Unwelcome Return Home: Jews, Anti-Semitism and the Housing Problem in Post-War Kyiv

1 Anti-Semitism in Kyiv before World War II

Judeophobia and anti-Semitism in Kyiv have deep historical roots. Religious intolerance of Jews in this Holy Orthodox Christian city, envy of the professional success of Jews, and later political and racial anti-Semitism contributed to the hatred of Jews by much of the Kyiv gentile population. Anti-Jewish pogroms occurred in Kyiv in 1881, 1905 and several times during the civil war (1918–1920). The blood libel Beilis affair (1911–1913) was initiated by the Kyiv Black Hundreds organization “Two-Headed Eagle.” Kyiv was an outpost of Russian nationalism and chauvinism before the February 1917 Revolution.

During the interwar period the Soviet authorities suppressed popular anti-Semitism, but it continued to persist in everyday life. For example, my late high school history teacher Alexander Yakovlevich Kravets (1929–2006) told me how he found out that he is Jewish.^[1] Once when he was six years old (1935) his parents went to the theater and left him at home in their communal apartment with their roommates (usually three to five different families lived in a communal apartment). One of these roommates shared with another her recollections from the time of the civil war. She vividly described how petliurovtsy (as members of the Ukrainian National Army were called) put a ‘Yid’ on a pike and gleefully mimicked how the ‘Yid’ pitifully screamed and tried to escape. Alexander Yakovlevich told me that everybody in apartment was laughing at the story, except him, because he did not understand the meaning of the word ‘Yid.’ So, he asked the woman what does ‘Yid’ mean. All the roommates began to laugh at him, because he was Jewish and did not understand the meaning of the word ‘Yid.’

Anti-Semitism intensified in Kyiv with the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union. When anti-Semites were no longer afraid of punishment by the Soviet authorities, they began to speak openly against Jews. Thus, Klepfer-Chumak, a female resident of Kyiv said in late July 1941, “Hitler will come soon and … he will kill all Jews. Then all of us will be better off.”^[2] “A lecturer named P.M. Korbut expressed similar thoughts on August 6, 1941: “… The Jews derailed the war. They were the first to sow panic and devastation. They brought the country to a catastrophe.”^[3] Historian Igor Shchupak wrote that some anti-Semites in Kyiv were “waiting impatiently for the Germans’ arrival” to organize a pogrom in the city and kill Jews.^[4]

2 Babyn Yar

The Nazi occupation of Kyiv unleashed and encouraged popular anti-Semitism in the city and promoted it to a new level. Kyiv was the first large European city where almost all Jews, who remained in the city during the occupation, were massacred.^[5] Historians continue to debate the widely varying estimates of the number of Jews murdered in Babyn Yar in Kyiv.^[6] Depending upon the source, the number of Jews killed in Babyn Yar was anywhere from 33,771 to 150,000.

It is impossible to know with any precision how many Jews were in Kyiv when the Nazis occupied the city on September 19, 1941. We don’t know how many Jews were able to evacuate, how many Kyivan Jews were mobilized into the Red Army, or how many Jewish refugees from other places were in the city. At the time of the chaotic retreat of the Soviet Army, nobody thought about such statistics. A few days after the German occupation, on September 28, Einsatzgruppe C, the Nazi paramilitary extermination unit in Kyiv, reported, “There are probably 150,000 Jews in Kiev. To check this information has been impossible thus far.”^[7]

When the Nazis occupied Kyiv, they could not identify Jews themselves. The majority of Kyivan Jews were quite assimilated and did not look different from their gentile neighbors. But, according to Timothy Snyder, “In Kyiv, Ukrainians and Russians helped the German Order Police find and register Jews before the mass shooting at Babyi Iar.”^[8] Thus, due to the collaboration of some part of the local gentile population with the Nazis, almost all Jews who were in the city during the Nazi occupation were executed in Babyn Yar.

German statistics of the number of Jews massacred in Babyn Yar are not reliable, because they counted the number of executed Jews only for two days, September 29-30, 1941. Karel Berkhoff wrote that the Nazis already began killing Jews in Babyn Yar on September 27 and continued after September 30 “at least until the end of October”.^[9] Then periodic executions of Jewish and gentile prisoners of the war, partisans and others continued in Babyn Yar through the entire period of the Nazi occupation of Kyiv until November 1943. Only a few dozen Jews who were hidden by their gentile neighbors survived in Kyiv the Nazi occupation. The rest of the Kyivan Jews who survived the war were those who went to evacuation or who returned from the front. However, surviving Jews were not welcomed upon their return to Kyiv.

3 The Struggle for Apartments

Some Jewish and non-Jewish evacuees returned to Kyiv soon after the liberation of the city, before the end of the war. Although Kyiv was in ruins, the conditions of life in evacuation were harsh, so many evacuees hoped for a better life and to recover their property and former apartments when they came back to their native city. This was an “unauthorized” return of evacuees. Historian Solomon Schwarz wrote,

Generally, return without special permission was not authorized until August 1945; from then on, organized re-evacuation was carried through by special trains. Its start was reported late in August from Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. A correspondent from Tashkent wrote:

These last days the mass re-evacuation of Uzbekistan’s Jewish population has begun. In addition to those hundreds and thousands who moved westward with the regular railroad traffic, special trains for re-evacuated are now being dispatched from time to time.

This Tashkent correspondent witnessed the departure of a special train that took 2,500 Jews from Tashkent to the Ukraine and White Russia; several more special trains were scheduled for the following weeks. Similar reports abounded.^[10]

However, when surviving Jews came back to Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities, they encountered an utterly new level of vicious, violent anti-Semitism that did not exist in Ukraine before the war. This eruption of popular anti-Semitism can be explained partially by the influence of Nazi propaganda on the local gentile population, and partially by the awful conditions of the life in the ruined cities and towns. According to the report of the Extraordinary State Commission for the Investigation of German-Fascist Crimes Committed on Ukrainian Territory, over 6000 apartment buildings and houses (over 40 percent of all living accommodations) were destroyed in Kyiv during the war, and over 200,000 Kyivans were homeless in 1944.^[11]

In this situation, many gentiles in Kyiv broke into the empty apartments of the evacuees and then refused to return them to their legal inhabitants, when the evacuees returned home. When Jews came back and attempted to return to their apartments, this provoked a sharp anti-Semitic reaction. Thus, most ‘re-evacuated’ Jews in Kyiv failed to regain their apartments and other property. Appeals to the authorities or even official court orders to restore to Jews their property, usually did not work.

In January – March 2021 I conducted twelve interviews for the Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center with Jews – Kyivans who survived in evacuation during the Second World War. Only two of twelve Jewish families were able to return to their pre-war apartments or rooms in communal apartments. Ten other families had to find another place to live in basements, barracks, rooms in semi-ruined houses or sharing a room in a dormitory for workers.

Even when the authorities decided in favor of the Jewish owners of apartments or room in a communal apartments, local gentiles often refused to vacate the property for Jews. Thus the Jew Kiva Aronovich Vekselman wrote to Ilia Ehrenburg in August 1944 that his room in a communal apartment was occupied by his neighbor while he and his family were evacuated to Kazakhstan.^[12] Vekselman complained that, “despite a whole slew of resolutions from the procuracy office of the Kaganovich district of Kiev and resolutions of the soviet of the same district about freeing up a room for my family, the room has still not been vacated.”^[13] Certainly such disobedience of official resolutions by the gentile population shows the weakness of Soviet authorities in Kyiv immediately after liberation of the city and in the post-war years. Clearly gentiles did not need to worry much about punishment for disobedience of the authorities, nor about administrative eviction.

A similar story was told to me by my mother Liudmila Brovarnik (b.1939) about the return of her family from evacuation.^[14] When my maternal grandparents returned to Kyiv with their two children in 1946, they found their apartment occupied by gentiles. My grandfather, Il’ia Vladimirovich Brovarnik, appealed to the court. The judge decided that, due to the shortage of apartments in Kyiv, one of two rooms in the apartment would be returned to my grandparents and the other room left to the gentile family, which settled there during the war. However, when my grandparents attempted to reoccupy their one room, the head of the gentile family threatened that he would slaughter my grandparents’ children (my mother and her sister) at night if my grandfather dared settle there. My grandparents decided that it would be impossible to live with such rabid anti-Semites in one apartment and looked for an alternative place to live.

Through the personal connection of my grandfather with the mayor of Kyiv Fedor Chebotarev (my grandfather was a good dentist and had treated Chebotarev), they received a basement on Andreevskii Descent Street that they only had to share with big rats. Even such a place to live was difficult to obtain in Kyiv after the war. My mother recalled that the rats made holes in the ceiling and came to their basement apartment from the first and second floors and ran on the walls and ceiling. After the war Andreevskii Descent Street had a bad reputation, and there were many hooligans (shpana). When my mother returned home from her elementary school the local boys often scared her with their German Shepherd, by commanding the dog, “Go get the Jew!”^[15]

Rebecca Manley pointed out that the Soviet authorities often resolved apartment disputes “in favor of the rights of the families of servicemen.”^[16] This obviously explains the “good luck” of my paternal grandparents who were able to regain their one room apartment after the liberation of Kyiv. My grandfather, Boris Yakovlevich Khiterer, was a senior lieutenant in the Red Army and fought on the front for the entire war. When his wife and son returned to Kyiv in 1944, their apartment was occupied by gentiles, who refused to leave. My grandfather received a 10 day leave and came to Kyiv to visit his family and was able to retrieve his apartment. My father Mikhail Borisovich Khiterer told me that his father was able to recover their apartment, because he was an officer, and because the head of the gentile family which occupied the apartment was a Nazi collaborator, who had previously been arrested. So, when my grandfather came to the apartment with a policeman, the Nazi collaborator’s wife and other family members quickly disappeared without further resistance.

My grandfather was the luckiest person in his extended family. All his and his wife’s relatives were unable to return to their apartments after the war. So, they all came to live with my grandfather’s family and ultimately thirteen people were living in his one-room apartment. They stayed there until Nikita Khrushchev began his mass apartment construction program in the beginning of the 1960s. My aunt Elena Sokolovsky recalled that the one large room (before the revolution in the house was a bakery) was divided into cubicles by plywood boards, but not to the ceiling, because the room had only one fireplace. The two restrooms for the six apartments in the building were outside: one for men and one for women.

However, even military service on the front did not always help Jews return to their apartments. Most surviving Kyivan Jews were unable to get their apartments back. Their appeals to the authorities, where they mentioned their family members who served or were killed on the front or who perished during the Holocaust, did not help much, if at all. Six members of Tsil’ia Solomonovna Sokolovsky’s family were killed on the front during the war: her husband, stepson and all four of her brothers. She returned to Kyiv with her two children from Siberia after the war and applied to the authorities asking to return her apartment or provide for her another apartment or room. However, all her requests were rejected. She rented a room and her teenage son had to go to work so that they could afford it.^[17]

During the war Kyivan Moisei Volynsky (b. 1936) lived with his mother in evacuation in the Urals. His father Iakov Volynsky was drafted to the Red Army and was killed on the front. When Moisei and his mother returned to Kyiv in 1945 their apartment was occupied by gentiles. They could not find any apartment or room where they could live. His mother went to live in a factory dorm for women and put Moisei in an orphanage, because she was not allowed to live in the dorm with her son. Moisei lived several years in the orphanage until after a long court process his mother received their apartment back. Moisei recalled that many Jewish children lived in the orphanage for the same reason: their relatives did not have a place to live or were so poor that they could not afford to support their life.^[18] Thus the hopes of many Jews who returned to Kyiv were dashed: they thought they were coming home, but they not only could not regain their apartments and belongings, but they had a hard time finding any place to live in their native city at all. In evacuation the local authorities often assigned some place to stay for newcomers. When Jews returned to Kyiv, they often discovered that finding a place to live was their own problem and the authorities did not give them any support at all.

Sofia Kuperman from Kyiv wrote in her letter applying for legal assistance to a lawyer, dated February 22, 1946, that she went

from office to office for action on the court decision that allowed her to move back into the apartment that once belonged to her. Using not only legal arguments but emotional ones, Kuperman wrote that eleven members of her family were killed by the Nazis during the occupation. The first secretary of the Party in their region, whom she finally got to see (she does not give his name), replied, “Who supplies you with hostile disinformation on the alleged martyrdom of Jews? Why don’t you look for your tortured relatives in Tashkent somewhere? They just changed their names and are living happily ever after. And where did you hide? Not in partisan trenches, I’ll bet. You fed your face in the rear of the front and now you want an apartment too. I’ll pass your complaint on to the NKVD, they’ll take care of it for sure.^[19]

The apartment crisis affected not only Jews, but also the gentile population, however for Jews it was especially severe. Manley wrote, “At a distinct disadvantage in the emerging hierarchy of entitlement were Jews. As in the reevacuation more generally, Jews seeking to reclaim housing in the previously occupied territories faced particular difficulties.”^[20] She partially explained these difficulties by anti-Semitism, partially by the sharp apartment crisis, when gentiles who stayed in the occupied territories moved into empty apartments. Manley showed in her work that Jews re-evacuated to Odesa had a similar problem retrieving their apartments and belongings as Jews in Kyiv.^[21] However, the apartment crisis in Kyiv was even worse, because the city was more ruined than Odesa during the war.

4 Jewish Pogrom in Kyiv

The severe apartment crisis in Kyiv provoked strong anti-Semitism and anti-Jewish violence. Many gentiles who occupied Jewish apartment during the war and used Jewish belongings did not want to return them to their rightful owners. After the liberation of Kyiv from Nazi occupation popular anti-Semitism erupted in the city without the permission, encouragement, or approval of the local or higher authorities. Ukrainian authorities were even concerned for a while about how to deal with this phenomenon, not so much due to their compassion for Jews, but more likely because they were afraid of their responsibility to Moscow for street disorders. The Security Service of Ukraine (NKGB) admitted to a rise in popular anti-Semitism in Ukraine after its liberation from the Nazis. According to a top-secret report of the People’s Commissar of the Security Service of Ukraine to Nikita Khrushchev, the Chairman of the Council of Ministers of Ukraine and the First Secretary of the Communist Party of Ukraine in 1944–47, “About Anti-Semitism in Ukraine,” dated September 13, 1944, the Kyiv population had called for a pogrom on June 22, 1944 (the third anniversary of the beginning of the Nazi–Soviet War) and the local gentile population attacked and beat Kyivan Jews on the streets.^[22]

Jews who returned to Kyiv from evacuation were deeply traumatized by the loss of their relatives and friends in Babyn Yar. They felt that they needed to do something to commemorate the victims of Babyn Yar. However, when the Yiddish poet David Hofshtein attempted to organize “a mass demonstration [according to another source, a meeting ^[23]] of the Jewish population on the anniversary of the German massacre at Babi Yar” in 1944, the authorities forbade the demonstration, claiming that it might “provoke anti-Semitism.”^[24] And probably the authorities were right. Considering the militant anti-Semitic mood of much of the gentile population, such a Jewish demonstration could have incited a pogrom in the city. But a Jewish pogrom broke out in Kyiv anyway the following year.

On September 5, 1945, the Vice Commissar of Interior Affairs of the Ukrainian SSR, I. L. Loburenko, reported to the secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine, D. Korotchenko, about the pre-pogrom situation in Kyiv after NKGB Lieutenant Iosif Rosenstein killed two local anti-Semites the prior day.^[25] The events developed as follows. During the war Ivan Grabar and his mother occupied the apartment of the Jewish family Rybchinsky, which went to evacuation to Uzbekistan. Grabar was drafted to the Red Army in the beginning of the war, but soon deserted out of the Nazi encirclement and returned to Kyiv. He stayed with his mother in Kyiv during the Nazi occupation. After the liberation of Kyiv, Grabar was drafted to the Red Army again in November 1943. The Rybchinsky family returned to Kyiv from evacuation in February 1945 and through the court got back their apartment. Grabar’s mother and his relatives wrote letters to Ivan, demanding that he come to Kyiv and help them recover the apartment. So, Ivan Grabar and his friend Nikolai Melnikov received leave from the army from August 16 to September 8, 1945 and came to Kyiv. However, Grabar’s hopes of getting back Rybchinsky’s apartment were soon dashed.

A few days before his murder, Grabar came to the Office of the Public Prosecutor and told the prosecutor, “We fight on the front and Yids occupy our apartments.”^[26] Grabar stated openly his anti-Semitic views and said he dreamt of revenge against all Jews. On September 4 Grabar and Melnikov were drunk on the street when a Jew Iosif Rosenstein passed by them.

On September 4, 1945, at 5.30 p.m., Rosenstein, who worked for the NKGB as a radio technician, was returning home from the grocery store dressed in civilian clothes. Grabar and Melnikov insulted and beat Rosenstein. Some passers-by came to Rosenstein’s defence, and he was able to get home, but saw where the anti-Semites went after harassing him. At home, Rosenstein put on his NKGB uniform, took his service pistol, and went to the courtyard of Grabar’s mother’s house, where Melnikov was also present. Rosenstein’s wife followed him.^[27] Rosenstein demanded that Grabar and Melnikov come with him to the police station. But they refused and continued to insult Rosenstein. Rosenstein lost control and shot and killed both of his abusers in the courtyard of Grabar’s house. Hearing the screaming of Grabar’s mother, a large crowd gathered, shouting antisemitic slogans and severely beating Rosenstein’s wife and a passing Jew named Boris Spektor.^[28]

The Kyiv police quickly arrived at the site of the killings and attempted to pacify the crowd that had gathered there, but the crowd resisted the authorities. Mounted police then came and restored order.^[29] Rosenstein was immediately arrested and was soon executed according to the decision of a military tribunal.^[30]

The funeral of the anti-Semites shot by Rosenstein, which took place on September 7. 1945, turned into open violence against Kyiv’s Jews, with some three hundred rioters participating. Kyiv Jews Kotliar, Zabrodin, Pesin, and Miloslavsky wrote a letter on October 16, 1945, addressed to the “Central Committee of the Communist Party, Comrade I. V. Stalin, NKVD USSR, Comrade Beria and the editor of the newspaper Pravda Comrade Pospelov,” noting that the funerals had turned into a pogrom:

The funerals were organized in a special way. The coffins were carried on the most populous streets [downtown Kyiv] and then the procession went to the Jewish market. This procession was set up by the pogrom-makers. They began to assault Jews. One hundred Jews were beaten up on this day, thirty-six of them were taken to Kyiv hospitals with serious injuries, and five of them died on the same day.^[31]

Schwarz reported that sixteen Jews were killed during the pogrom in Kyiv.^[32]

Kotliar, Zabrodin, Pesin, and Miloslavsky lamented in their letter that they could not recognize their city “not only by its outlook, but also due to the existing political situation there.”^[33] They said they felt the strong influence of Nazi propaganda:

The words ‘Yid’ or ‘Let’s beat the Yids’ you can hear everywhere in the capital of Ukraine: in trams, trolleybuses, stores, markets, and even in some Soviet offices.

In some more latent form, it [anti-Semitism] is present in Communist organizations, up to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine.^[34]

The authors of the letter wrote that the pogrom was a result of the rabid anti-Semitism that raged in Kyiv. They stated that every day many Jews were insulted and beaten in Kyiv and the authorities did not defend them.^[35]

Ukrainian authorities also reported on the pogrom mood in the city and took measures to reinforce security.^[36] As shown on September 8, 1945, in a secret report of the People’s Commissar of Internal Affairs of the Ukrainian SSR, V. Riasnoi, to the Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine, Korotchenko, the local authorities took seriously the threat of an even larger pogrom in Kyiv. Riasnoi wrote,

Considering the inflamed condition of some part of the population of the city due to the spreading of bogus rumors and agitation directed against Jews, we reinforced patrols in the city, giving special attention to the markets, gathering places, and the places of residence of relatives of the murdered Grabar and Mel’nikov.^[37]

It is obvious that without the measures taken by the Soviet authorities, anti-Jewish violence in the city would likely have taken on even larger dimensions.

The demobilized veteran M. Vaslits wrote in his letter to the newspaper Pravda that the housing question was the main reason for rise of anti-Semitism in Kyiv. He pointed out that “those who had been here with the Germans had already in most cases succeeded in settling. The effort to evict these settlers has led to spread of anti-Semitism everywhere and in everything.”^[38]

Unfortunately, the Kyiv pogrom was not unique. Anti-Jewish violence occurred in other Ukrainian cities and towns, although on a smaller scale. Antisemitic violence was often sparked by the attempts of Jews to return to their pre-war apartments. Even if Jews came to their apartments with court orders, the occupants still refused to move out. On August 25, 1944, the Jewish dentist Yuzef Markovich Petelevich attempted to return to his apartment in Dnipropetrovsk (now Dnipro), where Pelageya Orlova had settled. Petelevich had a court order giving him the right to the apartment, and Orlova, according to the court’s decision, was to be resettled in a less comfortable apartment. During her forced move, which was demanded by ‘administrative order’, Orlova resisted, and at the sound of her screaming, a crowd of about two hundred people gathered, shouting, “Beat the Yids, save Russia!”, “Death to the Yids”, “Thirty-seven thousand Yids were slaughtered [by the Nazis in Dnipropetrovsk]; we’ll kill the rest, etc.”^[39]

Then several members of the crowd attacked Petelevich with stones and tried to break into a neighbouring apartment, in which a Jew named Ulanovsky lived: “Because the apartment was locked, the above-mentioned group of people brought an axe, broke the door, and burst into the apartment, where they danced and shouted antisemitic words while setting about smashing the furniture.”^[40] The Dnipropetrovsk police dispersed the crowd and arrested the three most active pogrom-makers.^[41]

In March 1945 the Bulletin of the Rescue Committee of the Jewish Agency for Palestine published the testimony of a Ukrainian Jew who had escaped from Kharkiv and the Soviet Union in 1944. It stated:

Ukrainians meet returning Jews with animosity. In the first weeks after the liberation of Kharkiv [the city was liberated on August 23, 1943], no Jews dared go into the street at night. The situation improved only after the intervention of the authorities, who reinforced police patrols in the city. There were many cases when Jews were beaten up on the market squares, and in one incident a Jew was killed in the market by a Ukrainian. The police were summoned to the spot of the crime; however, the peasants who were present during the murder began to quarrel with the police; all of them were arrested together with the killer…

Returning to their apartments, the Jews received only a small portion of their belongings. When they appealed to the court against the Ukrainians who had possession of their items, other Ukrainians supported the thieves and provided false testimony in the court.

The Ukrainian authorities are infected to a significant extent with antisemitism. Appeals made by Jews are not considered in an appropriate way. When the [Kyiv] Commercial Institute returned from Kharkiv to Kyiv, Jewish professors asked for permission to return too. Their request was rejected … The Jewish Theatre did not receive permission to return to Kharkiv. The radio programme in the Jewish language [Yiddish] was not renewed. The official answer to all complaints by Jews stated that antisemitism, through which the Germans had poisoned the mentality of the population, could be eradicated only gradually.^[42]

5 Anti-Semitism and Soviet Authorities

Anti-Semitism metastasized into all strata of Soviet society. On the popular level it was often more open and violent, while in the government it was more covert. The letters cited above from Kyivan Jews showed that they tried to struggle against anti-Semitism, applying to higher authorities in Moscow and for legal help from lawyers. They were sure that anti-Semitism contradicted socialist internationalist principals and that the higher authorities would restore order.

However, the authorities received complaints not only from Jews, but also from anti-Semites. For example, Ivan Sergeevich Soloviev, a Russian, born in 1902, wrote to the Chairman of the Party Control Commission of the Central Committee A.A. Andreev that the Russian people always “was and is the leading nation” in the country:

We saw who sold and betrayed the Motherland – this is the damn Yids, seated in the rear, in the second echelons and receiving orders for alien blood…

What is going on here in Ukraine? How did the Jews come to own all of Ukraine? It is they with their Yid snouts who torture Russian people in Ukraine. For money they purchased many people, even Ukrainian district and city leaders. Who sells passports on the markets? Jews. Who is selling awards? Jews. Who is killing Russian people? Jews. Who is throwing people out of their apartments in the winter in Kyiv? Jews.^[43]

Soloviev wrote that Jews threw out him, a disabled veteran of World War II, from his apartment in the winter. But he also mentioned that before World War II he lived in Siberia and settled in Kyiv after the liberation of the city. Soloviev obviously occupied an apartment that belonged to some Jewish family before the war. He wrote that “it is necessary to exterminate all of these parasites (i.e., Jews).” Soloviev said also that he gathered a meeting with twenty people, and they decided to begin a “ruthless struggle with these parasites.” He claimed that this opinion is shared by many people in Kyiv. He said that there were signs appearing in the city “Beat Yids, save Russia!” and he asked why the government in Moscow ignored this will of the people.^[44]

Soloviev proposed his solution for the Jewish question:

1. Exile to the last men all Jews to Siberia, and then resettle part of Siberians to Ukraine so that Siberian Russian people can taste life.

2. Perform the cleansing of Jews from all state offices of Ukraine … and the Army …^[45]

Martin Blackwell wrote that the rise of anti-Semitism in Kyiv “left the Stalin regime … with little choice but to ratify the marginalization of Jewish interests in that city.”^[46] The Ukrainian authorities tried to limit the re-evacuation of Jews to Ukraine, following the policy of less Jews, less anti-Semitism. Lieutenant General of the NKVD Pavel Sudoplatov wrote in his memoirs that he was present in the office of the First Secretary of the Communist Party of Uzbekistan, Usman Yusupov, during a telephone conversation that Yusupov had with Khrushchev in 1947:

Khrushchev complained to him [Yusupov] that Jews evacuated during the war to Tashkent and Samarkand ‘are flying to Ukraine like ravens’. In this conversation, which took place in 1947, he [Khrushchev] claimed that he did not have room to accept all of them, because the city [Kyiv] was in ruins, and it was necessary to stop this flood; otherwise, pogroms would begin in Kyiv.^[47]

Ukrainian authorities tried to prevent the further influx of Jews into the city. They required for return documents which proved that the Jews had lived in Kyiv before the war and that they are needed at their workplaces. So, it became quite hard for many Jews to return from evacuation to Kyiv. The Kyiv State Jewish Theater was not allowed to return from evacuation in Kazakhstan to Kyiv after the war, on the pretext that their theater building was destroyed during the war and no other building was available. Instead of Kyiv, the theater was sent ‘temporarily’ to Chernovtsy and was subsequently liquidated in 1950 during the anti-cosmopolitan campaign.^[48]

But, despite all obstacles, most Kyivan Jews who survived the Holocaust returned to the city. The Kyivan Jewish population increased rapidly after the war. By January 1, 1947, Jews already constituted 18.8 percent of the Kyiv population: 132,467 of 704,609 city inhabitants.^[49] In 1959 153,466 Jews (13.8 percent of the total population) lived in Kyiv.^[50] Many of these Jews moved to Kyiv from provincial towns and shtetls after the war, often without authorization.

Thus, the Soviet authorities failed to prevent the influx of Jews to the city, as well as prevent violent anti-Semitic incidents. Obviously, Khrushchev was having problems handling the situation regarding anti-Semitism in Ukraine. Popular anti-Semitism in Kyiv and Ukraine appeared to be stronger than the powerful Soviet repression machine. Solomon Schwarz wrote,

The Communist Party did not fight openly against Ukrainian anti-Semitism, but considering the danger of anti-Semitism, as the most popular form of the Ukrainian anti-Soviet mood, began a campaign against anti-Semitism in a covert manner, slowly adjusting the population to the fact of the promotion of Jews to important positions in different lines of work, including particularly [Communist] party work … It is possible that the realization of this policy was one of the goals for which Kaganovich was sent to Ukraine.^[51]

In March 1947 Khrushchev was dismissed from his position as the First Secretary of the Communist Party (Bolsheviks) of Ukraine (KP(b)U) and Lazar Moiseevich Kaganovich was appointed. The official explanation for this change was ‘the need to separate the posts of premier and First Secretary of the republic, but criticisms of [Khrushchev’s] agricultural performance appeared in the press as well.”^[52] Of course, when Stalin sent Kaganovich to Ukraine, the Jewish question was not his main consideration. The agricultural failure and famine in Ukraine in 1946–47 were the main reasons for Stalin’s dissatisfaction with Khrushchev’s performance. The struggle against all kinds of nationalism and chauvinism was a secondary task.^[53]

After Kaganovich arrived in Kyiv in the end of February 1947, Khrushchev disappeared from public view until September. Khrushchev retained the post of Ukrainian premier but did not actively participate in politics while Kaganovich was in Ukraine.^[54] Khrushchev wrote in his memoirs that he had been ill with pneumonia. However, Khrushchev’s biographers suggest that his ‘illness’ had more to do with politics. Perhaps Khrushchev feared that his dismissal from his position as First Secretary was the beginning of the end of his political career.^[55]

In May 1947 Kaganovich proposed a resolution, which was approved by the Central Committee of the KP(b)U, “on the improvement of ideological-political work with personnel and on the struggle against manifestations of bourgeois-nationalist ideology,” stating that nationalist forces in Ukraine use “the most disgusting weapon of fascist obscurantism—anti-Semitism.”^[56] On May 29, 1947, this document was sent to Stalin.

It is hard to say how successful Kaganovich would have been in suppressing anti-Semitism in Ukraine had he stayed longer in his position. His term as First Secretary of the KP(b)U continued only for several months: On December 15, 1947, Kaganovich received an order “to transfer his position as the First Secretary of the KP(b)U to Khrushchev and return to Moscow and again take up the position of Deputy Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the USSR.”^[57]

Why did Stalin recall Kaganovich to Moscow so soon? Perhaps one of the reasons was the explosion of popular anti-Semitism in Ukraine. With the arrival of Kaganovich to Ukraine anti-Semitism became even stronger. In December 1946 – beginning of Summer 1947 there was a famine in Ukraine. This was the result of the poor harvest of 1946, when due to drought, the plan for the collection of grain in Ukraine was only 52.4 percent fulfilled.^[58] When Kaganovich arrived in Ukraine the famine had already begun. The central Soviet government did not provide any help with grain, so Ukrainian leaders could not do much to improve the situation before the next harvest. Bread was distributed by vouchers allowing only 100–200 g per person per day. However, the bread vouchers were received only by working people, while children, pensioners and the disabled did not receive vouchers. The authorities organized free dining halls, which provided one poor meal per day for starving people, which did not help much. By Summer 1947 over one million people in Ukraine were suffering from starvation. In 1946–47 approximately 800 thousand died from famine in Ukraine. The situation improved only after the harvest of 1947.^[59]

Paradoxically the gentile population blamed their horrible living conditions and famine not on the higher Soviet authorities, but on Jews and speculators. This was “a popular motif in ballot inscriptions and anonymous notes” during the municipal elections in December 1947.

“Jews live well,” “Down with the Yids,” and “Beat the Yids” appeared regularly on ballots. There were also longer letters that combined, as does this one from December 1947, Bolshevik language with the language of prejudice: “I give my vote to the block of the communist and non-party people, and thank the Government, the party, and Comrade Stalin for abolition of rationing and the currency reform. However, there is one more request, namely, to remove Jewish speculators from Soviet trade.” The same year other voters expressed this sentiment in cruder terms: “We are voting for you, but how long will you torment us; you have allowed the Yids to live [well], while the workers are starving.” “It would be good if the Jews worked more and drank the workers’ blood less.” Since some of the hundreds of candidates in the municipal election of 1947 had Jewish names, seeing them on ballots prompted anti-Semitic voters to write things like “Yid, to Palestine!”, “Against. Not sure about her nationality,” or “We don’t need them.”^[60]

Anti-Semites in Kyiv were not afraid to openly demonstrate their hatred toward Jews who occupied high government positions, particularly the member of the Presidium of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Bolsheviks of the Soviet Union, Lazar Kaganovich. The following anti-Semitic incident occurred just before the appointment of Kaganovich as the First Secretary of the KP(b)U in March 1947. The Head of the Administrative Department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine I. Golynnyi wrote in a secret report to the Secretary of the Central Committee of Communist Party of Ukraine (KP(b)U)^[61] L.G. Mel’nikov on February 23, 1947:

The Head of Police Administration of Ministry of State Security (MGB) Ukrainian SSR comrade Rudenko informed me by phone about an incident that occurred yesterday at the 175th elective district of the city Kyiv.

Ermakov, a blind worker of the Association of Blind People, born in 1903, came to vote in an intoxicated condition, with his wife.

They received ballots for the election with the name of L.M. Kaganovich on one of them. Ermakov tore up the ballots and made anti-Semitic pronouncements in the presence of voters and members of the [election] commission.

The Regional Administration of MGB is checking the situation.^[62]

Perhaps the Soviet government considered the widespread anti-Semitic mood when they switched from the suppression of popular anti-Semitism to a policy of state anti-Semitism. After the war the Soviet authorities lost total control over the population. To re-establish control, they need to flow with, not against, the popular mood. This was clearly understood by the First Secretary of the KP(b)U Nikita Khrushchev, who allegedly said: “This is Ukraine! And it is not in our interest that Ukrainians should associate the return of Soviet power with the return of the Jews.”^[63] The suppression of popular anti-Semitism and the protection of Jews would undermine further the prestige of the Soviet authorities. On the contrary, by supporting the popular anti-Semitic mood, the Soviet authorities satisfied the desire of much the gentile population and became closer to their people. The use of popular anti-Semitism was also convenient, because it diverted the people’s anger about the famine and their miserable poor life from the Soviet authorities toward ‘Jewish bloodsuckers and speculators.’^[64]

Perhaps the Soviet leaders considered all these factors when they adopted the policy of state anti-Semitism in January 1948. Later disappointments of the Soviet authorities toward Israeli policies, reinforced state anti-Semitism. Soviet leaders were unhappy that the newly created State of Israel chose a pro-western, not pro-communist, developmental path.

The state anti-Semitic campaign began with the murder of the chairman of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, the prominent Jewish actor and director of the Moscow State Jewish Theater Solomon Mikhoels in January 1948 by the order of Stalin. In November 1948 the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee was dissolved and many of its members arrested. The struggle against popular anti-Semitism no longer continued because the Soviet regime itself adopted anti-Semitic policies. Soviet leaders who had earlier discouraged anti-Semitism began publicly to spread anti-Jewish prejudices to support the state’s anti-Semitic campaign and to fabricate the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee affair and the Jewish ‘Doctors’ Plot’. Jews became convenient scapegoats for the Soviet government, who blamed them for all the country’s internal problems and difficulties. The anti-Semitic mood in the Soviet Union was shared by the Soviet leaders and the general population. Popular anti-Semitism was even more dangerous for Jews because it was more violent, while Soviet state anti-Semitism was disguised under general campaigns directed against certain kinds of ‘enemies.’

Thus, the policy of state anti-Semitism and the anti-Jewish campaigns organized by Soviet leaders from 1948 until Stalin’s death on March 5, 1953 were in some ways a response to and an exploitation of the widely spread anti-Semitic sentiments among the common gentile people in the aftermath of the Second World War.

6 Conclusion

Russian Jewish poet Naum Korzhavin (pseudonym of Naum Mandel), who lived in Moscow and visited his native Kyiv in the summer of 1946, recalled in his memoirs that he encountered there “hard, overwhelming anti-Semitism, which in such concentration and absolute power I never saw anywhere again.”^[65] There were several factors that overlapped in Kyiv and made anti-Semitism so virulent: the long lasting local anti-Semitic tradition, Nazi propaganda during the war, the postwar struggle for survival in the ruined city, and Soviet state anti-Semitism. Horrible living conditions and the famine of 1946–47 further embittered and brutalized the local gentile population. Anti-Semitism in Kyiv took on more violent forms than in other places in the Soviet Union.

The Soviet authorities attempted to suppress popular anti-Semitism in Ukraine after the war but failed. Then they adopted the policy of state anti-Semitism in 1948–1953. They decided to flow with the mood of a significant part of the gentile population, who wanted to see Jews suppressed and humiliated. State anti-Semitism was directed against the Jewish national awakening in the Soviet Union after the war, against Jewish culture and Jewish intellectuals. The state-initiated campaigns against ‘bourgeois nationalists,’ ‘cosmopolitans’ and ‘doctor-murderers’ inspired anti-Semites for new attacks on Jews. In Kyiv, however, the local anti-Semites exceeded the acceptable limits for attacks allowed by the authorities and called in their leaflets for the expulsion or extermination of all Jews.^[66] So Kyivan anti-Semites were more violent than the government in their attempt to solve the Jewish question. The authorities, who understood the real threat of a new Jewish pogrom in the city, arrested and imprisoned the most rabid anti-Semites. So, to compare state versus popular anti-Semitism in Kyiv, the latter was more violent and directed against all Jews, while the state authorities selected their victims mostly among the Jewish intelligentsia.

After Stalin’s death, the level of state and popular anti-Semitism decreased throughout the Soviet Union as well as in Kyiv. Anti-Semites lost official justification for their attacks on Jews. Furthermore, they saw that the most rabid anti-Semites, who called for the murder of Jews were arrested and received long sentences in corrective labor camps. Certainly, both state and popular anti-Semitism continued to exist in Kyiv and the Soviet Union, but in more latent forms, often disguised under the struggle against Zionism and Judaism.