The Soviet Jew
This is a reprint of the introduction to a longer series, called "The Soviet Jew," currently being published on Yasha Levine's Substack, "Weaponized Immigrant." We encourage you to continue reading and support Yasha's work.
Intro
It was the morning of November 9, 2017, Washington, DC. It was cold and windy outside. But I was warm, standing inside a hallowed hall of American Democracy — a plush room on the first floor of the Library of Congress. There were fireplaces, marble columns, redwood paneling, gold-trimmed ceilings, mosaics of scenes out of ancient Greece.
I had just arrived and was standing at the back, near the buffet, drinking coffee. Looking around, I saw a lot of gray hair and stooped shoulders and shapeless bureaucratic suits. Most people seemed bored out of their minds. They sat there scrolling their phones or drinking their cheap coffee and snacking on catered sandwiches. There were also a lot of eager young interns. Expectant faces and pressed blue shirts and khakis. They were waiting in the wings, ready to run errands for the organizers of the conference or the various VIP guests that were in attendance. Up on stage, several Russian emigres and a couple of Russia experts were discussing Vladimir Putin and whether or not the Russian people — sullied as they’ve been by a century of debased communist ideology — could ever be truly free.
For two days I had been sitting through various similar panels exploring similar themes. There was one talking about the need for countries to truly and honestly account for their communist crimes. There was another where various experts talked about the dire need to educate today’s American youth about the horrors of communism. The panel’s moderator — who, according to his bio, was the chairman of the White emigre Russian Ball — said he was horrified at recent polls showing that young people in America hate capitalism more than communism. On that same panel, a Russian human rights activist, speaking through an interpreter, had talked about how much worse the Soviets were than the Nazis. “At least the Nazis didn’t kill their own,” she said. I shook my head at that one. Guess she was in agreement with the Nazis, then. That German Jews weren’t really German. And all the other Germans the Nazis murdered — the gay, the handicapped, those deemed mentally unfit — weren’t German, either.
But what was I complaining about? A Russian woman doing revisionist pro-Nazi history to score points against Stalin — and doing it across the street from the U.S. Congress, surrounded by serious people involved in American politics — was exactly what I had expected to see at an event put on by the Victims of Communism Foundation. It’s why I made the long trip to DC from the capitalist kommunalka apartment in Brooklyn that my wife and I were sharing with two other people at the time.
What is the Victims of Communism Foundation? A kind of fascism appreciation society is probably the best way to describe it.
The organization was conjured out of the void by a unanimous, bipartisan act of Congress and signed into existence by President Bill Clinton. Since then, it’s been backed and funded by a bunch of American oligarchs and their various foundations — Charles Koch was the biggest name, but there were others. It has a big reactionary Eastern European emigre presence, not to mention some very real Nazi sympathizers on its sponsor sheet.
Since being set up in 1993, the foundation’s main functions has been to tell the truth about communism — namely, that it is the most evil ideology known to man, much more more evil than even the most evil, the ideology of the German Nazis. To help achieve its educational goal, it has been recruiting various research fellows and putting on events and panels decrying the evils of communism and socialist-adjacent political movements. It has also been running a modest Victims of Communism Museum nearby, dedicated, as promotional materials explain, “commemorating the more than 100 million victims of Communism around the world and to those pursuing freedom from totalitarian regimes.”
Everything the Victims of Communism did had an over-the-top comic feel, like the whole thing was a gag. And people have been mocking the foundation online for years — by doing things like posting photos of homeless people sleeping rough right outside the doors of its museum.
But no, the foundation took itself very seriously. And 2017 was an important year for anti-communist warriors all around the world. It was the 100-year anniversary of the October Revolution, which toppled Russia’s weak Provisional Government and put Vladimir Lenin’s Bolshevik-led revolutionary coalition in control of Petrograd and then, ultimately, the former Russian Empire.
So Victims of Communism had a big special event planned to mark this International Date of Evil, and to remind DC’s political warriors that the fight against the communist virus was not over, not by a long shot. China, Venezuela, North Korea, Vietnam — all of these were still in the grips of an evil ideology. According to them, even in Russia, a place that had a capitalist counter-revolution and where almost everything is owned by a very anti-communist private oligarchy, was somehow in the grips of communism.
Organizers had packed in a bunch of famous anti-communist emigres and activists. Vaclav Klaus — one of the early prime ministers of the post-communist Czech Republic, as well as an outspoken libertarian weirdo and Cato Institute talking head — was a featured speaker. Paula Dobriansky, whose father Lev ran an umbrella group after World War II for various rebranded Nazi collaborators, was scheduled to appear as well. Natan Sharanksy, the VIP Soviet Jewish nationalist, was booked for event. Senator Ted Cruz even put in an appearance, brightening everyone’s day.
The audience had some interesting people, too. At lunch break I got to talking to a kindly old man named Jaroslaw, who turned out to be…well, spy adjacent would be a nice way of putting it. From what I gathered, he also hailed from a family of Ukrainian Nazi collaborators. He proudly talked to me about working for organizations that I knew to be covert CIA influence projects — including one founded and led by an infamous Nazi collaborator Mykola Lebed who worked out of New Jersey with CIA backing.1
Like I said, Victims of Communism attracted real quality people with interesting biographies. And that’s why I was there — researching what I hoped would be my next book about a subject that had long fascinated me: how after World War II, America began to see nationalism as a potent weapon against the Soviet Union.
The outlines of this scheme has been known to historians for years. It was cooked up by the leading lights of American foreign policy — people like George Kennan and Allan Dulles. Under their various programs, American intelligence agencies recruited and cleared thousands of people active in nationalist and fascist movements across Eastern Europe — many of whom had actively collaborated with the Nazis and fought against the Soviet Union. They came from Ukraine, Hungary, Croatia, Latvia, Russia, Lithuania — regions that had came under Soviet and Communist Bloc control after World War II. The idea behind supporting these groups was simple: utilize their nationalist, sectarian, and religious movements and identities as weapons against communism.
Countries like the Soviet Union and the Socialist Republic of Yugoslavia were multi-ethnic societies held together by an idea that sought to transcend the ethnic and cultural divisions and wars that had preoccupied those lands. And it was the very nature of their multi-ethnicness that made them vulnerable. Socialist ideology could attempt to paper over ethnic and nationalist strife and prevent old sectarian beefs and identities from breaking to the surface, but they were still there — dormant. And America wanted to use nationalism of these societies to break them apart.
So I started working on my book, doing research in archives, taking trips to the Old Country, analyzing the scaffolding used to support the weaponization process, and then trying to get a handle on the main players involved. The way I saw it, this was a true crime story — the story of a cynical, highly-classified plan to rescue European fascism, to nurture it, to inject it back into Europe and Russia, and to watch as it ratcheted up long-simmering ethnic strife and turned people against one another. I wanted to unravel the story like a detective thriller: Clandestine meetings with the enemy. Recruitment of sadists and mass murderers. Doomed commando missions behind the Iron Curtain. Soviet assassins prowling Europe. Defection and infiltration. Genociders enjoying quiet, respectable lives in America, while secretly living in fear of being exposed. American politicians in bed with Nazi collaborators.2
But as I got deeper into the project, my excitement for the original idea started to wane. I began to realize there was something off about the way I was approaching the book. There was something missing in my hyper-focus on this Eastern European fascist menace. And it finally clicked for me at the Victims of Communism event. What was missing from this story was…me.
I’m a political refugee. My family — me, my brother, my mother and father — left Leningrad in 1989 when I was eight years old.
We took off in a hurry with a bit of cash and one-way tickets to Warsaw, where my mom had to sell her mother’s jewelry so we could buy connecting tickets to Vienna. We spent the better part of the year in refugee camps — first in Austria and then in Italy, where we lived in a trailer park by the name of “Castel Fusano,” owned by an aristocratic family in the town of Ostia, just outside of Rome.
Castel Fusano had been rented by an American-Jewish organization from a minor Italian aristocratic family and hastily converted into housing for a few hundred refugees like us who were waiting to get our refugee immigration status cleared by American officials. The camps were tough for my parents. They were stateless and totally powerless. They had no idea where we’d end up, or even if America was going to take us in. We were dependent on weekly handouts from American Jewish organizations and the mercy of America’s opaque immigration bureaucracy. It was doubly difficult for my mother. She had left the Soviet Union with stones in her kidneys and the condition worsened and became more painful as the months dragged on.
Still, my parents thought the risk and the chaos of leaving their old lives behind was worth it. All their lives they had been made to feel their Jewish “otherness” in countless different ways. They felt restricted in their opportunities and on a very deep level they hated the Soviet system, and they had good reasons to. They wanted a better life for themselves, and for me and my brother. When they got the chance to get out, they took it. And they weren’t alone.
Our family left the Soviet Union as part of a larger wave of Jewish immigration that took place in the 1970s and 1980s — a mass migration that was backed up by vast resources from private Jewish-American organizations, but which could never have happened without an under-the-radar campaign by Israel and aggressive economic and diplomatic pressure leveraged by the United States.
I had long been aware of the Cold War politics behind my family’s immigration to the United States. Yet for years it had been compartmentalized, existing in a space in my head all by itself. But as I sat at that Victims of Communism conference, thinking about the way that America sought to weaponize nationalist diasporas and listening to various emigre speakers talking up their own liberated-from-communism societies, it suddenly hit me. I realized that it was all connected. My own family’s immigration out of the Soviet Union wasn’t just a separate phenomenon related to Soviet Jews, it was part of a continuum. It was part of this larger story. As I thought about it more, it dawned on me that there was something intellectually lazy about my hyper-focus on Eastern European nationalist movements. It was easy to write and get worked up about America doing deals with cartoonishly evil Nazi collaborators. It’s all very black and white and the morals are very clear, which is why plenty of other people had already tried to write it in various limited ways and with varying levels of success.3
It was a lot more difficult for me to put myself into the story, and to examine the much subtler weaponization of my own family and my own Soviet Jewish community.
I’ve been wrestling with how to approach the subject for the last few years. Taking a break from it helped clarify some things, and I now have a better way into it. It’s a multisided history that reflects my own fragmented immigrant identity. It involves not just America’s relentless imperial pursuits and Israel’s ethno-nationalist plans, but also the stagnation and failure of the Soviet project — a failure that was internal and can’t be easily blamed on America or some other outside power. In the end, the bigger story is about how nationalism won. Nationalism has come back to the Soviet Bloc. It’s the only ideology that has any real power today.
Chapter 1
At 10:43 am on September 28, 1973, the Chopin Express pulled into a small station in the Czechoslovakian town of Bratislava, right on the Austrian border. The train, dark olive and streaked with grime, had come from Moscow and was on its way to its final stop in Vienna. It moved slowly as it approached the platform and then, with a long deep squeak, ground to a halt.
It was a cold autumn morning. People stood around wrapped in their coats, surrounded by their luggage, waiting anxiously for the train doors to open. Among the small crowd were two men who looked to be in their 20s. They had black hair and beards and minimal luggage. They showed their tickets to the conductor waiting on the platform and then climbed into the train.
Inside, the scene was immediately reassuring. It was filled with people — crying children, heaps of luggage and boxes spilling out into the corridor, the smell of salami and hard boiled eggs. It was loud and chaotic, exactly what they were expecting. They pushed their way through the train, found their compartment, and sat down in their seats. Inside with them were five others: a young couple with a small child and two elderly people. No one paid them any attention.
The train started with a lurch and slowly accelerated. Outside, the last bit of Czechoslovakia slipped by — fields, industrial complexes, the wide Danube River. In a half hour, the train came to a stop once again — this time at a train station outside Marchegg, a tiny town on the other side of the border in Austria. A couple of border guards and a customs official boarded and made their way through the train, checking passports and papers, poking at luggage. The two lone men felt their adrenaline kick in. Their hearts raced, their mouths went dry. The moment they had trained for, the moment that had been keeping them up at night for weeks and weeks — it was about to start.
The border officials got to their cabin and asked everyone for their passports. That’s when the men sprung into action. One of them pulled out a Bulgarian-made Kalashnikov. The other took out a grenade and an automatic pistol. They yelled at everyone to raise their hands and told the guards to drop their weapons. The two men then herded one of the guards and five passengers, including the child, off the train. Everything was going according to plan.
Then, as they made their way towards the station, something unexpected happened: the young woman with the child suddenly broke away and ran down the platform, clutching her child to her breast. At that moment, the kidnappers made a split second calculation: Let her go, the other hostages would be enough for what they needed to do.
Once inside the station, they commandeered a Volkswagen minivan, crammed the remaining four people inside, and sped to the airport in Vienna half an hour away. There — with police surrounding the airport and snipers posted on rooftops hoping for a chance to take them out — the two men began their negotiations with the Austrian government.
The kidnappers said their names were Mustafa Aoueidan and Mahmoud Khaldi and that they were members of the Eagles of the Palestinian Revolution. They issued a list of demands and warned that if they weren’t met they’d start executing their hostages.
Europe in the 1970s was full of leftwing terrorism and guerrilla activity. Palestinian groups were particularly active. Hitting Israeli targets, taking hostages, commandeering airplanes — these things were almost as a matter of routine. The most spectacular plot, the one that shocked the world, had taken place less than a year earlier just across the border in Germany and involved the kidnapping of members of Israel’s Summer Olympic team in Munich — and had ended with both the hostages and Palestinian kidnappers dead after a botched rescue attempt.
But this attack on the train was different. In its own way, it was historic. It was the first time that a Palestinian group had specifically targeted Soviet Jews.
The people that Mustafa and Mahmoud had dragged off the train — well, everyone except the Austrian customs official — were Jews from the Soviet Union. Yolka Baransky, 68. Her husband Chaim, 71. David Czaplik, 26. They had all been traveling on a train packed with other Soviet Jews and all were on their way to Vienna, where Israeli officials were supposed pick them up, house them temporarily at a secure castle, and ultimately route them by air to their final destination: Tel-Aviv and Israel.
Why target Soviet Jews? And why in Austria?
The reason was simple. Mustafa and Mahmoud believed Israel was using Soviet Jews as a weapon in its war against the Palestinian people — and that Austria was complicit. They weren’t wrong.
Continue reading more from Yasha Levine's "The Soviet Jew" series on his Substack.
Yasha Levine is the author of "Surveillance Valley: The Secret Military History of the Internet," co-creator of the film "Pistachio Wars," and a variety of other journalistic projects.
