Russian Revolution: A Contested Legacy, on display at the International Print Center New York until December 16, attempts this by framing the centenary in terms of “a century in pursuit of individual freedoms”. Curator Masha Chlenova presents the revolution through three such “freedoms” sought by the fledgling socialist society: the emancipation of women; racial equality and the rights of ethnic minorities in Russia, especially Jews; and sexual and gay liberation. The exhibition combines material from the 1920s and 30s with contemporary works by Yevgeniy Fiks and Anton Ginzburg — both Russian-born and now based in New York — to bring the liberation struggles of the past and present into dialogue. [...]
The extent to which 1917 was tied up with questions of anti-Semitism and Jewish identity in the former tsarist Empire is rarely discussed in the West. But this was one of the revolution’s most urgent and vibrant battlegrounds, politically and culturally. Since the late 18th century, Jews in the Russian Empire had been confined to the Pale of Settlement; the February Revolution that preceded October 1917 granted them the freedom to live and work throughout the country. Violent reprisals and full-blown pogroms became commonplace, particularly across the western borderlands of the collapsing Empire. The integration of Jews into the building of a socialist society was a vital part of the Bolshevik policy to afford equal rights to ethnic minorities. [...]
Yevgeniy Fiks agrees that this is a “point of moral clarity” downplayed in much reflection on 1917. “Liberals and leftists for decades tended to try and downplay the embrace of the Revolution by the Jewish masses,” he says. “What I think our exhibition does differently is present the representative of the mostly poor, Yiddish-speaking masses of the former Russian Empire unapologetically. Because there is no shame in being free.” As Chlenova points out, “in the spirit of Soviet internationalism, Jews who actively supported the Revolution were not singled out as an ethnos but were rather seen as international, radically minded figures [with] broader goals than [just the military] struggle against pogromist forces.” [...]
By the 1930s, of course, Stalinism was fully operational, and many of the emancipatory gains of the early revolutionary years were abandoned. In 1934, the Jewish Autonomous Region of Birobidzhan was founded in Russia’s harsh and undeveloped Far East, a sign of Stalin’s signature approach to ethnic minorities: herding them en masse to out of the way regions. A Contested Legacy features posters and lottery tickets by Epstein and Mikhail Dlugach for lotteries held to raise funds for the Birobidzhan “project”. This is another strand of the Soviet Jewish story deserving of wider attention. One of the USSR’s most lamentable anti-Semitic backlashes, coming so soon after the Soviet Union had proven decisive in beating back Nazism, was the so-called Doctors’ Plot of 1952-3 — a purge of (mainly Jewish) high-ranking medical professionals on phoney charges, which had the clear intention of fostering mass anti-Semitism and might have had serious repercussions were it not for Stalin’s death in 1953. For the rest of the Soviet period, Jewish culture was largely neglected by the state, and since the fall of the USSR the vast majority of its Jewish citizens have emigrated to Israel and the US. Less than one per cent of Birobidzhan’s population now identifies as Jewish.
