As elsewhere in the Russian Empire, many of the younger generation of Rostov Jews became dissatisfied with the Tsarist regime, and joined the ranks of the revolutionaries.21 In the second half of October 1905, a pogrom occurred in Rostov-on-Don, which also involved clashes between the Black Hundreds22 and revolutionary-minded workers and young people. Some 150 Jews were slaughtered in the pogrom, which made it the second bloodiest pogrom in the Russian Empire (after Odessa) before the Russian Civil war.23
The next landmark in the history of Rostov Jewry was the arrival in the city of the fifth Lubavicher Rabbi, Rabbi Sholom Dov-Ber Schneerson, in 1915.24 He spent five years there, until he passed away in 1920.
Contrary to what occurred in many other parts of the former Russian Empire, after the Bolshevik revolution in November 1917, the sympathies of at least the more prosperous local Jews were with the White Russians. On December 13, 1917, A. Alperin, an important local merchant, delivered 800,000 rubles that had been collected by Rostov Jews to the Ataman of the Province of the Don Cossack Host for the fight against the Bolsheviks.25
In the course of the Russian Civil war in 1917–1920, the Jewish population in the North Caucasus found itself largely under the control of the White Russian movement. It is well known that a considerable number of White Russian troops espoused strong anti-Semitic feelings (see further on). In spite of this, in the North Caucasus the situation remained under control, obviously because of the relatively strong rule of the White administration, and there were no reports of significant anti-Jewish excesses there.26 For some months, in the second half of 1918, part of the region, including the city of Rostov-on-Don, was occupied by the German army.27 On the whole, under White Russian rule, independent internal Jewish life continued during these years, with a particular rise in Zionist activities.28
With the advent of the Bolsheviks, anti-Semitism in the region did not disappear but largely went underground.29 Nevertheless, the infrequent reports published in a Rostov newspaper in 1929 depict vicious verbal attacks by local workers, who lashed out at their Jewish colleagues at the city’s plants.30 Still, the Jewish population in the region grew slightly in the period between the two World Wars, attracted by growing economic prospects and relatively plentiful food,31 an important factor in the Soviet Union at that time. On the eve of the Soviet-German War, the small Jewish population was concentrated in several large North Caucasian cities, with Rostov-on-Don having by far the largest Jewish population in the region. According to the 1939 Soviet population census, 27,039 Jews (5.3% of the total population) lived in Rostov-on-Don,32 while 33,024 Jews (1.1% of the total) lived in the whole Rostov District.33 In addition, 4,600 Jews were registered in Kabardino-Balkaria, 2,100 in North Ossetia, 7,600 in the Krasnodar territory, and 7,100 in the Stavropol territory.34
The region was noteworthy for its unique Cossack population, well known for its anti-Semitic mindset. The Cossacks participated in the deportation of Jews by the Tsarist army during World War I,35 and were actively involved in the pogroms in Ukraine, for example, in 1919.36 The Bolshevik anti-Cossack crusade37 (likely associated, one way or another, with the Jews, in the eyes of the local people in the region), included the Bolshevik onslaught on the Cossacks during the Collectivization period (presided over by Lazar Kaganovich, the only Jewish member of Stalin’s inner circle).38 The continuing anti-Semitic sentiment inculcated in the local people was latent, as it had almost no way to express itself, before the Germans occupied parts of the region. But it was significant, judging by the noticeable number of active collaborators and quiet denouncers in the North Caucasus during the German occupation.39 It was not all-encompassing, however, as evidenced by some manifestations of sympathy towards the Jews under Soviet rule before the German occupation in 1941–1942, and especially during the occupation.40
Finally, we should mention that the oppressive Soviet policies adversely affected the whole population of the North Caucasus, as they did the rest of the country. During the 1930s, some 42,000 Russian civilians were “repressed” (to adopt the Soviet term), that is, either shot down or incarcerated in the Azov-Chernomorsk territory (an administrative unit with the capital in Rostovon-Don, which existed from 1934 to 1938).41 The Cossacks, the Bolsheviks’ bitter enemies during the Russian Civil war, suffered particularly as a result of these policies.42 It is suggested that these policies affected local Jews, in a similar way to the rest of the population, but no worse.43
During the 1920s and the 1930s, most members of the Ginsburg family continued to live in Rostov-on-Don. It seems that following their relocation to a considerably more Russian and less Jewish city than Odessa, father Gedaliya changed his first name to Grigory, probably in order to improve his standing with his customers. But his wife kept her Jewish-sounding name, probably because she did not work outside of their home. However, we cannot rule out that this behavior also reflected the different attitude of the husband and wife to assimilation. Presumably they died in the 1920s or the 1930s, but we do not know when or how they died, for the correspondence does not mention them even once.
The only family member who was not living in Rostov-on-Don at the end of the 1930s was the youngest brother, Efim Ginsburg (1897–1973). The brother of the three aunts, he received almost every letter in this collection and managed to keep them in his possession during and after World War II.
Efim Ginsburg. 1930s. Courtesy of Yad Vashem Photo Archive.
His road from Rostov-on-Don to Moscow had been a very tortuous one. In 1921, Efim Ginsburg was imprisoned by the Soviet authorities on account of his “belonging to a socialist party,”44 as recorded in the database compiled by the Russian “Memorial” society. If we try to interpret this meager information, it seems most plausible that Efim Ginsburg (who turned twenty in 1917) had been affiliated with one of the Russian socialist parties (but not with the Bolsheviks or with Jewish Socialist parties) even before 1917. I assume that most likely he was a member of the Menshevik faction,45 or a Socialist Revolutionary party with their particularly high number of Jewish followers. This would account for his persecution by the authorities as early as 1921, that is, immediately after the Bolsheviks managed to consolidate their rule in Rostov-on-Don, at the end of the Civil War.
Unfortunately, there is almost no information about Efim Ginsburg’s life between 1927, when he was released from prison, and late 1939, when he resurfaced in the Ginsburg correspondence.46 So all we can do is to try to conjecture how he spent those years. The likelihood that the Soviet security agencies would have left him alone and that he was not hounded or discriminated against in that period would seem low. It is highly unlikely that Efim Ginsburg’s socialist past would have been entirely erased from police records.47 Formally, the rights of all those suffering from legal disenfranchisement were reinstated according to the 1936 “Stalin” Constitution.48 But, in fact, people with such backgrounds were the first on the list of those targeted by the largest wave of the Big Terror in 1937–1938, and the odds were high that Efim Ginsburg would not have survived.
Yet he did survive, and this begs for an explanation. There were some, albeit minor, exceptions to the aforementioned trends in the Soviet policies. Some members of Socialist parties were able to change their banners and join the victorious Bolshevik regime. One of the most prominent examples is Andrei Vyshynsky, who, in 1917, as a minor official, signed the Provisional Government order to arrest Lenin. He formally switched allegiance from the Menshevik party to the Bolsheviks only in 1920, but was, nevertheless, able to rise to prominence in the Soviet Union, becoming a Chief Prosecutor in 1935–1939 and the Minister of Foreign Affairs in 1949–1953. Certainly even Vyshinsky knew that such a stain on his reputation could never be entirely