An autonomous, flourishing national culture in its diverse manifestations is one of the principal characteristics of national existence, the very essence of a nation. Hence government policy towards the cultures of national minorities is immensely important in a multi-national state. Despite the extreme anti-Jewish policy of the regime in Tsarist Russia, a rich tri-lingual Jewish culture–in Hebrew, Russian and Yiddish – developed there in the second half of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries.

However, the Soviet regime, in the very first years of its existence, severed the Hebrew branch of this tri-lingual culture when it launched its relentless war on the ‘clerical’ Hebrew language, Hebrew cultural institutions ‘connected with Zionism’ and the Jewish religion. The ‘Russian’ branch of Jewish culture began to be subjected to a similar fate in the 1920s and 1930s, as independent Jewish research institutions such as the Historical and Ethnographic Society were liquidated, the publication of Jewish research and literary collections in Russian was terminated and the newspaper Tribuna, the organ of Ozet, was closed. The axe was poised over the Yiddish branch in the second half of the thirties, and it was only the outbreak of the war and the subsequent change in policy on the whole national problem which kept it from falling on the third branch of Jewish culture. There seems little doubt that the Soviet leadership sought to ‘denationalise’ the Jewish minority by severing it from its historical past and, in particular, by stifling its national culture.