SOVIET UNION: Degrees of Terror

"There is no Jewish question in the Soviet Union," Soviet Premier Aleksei Kosygin told a press conference in Canada last month. "This question is from beginning to end an invented one."

That, to put it mildly, is something of an exaggeration. A talented Jew can rise to great eminence in Soviet society, as have Violinist David Oistrakh and Ballerina Maya Plisetskaya, but the ordinary Jew is subject to rigid quotas that often bar him from universities and good jobs. Teaching Judaism and Hebrew is illegal; Yiddish culture is severely restricted. In the streets, Russia's traditional anti-Semitism has never really died. "We may not be victims of physical genocide," says Mikhail Zand, a distinguished philologist who recently managed to get out of Russia and settle in Israel, "but we are the victims of a cultural and spiritual genocide, simply because the Russians refuse to let Jews live a Jewish life."

Carefully Balanced. For years, the Jews of Russia accepted their fate stoically—Novelist Elie Wiesel called them "the Jews of Silence"—but ever since the Arab-Israeli war of 1967 they have become increasingly vociferous. So have their supporters abroad. Last week a House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee headed by New York Democrat Benjamin S. Rosenthal opened an investigation into the problem by having the State Department present an evaluation. The Deputy Assistant Secretary for European Affairs, Richard T. Davies, appeared at the hearing with a 21-page statement. Though carefully balanced, it promptly touched off a chorus of protests that demonstrated how touchy the whole question has become.

"All Soviet citizens—not just Jews —suffer from the Soviet government's policy of militant atheism and its refusal to consider migration as a right rather than a rare privilege," Davies said. He added that Jews were treated worse than other minorities, harassed by "anti-Zionist" campaigns and "deprived of the cultural ingredients needed to preserve their cultural and religious identity." He said that the State Department "deplored" this and was doing what it could to help. At the same time, Davies warned against exaggeration. "Claims that Soviet Jews as a community are living in a state of terror seem to be overdrawn," he said. "There can be no comparison with the terrible era of the Nazi holocaust or Stalin's blood purge of Jewish intellectuals."

There is certainly no disputing that statement. Still, Davies' cautionings were all that the Soviet dailies Izvestia and Pravda reported in stories declaring that the U.S. Government had in effect absolved Moscow of mistreating its Jewish population. Even the New York Times headlined: U.S. ASSERTS SOVIET JEWS ARE NOT LIVING IN TERROR. Predictably, the reaction was sharp.