Central Committee: "Zionism is Fake News. We need more fact-checkers!"
Note: I was going through my drafts folder and noticed that I have a bunch of stray things that I wanted to send out but for some reason never got around to it. This is one of those — a short note that goes back a few years (probably to 2022) to my effort to serialize a book about Soviet zionism. With zionism now taking center stage in global politics…I think it’s interesting enough to resurrect and send out into the world.
Jewish Emigration: In Light of New Documents. Tel-Aviv, 1998.
I’m going through a collection of documents that deal with the Soviet Union’s response to the Soviet Jewish exodus — beginning from the 1950s and all the way through the 1980s. Mostly, it’s correspondence from the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, the executive branch of the government. Most, if not all, of the documents are marked “top secret.” Looking through them, I gotta say that it’s no wonder the whole Soviet project collapsed.1 There is a general lethargic and dim-witted feel to the documents they produced. The leadership of the country really did not understand what they were doing, and did not comprehend the internal forces of stagnation and loss of faith that were disintegrating their society from within.
From what I can tell, the basic top-level Soviet strategy boiled down to this: “We must educate the Soviet people that Zionism is a reactionary nationalist ideology and that it is nothing but a giant imperialist plot to undermine Soviet ideology. Write some articles in Pravda. Get an anti-zionist committee together and staff it with some reliable Jews to condemn zionism a reactionary ideology. That will do the trick!” It no doubt had the opposite effect. For a lot of Jews, seeing Zionism denounced in official organs made it cooler, more interesting…something to explore.
In essence, their grand strategy of dealing with the growth of the Soviet zionism boiled down to the same thing that liberals have been doing since 2016 to fight Trump and the MAGA menace: obsessed with deploying fact-checkers to expose his lies — refusing to acknowledge (even internally) their own political failure and the political conditions that helped produce conditions that made the thing they’re condemning attractive in the first place. That’s the thing, the growth of nationalist ideologies in the Soviet Union — not just zionism but Russian, Ukrainian, and other kinds of local nationalisms — was a direct result of the slow collapse of Soviet ideology. People needed something else to believe in, and various nationalisms were really the only thing around.
I think a similar process was afoot in the United States.