THE UNTOLD STORY OF AUSTRALIA AND THE SOVIET JEWS 1959-1989

For 50 years, until the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, the Soviet Union ran a campaign of repression, imprisonment, political trials and terror against its three million Jews.  In Australia, political leaders and the Jewish community contributed significantly to the international protest movement which eventually triumphed over Moscow’s tyranny and led to the modern Exodus of Soviet Jews to Israel and other countries. Now former journalist and TV presenter Sam Lipski, with Suzanne Rutland, has recorded the story in Let My People Go” – The Untold Story of Australia and the Soviet Jews 1959-1989. Sam Lipski addressed The Sydney Institute on Tuesday 19 May 2015 to discuss this historic event.

THE UNTOLD STORY OF AUSTRALIA AND THE SOVIET JEWS 1959-1989

SAM LIPSKI

Thank you Gerard. It’s terrific to be here.

I don’t know how many of you were at The Sydney Institute’s Annual Dinner with Julie Bishop just a few weeks ago. A terrific affair, and a great tribute to Anne and Gerard – 900 of Sydney’s finest who paid good money to come and hear the Foreign Minister. But sitting at the table, to my delight and somewhat to my embarrassment, I found that the back of the menu quoted comments about The Sydney Institute from Clive James, Jana Wendt, Michael Kirby, Nikki Gemmell – what an interesting mix – and Sam Lipski! And this is what I am alleged to have said, “The Institute is a civilised and pluralist island of ideas and conversation in a sea of spin and obfuscation. It’s one of the few attributes that gives this Melburnian genuine Sydney envy.” Well, that’s true.

I know that both Anne and Gerard have a Melbourne connection as well. So I just want to say something about that, which some of you may remember. Those of you who were at Sydney University or Melbourne University in the 1950s might recall that we at Melbourne University distinguished ourselves from those Sydney University hacks because we liked Albert Camus. We also wore duffle coats and desert boots rather more stylishly than our Sydney counterparts. The thing about Albert Camus was that, in order to say that you really understood Albert Camus, you didn’t actually have to read his books. The titles usually sufficed. And if you had the right look about you as you mentioned the revered name, you could get away with it.

I don’t remember much about Albert Camus. But I do remember a quote from the book which helped him to win the Nobel Prize in 1957. A year earlier he published  The Fall, from which came the following: “A single sentence will suffice for modern man. He fornicated and read the newspapers.” That was back in 1956. Here’s my problem. We’ve given up reading the newspapers. What’s left to modern man? But Camus, briefly a Communist in his youth and a socialist all his life, denounced Soviet Communism, especially after the Red Army’s brutal suppression of the Hungarian Revolution. He said that in defending Western democracy against Soviet totalitarianism, he may only be defending a quarter-truth against an absolute lie. But it was a quarter truth worth defending, and sacrificing for.

Western democracy. Soviet totalitarianism. If I could have a little slogan to wear on my shirt, about what I am going to talk about tonight, that is what it would read. Western democracy Vs. Soviet totalitarianism. But as my namesake Samuel Goldwyn famously once said, “Before I speak, I just want to say a few words.” Sam Goldwyn came to the United States when he was about six from Russia. He never quite mastered the English language. He mangled it a bit. Some of you may be Sam Goldwyn fans. Goldwyn is the “G” in MGM, remember, he of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Seeing faces here that I recognise, reminds me of something else that Sam Goldwyn said. As he met one of his friends after some time he said, “Ah, my friend, you and I have passed a lot of water under the bridge since we last met.” Well, Michael and John, and everybody else here who vaguely remembers me, and I vaguely remember in turn, yes, we’ve passed a lot of water under the bridge.

On a more personal note, to my delight and my wife Aura’s delight, Meg Pocock introduced herself to us here this evening. It has made my night. Meg is the widow of the late Ted Pocock, Australia’s ambassador to Moscow, amongst many other distinguished posts that he held during a magnificent diplomatic career. Ted was the ambassador in Moscow when Aura and I went there in 1987. That is when we met the Refuseniks, those magnificent men and women. In Moscow, in 1987, Gorbachev was just beginning Glasnost/ Perestroika, but the Soviet Union was still very much the Soviet Union. And Ted was just magnificent, a great Australian. And very important.

My book Let My People Go is about events during my lifetime. We’re not talking about events during the Crusades, or the War of the Roses. But I fear that any book which nowadays includes the dates 1959 to 1989, which ours does, may seem just as ancient to a new generation.

I agree that books should speak for themselves. And I hope that for those of you who get to read Let My People Go it does just that. But I’ll try to explain why I wanted to write it, and how with my co-author Suzanne Rutland’s research, documentation and editorial collaboration, I was enabled to do that. Suzanne wanted to come tonight, but she had a clash with another engagement and couldn’t make it. She sends her apologies. But, as I say in the foreword to the book, as much as I wanted to write it, without Suzanne’s magnificent documentary work and her research over a decade, it wouldn’t have happened.

So why the book? Well, I provide the short answer to that question in the book’s first two sentences: “The Soviet Jewry movement gave me my first serious experience as a journalist and editor, my first taste of Zionist activism and my first exposure to Cold War politics, Australian style. I had wanted to write a book about it ever since I spent an unforgettable ten days in Moscow in September, 1987. That is when I met the heroic Refuseniks, came up against the Soviet totalitarian system, and, as an Australian Jew, felt grateful and proud that the Australia government, and its diplomats, had supported a just and righteous cause.” So much for why I wanted to write the book. But I think it’s only fair that I also tell you where I was coming from when I first began writing it some six years ago.

Although I was writing in the twenty-first century, I was actually coming from the twentieth century. Which reminds me of something that the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm wrote in The Age of Extremes, the book he said was about, “the short twentieth century”. Hobsbawm remained a mostly unreconstructed Stalinist until the day he died, which was just three years ago. But he was right about the loss of historical memory in our time. In The Age of Extremes he tells of the strange experience of lecturing to an otherwise quite bright group of American postgraduate students, who at the end of one of his lectures asked him, “Professor Hobsbawm, you spoke about the Second World War, does this mean there was a First World War?” So to understand twentieth century history, certainly Jewish history, we have to go back just a little earlier.

The founding Rabbi of the Hasidic movement in eighteenth century Eastern Europe, the Baal Shem Tov, spoke about the importance of memory in Jewish history. He said, “Forgetfulness leads to exile, while remembrance leads to redemption.” Remembrance and not forgetting, exile and redemption. They have been profoundly important ideas central to the Jewish experience and to the Jewish tradition for the twenty centuries since the loss of Jewish sovereignty in Judea in the first century. But of course, the injunction to remember – “zachar in Hebrew – dates back a millennium earlier, to biblical times. Remembering is embedded in the cycle of the Jewish year, expressed every week on the Sabbath and at every festival. I don’t think you can understand the Soviet-Jewish story of the twentieth century unless you see it through the prism of Jewish history. Re-enacting itself centuries later, which Jewish history has a strange habit of doing.

Natan Sharansky –  the most well-known Refusenik and prisoner of Zion, who I’m delighted to say endorsed the book – was a leading voice in both the Zionist and human rights movement in the Soviet Union. He spent nine years in the Gulag, mostly in solitary confinement on a trumped up charge of being a CIA spy. As chairman of the Jewish Agency in Jerusalem  today and a former Israeli cabinet minister, Sharansky expressed some concerns back in 2008, around about the time that I began writing the book. Those concerns spoke to me. “For three thousand years,” Sharansky wrote, “we Jews have remembered the great exodus of Israel from Egypt. We keep it alive by telling it anew each time to our children. But the exodus that happened in our own lifetime, and which so greatly influenced world history has almost escaped from our collective conscience.”

Jewish history doesn’t happen within its own self-enclosed time capsule. It always happens within world history. Which is why, two centuries after the Baal Shem Tov, it’s worth recalling that the dissident Czech writer, Milan Kundera, offered yet another take on the importance of remembrance. Writing from his own bitter experience of Soviet-style Communism in his homeland, Kundera said in his novel, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” Memory and forgetting. From the day I started writing the book, and through the time that I worked on it, Sharansky’s words and Kundera’s words, and the Baal Shem Tov’s words all resonated.

It concerns me, even now, that the great drama of Soviet Jewry is already fading from the Jewish historical memory, – from us Jews, of all people. I was struck by the fact, as I wrote and tried to remember, that I was there. I lived this. But I was struck, too, even more quickly, by how in the wider international community, “the long twilight struggle” – to quote John F. Kennedy – the long twilight struggle for freedom, which characterised the Cold War, had also faded from the historical memory of Western democracy. Australia is included in that.

The reawakening among three million Jews, which gathered strength after the 1967 Six Day War in the Middle East, is one of the epic sagas of Jewish history and of the twentieth century. Why so? Because of the struggle. After decades of Communist oppression of the Jewish religion, and the persecution of those who taught Hebrew or Jewish culture or Jewish identity; despite the Stalinist murders of Jewish intellectuals and community leaders in the 1940s and early 1950s; despite the Kremlin’s inspired campaigns of anti-Semitism in the mass media under Malenkov; despite the relentless Soviet-inspired, anti-Zionist campaign against Jews in Israel at the United Nations throughout the 1970s; despite the loss of their jobs and property, for those Jewish activists daring to ask to leave the Soviet Union; despite the KGB harassment, the house arrests, the imprisonment, the exile; despite all this, the Refuseniks never gave up. They never gave up until all of them were free in the late 1980s, when finally Gorbachev got the message.

For these reasons and more, I regard Soviet Jewry’s rebirth, as I write in the book, as one of Jewish history’s three Himalayan peaks in the twentieth century, together with the restoration of Jewish sovereignty in Israel and the Holocaust. I  also know in my bones that the wider conflict between liberty and Soviet totalitarianism, was the framework within which the twentieth century dramas of both Israel and the Jewish people and Soviet Jewry unfolded. The conflict provided the defining story of my own life – politically, as an Australian citizen, professionally, as a journalist writing about international affairs, and psychologically and emotionally as a Jew and a Zionist.

It’s as obvious, as night follows day, to quote another Australian Foreign Minister, that you simply cannot understand Australian political history, let alone the history of Israel and the Middle East and the Jewish people, and the East/West struggle, without understanding that there was a Cold War. There may have been a hot war before the Cold War. But there was a hot war and then a cold war. You can’t understand the Labor Party, and you certainly can’t understand the Liberal Party. You can’t understand that there was a Democratic Labor Party, or what all that was about in the 1940s and 1950s. Who were the faceless men, and what was all that about? You can’t understand Australian political history until you know something of the Cold War and its impact on our own domestic politics.

Yet, here we are, 50 years after many of the events in the book, although barely 25 years since the Berlin Wall fell. And, sadly, the rallying cry of “Let my people go,” which galvanised the Soviet Jewry campaigns throughout the Jewish world for three decades, has mostly been consigned to the past, that other country. The great heroes of the Jewish people through the 1970s and 1980s, the Refuseniks, the prisoners of Zion, who eventually found freedom in Israel and the West, have died. Or they continue to live unrecognised everyday lives, mostly forgotten, even in Israel where they were first welcomed as heroes. At one level that’s as it should be. Maybe that’s the real victory. After all, to be free from totalitarianism, to live in a democracy, means that you are free from the state’s repression and control over you. It also means you are free to be ordinary, to be private, to be unrecognised and to be unheroic. But all that is something different, I would argue, than accepting the loss of national historical memory. Nations and peoples who have succumbed to that malaise do so at their own risk.

So, faithful to our good friend Mr Goldwyn, having said a few words, I should now like to speak. I want to give you a picture of this book’s two intertwined themes. First, as I’ve suggested, it’s about why the successful struggle for freedom by Soviet Jews mattered in twentieth century history and second, how Australian involvement in that struggle unfolded, what difference it made and why that matters.

The emigration of over a million Jews to Israel, and many hundreds of thousands more to the United States, Canada, Western Europe and Australia, happened after an international human rights campaign lasting more than three decades. The Jackson Amendment was named after Senator Henry Jackson, at one stage a candidate for the presidency of the United States, and a Truman Democrat. The Amendment, passed in Congress during the Nixon-Kissinger years, became the most critical issues in relations between Washington and Moscow. It was introduced to persuade, cajole, or force Moscow to let the Jews of the Soviet Union, who wanted to leave, go. For at least a year, and some would say longer, this was the critical issue between East and West. And whether the whole Soviet Jewry struggle played a primary role, as I believe it did, or whether you merely assign it a contributory role, the Soviet Jewry movement, calling for freedom and emigration, helped to end the Soviet Empire. In Sharansky’s words, “It tore a gaping hole in the Iron Curtain”.

Moreover, the Soviet Jewry campaign redefined the notion of human rights. I believe it can claim to be among the twentieth century’s most successful human rights movements. Because of the extensive academic qualifications of most of the émigrés when they left the Soviet Union – and a million of them arrived in Israel – I believe it was the largest human knowledge transfer in the twentieth century, with Israel the beneficiary. George Shultz, a former United States Secretary of State famously said, in 1992, that the emigration of the million, give or take, Soviet Jews, with all those high academic qualifications was better for Israel than if it had struck oil.

At the height of the campaign for Soviet Jews, one of the excuses the Soviet Union used was that they knew too many state secrets. The story goes that one Jewish computer scientist was sitting in the KGB office trying to explain why after 12 years he really wanted to leave. The KGB constantly answered back, saying, “But you know too many state secrets.” The computer scientist said, “You fired me! I haven’t worked with a computer for 12 years, I don’t know any more secrets, if I ever did. Besides, the West has surpassed us and are way beyond us now in computer science.” The KGB man said, “Ah yes, but that is the secret.”

These  highly educated Soviet arrivals have not only helped Israel become “ The Start-Up Nation” economically and scientifically; they have helped to change Israel’s politics and, by extension, the politics of the Middle East. And they’ve continued to do so, right up until the recent elections in Israel in March.

Our book doesn’t try to be the whole story of Soviet Jewry. There are other fantastic books about that. The book’s specific focus is Australia’s role – 1959 to 1989 – over three decades. On more than one occasion, the Australian Jewish community and the Australian government, parliamentarians, diplomats, human rights activists, journalists and other opinion leaders, provided critical leadership to the rest of the world on this issue.

Suzanne Rutland and I believe that we’ve told a hitherto untold story. The reason we deliberately chose to call it “untold” was because what we came across in some of the archival material was not known at the time. Suzanne, in particular, had incredible access to archival material and ASIO files in Canberra and we have tried to show that very significant contribution. At various points, some of the great names of Australian politics throughout this period were involved directly. Garfield Barwick, Malcolm Fraser, John Gordon, William Wentworth, John Wheeldon and of course Bob Hawke who championed the Soviet Jewry cause, not without controversy on occasion. And with him the Jewish leader Isi Leibler, now living in Israel for whom Soviet Jewry became “a magnificent obsession” and who, of course, more than any other Australian led the way for those three decades.

I’d like to summarise three important Australian firsts in the Soviet Jewry story. In the second half of 1962, following contact between Isi Leibler and Liberal Party backbenchers William (Billy) Wentworth in Sydney and William Haworth in Melbourne and Sir Garfield Barwick, then the Minister for External Affairs, the Menzies Government became the first government in the world to raise the plight of Soviet Jewry with the United Nations. You might say well what was the big deal? It was a big deal because on 2 November 1962, just five days after President Kennedy and Khruschev had finally resolved the Cuban missile crisis, Australia’s delegate Douglas White, a junior diplomat, spoke at the UN General Assembly’s social committee. Sir James Plimsoll was Australia’s ambassador to the UN, but it was Douglas White who spoke. No government up to that point had ever raised the issue of  Soviet anti-Semitism. In fact, it was another two years before the United States followed the Australian example. More than that, as instructed by Barwick, Douglas White not only detailed what he called violent and inflammatory examples of Soviet anti-Semitism, but he introduced a most significant additional request. He said if the Soviet Union wasn’t willing to allow Soviet Jews to practise their religion freely, then it had a moral obligation under Article 13 of the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights to permit them to leave the country. Now, this was 1962, and there wasn’t even a significant Jewish immigration movement in the Soviet Union at that stage. And here was Australia in the United Nations, in the General Assembly Third Committee, saying to the Soviet Union, if you don’t lift your game and treat Jews humanely and with full rights, then let them leave.

Even Israel had not dared to call for that right publicly. Israel didn’t raise this issue for a variety of reasons, it was too sensitive. The question is, why did Barwick, against the advice of his diplomats, press this issue? There’s nothing in his own memoirs, nothing in David Marr’s biography, nor elsewhere, that even touches on it. Maybe for Barwick this was just another day at the office. Well, fair enough. But it seems that Barwick didn’t quite grasp the size of the grenade he was throwing at the Soviet Union. Moscow certainly did. The Soviets were completely taken aback and they were furious. And out of all this the Israelis took heart. It’s important to know this because the Israeli cabinet was divided on whether to go public. Australia’s bold move united a previously divided Israeli government. If Australia was willing to raise the issue then the Jewish state could no longer stand on the sidelines and advocate quiet diplomacy. Australia’s initiative also aroused interest in the United States Congress, in Canada and among European governments. The issue was out there, the issue of Soviet Jewry was now on the United Nations international global agenda.

I want to quickly mention just two other Australian firsts. About three years later, another came from a completely different quarter. The Australian Labor Party opposed the issue going to the United Nations in 1962 because they saw it a deliberate effort to split the Labor Party between its left and right. But, in 1965, it was the Communist Party of Australia that provided a world first. This happened because Isi Leibler made an unusual move. After the Jewish left had denounced him for being too brash and too right-wing, and after Jewish Labor party supporters were caught in the middle between wanting to raise the issue at the UN, but with the Labor Party as such opposing it, Leibler, who was seen to be the Cold War Warrior par excellence, began a dialogue with the Australian Communist Party. From that dialogue, Leibler published a booklet entitled Soviet Jewry and Human Rights. After quite a few months of discussion, he persuaded Rex Mortimer, a leading CPA intellectual and editor of the CPA newspaper, The Guardian, in Melbourne, to write a letter of endorsement. In the letter, Mortimer urged his fellow communists and the Australian left generally to denounce Soviet anti-Semitism.

Those of you who remember, will recall this was a time when the Communist Party of Australia was still very much pro-Moscow. Dubcek, Prague and the Red Army’s invasion of Czechslovakia was the huge watershed in communist parties around the world including Australia, but that was still three years into the future. Mortimer’s personal courage in breaking with the party in 1965 was very significant. It was the first time that a leading official of any Communist party, anywhere, including the  Italian Communist Party with its shifting views, had declared there was anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union. It’s hard to believe that so many in the Labor Party and the Australian left, through the early 1960s, were in such denial. But they were.

The third first was Labor’s Senator John Wheeldon. In 1979 he chaired the committee of inquiry on human rights in the Soviet Union. For those of you who like to discover classics of Australian political writing, read John Wheeldon’s very powerful introduction to the Australian parliamentary committee’s report on  that inquiry. This was the first time that any parliament in the West had held such a comprehensive inquiry and written such an important report.

Our book’s opening chapter begins with the event in the Melbourne Concert Hall in 1988 welcoming 15 freed Refuseniks, quite a few of them as a result of Hawke’s meeting with Gorbachev just a few months earlier. Three thousand Jews were in the Concert Hall. On stage were Prime Minister Bob Hawke and the then leader of the Opposition, John Howard, later to become prime minister. In Moscow, as history would have it, sitting in the Australian embassy and waiting to come online through the satellite hook-up was former prime minister Malcolm Fraser with a bunch of Soviet Jewry Refuseniks still waiting to leave.

It was an unforgettable evening, and I begin the whole story of Soviet Jewry in Australia with that first chapter. There were an Australian Labor prime minister, a future Liberal prime minister, and a former Liberal prime minister —  all united around this great epic saga of Soviet Jewry and Australia’s role in it. As John Howard has said in endorsing the book, it’s “an inspiring and fascinating story” and I hope you agree.