Molotov’s Magic Lantern

In an interview on 20th-Century Russia

Your fourth choice is Yuri Slezkine’s provocative The Jewish Century.

Slezkine is an ex-Russian Jewish historian who now works in the United States. And this is a fascinating heterodox piece of 20th-century history which has annoyed some people quite a lot. That’s because he says our sense of 20th-century Jewish history has been distorted by the eventual success of the American Jewish experience as the main metropolitan one – that, he says, was not true for most of the 20th century.

He uses this metaphor from the story of Fiddler On the Roof about the milkman’s three daughters. One of whom goes to Palestine, one of whom goes to America and one of whom goes to Moscow. And he says that if you had to rank them in the importance people thought they had in the 20th century, America comes last, Palestine in the middle and Moscow is the most important Jewish city, and the central Jewish experience of the 20th century is the Soviet one. He thinks it wasn’t an experience of persecution and state-sponsored anti-Semitism until later.

The bit that really annoys people is when he says in the 1920s and 30s the Soviet Union was a brilliantly successful state for Jews. It was the only officially philo-Semitic state on the planet. And it was somewhere where Jewish life thrived and there was incredible social mobility and educational opportunity for Jews. He has spun out of this a very engaging and, I suspect, deliberately annoying account of history which should certainly be read against the pieties of the present.

But do you agree with him?

I think some bits are undeniable. But communism is a bit embarrassing now. It is getting hard to get people to own up to the fact that once upon a time they thought it was sensible. It was part of the centre of gravity of the 20th century. What I agree with about it is that it brings an aspect of the 20th century into view. One of the hardest things for us to remember about Stalinism is that as well as being a system of horrors it also represented modernity and social mobility and opportunity for lots of people. In a horribly straightforward way the great purges opened up an incredible number of jobs, as we saw with Khrushchev, who is a fine example of Russia being a land of opportunity built on numerous graves.