generations, including those in which only one member is married to a non-Jew; the number of mixed marriages, therefore, is almost certainly lower than the number of "mixed" families.) 22 While the data are too fragmentary to draw any hard conclusions, there seems to be little doubt that assimilation in this sense is no longer characteristic of the Soviet Jewish community as a whole.

T

he decline in the rate of intermarriage has been accompanied by another significant development—namely, the resurgence of national identity among a large number of Soviet Jewish youth. To an extent this is due, as mentioned before, to the shattering experience of World War II, as well as to the antisemitic policies followed by Stalin and continued, albeit on a far lesser scale, by his successors. Yet there is another reason, too. Soviet Jewish youth have largely lost the "immigrant mentality" of their elders. Many of their parents were immigrants, uprooted from their homes in the small towns of the Ukraine and Belorussia, and consequently physically and ethnically disoriented. The children have firmer roots. Together with millions of other young Soviet citizens, they had been spared the crippling effects of Stalinist totalitarianism. Together with their coevals, too, they are subject to the forces of nationalism which since the war have swept over all areas of the USSR. They are more secure, more hopeful about their future, and more courageous in demonstrating their ethnic belonging.

The forms in which this assertiveness expresses itself are often quixotic. Soviet policies have raised Jewish culture to the status of "forbidden fruit," which only excites the appetite of the youth. Many young men and women, without any background of religious upbringing or affiliation, crowd the synagogues during the joyous holiday of Simchat Torah (festival of the Torah) noisily affirming their bonds with the Jewish people.23 Others wear the star of David, learn Hebrew in secret, or listen to the Israeli radio. They are not an "oppositionist" element. If offered an opportunity, the majority of them would surely decline to emigrate to the Jewish state. But they refuse to accept the proposi

22 V.I. Naulko, Etnicheskii sostav naseleniia SSSR: Ukrainskoi SSR, Kiev, 1965, p. 109.

23 For a perceptive eye-witness report, see Elie Wiesel, "Will Soviet Jewry Survive?" Commentary (New York), February 1967.

tion that any fervent manifestation of Jewishnessincluding sympathy for Israel-is in conflict with their loyalties as citizens of the USSR.

That this group is a minority is perhaps not as important as the fact that such a minority exists. If, after all these years of forced and voluntary acculturation, of antisemitism and cultural deprivation, the interest in things Jewish not only remains but grows, then the prospect of the eventual disappearance of Soviet Jewry is hardly tenable. It might be that a basic error has been made in failing to differentiate between acculturation and assimilation. Acculturation can be defined as "the adoption by a person or group of the culture of another social group, or the process leading to this adoption." Assimilation, on the other hand, is "the adoption of a culture of another social group to such an extent that the person or group no longer has any characteristics identifying him with his former culture and no longer has any particular loyalties to his former culture." All Soviet Jews are acculturated, but large numbers of them are not assimilated. The internal passport, the social significance of ethnic identity, antisemitism and the persistence of distinct social mores prevent the Jews from assimilating completely, from becoming objectively and psychologically Russian. The Jew is Russianized, but not Russified.

What of the Future?

Ideologically and historically committed to promoting assimilation, yet faced with a mounting resistance to it on the part of a large sector of the Jewish community, what is the future attitude of the Soviet government going to be? If the leadership is influenced by an irrational and virulent antisemitism, then there is no doubt that repression of Jewish culture will continue, and perhaps new antisemitic policies will be pursued. On the other hand, if the Soviet leaders can approach the problem in a more rational way, they are confronted by a fundamental policy choice: either to treat the Jews as other non-territorial national minorities such as the Germans, for example; or to continue treating them as a special case. There are costs and benefits accruing to each of these courses.

Abolishing discriminatory practices against the Jews that is, allowing them the same cultural facilities as other nationalities and discouraging social antisemitism-would, first of all, ease external pressures from abroad, including the embarassing pressures of foreign Communist parties

and of sympathetic intellectuals and world figures. Secondly, it would assuage the discontent of a significant segment of Soviet Jewry-a discontent which might otherwise assume a genuinely antiSoviet and perhaps even pro-Zionist form. In other words, it would reinforce the loyalties of a group which the Soviets seem to feel is at least potentially disloyal. Granting the Jews the cultural facilities available to other minorities would bring out into the open the desires and activities that exist anyway and would thus remove from them any taint of subversion.

Finally, such measures would probably be applauded by the liberal intelligentsia, who have made the Jewish issue almost a symbol of their own struggle for decency and freedom, and who view it as a barometer of the regime's attitudes and and intentions. Undoubtedly, the intelligentsia of other minority nationalities would also support the revival of Jewish culture since it would buttress their own claims to cultural facilities and opportunities.

On the other hand, the Soviet government could -for reasons elucidated earlier-continue to treat Jews and Jewish culture differently from all other peoples and cultures, both because of their links. to Jews in other (mostly hostile) countries and because in the Soviet view-any encouragement of Jewish culture must inevitably lead to "the detachment of the Jewish workers from the international labor movement," or, to put it less obscurely, to increased Jewish consciousness, to nationalism, and perhaps ultimately, to Zionism. Such a policy would obviously be supported by those who are pressing for a more rapid "fusion" of Soviet nationalities into one supranational culture. It would please the many Russian apparatchiki in the various Soviet republics who are just barely tolerant of native cultural institutions and national feelings. And it would also play into the hands of those elements in the elite who are in favor of an unqualified pro-Arab policy in the Middle East: any internal tolerance, let alone active approval, of even vaguely Zionist expressions in the USSR, they might well argue, would be sure to awaken distrust among the Arab states and among their many sympathizers in the "Third World."

This second policy-obviously the one the Soviets are presently pursuing, however incon

sistently-may or may not be labelled "antisemitic." It certainly affects the status of the Soviet Jews adversely. To what extent it is influenced by an ingrained antipathy for the Jews and to what extent by "practical" considerations cannot, of course, be determined with certainty. Whatever the case may be, there is a fundamental internal contradiction in the Soviet attitude. If Jewish culture is to be repressed to the point of disappearance, and if the Jews have no other special characteristics, such as their own territory, then why continue to insist on the maintenance of Jewish identity by categorizing Jews as a nationality and by indicating the ethnic affiliation of every Jew on his internal passport? Why single out Jews and point to their Jewishness in connection with a campaign against economic speculators? This only stimulates Jewish self-recognition, which, at least among many of the youth, is no longer regarded as a cause for embarrassment, or as something to be denied and suppressed. As long as consciousness and identity are maintained officially, there will be a search for the content of that identity. Soviet policy tries to have its cake and eat it too: it wants the Jews to become acculturated and assimilated, but while it forces acculturation, it makes assimilation difficult. by its official maintenance of Jewish identity. This may possibly indicate either that the Soviet leaders cannot bring themselves to deny the objective fact of a Jewish identity and nationality, however devoid of content they may want it to be, or that they have not yet made a thoroughgoing choice between the two basic alternatives open to them.

When and if this choice is made, it will undoubtedly be determined-or strongly influencedby a far more fundamental issue: the nature and direction of the political evolution of the USSR. At present, when the fundamental decisions as to the future of the system are being postponed, the party is pursuing the same kind of temporizing policy in regard to Jewish culture and the Jewish people as it is in other areas. It has deferred seminal decisions in nationality policy in general, and it has given no sign that major changes in policies affecting the Jews are at hand. For the time being, both the Soviet regime and the Soviet Jews are "muddling through." This may be inconvenient for the regime; it is tragic for the nearly three million Jewish citizens of the USSR.

An Unsavory Story

he deportation of seven nationality groups during World War II is a somber chapter in the history of Soviet nationality policy. The Soviet regime maintained a strict silence about every aspect of the deportations; indeed, for ten years virtually all information about the past and current status of the deported peoples was successfully suppressed. The floodgates of revelation were opened by Khrushchev in his secret speech to the 20th Party Congress in 1956, and since then, it has been possible to reconstruct at least to some extent-the undoing of these nations.

The very first clue came with the publication in Izvestia on June 26, 1946, of "The Law Concerning the Abolition of the Checheno-Ingush Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic and the Changing of the Crimean Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic into the Crimean Oblast." A simple explanation of the decreed territorial changes was proffered:

During the Great Patriotic War, when the peoples of the USSR were heroically defending the honor and independence of the Fatherland in the struggle against the German-Fascist invaders, many Chechens and Crimean Tatars, at the instigation of German agents, joined volunteer units organized by the Germans and, together with German troops, engaged in armed struggle against units of the Red Army . . meanwhile, the main mass of the population of the Checheno-Ingush and Crimean ASSR's took no counteraction against these betrayers of the Fatherland.

In connection with this, the Chechens and the Crimean Tatars were resettled in other regions of the USSR.

The admission of active disloyalty on the part of the Chechens and Tatars was politically difficult, for it discredited two decades of declarations about the freedom and contentment of these peoples under the Soviet wing. But five years earlier, Soviet officials had been realistic about the potential disloyalty of Soviet Germans and had arranged to remove them from their Volga Republic and scattered "national areas" in the Ukraine in August 1941 before the Nazis had penetrated that far. The deportation of the Karachai, Kalmyks, Chechens and Ingushi, Balkars

and Crimean Tatars followed, after a two year interval, in the winter of 1943 and the spring of 1944.

uring the German occupation of 1942-43, the subject Caucasian peoples' behavior toward Russia ranged from defiance to indifference. The Chechen and Ingushi, both Moslem peoples of the Northern Caucasus, had opposed the new Bolshevik regime after the Revolution with legendary fierceness that included terrorist raids on Russians living within the area. Their nationalism was combined with extraordinary attachment to their Moslem religion, and to the mores inspired by it. They were first denied any chance at autonomy because their capital, Groznyi, became a major oil center, wholly controlled by the Russians.

The

The Karachai and the Balkars are both Turkic-speaking Moslem nations, who inhabited areas that were geographically contiguous but separated by mountains. Karachai had their own autonomous Republic, while the Balkars were joined with the Kabardines in the Kabardine-Balkar Autonomous Republic, in which they were a minority. Like the Chechen-Ingushi, they had resisted the incursions of the Tsars and the Soviets, and their native Communist parties had been severely purged in the late 1930's.

The Kalmyks were the only Mongol and Buddhist people in Europe until their evacuation from the steppes of the lower Volga. During the 19th century the Tsars had ousted the Kalmyks, whom they considered an alien and unreliable element, from the valuable fishing waters of the Volga and Caspian, and the Kalmyks grew increas ingly poor. After the Revolution, the Soviets broke up and forcibly expelled the "feudal aristocrats" who were also the hereditary heads of local Kalmyk self-government organs. When the Nazis retreated from Kalmyk lands after their occupation, a number of Kalymks went with them.

The Tatars of the Crimea once formed an empire, and their prestige in the Turkic and Moslem worlds continued after their subjugation by the Bolsheviks after the Civil

War. During the 1920's and 1930's the Soviet government enforced agricultural colonization of the Crimea by Ukrainians and Russians, until in 1936 more than half of the population was Slav. Official Soviet statements (above) of the grounds for the deportation are difficult to verify; the Russians claimed that a great many Crimean Tatars joined German volunteer detachments and dogged the Soviet army at the rear by means of saboteur gangs while the rest of the Tatars stood by. Crimean lands were resettled so thoroughly afterwards that a return by the Tatars would hardly be feasible today.

The Germans were the largest single group to be deported; they numbered 400,000 in the Volga Republic and over 1 million in 17 national districts in the Ukraine and RSFSR. The Nazis later evacuated many Germans from the Black Sea area. While Soviet concern about possible collaboration with the advancing Nazis may be understandable, no proof has thus far been offered of any more enthusiasm for the Nazis among the Volga Germans than among any other Soviet nationality. Indeed, there is considerable evidence of loyalty to the Soviet regime among people who, after all, were the descendents of settlers under Catherine the Great and who had flourished in the intervening century and a half.

T

he actual rounding up of the citizens in each village was handled by regiments of NKVD troops. The troops were generally brought into the area several weeks before to familiarize themselves with plans and positioning. The villagers were called out to rallies or compulsory meetings celebrating Soviet military successes; a decree of deportation was read, a baggage allowance announced, and then families were assembled immediately. The procedure varied according to the group, as did the kilogram allowance for baggage and food. Some of the boldest resisted, often without arms, and were caught and shot or fled to the mountains to live as outlaws.

Exact figures for the victimized nations are not available. The following estimates for 1941 were arrived at by applying the percentages of native nationalities as given in the 1926 census (which was based on nationality) to the total population figures in given areas taken from the 1939 census (which in turn was based exclusively on regions):

524,577

The journey in cattle trucks took a toll of casualties that may have ranged as high as 40 percent, particularly old people and children who died of starvation, exposure and typhus en route. The surviving deportees were put to work, mainly in agriculture, but also in mines and railway construction. Many were sent to the Siberian settlements near Karaganda, where deported kulaks had been literally dumped with no shelter in the early 1930's. The bulk of the Chechens and Ingushi were sent to Kazakhstan and Kirghizia, but the Tatars and Germans were scattered over an even wider area. Information about the whereabouts of the Karachai, Balkars and Kalmyks has been incomplete, with settlements noted near Krasnoiarsk for the Kalmyks, and near Issyk-Kul and between Dzhambul and the Kirghiz border for the others.

Administrative rearrangement of the former "autonomous" regions and republics took place along with the deportation. The Volga German ASSR went over to Saratov oblast, with a southern strip being added to Stalingrad (now Volograd) oblast. The Kalmyk ASSR was largely incorporated into a new Astrakhan oblast. The Karachai Autonomous Oblast was taken over by the Georgian SSR along with the Upper Baksan Valley, where most Balkars resided. The rest of Balkaria was left in the renamed Kabardine ASSR. The bulk of the Checheno-Ingush ASSR was included in a new Groznyi oblast, except for a Western strip that went to the North Ossetian ASSR, an eastern strip to the Daghestan ASSR, and the southern mountain area to the Georgian SSR. City and place names in the languages of the former peoples were changed to Russian. Interestingly enough, outside observers were able to deduce from this reorganization that the Kalmyks, the Karachai and the Balkars had also been subject to deportation, a fact which was not confirmed until 1957.

Just as the map of the Crimea and Northern Caucasus was redrawn, the history of these German, Moslem, Turkic and Buddhist Mongol minorities was either rewritten so as to establish "precedents" for their disloyalty to the Soviet regime or obliterated from textbooks and encyclopedias altogether. The Chechens and Ingushi, for example, were denied the label "revolutionary" in a history of the revolution in North Caucasus; and in 1948 the Central Committee of the Soviet CP issued a resolution condemning the opera, "The Great Friendship," by the Georgian, V. Muradeli, for, among other reasons, giving the impression that the Georgians and Ossetiansrather than the Ingushi and Chechens-were "in enmity with the Russian people" (Pravda, Moscow, February 11, 1948).

200,000

217,235

141,150

79,583 380,000 1,495,894

(Based on Corliss Lamont: The Peoples of the Soviet Union, New York, 1946, pp. 212-13.)

Altogether nearly one and a half million people were dispatched into exile, and an area of 60,000 square miles -about the size of Czechoslovakia and Albania-was depopulated, later to be settled by Russians and Ukrainians.

W

ith a few exceptions such as the publication of the 1946 law the ten-year silence about the deportations was carefully maintained. It was not until 1956 when the truth or more accurately the partial truth-was officially disclosed. In his "secret speech" to the 20th CPSU Congress in February of that year, Khrushchev openly denounced the "monstrous acts whose initiator was Stalin and which are crude violations of the basic Leninist principles of the nationality policy of the Soviet state." He mentioned the deportations of the Karachai and Kalmyks in December 1943, the March 1944 liquidation of the Chechen-Ingush ASSR and the de

portation of the Balkars one month later. Without referring either to the Volga Germans or the Crimean Tatars, he told his listeners that "the Ukrainians avoided meeting this fate only because there were too many of them and there was no place to which to deport them." And he concluded:

Not only no Marxist-Leninist but also no man of common sense can grasp how it is possible to make whole nations responsible for inimical activity, including women, children, old people, Communists and Komsomols, to use mass repression against them, and to expose them to misery and suffering for the hostile acts of individual persons or groups of persons.

(See The Anti-Stalin Campaign and International Communism, edited by the Russian Institute, Columbia University, New York, Columbia University Press, 1956, pp. 57-58.)

At a meeting of the Supreme Soviet in February 1957, the rehabilitations directly inspired by Khrushchev's statement were proposed and passed. As a result the Kabardine-Balkar ASSR and the Chechen-Ingush ASSR were reconstituted; and a Kalmyk Autonomous Oblast and a Karachai-Cherkess Autonomous Oblast were formed.

In December 1964, the post-Khrushchev leadership took up the matter of the Volga Germans. A decree dated August 29, 1964, repealed the 1941 deportation order. The former accusations against the Germans were described as groundless and as a manifestation of the Stalinist "cult of personality." However, a return to the Volga territory-which was resettled soon after their exodus was ruled out. At their present locations in Central Asia, they do have their own German-language schools, radio programs and newspapers, including a new publication, Freundschaft, which made its first appearance in January 1966 and has been coming out five times a week since then.

Eleven years after the Caucasian nations were rehabili tated, the Supreme Soviet of the USSR has seen fit to exonerate the last of the exiled groups, the Crimean Tatars. The decree, adopted this September 5 and announced in the Central Asian republics where the survivors reside, describes the original accusation against all Crimean Tatars as "indiscriminate" and "unjust"; only a "certain segment" were guilty of collaboration with the Germans. Yet

as in the case of the Volga Germans, the decree makes it clear that the Tatars must stay in their present locations, for it orders the republican governments to "offer assistance and cooperation to the Tatar nationality in developing economic and cultural life in accordance with national interests and traits."

I

n assessing the motives for the expulsion of the Caucasian peoples, their determined opposition to the penetration of Soviet communism must certainly be taken into account. As Moslems, as mountaineers, with comparatively recent traditions of clan rule, they possessed a strong sense of their historical and cultural unity, which neither the Tsars nor Soviets had been able to shatter in less than a century of rule. Moreover, the strategic importance of the Ukraine, the Crimea and the Caucasus for military and industrial purposes may have forced Soviet thinking on this point. That Stalin was pro-Georgian and pro-Ossetian in his choice of exiles and of beneficiaries for the redivided areas can be explained by his parentage. But there is also an element of arbitrariness in his leaving 50 or 60 potentially subversive nationalities untouched.

If the Soviets intended the early expulsion of the Volga Germans as a warning, and the later deportations as punishment for collaboration, they failed to publicize these acts and thus limited their effectiveness for those purposes. Obviously they were aware of how shameful it was to uproot non-Slavic minorities, to give their land away to Slavs, and to give undeniable evidence to the world of the absence of unity and loyalty among the constituent nations of the USSR. The fact that the Crimean Tatars had to wait over twenty years for their partial rehabilitation, and that until the publication of the decree their fate had not been as much as alluded to in the Soviet press, only helps to underline the iniquity of Stalin's nationality policy and the reluctance of his successors to break decisively with it.*

*This account is based largely on The Soviet Deportation of Nationalities, by Robert Conquest (London, Macmillan & Co. Ltd., and New York, St. Martin's Press, 1960).