Perhaps the most bizarre of all Stalin’s nationality experiments was the creation of a Jewish Autonomous Region in Siberia in 1934 as a Jewish national “home.” Popularly known as Birobidzhan, after the name of its administrative center on the Bira River (a tributary of the Amur), it was supposed to attract Jews with a pioneering spirit then living within restricted administrative areas of Jewish Settlement, or the Pale. Stalin had originally toyed with the idea of designating the Crimea as their homeland, as part of a larger plan to destroy the Crimean Tatar nation. Jewish agricultural communes were set up on the Crimean Peninsula, but the Tatars resisted, and a large tract of land (twice the size of Palestine) was selected in Siberia instead. The climate, however, was harsh, and the region remote and about as far from biblical Judea as one could get. Nevertheless, widespread propaganda urged young Jewish enthusiasts to migrate there and start building their own state – based, of course, on Communist, not religious, principles.
Most Jews correctly recognized the scheme as an attempt to create a new Pale by another name, through the voluntary Siberian exile of the whole Russian Jewish community. Nevertheless, a little army of seven thousand die-hard pioneers set out; when they arrived, they found a small railway depot off the Trans-Siberian and a few wooden shacks surrounded by swamp. No roads led to the world beyond. In time, through extraordinary effort, the settlers established a town, furnished it with electric power, built facilities for making textiles, clothing, and prefabricated housing, and in reclaimed plots of ground sowed oats, buckwheat, and rice. Some of the local mineral wealth was also tapped. Their progress, however, never led to a general migration, and eventually the Jews became just another minority in their own state. Of course, it was never intended that they cohere into a truly national force. So Birobidzhan remained, as one enthusiast about Soviet Siberia was constrained to put it, “a sterile political idea devoid of any economic or emotional attraction to Soviet Jewry.”768
Having failed to induce the Jews to “concentrate” themselves, Stalin, in the Gulag’s last gasp, undertook to do it by force. This produced the so-called “Doctors’ Plot” of 1953, which recapitulated the Kirov assassination as a pretext for another purge. In effect, it alleged that a number of doctors (mostly Jews) had murdered Andrei Zhdanov, head of the Leningrad Party Organization, in 1948, and planned to murder other Party and government leaders, including Stalin himself. The authorities took steps to prepare the Soviet public psychologically for a massive resettlement of Jews to “reservations” in Siberia, supposedly in order to protect them from “popular anger,” but in fact a large-scale operation had already begun two years before, “the purpose of which,” wrote one witness, Stajner, “was to complete what Hitler had begun.”769 In 1951, fifty thousand Jews had been deported to the banks of the Lena, and in the following spring, “Jewish transports” began to arrive at Tayshet. The public announcement of the “Doctors’ Plot” was merely the signal for a pogrom. Jews were thrown out of offices and factories, dismissed from universities and trade schools, and imprisoned as “Zionists,” “terrorists,” and “American spies.” Only the death of Stalin in March 1953 spared them an unspeakable end.
Stalin hated poets even more than he hated Jews or Baptists, and his whole terror machine, as Osip Mandelstam once remarked, was designed “to destroy not only people, but the intellect itself.”770 Anna Akhmatova’s former husband, the poet Nikolai Gumilyev, was shot as a counterrevolutionary in August 1921; the Leningrad poet Nikolai Zabolotsky, arrested in March 1938, ended up after numerous interim torments at Komsomolsk-on-the-Amur, at hard labor; the theater director Vsevolod Meyerhold was arrested, tortured, and finally shot on February 2, 1940, and his wife was later found brutally murdered in their apartment with her eyes cut out. The poet Marina Tsvetaeva’s husband and daughter both fell victim to the repressions, as did Tsvetaeva herself, driven to suicide in August 1941. Osip Mandelstam, already under suspicion as an “internal emigre,” was arrested in 1934 for having written an epigram critical of Stalin, and after a fierce interrogation was sentenced to three years’ exile at Cherdyn, a small provincial town in the Urals. There he suffered a nervous breakdown and attempted suicide. Allowed to complete his exile at the more hospitable Voronezh on the Don, he returned to Moscow in May 1937, only to be rearrested and sentenced to five years’ forced labor in the Far East. On December 27, 1938, starved and half-demented, he died at Vtoraya Rechka Transit Camp near Vladivostok, and was buried in a common grave.
Less well known is the fate of one of his colleagues, the remarkable Ukrainian poet and scholar Mikhaylo Dray-Khmara. Born in Kiev on October 10, 1889, Dray-Khmara had studied at the University of St. Petersburg, and there came under the influence of both Alexander Blok and Mandelstam, whose varying examples helped him to imagine what an indigenous Ukrainian literature might achieve. In 1917, he returned to Kiev, taught philology at the first all-Ukrainian university, and (fluent in nineteen languages) translated a number of classic works into his native tongue. “Like Yeats in Ireland,” wrote Padraic Colum in tribute, he “aimed at creating a poetry free of propaganda and national self-glorification.”771
Such a man could not remain free for long. In February 1933, Dray-Khmara was arrested on a vague charge of counterrevolutionary activity, released but dismissed from the university, and forbidden to publish his work. Two and a half years later, on September 4, 1935, he was rearrested, slandered at the instigation of the NKVD, and condemned to five years’ hard labor in Siberia. Among the specific accusations made against him was that he had received correspondence from abroad, based on a postcard found in his apartment with a Bulgarian stamp. When Dray-Khmara pointed out that the date on the postcard was 1912, before the Soviet government had begun to exist, he was told: “It is not important if it existed or not; the fact remains that you had correspondence with our enemy Bulgaria.”772
Among the few personal effects he managed to take with him was his own unfinished translation of Dante’s Purgatorio.
Almost all testimonials about the Gulag come from those who survived it. Dray-Khmara did not survive, but a surprising number of his remarkable letters did, and this correspondence, recently come to light, gives rare voice to a great man’s demise.
“Dearest and beloved,” he wrote to his wife and daughter on May 27, 1936, “at the beginning of June I shall probably be in Vladivostok... From Vladivostok I will write to you. I will be going with a convoy of about 1,500 prisoners. Twice a day we receive hot water. On the way to Mariinsk (before Krasnoyarsk) I was in a ‘stolypin’ car (a freight car adapted for the movement of prisoners) with only dry rations in the way of food. I shall have enough sugar to Vladivostok; in Novosibirsk I bought one kilogram of fat for 5 rubles.”773
After he got to Kolyma, his ultimate destination, he put the bravest face on things. “In Kolyma one year counts as two; that is why I hope to be free earlier,” he wrote on June 2, 1936, and a few months later asked his wife to send him only “bacon, garlic, and dried fruits... What I really need are fats and Vitamin C.” Meanwhile, he was put to work in the mines, forced to stand knee-deep in icy water washing gold, and sent on logging details. Somehow under these extreme conditions he managed to read sequestered works by Dickens, Balzac, Shakespeare, Sholom-Aleichem, and others – including Dostoyevsky’s Notes from the House of the Dead (which he found somewhat self-indulgent) – and had begun to teach himself English. He made light of the cold: “Now the temperature reaches -45 degrees, but I don’t feel it; that is the same as -15 degrees in Kiev. This is because of the absence of wind, and the continental climate.” At night, he slept on a mattress stuffed with woodchips, and a pillow filled with grass. “But after the work,” he wrote, “one goes to sleep quickly and does not feel whether the bed is soft or hard.”