Yellow Stars

Soviet SF, Jews, and Other Aliens

“Antisemitism is the dislike of the unlike.”¹

To celebrate Fourth of July, I want to share with you a chapter from my book The Pilgrim Soul about Soviet SF and its intersection with the history of Soviet Jewry.

In a recent long-form interview with Ilana Maymind I have some updates about this book that was originally published in 2009 and is dedicated to the situation of the post-Soviet Jews after almost a million of them came to Israel and permanently changed the Middle East. The interview can be found here. But first, a little glimpse into the mostly unfamiliar world of Soviet SF and Soviet history. Perhaps it will remind my American readers why they should be grateful to, and proud of, their country.

Dislike of the Unlike

I grew up in a family, in which the word “Jew” was never mentioned. The extent of our observance of the Jewish tradition was eating matzo together with bread somewhere in April, roughly in time for the Passover. I believed that matzo was a sort of seasonal cracker and the idea that it had some spiritual significance was altogether beyond my ken.

Christianity, on the other hand, was very familiar. Since it is impossible to understand classic English and Russian literature without knowledge of the Christian doctrine, such knowledge was available in scholarly volumes and special editions. By the time I was twelve, I had a decent grasp of the notions of the Trinity, transubstantiation, and atonement. At this age I also read the entire Bible, including the New Testament, and thought the latter pretty neat, especially as compared to the Leviticus. For a short while I fancied Catholicism but then became permanently converted into atheism by Darwin. Many prominent Russian-Jewish intellectuals, however, such as the poet Osip Mandelstam and his wife Nadezhda had succumbed to the honeyed lure of Christianity, while continuing to regard themselves – and being regarded by others – as Jews.

My upbringing was not unique. Larissa Remennick lists all the aspects of a Jewish identity absent among the Soviet Jews: “knowledge of the Jewish history and holidays, keeping some household and cooking traditions, the imperative to marry other Jews, religious rites of passage and Jewish education for the children, knowledge of the Jewish languages, and identification with Israel” (2—7, 24). So what was left?

Escape Attempt

The speakers for several generations of the Russian-Jewish intelligentsia were two SF writers working as a team. The two brothers Arkady Natanovich Strugatsky (1925-1991) and Boris Natanovich Strugatsky (1933-2012) were more than just bestselling authors. They were the voice of a culture. The sequence of the Strugatskys’ novels was the Bible of Russian Jewry that started in the Eden of Communism, continued with the Fall of Stalin’s Terror and the Holocaust, and culminated in the Exodus of the rejected and the disillusioned.

The brothers’ first novels were bland utopias, very much in the spirit of the 1960s consensus when the post-Stalin “thaw” created the illusion that the Terror was just a mistake and that true Communism, ardently embraced by the Jews in the 1920s and 30s, was still a real possibility. But historical memory would not be silenced, and the Strugatskys registered its stirrings in their first mature work, Escape Attempt (1962), in which the nightmare of history catches up with a utopian day-dream.

In the Communist future of the novel, two friends, Vadim and Anton, are approached by a man who calls himself Saul and asks them to find an uninhabited planet for him. They comply; but the planet turns out to be inhabited with a vengeance. It is a vividly portrayed concentration-camp hell, in which naked political prisoners are being tortured by the emissaries of a supreme ruler who is absurdly titled “The Great and Mighty Cliff; the Shining Battle with One Foot in the Sky” (81). It is hard not to think of another ruler who was addressed by his sycophants as “Father of Nations” and “Slayer of the Fascist Hydra” (Stalin, of course). It is equally hard not to think of the freezing inferno of the Kolyma Gulags when reading a description like this:

“Vadim saw dozens of distorted bodies pressed closely against each other; a tangle of naked skeletal legs with giant protruding feet; skull-like faces crisscrossed by sharp shadows; black gaping mouths. The people slept on the bare earth and on each other. They seemed to be packed in rows and piles like wood, and they were shivering in their sleep” (62).

Vadim and Anton attempt to help everybody, with the predictable result of provoking incomprehension and hostility of the guards and the inmates alike. Saul is savvier, telling them: “You are trying to change the natural course of history! Do you know what history is? It is humanity itself. You cannot break history’s backbone without breaking the backbone of humanity!” (84). Saul should know. The ending of the novel reveals him as a Russian POW in a Nazi camp who, inexplicably, manages to escape into the future. Shaken by his experiences on the hellish planet, he goes back into his own time and dies a hero’s death.

Escape Attempt ends with an image of the “oily smoke” rising from the stacks of a Nazi camp, conflating the Holocaust and Stalin’s Terror in a trans-historical allegory of freedom and compassion versus slavery and cruelty. But in doing so, it denies the Jewish dimension of the Holocaust. And the character of Saul confirms this denial. “Saul” sounds unmistakably Jewish in Russian; his physical description – “a thin, very dark face with protruding brown ears” – is a stereotypical Jewish physiognomy (13). But from the epilogue we find out that his real name is Savel Petrovich Repnin, an impeccably Russian cognomen. A seeming Jew is a Russian hero; Auschwitz is the same as the Gulag.

Denying the Jewish uniqueness of the Holocaust is not denying the Holocaust. It took moral courage to deal with the sensitive issue of concentration camps in 1962. But the Strugatskys’ allegory dissolves the victimization of the Jews in the larger victimization of the intelligentsia, “people who want strange things”, as the novel puts it. It was fashionable in the thaw years to interpret the Terror as a war of the rabble against the intelligentsia, overlooking the starved Ukrainian peasants on the one hand; well-fed Stalin’s intellectuals on the other. So the Strugatskys’ Jewish readers, urban intellectuals, white-collar professionals, and successful techies, could confront the history of their victimization without confronting it as Jewish history. We have been persecuted because we are unlike the rest of you. No need to ask the uncomfortable question: what are the unlike like?

Hard to be a Dog

As the 60s progressed, Khrushchev’s thaw was caught by a new frost. Instead of rejuvenating itself, the country was sliding into senility. For more than three decades, Soviet culture had fed on the bloody exaltation of the march into the Promised Land that demanded innumerable sacrifices but promised the Communist millennium. And suddenly, after Stalin’s death, the promise sounded hollow, the glow of the future dimmed, and people were left in the lurch, struggling against the disintegrating economy and pervasive boredom. The utopian intoxication was over, supplanted by its alcoholic twin.

And at the same time, the so-called anti-Zionist campaign was getting underway, to persist throughout the remaining years of Soviet Russia as a spiteful, demeaning, backbiting form of antisemitism, without the tragic enormity of the Holocaust or even the demented grandeur of Stalin’s Doctors’ Plot. In 1963 the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences published a volume called Judaism Without Embellishments graced by a Der Sturmer – like caricature of a Jew wearing a prayer shawl on the cover. Many such volumes floated in the murky soup of the official propaganda, seemingly irrelevant since few took them seriously, and yet at the same time as inescapable as a bad odor. Jews were not slaughtered or expelled but they were daily humiliated, made the butt of obscene jokes, whispered comments, and routine discrimination. There was no officially declared policy of Jewish quotas for higher education, as there had been in Tsarist Russia, but everybody knew that these quotas existed. Bright Jewish boys and girls who grew up in Kiev or Moscow, capital cities, and wanted to study nuclear physics or Russian literature, went to second-rate colleges in provincial towns and prayed for a miracle that would allow them to transfer back. Certain departments, notably in the humanities, were practically closed to Jews. The Jews had been the exalted heroes of the Revolution and the tragic victims of Nazism. Now they became dupes of the “fifth rubric” (“pyataya grapha”).

The Jews were considered an ethnicity, not a religion (there are two separate words in Russian to designate an ethnic Jew and a person whose religion is Judaism). Every Soviet citizen had an internal passport; and every passport, along with the rubrics of sex, birthplace and so on, had the fifth one, the rubric of ethnicity. And so every “pure” Jew found him or herself saddled with a verbal equivalent of the yellow star.

There was a loophole. A person of mixed ethnicity could choose to be registered in the ethnicity of either of his parents. The intermarriage rates of Russian Jews skyrocketed shortly after the Revolution. Consequently, there were many Jewish children who at the age of sixteen when the time came to go to the nearest police precinct and receive their passport, could choose to be Russians, Ukrainian, Georgian, and so on. There was no end of smutty jokes directed at these crypto-Jews.

It would be easy to compare the victims of the fifth rubric with the Spanish Marranos, the Jews forcefully converted by the Spanish Inquisition who continued to practice their religion in secret. But the Marranos knew what they were suffering for: their God. What positive identity could Soviet Jews salvage from the malicious baiting by the system? “Jew” in your passport did not designate religion or even race as in Nazi Germany. The word was a meaningless obscenity, an invitation to petty malice. A persecuted people can thrive if they know the reason for their persecution. But absurdity wears them down as surely as it wore down Josef K., the protagonist of Franz Kafka’s The Trial, whose last, most burning regret is not that he is being murdered but that he is being murdered senselessly and humiliatingly, “like a dog”.

A dog’s lot is hard; how much harder it is to be treated like a dog if you used to be a god! The Revolution’s Jews, Stalin’s Jews, felt themselves to be immeasurably superior to the dull, sluggish Russian masses, whom they tried to set aflame with their messianic rhetoric. There were hard-hitting, ruthless, arrogant Jewish commissars whose ascetic cruelty was redeemed, in their own eyes, by their total dedication to the cause. They took pity on no one, least of all themselves. They were in revolt against the fearful gray world of the shtetl and against the imbecility of the Russian masses.

And now Soviet Jews were dragged back into that gray world, forced to swallow insults and drunken mockery hurled at them by the children of the peasants they had tried to “raise” into Communism. Can there be greater humiliation? And the Strugatsky brothers gave their embittered readers a flattering mirror, in which they could still discern their own trampled-down divinity.

Hard to Be a God (1964) has been published in English like most Strugatskys’ novels; and like most of them, it has failed utterly at crossing the barrier of cultural translation. Within the context of the Anglo-American literary tradition, the novel is an average sword-and-sorcery fantasy, marred by plot incongruities and boring philosophical digressions. Within the context of the history of the Russian-Jewish intelligentsia, it is a gospel.

The novel describes the trials and tribulations of an agent of the future Communist society sent to help the inhabitants of a planet mired in a strange combination of medieval savagery and fascism. If Escape Attempt dealt with the residue of the Holocaust and the Terror, Hard to Be a God addresses their causes. According to the book, the mass violence of the twentieth century is the revenge of the rabble upon the idealistic (Jewish) light-bringers.

Don Rumata (Anton) is a “Progressionist”, whose task it is to speed up the historical development of the planet, just as it was the self-appointed task of the Jewish agents of the Revolution to speed up the historical development of Russia. As opposed to many of them, he is a humane and sensitive man. He is striving to protect the “book-readers”, the local intellectuals who are persecuted by the philistines, and to do it without using deadly force. Nevertheless, the end of the novel depicts Rumata taking up arms against the black Order that has seized power in the pseudo-medieval kingdom of Arkanar.

The color symbolism in the novel is highly significant, conveying its coded political message, which is the connection between the “gray terror” of everyday life and the “black terror” of political repression. The gray terror is “meschanstvo”, an untranslatable Russian word that describes a combination of materialism, self-interest, ignorance, and bad taste. “Meschanstvo” is the stifling world of the self-satisfied rabble, which the Jews of the Revolution had tried so assiduously to eradicate by unleashing the Red Terror. But now, in the dusk of utopian disillusionment, the Terror is re-evaluated. Instead of the intelligentsia’s attack upon “meschanstvo”, it is represented as an attack of “meschanstvo” upon the intelligentsia.

“When the gray is triumphant, the black comes to power,” says Rumata, summing up his own theory of totalitarianism that conflates Nazism and Stalinism in the common narrative of the revolt of “meschantsvo” against the intelligentsia.

Having tasted the ingratitude of the Russian masses, Jewish intellectuals are beginning to rediscover their Jewishness. Not, however, in the mass graves of the former Pale of Settlement but in other galaxies – and increasingly, upon other shores.

Have Passport, Will Travel

Stalin’s idea of building socialism in a single country, vocally opposed by the internationalist Trotsky, triumphed in unpredictable ways: the USSR cut itself off from the rest of the world. People were, of course, fed the daily diet of propaganda pabulum about the iniquities of American capitalism and Zionism. But somehow these angry articles and news clips did not seem to relate to actual places or actual people.

In a classic of Soviet humor, The Golden Calf by Ilya Ilf and Evgenii Petrov, a confidence man who dreams of living a good life in Rio de Janeiro, says wistfully, “There is nothing beyond the border. The world ends here.” Even the countries of the Eastern bloc were almost beyond reach; as for Western Europe or the US, they were practically an afterlife. Scientists, athletes, and actors who were grudgingly let out defected in increasing numbers, despite the omnipresent KGB agents that accompanied every delegation abroad. Defectors became “socially dead”, unspoken of, obliterated by what Istvan Rev calls extinguishing of the name (2005, 64). Alexander Kaletskii’ dissident novel Metro set in the 1970s depicts a delegation of Soviet actors traveling to Canada and the US. Most of its members are plotting a defection, yet finding themselves in Montreal and New York they cannot quite believe that these cities are real. Rather like the protagonist of Matrix, they feel part of a clever simulation.

But just as the cinematic Matrix succumbed to the determination of Neo, Soviet virtual reality was shattered by the determination of the Jews. The love for SF served them well. Of all the inhabitants of Planet USSR, Jews were the only ones who managed to build a spaceship and take off.

On May 15 1970, a group of sixteen people, all but two of whom were Jewish, tried to hijack an aircraft and fly to Sweden. The leaders of the group were Eduard Kuznetsov and Mark Dymshitz. The attempt failed; the sixteen were arrested and sentenced to long imprisonment (Kuznetsov and Dymshitz, in fact, were initially sentenced to death for treason but won an appeal). Most of them were released early, due to international pressure. Only the two non-Jews, Yuri Fedorov and Aleksei Murzhenko, served their full terms.

The failed hijacking, known in Russian as “the Leningrad affair”, was not really about Zionism. It was about the breaking down of the mental Berlin Wall that separated the Soviet Union from the rest of the world. It was about reconnection. The paths of the two Jewish utopias, Communism and Zionism, were about to cross again.

Between 1960 and 1970, only about 4,000 Jews emigrated from the USSR, most of them to Israel. In the following decade, this number rose to 250,000. The great exodus had begun. It ended after 1991 when more than a million Jews landed on alien planets, Israel and the USA.

The ugly supermen

The Strugatskys’ novel The Ugly Swans (written in 1967; published in 1972; revised by Boris Strugatsky in 1993) is a literary symbol of this exodus. It is a novel about escape. And it is also a novel that escaped. Too provocative to see light in the USSR, it was published abroad, despite the considerable risk to the writers such a step entailed.

The novel takes place in an unnamed totalitarian country, where the victims of the “spectacles” disease, also described as “lepers”, are feared and despised by the masses. But it turns out that they are spiritual and intellectual supermen (the name of their condition is a pun on the Russian equivalent of “egghead”).

Surrounded by the drunkenness, filth, and stupidity of a provincial town, the lepers reach out to the town’s children. Led by the ugly supermen, the children leave their parents’ suffocating world behind. In the last pages of the novel, the stinking town simply melts away.

The opposition of the rabble and the intelligentsia is here brought to the point of a civil war. There are no redeeming features in ordinary lives, which are soaked in cruelty, boredom, drunkenness, and lust. When the disembodied Voice addresses the distraught townspeople, it explains that the superhuman children are contemptuous of their all-too-human parents: “They do not want to grow up alcoholics and rakes, small-minded people, slaves, conformists; they do not want to be made into criminals; they do not want your families and your state” . Where Rumata tried to “elevate” and “enlighten” the masses, the new supermen just want to be left alone, to pursue their own dream, to build their own utopia. Let my people go!

The beetles and the ants

The Strugatskys’ Beetle in the Anthill (1980) takes up the theme of the Wanderers, a non-humanoid super-civilization that had been sporadically referred to in their previous works (including Escape Attempt where the Wanderers created the mysterious machinery misused by the camp guards to torture and kill the inmates). Nothing was known about them except the fact that they had no home planet and avoided any contact with other civilizations.

But in Beetle in the Anthill the Wanderers are suddenly brought into the thick of human affairs. The novel’s protagonist, Lev Abalkin, discovers that he is one of the thirteen “changelings”, the children grown from the fertilized human ova left by the Wanderers on a distant planet thousands of years ago. Desperate to solve the mystery of his origin, he breaks into a museum where the alien incubators are stored. There he is killed by a Secret Service Agent, fearful of the “unknown dangerous program” that Abalkin may be carrying, unbeknownst to himself, in the depth of his unconscious.

The setting of the novel is the Communist society of Escape Attempt and Hard to Be a God. But now it has turned chaotic and ominous. The shot at the end of the novel rings down the curtain upon the already tattered utopian dream, breaking the no-violence taboo of Soviet SF. But even more disturbing than the overt paranoia of the killing is the covert and senseless paranoia that envelopes Abalkin’s quest for his origin. Thwarted at every step, Abalkin is determined to salvage some logic from this miasma of absurdities. He wants to

“find out, once and for all, why he is prevented from doing the work he loves; who – personally – has been interfering with his life; who he could hold responsible for the debacle of his cherished plans for the future; for his bitter incomprehension of the events of his life; for the fifteen years wasted in slogging at a hard and unwanted job”.

Abalkin is marked with a mysterious birthmark in the shape of the Russian letter “Zh”, which is the first letter of the word “Zhid”, an antisemitic slur. But like the Soviet Limbo itself, the novel promises an explanation and snatches it away at the last moment. The mystery of the Wanderers is never solved; neither Abalkin himself nor the reader finds out what the Wanderers intended; whether the genetic “program” even existed; and whether the “changelings” were hidden supermen, evil “pod people”, or mere confused victims.

So, this was what Soviet Jewishness came down to: the perpetual enigma of unearned victimization; the insoluble mystery of the alienated self; the identity that is the absence of identity. They do not want us because we are different; but what does this difference mean? We do not know, and they do no not care. Lev Abalkin is simply another incarnation of Josef K.: dying like a dog, victim of a universal conspiracy that may not even exist.

In 1984 the Strugatskys ended the Wanderers saga with the novel Waves Extinguish the Wind (Volny gasyat veter; translated as Time Wanderers). It turns out that the Wanderers are not aliens at all but a race of supermen who originate within humanity and eventually transcend and abandon it. The protagonist, Toivo Glumov, hates and fears the hidden super-humans, calling them “traitors…parasites. Like those wasps that lay eggs in living caterpillars.” And of course, he eventually finds out that he is one of them. His is a dilemma that would be familiar to Daniel Deronda, the protagonist of George Eliot’s 1876 eponymous novel: an English aristocrat who discovers his Jewish origin. Deronda’s solution is to move to Palestine and try to establish a Jewish state there. Glumov’s suicidal solution is to disappear into the interstellar space.

And after Planet USSR was blown up by the Death Star of its own ideology, post-Soviet Jews, secular or not; Christian or not; former Communists or not, gathered their diplomas and departed for other cultural planets. Most of them embraced Deronda’s destination; others preferred the USA. But the ignominious chapter of being the scapegoats of the failed utopia was over. We were now tax-paying citizens, not space aliens .

Works Cited

Remennick, Larissa. Russian Jews on Three Continents: Identity, Integration, and Conflict. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2007.

Rev, Istvan. Retroactive Justice: Prehistory of Post-Communism. Stanford University Press, 2005.

Strugatsky, Arkadi, and Boris Strugatsky. Escape Attempt; Hard to be a God; Predatory Things of the Century. Vol. 3 of Sobranie sochinenii [Collected Works]. Moscow: Text, 1992

----. The Boy from Hell; Anxiety; Beetle in the Anthill; Waves Still the Wind. Miry Bratiev Strugatskikh [The Strugatsky Brothers’ Worlds]. Saint Petersburg: Terra Fantastika, 1996.

1. The origin of this phrase is murky, but it has been attributed to Rabbi Sacks, among others.