“If we had wings we would fly to you”. Kiril Feferman
Markedonov, “Evrei v oblasti voiska Donskogo.”
27 It seems that from the Jewish perspective, the German occupation of the region in 1918 brought about calm and relief from pogroms or from fear of pogroms. On the military aspects of the German drive to the region, see Reinhard Nachtigal, “Krasnyj Desant: Das Gefecht an der Mius-Bucht. Ein unbeachtetes Kapitel der deutschen Besetzung Südrußlands 1918,” Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 53, no. 2 (2005): 221–246.
28 Oleg Budnitskii, “Evrei Rostova-na-Donu na perelome epokh (1917–1920),” in Rossiiskii sionizm: istoriia i kul′tura (Moscow: Evreiskoe agentstvo v Rossii, SEFER, Dom evreiskoi knigi, 2002). Cf. Oleg Budnitski, “The Jews in Rostov-on-Don in 1918–1919,” Jews and Jewish Topics in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe 3, no. 19 (1992): 16–29.
29 On one of the few examples of an open manifestation of anti-Jewish sentiments (directed against Mountain Jews), see Lyudmila Gatagova, “Caucasian Phobias and the Rise of Antisemitism in the North Caucasus in the 1920s,” The Soviet and Post-Soviet Review 36 (2009): 42–57.
30 “Na bor′bu s antisemitizmom,” Molot (Rostov-on-Don), December 14, 1928 and January 16, 1929. Quoted in: Gontmakher, Evrei na donskoi zemle, 167–168.
31 The emphasis here is on the word “relatively.” Soviet famine in the 1930s also struck at the North Caucasus, albeit arguably on a lower scale than elsewhere in the country. Brian J. Boeck, “Complicating the National Interpretation of the Famine: Reexamining the Case of Kuban,” Harvard Ukrainian Studies 30, no. 1/4 (2008): 31–48. Cf. Andrea Graziosi and Dominique Négrel, “‘Lettres de Kharkov’: La famine en Ukraine et dans le Caucase du Nord à travers les rapports des diplomates italiens, 1932–1934,” Cahiers du monde russe et soviétique 30, nos. 1–2 (Janvier–Juin 1989): 5–106.
32 Vsesoiuznaia perepis′ naseleniia 1939 goda. Osnovnye itogi (Moscow: Nauka, 1992), 24, 26. According to German sources, in Rostov there lived from 200,000 to 300,000 civilians. Andrej Angrick, Besatzungspolitik und Massenmord. Die Einsatzgruppen D in der südlichen Sowjetunion, 1941–1943 (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2003), 561.
33 Evgenii Movshovich, “11 avgusta—60 let tragedii v Zmievskoi balke,” Shma (Rostov-na-Donu) 7, no. 36 (May 15–July 24, 2002): 3. Cf. Vladimir Kabuzan, Naselenie Severnogo Kavkaza v 19–20 vekakh: etnostatisticheskoe issledovanie (St. Petersburg: Izd-vo “Russko-Baltiiskii informatsionnyi tsentr BLITS,” 1996), 209.
34 Including Mountain Jews. Distribution of the Jewish Population of the USSR 1939, ed. Mordechai Altshuler (Jerusalem: Hebrew University, Center for the Research of East European Jewry, 1993), 13–15.
35 John Klier [as Dzhon Klir], “‘Kazaki i pogromy’: Chem otlichalis′ voennye pogromy,” in Mirovoi krizis 1914–1920 gg. i sud′ba vostochnoevropeiskogo evreistva, ed. Oleg Budnitskii (Moscow: ROSPEN, 2005), 55–56, 59–60.
36 Peter Kenez, Civil War in South Russia, 1919–1920. The Defeat of the Whites (Berkeley: University of California, 1977), 172. Cf. Iosif Shekhtman, Pogromy Dobrovol′cheskoi Armii na Ukraine: K istorii antisemitizma na Ukraine v 1919–1920 gg. (Berlin: Ostjüdisches Historisches Archiv, 1932), 31, 76.
37 Elena Khachemizova, Obshestvo i vlast′ v 30-e—40-e gody XX veka: Politika repressii (na materialakh Krasnodarskogo kraia), PhD diss., Maikop, Adygeiskii gosudarstvennyi universitet, 2004, 44–107.
38 E. A. Rees, Iron Lazar: A Political Biography of Lazar Kaganovich (London: Anthem Press: 2012), 110–111, 113, 121.
39 Feferman, The Holocaust in the Crimea, 427–435.
40 Ibid., 438–441.
41 Evgenii Zhuravlev, Kollaboratsionizm na iuge Rossii v gody Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny (1941–1945 gg.) (Rostov-on-Don: Izd-vo Rostovskogo universiteta, 2006), 22–27, 42.
42 Natal′ia Bulgakova, Sel′skoe naselenie Stavropol′ia vo vtoroi polovine 20-kh—nachale 30-kh godov 20 veka: Izmeneniia v demograficheskom, khoziaistvennom i kul′turnom oblike, PhD diss., Stavropol, Stavropol′skii gosudarstvennyi universitet, 2003, 17–18.
43 Dissertations written in the North Caucasus by local researchers do not mention a noticeable Jewish presence among the regional power elites in the 1930s. Aleksandr Savochkin, Massovye repressii 30–40-kh gg. 20 v. na Severnom Kavkaze kak sposob utverzhdeniia i podderzhaniia iskliuchitel′noi samostoiatel′nosti gosudarstva, PhD diss., Vladimir, Vladimirskii iuridicheskii institut Federal′noi sluzhby ispolneniia nakazanii, 2008. Cf. Khachemizova, Obshestvo i vlast′.
44 I would like to thank an anonymous reviewer of this book for providing me with the clue as to where to search for Efim Ginsburg’s background during the prewar period. I contacted the Russian “Memorial” society, which gathers information on former members of Socialist parties in Russia. They had a couple of lines devoted to Efim Ginsburg and finally they were able to confirm that indeed we were talking about the same person.
45 On the Menshevik path in the Russian Revolution, see, for example, Abraham Ascher, “The Mensheviks in the Russian Revolution,” Zmanim: A Historical Quarterly 27/28 (1988): 38–53 [Hebrew]. On the Socialist Revolutionaries, see, for example, Marc Jansen, A Show Trial under Lenin: The Trial of the Socialist Revolutionaries, Moscow, 1922 (The Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1982).
46 The only exception is few photos dating 1932 and 1936, which either featured Efim or were addressed to him.
47 David R. Shearer, Policing Stalin’s Socialism: Repression and Social Order in the Soviet Union, 1924–1953 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), especially pp. 158–180.
48 Golfo Alexopoulos, Stalin’s outcasts: Aliens, citizens, and the Soviet state, 1926–1936 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003), 170–174. Disenfranchisement in the Soviet Union entailed a ban on participation in elections. It also meant receiving a reduced amount of food coupons, or not receiving them at all, a ban on certain types of employment, etc.
49 Valentin Berezhkov, Kak ia stal perevodchikom Stalina (Moscow: DEM, 1993), 226.
50 Letter from Liza Chazkewitz in Rostov-on-Don, December 26, 1939, YVA: O.75/324, pp. 3–4.
51 See, for example, Michael Parrish, The Lesser Terror: Soviet State Security, 1939–1953 (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1996), 1–51.
52 On the restrictions on communication under Stalin, see for example, Kindler, “Famines and Political Communication in Stalinism,” 255–272.
53 On the evacuation to Siberia, see, for example, Vo imia pobedy; evakuatsiia grazhdanskogo naseleniya v Zapadnuiu Sibir′ v gody Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny v dokumentakh i materialakh, ed. L. Snegireva (Tomsk: Izdatel′stvo TGPU, 2005), vol. 1: Iskhod; Kristen E. Edwards, Fleeing to Siberia: The Wartime Relocation of Evacuees to Novosibirsk, 1941–1943, PhD diss., Stanford, CA, Stanford University, 1996.
54 On the evacuation to Kazakhstan, see, for example, Kaganovich, “Evreiskie bezhentsy.”
55 Shulamit Shalit, “Mne rekomendovali vziat′ psevdonim. (Mark Kopshytser, 1923–1982),” http://berkovich-zametki.com/2005/Starina/Nomer9/Shalit1.htm, accessed March 12, 2016. I am grateful to the anonymous reviewer of the manuscript who gave me the clue to search for Efim Ginsburg in this publication.
56 No date, YVA: O.75/324, p. 406.
57 See the section “August 1942” for details of when and how the members of the Ginsburg family were murdered.
58 Boris Urlanis, Rozhdaemost′i prodolzhitel′nost′ zhizni v SSSR (Moscow: Gosstatizdat, 1963), 103–104.
59 Although in the information submitted to Yad Vashem, Efim Ginsburg’s widow wrote that Avraham Greener had perished in 1942 during the Holocaust in the Rostov district, there is no reference to this