In August 1988, a five person Israeli consular delegation visited Moscow — the first time there had been an Israeli presence in the Soviet capital since the cutting off of diplomatic relations during the Six Day War in 1967.
Old Jewish Bolsheviks were now rehabilitated decades after their murder in Stalin’s dungeons. Grigory Zinoviev (Hirsch Apfelbaum) is reputed to have said the shema on his way to his execution in 1936. Nikolai Bukharin’s wife Anna — the daughter of a Jewish Bolshevik — lived to see her husband’s rehabilitation in 1988, fifty years after his killing. Bukharin had attempted to protect and save Osip Mandelshtam, the writer and poet, from Stalin’s wrath — and failed.
The late 1980s was also a time when the first whiff of a rapprochement between Israelis and Palestinians was in the air and the possibility of an international conference hosted by the superpowers. Likud’s Yitzhak Shamir was vehemently opposed to any Soviet participation, whereas Labour’s Shimon Peres was more positive about involving Gorbachev.
Shamir attended the Madrid Conference between Israel, the Palestinians and the Arab states in 1991, co-hosted by a much diminished Gorbachev and President Bush. A couple of months earlier, Gorbachev was almost ousted by a hard line coup of those who could not stomach his reforms. Yasser Arafat supported the plotters — human rights, in Arafat’s eyes, only applied to the Palestinian question.
The Kremlin’s treatment of Jews since the Russian Revolution was symbolic of a wider Soviet disregard for the rule of law. While his positive approach to Soviet Jews formed the bedrock of Gorbachev’s advocacy of glasnost, it also opened the path to winning over the West — as the stridently anti-Communist Margaret Thatcher famously said, “Mr Gorbachev is someone I can do business with”. It led to a process of nuclear disarmament with Ronald Reagan’s America.
Gorbachev believed in the idea of socialism with a human face, but at the end of the day, the Soviet Union was unreformable and split into fifteen separate republics. Gorbachev significantly refused to use force to crush the revolutions in Eastern Europe in 1989 and did not wish to shed blood as the USSR gradually disintegrated.
He opposed the Putinist School of Falsification and the Kremlin’s imperialist designs on neighbouring countries. He looked forward, not backward.
As President Biden commented: “He had the imagination to see that a different future was possible”.
Gorbachev now belongs to history — and specifically to Jewish history. Detested by Russian nationalists, he holds a special place in the collective heart of the Jewish people. May his memory be for a blessing.
Colin Shindler worked for the UK Campaign for Soviet Jewry between 1966 and 1975.
