Stalin's dissolution of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (JAC) in November 1948 marked the official initiation of Soviet state antisemitism. This event effectively eradicated legitimate Jewish political activity in the USSR, which had existed in its modern forms for over half a century. Furthermore, it severed the robust connection between legitimate Jewish political life and legitimate Jewish culture. While Jewish culture began to re-emerge in semi-legitimate forms as early as the mid-1950s, legitimate Jewish political agency went underground, resurfacing only in the late 1980s amidst the Jewish communal and cultural revival of the Perestroika era. Since that time, post-Soviet Jewry has continuously sought an optimal model for political self-organization. One of the most successful frameworks has been a politico-cultural platform closely aligned with the ideas of autonomism formulated by Simon Dubnow at the beginning of the twentieth century; indeed, these ideas gradually came to define the tone of post-Soviet communities in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

August 12, 2023, marked the 71st anniversary of the execution of 13 out of 15 members of the presidium of the USSR Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee—prominent figures in Soviet science, culture, and art—in the basements of the NKVD in 1952. Stalin's dissolution of the JAC in November 1948 (which signaled the onset of Soviet state antisemitism) not only brought an end to legitimate Jewish politics in the USSR, but also disrupted the continuous history of modern Jewish political expression in the country, which had spanned over fifty years. Moreover, it halted centuries of Jewish political agency across much of Eastern Europe—territories that, since the final third of the eighteenth century, had, with brief interruptions, been part of the Russian Empire and its successor states.

Jewish Politics and Jewish Culture

During the late Middle Ages and the early modern period, Jewish political self-organization in Eastern Europe took the form of self-governing communities (kahals), various brotherhoods, religious movements, and the activities of shtadlanim (influential Jewish lobbyists at court). From the late nineteenth century until the mid-1920s, the institutional framework of legitimate Jewish political life in the Russian Empire and the early Soviet Union encompassed Jewish political parties, religious, social, cultural, educational, and charitable organizations, modernized communal structures, and the Jewish press. These institutions effectively replaced the traditional communal infrastructure. [1]

In the USSR, from the mid-1920s until the crisis of late 1948–early 1949 precipitated by state antisemitism, Jewish politics and the political agency of Soviet Jews persisted. During this period, while Jewish political parties disbanded or were banned and traditional communal institutions were systematically dismantled, new political vehicles emerged, such as Komzet and Ozet, alongside territorial self-governing autonomies ranging from the Jewish Autonomous Oblast to individual national town and village councils. The final organization to champion the political agency of the Jewish population in the USSR was the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee and its newspaper, *Eynikayt*.

The destruction of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee in November 1948, as noted, initially appeared to put an end to this previously uninterrupted political tradition. The state-sponsored violence of the late 1940s not only eradicated "Jewish politics" in any form, but also severed the historic link between legitimate Jewish political life and legitimate Jewish culture. This rupture was unprecedented; since its emergence in Russia in the late nineteenth century, modern secular Jewish culture had been inextricably linked to—and often subordinated to—political objectives. The most prominent figures of Jewish culture were simultaneously political actors. Consider the following examples:

The writer and folklorist S. An-sky was first and foremost a professional revolutionary and a co-founder of the Socialist Revolutionary Party, as was his friend Chaim Zhitlowsky, the "father of Yiddishism," who also co-founded various Jewish political parties and movements. Ber Borochov, the founder of Labor Zionism, compiled the first major anthology of Yiddish poetry and laid the foundations of modern Yiddish linguistics. The historian Simon Dubnow's scholarly interest in the past directly informed his autonomist ideals, which he implemented by founding the liberal Folkspartey (People's Party). The preeminent Jewish writer Sholem Aleichem repeatedly participated in Zionist congresses. The founders of the Kyiv Kultur-Lige were likewise active members of various Jewish political parties.

These examples could easily be multiplied. The converse was also true: political parties and the party press contributed immensely to the development of Jewish literature and art in the late Russian Empire and the early Soviet Union.

Politics and Culture

Jewish cultural life in the USSR was suppressed around the same time as legitimate Jewish political self-organization. However, unlike the latter, it began to recover in semi-legitimate forms as early as the mid-1950s. This revival achieved considerable momentum by the early 1960s, notably in both Yiddish and Russian: the journal *Sovetish Heymland* began publication, and substantial editions of works by Soviet Jewish writers and Yiddish literary classics were published, both in the original Yiddish and in Russian translation.

Prior to the severance of diplomatic relations with Israel in 1967, even Hebrew translations reflecting contemporary Israeli literature were published in the Khrushchev-era USSR. During those years, several prominent Jewish artists in Soviet art engaged with national themes and motifs in their work. Although a Jewish theater was not revived until 1977, Jewish concert ensembles and soloists had appeared on stage long before. In children's literature—the most widely distributed segment of publishing—few authors could rival the print runs and popularity of the Jewish poets Lev (Leyb) Kvitko and Ovsey (Shike) Driz. Essentially, the only segment of pre-war Jewish infrastructure that could not be revived was Jewish education.

There was another crucial distinction from the preceding period: the close cooperation between Soviet Jewish culture and Soviet Jewish politics that had existed prior to 1948 was not restored, as the latter had ceased to exist. In the USSR from the late 1950s to the late 1980s, during the "Thaw" and the subsequent period of "Stagnation," Jewish culture (primarily literature) re-entered the legitimate sphere, but legitimate Jewish politics remained practically non-existent. The Jewish Autonomous Oblast, a relic of 1930s Soviet nationality policy, had long since ceased to be perceived as uniquely "Jewish" by either the authorities or the Jewish population of the USSR.

The symbiosis between the two products of Eastern European Jewish modernization—Jewish culture and Jewish politics—which had emerged concurrently and coexisted for decades, was dismantled in the final decades of the Soviet Union. Within the legitimate sphere, Jewish culture not only ceased to derive from national politics but, to a degree, came to substitute for it. This was a novel development in local Jewish life, mirroring a characteristic Russian phenomenon where culture (especially literature) historically functioned as a substitute for politics. One need only recall how nineteenth-century Russian literature and literary criticism served as a surrogate for public political life in the Russian Empire.

A significant, albeit unintended, consequence of the "Thaw" was the emergence of a cultural underground, or "second culture," which included uncensored Jewish culture. The very act of opposing state authorities meant that cultural activity returned to the political arena. Characteristically, the Jewish underground, such as the Leningrad association of Jewish artists "Aleph," was contested by the authorities on both political and aesthetic grounds. [2]

Concurrently with the Jewish "second culture," Jewish politics as such re-emerged in the late 1960s in the form of an independent Jewish movement. From its inception, this movement comprised two interconnected and complementary factions: the "politicians," whose primary objective was the struggle for the right to emigrate from the USSR, and the "culturalists," who sought to revive a Jewish culture free from state constraints. (These processes have already been extensively documented in scholarly literature). [3]

Thus, the connection between Jewish politics and Jewish culture was restored, albeit in the underground. Paradoxically, the reinforcement of this link during the 1960s–1980s mirrored the situation of the 1920s, with the critical difference that it now occurred not through state sponsorship, but in direct opposition to it [4]. The paradox, however, is only apparent. While the revolutionary Soviet state viewed the artistic avant-garde as a pillar of its cultural policy and pursued an active national-building program, the conservative Soviet state of the "Stagnation" era preferred to ignore both national and cultural issues. The national Jewish movement and the "second avant-garde" (as the late Soviet underground art and literature is sometimes called) found each other, just as the revolutionary transformation of Jewish life and the avant-garde had aligned in the first post-revolutionary decade. Importantly, at both personal and institutional levels, these two facets of the Jewish movement—the cultural and the political—merged naturally, representing not "two sides of the same coin," but rather a Möbius strip.

By the early 1970s, both legitimate Soviet Jewish culture and the illegal Jewish movement (political and cultural) had largely established their structures, which remained intact until the onset of Perestroika. [5]

In the late Soviet era, for the vast majority of the Jewish population, legitimate Jewish culture represented the only accessible form of national life. Uncensored Jewish culture was available only to a minority (primarily in major urban centers) and was strictly linked to political activism. The attitudes of underground cultural figures toward legitimate Jewish culture varied significantly. Some argued that legitimate culture was so compromised by collaboration with the regime that it had no right to exist, frequently overlooking the fact that elements cultivated in the underground as forbidden were openly available in the legitimate sphere. Other figures in the cultural underground engaged with "Soviet Jewish culture" personally—for example, with the editorial board of *Sovetish Heymland*—and even attempted (unsuccessfully) to secure legitimate institutional status. Late Soviet Jewish cultural life, both legitimate and underground, formed a continuum in which the opposing poles remained connected by numerous channels.

The political Jewish movement prioritized a narrow and concrete goal: free emigration from the USSR. The models of "Jewish culture," both legitimate and uncensored, were far more diverse, with many existing not in contemporary reality but in memory and imagination. Various actors within the Jewish movement maintained idealized concepts of Jewish cultural life, ranging from 1930s Soviet Yiddish culture and modern Israeli culture to legendary Lithuanian yeshivas or Hasidic dynasties.

All models of Jewish culture that existed during the twilight of the Soviet regime—whether legitimate or illegal, actual or imagined—influenced the development of Jewish political and communal structures in the post-Soviet space and beyond. Consequently, the question raised in the title of this article regarding the "models of Jewish culture in the USSR on the eve of its collapse" remains central to understanding how post-Soviet Jewish political and social life was organized.

To complete the description of how the Jewish cultural landscape was structured in the USSR during this period, five key factors must be noted.

First, in the absence of a civil society and under constant state pressure, Jewish cultural institutions were weak and few in number. Consequently, the cultural field was poorly structured, resulting in numerous transitional and hybrid forms between different models.

Second, the boundary between legitimate and illegal Jewish culture was porous. The same individuals were active across both spheres. Late Soviet life, including Jewish life, featured a large and expanding "grey area" that, while not officially endorsed, was tolerated by the authorities.

Third, the period under discussion (late 1950s to mid-1980s) is long, and the Soviet Union was highly heterogeneous politically and culturally. Thus, many variants of Jewish culture were localized in time and space, being specific to particular periods and regions.

Fourth, after World War II, there were no compact settlements with a concentrated Jewish majority in the USSR, such as the shtetls of the former Pale of Settlement. Most of the Jewish population had migrated to major urban centers. While some regional centers and small towns retained historic Jewish communities, their populations had transformed from local majorities into visible minorities. This shift meant that Jews became highly integrated into the cultural life of the surrounding non-Jewish population, both legitimate and underground, adapting their own cultural production to these broader Soviet frameworks.

Fifth, at the close of the Soviet era, the once-impenetrable Iron Curtain began to disintegrate. Various sources of information and artifacts of Jewish culture, primarily from Israel and the United States, entered the country through these gaps, further shaping the models of Jewish culture in the late USSR.

In this analysis, when discussing models of Jewish culture, I limit the scope to Ashkenazi Jewry. The paths of modernization and the resulting forms of modern culture among Bukharian, Mountain, and Georgian Jews were distinct, and their cultural development in the late Soviet period requires separate consideration.

The Jewish Communal and Cultural Revival During and After the USSR

The history of the USSR in the twentieth century can be understood as a process of rapid and coercive modernization. The revolutionary upheavals, collectivization, industrialization, state terror, and wars resulted in a profound rupture for the majority of the Soviet population from the culture of their ancestors. Nonetheless, it can be argued that Soviet Jews experienced a more radical cultural shift during the twentieth century than most other major nationalities in the USSR. For instance, while the Russian population transitioned from a rural to a predominantly urban society, they retained the Russian language and the ability to comprehend the foundational texts of nineteenth-century Russian culture. This cultural continuity was state-sanctioned and reinforced by the educational system. Conversely, within roughly half a century, the Jewish population underwent a complete linguistic transition from Yiddish to Russian. In the 1897 Imperial Census, 94% of the Jewish population identified Yiddish as their mother tongue. Seventy years later, Yiddish speakers constituted fewer than 15% of the Jewish population, and those utilizing it in daily life or as a language of high culture approached zero. Such a rapid and comprehensive linguistic shift is exceptional.

To this linguistic transition, one must add the departure of the vast majority of Soviet Jews from traditional occupations, the decline of religious practice, mass migration from historic regions of settlement, and the total replacement of Jewish culture (both religious and secular) with Soviet Russian culture.

It would appear that such a thorough transformation of language and lifestyle should have led to the complete extinction of autonomous Jewish culture. However, the rapid nature of these changes ensured the preservation of memories and concepts—albeit fragmented—of a distinct Jewish culture. The Jewish population of the Russian Empire was culturally diverse on the eve of the revolution, and the twentieth century only magnified this heterogeneity. By the time of the Soviet collapse, the cultural experience of Jews in small Western border towns differed markedly from that of Jews in major industrial and urban centers.

The cultural background of Jews from the Soviet interior was qualitatively different from that of Jews residing in territories annexed by the USSR in 1939–1940. Furthermore, there were distinct differences in how these experiences were valued—what was considered a "usable past" versus what was deemed obsolete. Even those lacking direct personal experience of Jewish traditions maintained a firm belief in the existence of a distinct "Jewish culture" from which they had been estranged. This belief, whether derived from family narratives or literature, and whether accurate or highly mythologized, remained a powerful motivating factor. At minimum, it manifested as a form of negative identity: an awareness that Jewish culture, religion, and language differed fundamentally from those of the majority. The imperative to "reclaim" this heritage became urgent. When this reclamation became possible during Perestroika and its aftermath, it required the reconstruction of communal institutions.

The transformations across the Soviet and post-Soviet landscape during Perestroika were driven by a widespread perception that Soviet society had reached a historical dead end due to past policy failures. These changes were often guided by the idea of returning to a historical turning point before the system went astray, though different groups identified this turning point and the preceding "golden age" in highly divergent ways.

This divergence was equally true for various groups of Jewish activists who conceptualized the future based on differing, often idealized, interpretations of a "usable past." Significantly, the presentation and competition of these models occurred within the numerous Jewish cultural societies that emerged during Perestroika. Once again, communal development and Jewish political expression occurred under the banner of "culture."

The primary ideological positions (frequently hybrid and inconsistent) that emerged during this period include the following. Most proved poorly suited to the political challenges subsequently faced by post-Soviet Jewish communities.

At the turn of the 1990s, some activists believed that Soviet policy on the Jewish question had erred between 1938 and 1948 by closing Yiddish schools and suppressing Yiddish cultural activity. This utopian project to revive a "Soviet Yiddishland" resembled Zionist utopias in which Jewish history effectively paused after the Bar Kokhba revolt to resume only with late nineteenth-century resettlement in Palestine. The fundamental challenge was that Yiddish had ceased to be viewed as the primary basis of Jewish life inside or outside the USSR. While this platform relied on external assistance, the resources of international Yiddishist organizations, particularly in the United States, were limited. Furthermore, the revival of "Soviet Yiddishism" required active state support, which was impossible under the new political conditions. Finally, the proponents of this model were predominantly elderly. Nonetheless, the influence of "neo-Yiddishism" should not be underestimated; while minor in Moscow and St. Petersburg, it played a significant role during the transition period of the late 1980s and early 1990s in regions with traditional, Yiddish-speaking populations, particularly in southwestern Ukraine and Moldova.

Various forms of Jewish neo-romanticism emerged, idealizing historical elements ranging from Hasidic courts to Lithuanian yeshivas. These were championed by small, committed groups seeking answers within religious frameworks; they quickly integrated with established, primarily Orthodox, religious communities both within the former Soviet Union and abroad.

The largest, most organized, and most prominent group of Jewish activists emerged from the underground, focusing on Hebrew and emigration to Israel. These activists briefly assumed leadership roles in the newly forming communities but quickly relinquished them, as most achieved their goal of emigration within a few years. Their experience of communal organization acquired in the underground proved largely irrelevant to the institutional realities they encountered abroad, particularly in Israel.

Ultimately, the most successful framework proved to be a politico-cultural platform closely aligned with the autonomist ideas formulated by Simon Dubnow. Although historically a minority movement, by the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, ideas resembling autonomism came to define the character of post-Soviet Jewish communities.

The primary challenge for all activist groups was that political shifts rendered their historical agendas obsolete. The issues that had defined Jewish politics for decades disappeared. The struggle for emigration lost its meaning with the liberalization of travel; the fight for civil equality became redundant with the end of state-sponsored antisemitism. The path to establishing communal, religious, educational, and charitable institutions was fully open, met with benevolent neutrality or occasional support from the state.

Another specific issue concerned language. The Soviet regime had previously permitted Jewish cultural expression only in Yiddish, reflecting its broader nationalities policy. However, by the second half of the twentieth century, Russian had become the primary language of Soviet Jews. Indeed, Russian, alongside Hebrew and Yiddish, had been a legitimate language of the Jewish press and literature since the late nineteenth century. In contrast, Hebrew had been banned in the Soviet Union since the 1920s. With Perestroika, the state ceased to interfere in the internal language policies of the Jewish community, allowing Russian to re-establish itself as the primary language of Jewish publishing and scholarship, and Hebrew to return as a symbolic language and the language of Israel.

An additional challenge was the importation of communal organizational models by American and Israeli philanthropic organizations. In providing aid, foreign donors often bypassed local leadership, viewing the experience of local activists as negligible. This approach led to protracted conflicts within Jewish communities across the post-Soviet space during the 1990s and 2000s. These disputes, their typology, and their systemic nature warrant separate scholarly analysis within the framework of Colonial and Postcolonial Studies. In extreme cases, communities saw a duplication or triplication of organizational structures, with some funded by external donors, others relying on local resources, and religious communities acting as independent third parties. [6]

Nonetheless, the fundamental challenge remained the shift in priorities imposed by the new era. For the first time in decades, cultural objectives were superseded by social and welfare needs. In many respects, this represented a return to the nineteenth-century model where the primary function of the Jewish community was supporting vulnerable populations through charitable networks. This shift can be viewed as an indicator of the broader socio-economic challenges that affected the post-Soviet space during the transition decade. Because neither the legitimate nor the underground Soviet Jewish movements had experience in professional social work, prior organizational expertise proved of limited use.

Back to Autonomism?

This dynamic began to change in the mid-2000s with the emergence of domestic funding sources tied to major businesses. These donors established several philanthropic foundations, including the Russian Jewish Congress, the Russian Jewish Congress in St. Petersburg, the Euro-Asian Jewish Congress, and the Genesis Philanthropy Group. Similar foundations operated to support the post-Soviet diaspora abroad. These institutions implemented a cultural and political model reminiscent of the elitist, St. Petersburg-centered variant of autonomism.

In Simon Dubnow's formulation, autonomism was designed to prevent the cultural assimilation that had accompanied Jewish emancipation in Western Europe. Dubnow argued that in acquiring civil rights, European Jews had compromised their distinct identity. He proposed that Jewish life in the diaspora should be organized around self-governing, secular communities funded through self-taxation to support cultural institutions that preserved national identity as an independent value.

In practice, Dubnow's vision was realized only partially, relying not on broad communal self-taxation but on wealthy philanthropists who funded modern cultural and educational initiatives, such as the Jewish Historical-Ethnographic Society or Baron Günzburg's Courses in Oriental Studies. Crucially, these initiatives were supported by affluent patrons in St. Petersburg, Moscow, and Kyiv, who specifically funded secular cultural projects operating in Russian and Hebrew. While continuing to support traditional social and religious institutions, they became the first to systematically finance modern secular Jewish culture.

This developmental model yielded results reminiscent of the cultural achievements of the early twentieth century, including the establishment of Jewish museums, research centers, and publishing houses. By the mid-2000s, Jewish culture within the former Soviet Union had achieved significant autonomy, relying on domestic resources and engaging in peer-to-peer dialogue with Jewish communities worldwide. Conversely, this philanthropic model can also be viewed as a reflection of post-Soviet economic realities, characterized by a weak civil society and significant wealth disparity. Similar structural conditions naturally generated similar institutional outcomes.

In conclusion, despite significant external influences, Jewish communal and cultural development in the late USSR and the post-Soviet space emerged as a logical continuation of Russian Jewish history, heavily shaped by its late Soviet phase.

[1] Eli Lederhendler, The Road to Modern Jewish Politics. Political Tradition and Political Reconstruction in the Jewish Community of Tsarist Russia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989)

[2] Arefyev Circle / Comp. Lyubov Gurevich. — St. Petersburg: PRP LLC, 2002.

[3] See, for example: Yaacov Ro’i, The Struggle for Soviet Jewish Emigration, 1948-1967 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.); Yaacov Ro’i, (ed.) Jews and Jewish Life in Russia and the Soviet Union (London, Frank Cass, 1995); Zvi Gittelman, A Century of Ambivalence (N.Y.: Shocken Books, 1988); Yehoshua Gilboa, The Black Years of Soviet Jewry (Boston: Little Brown, 1972); Feedman, R.O. (Ed) Soviet Jewry in the Decisive Decade, 1971-1980 (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1984); Freedman, R.O. (Ed) Soviet Jewry in the 1980s: The Politics of Anti-Semitism and Emigration and the Dinamics of Resettlement (Durham and London, 1989); Edward Drachman, Chellenging the Kremlin: The Soviet Jewish Movement for Freedom (N.Y.:Paragon House, 1991)

[4] Altshuler M. Soviet Jewry – A Community in Turmoil// Terms of Survival – The Jewish World Since 1945/ Ed. by Robert S. Wistrich. London, Routledge, 1995. P. 195-230

[5] Vladimir (Ze’ev) Khanin, “The Struggle for Community: Factors of Revival of the Jewish National Movement in the late USSR”, in Zvi Gittelman and Ya’acov Ro’i, Eds., Revolution, Repression and Revival: Soviet Jewish Experience – in Honor of Prof. Mordehai Altchuler (Boulder: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007), pp. 221-239

[6] For a more detailed discussion of these and other processes of the revival of "organized Jewry" in the late and former USSR in the late 1980s – early 2000s, see: Vladimir (Ze’ev) Khanin, ed. Jewish Politics and Community-Building in the Former Soviet Union. Special issue of Jewish Political Studies Review, Vol. 14, Nos. 1-2, 2002