Who Killed Itzik Feffer?
By J. E. M. ARDEN ANEW and apparently sinister piece of evi- dence has recently come to light about this, one of the most horrible and—still—mysterious racialist crimes of post-war Russia.
When Khrushchev denounced, in considerable detail, the various frame-ups perpetrated by his predecessor there was one he did not think worth mentioning—the pogrom of 1949-52 in which Stalin massacred 450 Jewish writers, artists and intellectuals who have actually been identified, and an unknown number of lesser Jews. (That this was an intentional omission was shown when Pravda, reprinting an article on Stalin's crimes from the New York Daily Worker, deleted a single sentence—on 'snuffing out the lives' of 'Jewish cultural figures.') Among the most famous names were those of the writers David Bergelson,.. Leib Kvitko, Peretz Markish, Der Nister and the poet Itzik Feffer. That anything whatever has come out about their fate is due to the chance that as Jews, and as writers in Yiddish, they were - known to, and unremittingly inquired about by, their colleagues and admirers in the non-Com- munist world.
At first simple lies were handed out by the Soviet authorities—like the statements to Howard Fast and others (mentioned by Mr. Levin in his review the other week) by the Russian writer Polevoy, who asserted flatly that he often saw his neighbour Kvitko, really dead in the execu- tion cellars for more than three years. When approached by Jewish Communists from abroad, the Soviet leaders—Khrushchev himself, Suslov, Furtseva and others—always expressed astonish- ment that anyone could care what had happened to the missing men and spoke of 'anti-Soviet slander.' They often accompanied evasive com- ment by mildly anti-Semitic remarks—which, in far grosser form, the Soviet writer Paustovsky was later imprudently to denounce as the staple conversation of high Moscow government circles.
American and Canadian Jews were particularly persistent, and it was eventually the Canadian Jewish Communist Saltsberg who extracted from Khrushchev personally the admission that the writers had 'perished guiltlessly, involved in the Crimean Affair.' Inquiries elsewhere in Moscow produced the information that this referred to the secret execution in August, 1952, of a number of Jewish writers and politicians charged with planning to create a secessionist Jewish State in the Crimea.
Still, no public statement of any kind has been made about the case. But a sort of rehabilitation took place : their families returned from exile in 1955-56; their works started to be republished —but in Russian translation only. The last to appear was Itzik Feller's. I have a copy of it before me. The introduction speaks of his loyalty to Communism, but says nothing of his imprison- ment and death—except, perhaps, the assertion that 'his life story is one natural to Soviet writers'l None of the poems is later than 1948. The date of his death is given as 1952. As we shall see, it seems possible that this is false.
The Soviet Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee was dissolved in 1949 and its members were then arrested and sent to camps. They seem really to have approached Stalin with a view to turning the Crimea, then emptied by war and deporta- tion, into a Jewish settlement area. (Khrushchev, in 1956, went out of his way to say that Stalin was right to refuse, as such a settlement would have been an imperialist bridgehead.) Feffer was not among those originally arrested, and showed considerable courage in pressing openly for the release of Bergelson and others. The writers re- mained in camps. Some died; others were later recalled for torture and execution in the Lefortovsky prison in Moscow.
When Stalin died in 1953 his pogrom had not been completed. But there were.strong forces who wished to go through with it. Beria freed the 'doctor-poisoners,' mainly Jews. But he seems to have been unable to secure the release of other imprisoned Jews; for instance, Ivan Maisky, for- merly Ambassador in the UK, who had been arrested some time in 1952. It was apparently not until Malenkov's brief ascendancy in mid-1954, when Stalin's hatchet-man Ryumin was shot, that the remaining Jewish survivors were released. The latest evidence at least suggests that Feffer may have escaped the Crimean frame-up and perished at a later date—that is, on the orders not of Stalin but of Khrushchev.
The fiftieth and last volume of the Soviet En- cyclopirdia has lately been published. In its biographical index it gives, for the first time, the dates of death of a number of those who dis- appeared under Stalin—top-flight politicians like Kossior (1939), ,Postyshev (1940), Voznesensky (1950), Bubnov (1939); soldiers like Marshal Blyukher (1938); scientists like Professor Vavilov (1943); writers like Babel (1941) and Mikhail Koetsov (1942); producers like Meyerhold (1940). Among the names are several of the Jewish writers : Markish, Kvito—and Feffer. The first two are given as dying in 1952. For the last. no death date is provided.
The editors precede this index with a note in which they say that certain dates are unobtain- able and ask readers who can help to write in about them. The natural idea that in Feffer's case there might have been an error seems highly un- likely in Soviet conditions : the rigour with which every book, let alone the Encyclop(edia, has to he submitted to a whole series of different authorities for clearance and check is extreme. Moreover, it is clear that this index (selected as suitable for so many revelations) has been very carefully gone over from a political point of view : for instance, enemies of the people like Beria, Yezhov and Bukharin are not given dates, and the Christian names provided for everyone else are in their cases meticulously reduced to initials.
In their inquiry into the Feffer murder the de- tectives have few clues to go on. This may seem a slight one. Yet it certainly casts a nasty shadow of suspicion on Khrushchev and Serov, both al- ready known for their anti-Semitic views and already sponsors of falsehoods about the case. Until they end the murky secretiveness with which the whole business is still treated, they must not be surprised if such ideas seem only too plausible.
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