The Saber and Scroll Journal Volume 8, Number 3, Spring 2020 | Page 64

Soviet Russia’s Reaction to t
Implications of the Suppr
states; and to replace the memories
of individuals and communities
with the narrative of
the new imagined community—
the Soviet people ... the Soviets
moved to destroy the institutional
and individual memory-bearers.
Examples include the dissolution
of the Jewish Anti-Fascist
Committee, the only representative
body for Jews in the USSR,
and the execution of its most
prominent members ... It deported
en masse members of the
intelligentsia from the Union’s
western territories. In all these
cases, any attempts at recollection
were considered attempts to
resist the official narrative and to
advance an opposing narrative
based upon other values. 35
“Although the number of Jewish party
leaders remained high in the immediate
postwar years [in the Soviet bloc],
the percentage of Jews in the state apparatus
began to fall after 1948.” 36 This
Soviet attempt to limit Jewish presence
in Soviet society lasted a while longer
under Stalin’s successors, 37 but it was
doomed to fail.
A new generation of Soviet Jews
“began reawakening to their roots, emboldened
by Israel’s victory in the Six-
Day War in 1967.” Jewish communities
in places like Kiev and Riga (which
were occupied by the Nazis during the
war) saw “gatherings at the killing fields
outside of town, where for the first
time Kaddish was said for the dead—
no longer anonymous ‘victims of fascism.’
This was where the campaign to
2