it had elsewhere.30 Politically, the late imperial government was reticent to allow alternative centers of education and research to arise, and was quick to see in the professoriat a source of threat. This fear was not unwarranted because although professors had traditionally been a stodgy and conservative bunch, scientists and professors could now be found in outsized numbers among reformers and even revolutionaries. Indeed, Timiryazev and other prominent scientists like Vladimir I. Vernadsky argued publicly and ex cathedra that science thrived where democracy thrived.31 “There [are] decent people in the professoriate,” Tsar Nicholas II said in 1904, “but very few.”32
Philosophically, Russian philosophers of nature and scientists had long embraced an ideal of “pure” science, one that viewed the material applications and benefits that might accrue from science as disreputable by-products of a noble endeavor. As historian Alexei Kojevnikov wrote, “In fin-de-siècle Russia the ideology of pure science was taken much more seriously and literally” than elsewhere in Europe.33 This preference was a long-standing tradition in Russian science and natural philosophy (and fits well with the idealistic bent of much Russian philosophy and literature). The great zoologist and evolutionary theorist Peter Kropotkin chided his younger colleagues in 1885, writing: “The day when you are imbued with wide, deep, humane and profoundly scientific truth, that day you will lose your taste for pure science. … You will place your information and your devotion at the service of the oppressed.”34
It is a perennial parlor game among historians of science to hypothesize about the degree to which science in various times and places had an identifiable “national character.” Is there anything French about French science, or British about British science, or German about German science? Many believe that sometimes it is possible to answer these questions in the affirmative but that such national character as exists is at best a weak force buffeted in a field of many other forces. One can easily imagine that a culture that idolized Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy was especially hospitable to science of a more theoretical bent. (“I don’t think it is dishonorable for a Russian professor of chemistry to work in the applied direction,” Vladimir Markovnikov of Moscow University wrote in 1901, suggesting in a doth-protest-too-much sort of way that it was dishonorable, at least by some people’s lights.)35 But the notion that Russian scientists preferred “pure” over applied science reflects a Russian bent for idealistic abstraction may be overly fancy. The theoretical bent of Russian science was surely reinforced by the more earthly fact that in fin-de-siècle Russia there was not a lot of practical, applied, and impure science with which a young aspiring professional could occupy himself and pay his rent. In fact, the practical, political, and philosophical reasons for science remaining in the province of university halls and rarefied honorific professional associations each seemed to reinforce one another.
That is, until they stopped. By the first decade of the twentieth century, there were many signs that the established ways of organizing science were doddering. In January 1905, 125 professors, 201 junior faculty members, and 16 members of the Russian Academy of Sciences published a manifesto they called the “Declaration of the 342,” which read in part:
A stream of government decisions and regulations has reduced professors and other instructors at the institutions of higher education to the level of bureaucrats, blindly executing the orders of higher government authorities. The scientific and moral standards of the teaching profession have been lowered. The prestige of educators has dwindled so much that the very existence of the institutions of higher education is threatened. Our school administration is a social and governmental disgrace. It undermines the authority of science, hinders the growth of scientific thought and prevents our people from fully realizing their intellectual potentialities. … Academic freedom is incompatible with the existing system of government in Russia. The present situation cannot be remedied by partial reforms but only by a fundamental transformation of the existing system. … Only a full guarantee of personal and social liberties will assure academic freedom—the essential condition for true education.36
This declaration must be seen in the broader context of the Revolution of 1905 and the efforts to democratize all aspects of life under the tsars. By this time, the universities were fully identified with calls for social and political reform, which for a time seemed to be right at hand. The Duma was established, and though it had little authority, it signaled progress from autocracy to democracy. In October 1905, Count I. I. Tolstoi was appointed minister of education, and he immediately set out to put the universities on a new footing, describing his goals in an internal memo halting the “Russification” policies of the ministry, abolishing restrictions on Jewish students, and granting greater autonomy and self-government to university faculty.37 These policies were controversial at the time and were only partially put into practice. In any instance, Stolypin’s Coup in 1907 reversed most of the changes that had resulted from the Revolution of 1905. But the upheaval on campuses and beyond never cooled to less than a simmering, low boil.
Amid the continuing ferment, Russian scientists grew more confident and full-throated in their demands for greater budgets and greater autonomy. By 1911, Timiryazev could reasonably expect the assent of his colleagues when he wrote that “the success of science (and technology) is impossible without emancipating the modern scientist from his obligations as a teacher.”38 Indeed, envy of the newly built Kaiser Wilhelm Gesellschaft in Berlin was at the heart of an emerging consensus among Russian scientists that their government too must establish and support independent scientific research institutes that made no demands on their faculty save that they advance Russian science. The very nature of imperial science—the small-scale university study of pure science—had come to seem quaint and inadequate, even in the eyes of scientists who had managed to attain campus sinecures.
The conclusion that Russian science simply had to change became all but undeniable with the outbreak of the Great War. The war showed with terrifying clarity how much Russian science and Russian manufacturing depended upon German pure and applied sciences. Industries that relied on scientifically advanced new technologies discovered with a start that more than half of their chemicals and machines were developed and produced in Germany. When the border with Germany closed in August 1914, a great deal of Russian industry imploded like a defunct Vegas hotel. Foreign investors owned most of Russia’s civilian industries, and they had never bothered to establish research and development functions in Russia. Even state-owned arms and munitions factories would buy and copy innovations from elsewhere rather than pay scientists and engineers to develop technologies at home.39 Writing in 1915, at the height of the crisis, the geochemist Vladimir Vernadsky wrote: “Russian society has suddenly realized its economic dependence on Germany, which is intolerable for a healthy country and for an alive strong nation. … [This dependence] has developed into an exploitation of one country by the other. … One of the consequences—and also one of the causes—of Russia’s economic dependence on Germany is the extraordinary insufficiency of our knowledge about the natural productive forces with which Nature and History has granted Russia.”40
This dependency was in evidence across the board. The frustrations of the editors of the journal Priroda were on full display when they wrote in 1915 that “until now our country has made no serious effort to produce its own scientific and educational instruments and to free itself from the stranglehold placed on it by Germany.”41 The war drove home the inadequacy of Russian science and spurred changes on the fly that would have a lasting impact on Russian (and, soon, Soviet) science. Russian chemical companies went from employing 33,000 workers 1913 to 117,000 workers in 1917. Writing in 1914, Moscow chemistry professor Aleksei Chichibabin insisted that the rapidly growing Russian chemical industry, “from the very beginning, must find its basis in Russian science … and take care of the establishment of most favorable conditions for the quickest and widest development of Russian chemical science.”42
And Russian science grew at an unprecedented clip, as indeed it needed to do. If in most fields Russia was mostly a provincial client of European science, especially that of Germany, with the war, contact, communication, and collaboration across the border suddenly stopped. If Russian research before the war was written in German or English and printed in foreign journals, during the war new Russian-language periodicals were established. So too were new national scientific societies. The internationalist tendencies of Russian scientists before the war were quickly replaced by new nationalist ones. Old preferences for pure science dissolved in the face of the insatiable needs of the military and of a society now at war. Vernadsky himself proposed that the Imperial Academy of Sciences retreat from its commitment to pure science and establish what he called a “Commission for the Study of Natural Productive Forces of Russia” (KEPS). His notion was that the commission would do in an organized fashion what the military had begun haphazardly through its “mobilization of various engineers who work on the basis of exact sciences, physicians, bacteriologists, and … chemists”: put science to work in the service of the Russian people. “After the war of 1914–1915,” Vernadsky wrote with an eye to the future, “we will have to make known and accountable the natural productive forces of our country, i.e., first of all to find means for broad scientific investigations of Russia’s nature and for the establishment of a network of well equipped research laboratories, museums and institutions. … This is no less necessary than the need for an improvement in the conditions of our civil and political life, which is so acutely perceived by the entire country.”43
Vernadsky could already see that the science of Russia’s future would be different from the science of Russia’s past: it would be carried out by different people, for different purposes, in different sorts of laboratories, with different results.
He was right on every count. At the same time, it is now easy to see that many of the changes that in time came to be associated with the Russian Revolution were well under way before the Romanovs were placed under house arrest at the Alexander Palace or before the ten days in October that shook the world. This was true of almost every aspect of Russian society, including the revolution’s effect on the Jews, on science, and on the Jewish involvement in science.
Still, it was not until after the Revolution that many changes that had long been in progress became embedded in Russian, now Soviet, society. One change was in the official status of Jews. Just after the October Revolution, Fred Haggard, who knew the country well after his posting there as senior American secretary for War Prisoners Aid (WPA), observed in an essay called “The New Spirit in Russia” that
the treatment of the Jews was another illustration of the working of the former government. Their treatment marked the very climax of autocratic hate and senselessness, and it is the very irony of fate that now brings to the front men of that race to vex the souls of those who made pogroms and nameless horrors possible. The sad part about all this was that it was not simply the government, but the church, that instigated and carried through these cruelties and thus denied the principles and undermined the basis upon which it was supposed to be founded. Religious liberty had no place in the old Russian scheme of government. Today, religious liberty is an absolute fact in its fullest meaning. We have no more perfect religious liberty in America than there is in Russia at this moment.44
It is hard to resist the tendency to view early Soviet society by the light of what we know came to pass with the year. Anti-Semitism never disappeared in Russia, and not many years passed before it was cannily exploited by Stalin. Still, the revolution offered real hope and, more important, genuine advancement to Russia’s Jews. Lenin said:
The Tsarist police, in alliance with the landowners and the capitalists, organized pogroms against the Jews. The landowners and capitalists tried to divert the hatred of the workers and peasants who were tortured by want against the Jews. … Only the most ignorant and downtrodden people can believe the lies and slander that are spread about the Jews. … They are our brothers, who, like us, are oppressed by capital; they are our comrades in the struggle for socialism. … Shame on accursed tsarism which tortured and persecuted the Jews. Shame on those who foment hatred towards the Jews, who foment hatred towards other nations.45
Officially, Soviet law outlawed religious and ethnic discrimination, and while such discrimination never fully disappeared, the case can be made that Jews found fewer obstacles to obtaining education and employment in the USSR in its first decades than probably anywhere else on earth. A symbolic token of this change is the fact that of Lenin’s four closest allies in the revolution, three—Trotsky, Zinoviev and Kamenev—were Jews by heritage.
But there was more than symbolism in play. The revolution had crushed the old elites of tsarist Russia, and discrimination against the children of the prerevolutionary monied and powerful continued long after the revolution was won. This created opportunities for previously downtrodden and impoverished minorities, opportunities exploited more vigorously by Jews than anyone else. For one thing, Jews remained by far the most literate group in the USSR (85% of Jews could read in 1926 and 94.3% in 1939, compared with 58% and 83.4% for non-Jewish Russians). By 1939, a Soviet Jew was more than three times as likely to finish secondary school as the general population. Seventeen percent of university students in Moscow were Jews, as were 19 percent in Leningrad, 24.6 percent in Kharkov, and 35.6 percent in Kiev. Jews were ten times as likely to complete university studies as the general population, and one of every three college-age Soviet Jews was studying at a university.46 These trends ran deep and would prove durable: by 1989, at the very end of the Soviet epoch, 64 percent of Jews had a university education, compared with 15 percent of Russians.
Most of these Jews went into scientific and technical fields. A 1937 survey found that of the 82,300 Jews attending Soviet universities, 30,900 (37.5%) were in technical faculties.47 It was estimated in the early 1950s that 11 percent of all Soviet scientists were Jews, though Jews made up only 1.5 percent of the population.48 In 1959, Jews were more than thirteen times as likely to be “scientific workers” as Russians were. The top five Jewish occupations were engineering, medicine, work as “scientific personnel,” teaching (often in math and science), and chief production and technical management; the first three of these occupations accounted for more than a quarter—28 percent—of all Jewish employment. It was after the Soviet Union disbanded and almost a million Jews immigrated to Israel that the remarkable Jewish embrace of sciences in the USSR became most conspicuous. Over 60 percent of those immigrants who were employed prior to their immigration were engineers, scientists, physicians, nurses, technical workers, and other professionals (this last category comprising mostly teachers, most of whom taught scientific disciplines).49
These statistics alone are enough to show that Jews were prominent in Soviet science. But there are two sorts of prominence. One sort, as we have seen, is numerical. A great many scientists, doctors, and engineers in the Soviet Union were Jewish. The second sort concerns eminence. Here, too, statistics help paint the picture. For instance, four of the seven Soviet Nobelists in physics were Jews (and more than 30% of all Soviet prizewinners up to 1975).50 But to take full measure of the eminence of Jews in Soviet science, one must look beyond the statistics to the individuals who molded and guided Soviet science in its first decades, many of whom were Jews.
The eminence of Jews in early Soviet science is rarely remembered today, but it was a matter of some interest at the time. In his waning days, the great Hungarian Jewish physicist émigré to the United States, Edward Teller, reminisced about a road trip he and his wife took with George Gamow, the equally renowned Soviet physicist and émigré to America, and his wife:
We arrived in Florida and the closer we got to Miami the more annoyed Gamow seemed to get. I didn’t know why. I didn’t understand. Then his pretty wife Rho explained to me. “You know, you may not have noticed, Gamow is anti-semitic; there are too many Jews here.” Gamov antisemitic! His best friend in Russia was the Jewish Lev Landau! … That was one of the few occasions when he and I talked about politics. What he meant was that he was terribly, terribly unhappy about the Soviets, and Stalin, about the Communist government and he saw a connection, not a close one, … between Jews and Communism.51
That a Soviet physicist of Gamov’s stature linked the Soviet regime with Russian Jews is not as odd as it may seem from today’s remove. Teller observed that Gamov’s friend and colleague was the Jewish physicist Lev Landau. In the years when Soviet physics first established itself—the years when Gamow came of age as a physicist—a majority of the most important physicists were Jewish. Landau was the rule, not the exception, as Gamow well knew. Among Landau’s mentors, colleagues, and students (and Gamow’s as well) were a remarkable number of Jews who established and ran some of the most important science institutes of their day, making Soviet science—above all, physics—into the international powerhouse that it became: Abram Fyodorovich Ioffe (1880–1960), Yakov Il’ich Frenkel (1894–1952), Matvei Petrovich Bronstein (1906–38), Leonid Isaakovich Mandelshtam (1879–1944), Igor Yevgenyevich Tamm (1895–1971), Semion Petrovich Shubin (1908–38), Yuli Khariton (1904–96), Bentsion Moiseevich Vul (1903–85), Fedor Galperin (1903–?), Yuly Borisovich Rumer (1901–85), Semen Alex-androvich Altshuler (1911–83), and many more.
Although any one of these men might contend for the designation, it is Abram Ioffe who is most often called the “father of Soviet physics,” and for good reason.52 Ioffe won adulation in his lifetime and after his death, receiving the Stalin Prize (in 1942), the Hero of Socialist Labor Prize (in 1955), and the Lenin Prize (posthumously, in 1960); he founded some of the most important research institutes in the Soviet Union, mentored generations of the country’s best physicists, and carried out pioneering research, to international acclaim, over the course of half a century. Yet nothing in his background suggested that such extravagant success was possible. In the Ukraine of 1880, where Ioffe was born to a Jewish petty merchant of modest means, there were no passable trails which led to the elite of intellectual society. Ioffe received a generally inferior education; and when the time came, he enrolled, not in a classical gymnasium, but in a technical high school, a circumstance that all but barred him from Russian universities. Instead, he attended the Saint Petersburg Technological Institute. When he graduated in 1902, his professors exhorted him to continue his studies in Germany (like many other Russian Jews who sought advanced education in the sciences), and Ioffe procured a practicum in Wilhelm Roentgen’s renowned X-ray laboratory at Munich University.53 Ioffe remained there for most of four years, earning a prestigious doctorate for his discovery of a photoeffect (the “elastic aftereffect”) in X-rayed quartz, a précis of which was published in the Annalen der Physik.54 But this too was not enough to secure him a professorship upon his return to Russia, where advanced degrees were recognized only for those scholars who held a high school diploma from a classical gymnasium, and where Ioffe’s Jewish background made him harder to hire. Ioffe became a laboratory assistant at the recently chartered Saint Petersburg Polytechnical Institute.55
New institutions often offer opportunities to talented outsiders that more established ones, bound in tradition and concerned for reputation, do not. It was not long before Ioffe was invited to teach at Saint Petersburg Polytechnical, and he soon began to publish on a variety of topics, such as the photon theory of radiation. Indeed, he continued to work with Roentgen, traveling frequently to Munich, and building an international reputation that eclipsed his more constrained local one. (His ties with Roentgen were severed only with the outbreak of the Great War.)
At the same time, Ioffe began to cultivate an intellectual life of weight and substance at home. Soon after his return from Germany, Ioffe was joined in Saint Petersburg by a young Austrian Jewish physicist, Paul Ehrenfest, who had followed his Russian wife, mathematician Tatiana Afanas’ev, back to her home. A foreigner and a Jew, Ehrenfest could wrangle only a temporary, part-time job with no hope of tenure, but still, his influence on Russian physicists, Ioffe first among them, was enormous. Ehrenfest and Ioffe met frequently to discuss developments in physics (during arguably the most exciting years in the discipline’s history). The two men were outspoken members of the Russian Physical and Chemical Society and leaders of the young Turks advancing the newest theories. Together, they were the motive force of what has been called the Petersburg Physics Seminar, a group of young scholars who met to discuss cutting-edge physics as well as to lay the groundwork for new and improved institutions through which physics could be researched, studied, and taught. They aimed to build a central scientific institute in which to pursue research, and to devise new programs in which the best up-and-coming Russians could learn physics without travel abroad. In 1912, however, Ehrenfest finally left Russia and was soon thereafter selected by H. A. Lorentz to be his successor at Leyden University.
Ioffe stayed, teaching and at the same time pursuing further advanced degrees at Saint Petersburg University, in the hope that these would allow him to assume a professorship. The great Soviet inventor Leon Theremin (or Lev Sergeyevich Termen, as he was known in Russia) recounted how in 1913, when he was just seventeen, he was invited by a cousin who knew of his interest in physics to sit in on the master’s thesis defense of Ioffe, who was forging a reputation as a rising star. Theremin and his cousin had to jostle to find seats in the crowded room. After Ioffe’s jury passed him with superlatives, Theremin’s cousin introduced the boy to the young physicist: “I thought how good it would be if I could work under his guidance, had I already grown up.”56 (It was a wish that would later be granted.) Soon thereafter, Ioffe was secure enough in his future in Petersburg that he turned down a professorship at Kharkov University.57 By 1915, Ioffe had completed a doctoral dissertation and was promoted to full professor at the Polytechnical Institute. In 1916, Ioffe and his Saint Petersburg colleagues began to publish pathbreaking articles on crystallography, based on their X-ray work, in what amounted to “the first works of his emerging research school.”58
With the October Revolution, nothing changed for Ioffe’s career—and then again, everything did. Just over half a year after the revolution, Ioffe was selected to direct the Physico-Technical Division of the new State Roentgenological and Radiological Institute. The notion of such an institute was itself at once new and old. In 1910, a Jewish physician and roentgenologist, Mikhail Isaakovich Nemenov (1880–1959), had proposed establishing such a center. Nemerov, who came from Vitebsk and had completed a degree at the Petersburg Medical Institute,59 was convinced, like many of his contemporaries, that independent institutes of the sort he labored to establish were the only way to tow Russian science and technology into the twentieth century. In 1917, Ioffe joined Nemenov’s efforts, and almost immediately after the revolution the men persuaded Anatoly Lunacharskii, head of the new People’s Commissariat of Education, to make their vision a reality. And so it was that, as one historian observed, “by the time the establishment of the State Roentgenological and Radiological Institute (part of which would later become Ioffe’s Physico-Technical Institute) was officially announced on May 6, 1918, it had long been actively functioning. Ioffe was already carrying out his classical investigations there on the structure of mechanically deformed crystals.”60
Thus, the new institute’s work, while it was in some ways a continuation both of Ioffe’s vision and research, was also a new beginning—for Ioffe and for Soviet science. Even as the Bolsheviks were consolidating their control over the USSR, Ioffe and colleagues who shared his aims were hastily trying to consolidate their own control over their new country’s physics. They established the Russian Association of Physicists (RAF, by the Russian acronym), and Ioffe was selected its president. They petitioned the People’s Commissariat for Education, commonly called Narkompros, for authority to establish a new research center, The State Roentgenological and Radiological Institute (GRRI); and in May 1919 Zorakh Grinberg, the Jewish representative of the new commissariat, granted permission to incorporate. The institute had four departments: Nemerov headed the medico-biological sector, and Ioffe took charge of the physico-technical sector. Almost immediately, Ioffe’s “sector” began to operate as an independent institute itself, and an incomparably important one at that.
That the People’s Commissariat for Education chose to support scientists who first found work in the tsar’s universities is not a fact one can take for granted. Other intellectuals who had the bad luck of establishing themselves in the tsar’s Russia—writers, philosophers, historians, poets, and more—were viewed by the revolutionary guard with suspicion. The Workers’ Opposition, the Proletarian Culture Organization (Proletkultists), and the many other groups that burst to life, animated by revolutionary fervor to replace the debauched old with the pristine new, demanded class war against “bourgeois remnants,” of whom those who frequented university lecture halls offered an exemplar.61 In 1922, Lenin ordered the exile of two shiploads of such intellectuals in what was known as the “voyage of the philosophy steamer.” Among the exiled intellectuals was Semyon Frank, a famous philosopher who had converted from Judaism to Christianity and whose nephew, Ilya Frank, achieved even greater fame as a Soviet physicist, eventually winning the Nobel Prize in 1958.62 Scientists of Ioffe’s generation benefited from a double standard that saw in physicists, chemists, biologists, and the rest an inherent simpatico to the revolution that philosophers and poets did not have. Lenin himself made a double argument for treating scientists as valued allies instead of suspect traitors. In practical terms, the revolution and the Soviet Union needed what scientists alone could offer—the means to quickly advance the country’s industry, agriculture, and development. In terms of ideology, Lenin argued, scientists were by their nature materialists because modern science and technology militate to materialism. Positivism, Lenin believed, was a gateway to Marxism. The very vocation of scientists would draw them in time to socialism.63
Ioffe’s career, in any case, thrived under Communism, as did the fortunes of the Leningrad Physico-Technical Institute. There are many measures of the fecundity of Ioffe and his center. In its first twenty years, ten new institutes sprouted from the original. Many dozens of academicians and corresponding members of the Soviet Academy of Sciences worked or studied at the institute.64 Many of the Soviet Union’s greatest physicists trained there, worked there, or both, including the Nobel laureates Nikolai Semenov, Ilya Frank, Igor Tamm, and Lev Landau. That Ioffe’s institute produced so many laureates says something about the place. That three of the four men—Frank, Tamm and Landau—were, like Ioffe himself, born to Jewish parents says something about the penetration of Jews into Ioffe’s institute. Indeed, of the institute’s original staff of eight, at least three came from Jewish backgrounds.65 Consider the moment of the founding of the State Roentgenological and Radiological Institute, in which a revolutionary functionary of Jewish heritage charters a research center at the urging and under the direction of a physician and physicist of Jewish heritage. Fifty years earlier, even five years earlier, this would have been unthinkable. In no time after the revolution, Jews found a place in the heartland of Soviet physics and, more broadly, Soviet science.
Of course, this was not a phenomenon limited to Leningrad. In the winter of 1934/35, British journalist James Gerald Crowther made his famous survey of the Soviet science establishment and found that a great many of the new research institutes were directed by Jews. Nemerov, I have already noted, directed the Roentgenological and Radiological Institute alongside Ioffe.66 The Physico-Technical Institute that was established in Kharkov was run by Lev Landau.67 At the head of the parallel institute in Dnepropetrovsk stood a student of Ioffe by the name of B. N. Finkelstein.68 Boris Hessen directed the Physical Institute of the University, Moscow.69 Yakov Dorfmann ran the Physico-Technical Institute of the Urals, Sverdlovsk. David Talmud headed the Laboratory for Surface Chemistry in Leningrad’s Institute for Chemical Physics.70 The Maxim Gorky Medico-Biological Research Institute in Moscow was run by Solomon Levit.71 Ioffe’s friend and former student, Yakov Frenkel, became chairman of theoretical physics at Ioffe’s alma mater, the Leningrad Polytechnical Institute.72 V. F. Kagan became the head of the Scientific Division of the State Publishing House.73 Lev Landau directed the department of theoretical physics at the Kharkov Polytechnical Institute and then went on to direct the Theoretical Division of the Institute for Physical problems in Moscow.74 Semen Aleksandrovich Altshuler became head of theoretic physics at Kazan University.75 Yuli Khariton directed Arzamas-16, the center for atomic bomb research.76
It would be easy to make too much of these facts. Russian science grew quickly, and there were many institutes and departments to head. Measured against the sum total, the impression that Jews dominated Soviet physics quickly dissipates. They did not. But it is possible to make too little of these facts as well. For they do show that the place of Jews in science, in intellectual life, and in society more broadly changed immeasurably in the generation that divided the pogroms of the 1880s from the period I have been describing, the first decade or so after the revolution. The path from the Pale to the Party and the professoriat had been so short that grandparents born of a caste banned from cities, rejected from universities, and ineligible to work in the civil service survived to see their grandchildren heading some of the most revered institutions in the great metropolises of the country. In the Russia of 1880, no one could have predicted, or even imagined, the preeminence to which Jews would rise in the Soviet Union of 1930.
There were many reasons that Jews ascended so quickly in science, and to such heights. The first, and arguably the most important, was chance. After the revolution, the Soviet state was desperate for scientists and technicians and eager to build new laboratories and institutes in which they could train and work. This was, to a great degree, an extension of the pained realization to which earlier Russian leaders had been brought by the Great War, the realization that the state’s very survival depended on building the infrastructure of engineering, science, and manufacturing that the country lacked. What’s more, the Bolsheviks understood that the sustainability of their revolution depended on their ability to feed and clothe the multitudes they now ruled and that they could do this only if they managed to build modern factories and farms, which, in turn, they could do only if they had talented scientists and engineers working in labs stocked with up-to-date equipment, aided by talented students of intellect and energy. They understood that for the Soviet experiment to work, as many scientists as possible needed to be pressed into its service as soon as possible. Scientists who had established themselves before the revolution needed to be supported; and existing labs, research centers, and university programs needed to be supported. But these things were not enough. New scientists, new scientific workers, and new workplaces were also needed.
Jews, especially the multitude of young Jews who made their way to Russian cities from the Pale of Settlement, were especially fit to become scientists and engineers and lab technicians and doctors. They were the most literate of the ethnic groups in the Soviet Union. They were, as historian Yuri Slezkine observed, “the only members of the literate classes not compromised by service to the tsarist state (since it had been forbidden them).”77 This mattered, because they brought with them no great loyalty to, little affection toward, and scant nostalgia for an imperial regime under which they had suffered, often extravagantly. They were harder to suspect of harboring antirevolutionary sentiments than other “bourgeois experts” who might have something to gain by a return to the status quo ante. Their alienation from the past was an asset for the present and future, as Lenin himself observed: “The fact that there were so many Jewish intelligentsia members in the Russian cities was of great importance to the revolution. They put an end to the general sabotage that we were confronted with after the October Revolution. … The Jewish elements were mobilized … and thus saved the revolution at a difficult time. It was only thanks to this pool of a rational and literate labor force that we succeeded in taking over the state apparatus.”78
One reason, then, for the rise of Jews in science (as in at least some other literate professions) after the revolution was a rare confluence of circumstances. A new science infrastructure was hastily being built, so much so that the new soon greatly outweighed the old and established. In this situation, the power of an establishment scientific elite to stand in the way of young Jews and others wishing to enter science was negligible. This was all the more true because the sciences—most obviously physics but also biology and chemistry—themselves were rapidly changing in these years, undermining the august authority of old-school scientists. Jews, including the thousands of young Jews who trained in western Europe in the years prior to the revolution, were eager to enter Soviet sciences at a moment when the Soviet sciences were desperate precisely for such eager young scholars. New professions in search of professionals had met new professionals in search of professions.
None of this would have mattered, of course, if the postrevolutionary leaders of Soviet science—and, in a broader sense, Soviet society—had been resistant to allowing Jews to assume positions of leadership and influence. Few were; most were committed in word and deed to fashioning a genuine meritocracy. In 1930 William Horsley Gantt, an American physician who went to Russia in the twenties with the American Relief Administration and while there became an enthusiastic student of Pavlov, wrote an essay based on his travels, called “The Soviet’s Treatment of Scientists.”79 In it he applauded Russian science for hiring and advancing scientists on the basis of merit and achievement rather than background, politics, or ideology.80 The institutionalized anti-Semitism of the past —quotas, forced conversions, and all the other blunt instruments that had kept Jews from positions of influence before the revolution—was outlawed with the revolution. Even the more pernicious and durable informal sorts of anti-Semitism lost much of their force. “Virtually all memoirists writing about Moscow and Leningrad intelligentsia life in the 1930s,” Slezkine writes, “seem to agree that there was no anti-Jewish hostility and generally very few manifestations of ethnic ranking or labeling.”81 Vitaly Rubin, in time a world-famous sinologist, remembered his studies in a Moscow University, where half his classmates were Jews: “The Jewish question did not arise there. Not only did it not arise in the form of antisemitism; it did not arise at all. All the Jews knew themselves to be Jews but considered everything to do with Jewishness a thing of the past. I remember thinking of my father’s stories about his childhood heder and traditional Jewish upbringing as something consigned to oblivion. None of that had anything to do with me. There was no active desire to renounce one’s Jewishness. This problem simply did not exist.”82
Scholars argue whether this state of affairs changed beginning in 1936, with the Great Purge. Most conclude, like historian David Priestland, that Jews as a group did not suffer special discrimination during the Purge or indeed at any time before World War II.83 There is little disagreement with historian Zvi Gitelman’s assessment of the first years after the revolution: “Never before in Russian history—and never subsequently—has a government made such an effort to uproot and stamp out antisemitism.”84 Part of the explanation for the great wave of Jews entering the sciences is the sudden, unforeseeable, and quite remarkable absence of official resistance to their doing so.
This absence of resistance did two things at once. For decades, there had been far more Jews who wished to attend university and enter learned professions than there had been places allotted to Jews. With the lifting of the barriers of quotas and official limitations on the professions which Jews could practice, these greater numbers streamed into and through the universities, with many ending up in laboratories and research centers. Once the dam was removed, the stream of Jews entering sciences swelled to what it would have been had the obstructions never existed. But the absence of resistance did something more. Removing obstructions not only allowed Soviet Jews to do what they in any case wanted to do, but it also spurred them toward those professions that were previously all but closed to them. The learned professions, the sciences among them, by virtue of being newly available to Jews, came to be seen as especially meritorious by Jews.
It is worth pondering the nature of this alchemy, through which the absence of a negative became a positive. To start with, it is important when speaking of Soviet Jews and their attraction to science to understand who these Jews were and who they were not. For one thing, these Jews were not always Jewish. Abram Ioffe himself converted in 1911 from Judaism (a religion he had not practiced since childhood) to Lutheranism (a religion he would never practice), in order to marry (as Russian law required). Few of his Jewish colleagues had reason to convert, but fewer still found meaning in any traditional formulation of Jewish religious practice, study, or belief. Yet their being Jews, or the children of Jews, was a fact of significance in their biographies. Jewish ethnicity remained a category that mattered, being one of the multitudes of accepted national minority groups in the Soviet Union, a “country of 189 peoples,” as a 1934 travel poster had it.85
Following the revolution, the requirement to carry unified identification documents was rescinded, but when a system of internal passports was reinstituted in 1932, these new documents indicated peoples of “Jewish nationality.” The nomenclature was important; from the start, Soviet social planners sought ways, not to wipe out Jewish identity, but to redefine it in “national” terms that fit more fully into the Soviet model of a state composed of many semi-autonomous nations or peoples.86 It was for this reason that Yiddish schools, theaters, and presses were established, and that the far-flung Jewish autonomous oblast, or administrative region, was established in 1934, with Birobidzhan as its administrative center. The result of these efforts, over time, was paradoxical. The redefinition of Judaism as a nationality, with a language that only dwindling numbers of Jews wished to speak and a homeland that few Jews wished to occupy, drained Soviet Jews of their Jewish identity more than it sustained that identity. This was hardly viewed as a tragedy by most Jews; as Slezkine observed, “No other ethnic group was as good at being Soviet, and no other ethnic group was as keen on abandoning its language, rituals, and traditional areas of settlement.”87 But while the Soviet policy of identifying Jews as a nationality ultimately diminished Jewish identity, it at the same time contributed to the durability of, at the very least, the superficial identification of Jews as Jews. If it became harder in the Soviet Union to remain a Jew in anything but name alone, it at the same time became harder to escape remaining a Jew, at least in name only.
For Jews in these circumstances, science had special appeal. For one thing, it offered a pathway to full Soviet citizenship that was different from and superior to that offered by Jewish nationalism. Science in the first half of the twentieth century was almost universally associated with progress, improvement, and modernity. This was nowhere more true than in the Soviet Union, whose prophets and leaders—Marx, Engels, Plekhanov, Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin—had each described their outlooks as “scientific” and had each praised science as a basic tool for reconstructing society on a sounder basis. When the American physicist Haroutune M. Dadourian returned from a long trip to the Soviet Union in 1930, he cannily observed that “science and the scientific method have assumed an importance in the minds of the Russian leaders second only to communism” itself.88 Many Jews embraced science because science itself was seen as so valuable to the revolution while being so snuggly fit to the values of the revolution. To be a scientist was to demonstrate commitment to the Soviet ideal and to the Soviet Union. At the same time, to be a scientist in the Soviet Union, as elsewhere, demonstrated a commitment to universal ideals like the advance of human knowledge and the betterment of humankind. Science was an avenue whereby Jews could be superior Soviet citizens and superior human beings.
For some in the first decades after the revolution, this was part of the great appeal of science. And even when the corruption and oppression of the Soviet regime became too blatant to ignore (a moment reached by some Jews in the 1920s and by others only as late as the 1940s), science remained a profession through which one could remain a contributing Soviet citizen without being overly involved with the degrading ideological casuistry that was so often a part of Soviet life. Scientific institutions were not free of informants, loyalty tests, and Party apparatchiks, but these played less of a role in science than they did in any other intellectual profession.89
For Jews of the Soviet Union, science provided a profession that was hyper-modern, progressive, praiseworthy, and at once universalist and patriotic. It offered a high road into Soviet life while seeming to advance humanist values that a Jew one short generation from the Pale of Settlement might wish to see embraced within the Soviet Union and beyond. In this, the appeal of science for Soviet Jews was not terribly different from the appeal of science for American Jews, many of them too a scant generation from the Pale of Settlement. They all sought not simply to find their place in a society new to them, but also to remold these new societies in such a way that they might accommodate Jews.
When the great immigration of Soviet Jews to Israel began in the 1970s, waves of these Jews brought with them scientific training and skills, and expectations that these would somehow smooth their assimilation into their new home. These expectations were, after all, the same expectations that had drawn many of these Russian Jews, and their parents and grandparents, to science in the first place.