Confessions of a Foreign Intelligence Agent’s Son

HAIFA, Israel — Many years ago, I was in the German city of Cologne and went to a station restaurant for lunch. I was surprised when I saw “Chicken Kiev-style” on the menu. I was surprised because I was born and raised in Kiev, and I knew nothing about Chicken Kiev-style. Truth be told, I have not lived in Kiev for a long time now, and I am not aware of the chickens there. I asked the waitress to bring me some chicken from Kiev, because I was born in Kiev. She graciously agreed to bring me the dish I ordered and added: “Kiev! I know, it’s a city in England.”

Maybe she thought Kiev was in England because I spoke to her in English, not German. In any case, nowadays many people know in which country Kiev is located. But it’s worth mentioning that not only I was born and grew up in Kiev, but also my father.

My father had two defects — a heart defect and Jewish ancestry. Because of the first defect, he was not taken into the Soviet army during World War II. Because of the second vice he was declared “an enemy of the people” after World War II. Then in 1949 in the USSR there was a campaign against “homeless cosmopolitans,” that is, against Jews, artists and cultural figures, among whom was my father, who was declared “anti-patriot” and “agent of foreign intelligence” by the authorities. My father was a professor of German and French literature at Kiev University and a contributor to the literary journal Vitchisna (translated from the Ukrainian language, the name means homeland). He was dismissed from both institutions as an adherent of foreign literature, preferring foreign art to Soviet art, and a “traitor to the socialist motherland.”

My father published his memoirs, Confessions of a Foreign Intelligence Agent, about these events 30 years ago. At the same time as my father, my mother’s sister, who was then a professor and head of the department of the history of Russian music and dean of the vocal faculty of the Kiev Academy of Music, was dismissed from her job and denounced in the press and at political meetings with the same accusations. My father and aunt were forced to leave such inhospitable Kiev. 30 years passed, and I, too, received the title of “traitor to the motherland.”

My former worker of the Kiev Institute of Physics, doctor of physics and mathematics, future corresponding member of Academy of Sciences of Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, future deputy of Supreme Soviet of the USSR, future minister of science and technology of Ukraine, who tried to talk me out of leaving for Israel in 1979, reached the opposite effect. He told me that the quotas for Jews were not discriminatory, but the right policy to regulate relations between nationalities in a multinational country: The percentage of Jews admitted to universities should not exceed the percentage of Jews in the population. He fell within the definition of a “moderate” antisemite by Jean-Paul Sartre in his Reflections on the Jewish Question (1944): “A ‘moderate’ anti-Semite is a polite person who gently tells you: ‘Personally, I do not hate the Jews at all.'” I just think that for such and such reasons they should be limited in the life of the country. And he told me this after I had told him the story of the persecution of my father and my aunt as Jews as one of the reasons for my leaving the USSR. He said that Soviet Jews did not fight and die in World War II. This he reported to me, whose uncle had died fighting in Estonia in 1941. The co-worker was older than I was. According to his story, after the war Jews were deputy directors of grocery stores in starving Kiev and were provided with everything then, as Ukrainians lived starving. Many Kiev Jews could not get to be deputy grocery store directors because they did not need food-they were murdered by the Nazis and their Ukrainian associates.

This colleague said that by going to Israel I was harming the Jews as well, for none of them would now be hired even by him, the “progressive” man. He perceived the Jews as hostages bearing the collective blame for each other, and he presented me as an enemy of the Jews who had harmed them by my departure. He said that the USSR was in a difficult situation and that he perceived my move as “desertion,” as an enemy act. I felt that I quite fit into his vision of the Jews during and after that war: Jews avoided the front, Jews are anti-patriots. The director of the Institute of Physics, a corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR, summoned me for a conversation about my application to leave for Israel and informed me that I was a traitor to the motherland. As the deputy editor-in-chief of the Ukrainian Physical Journal he decided to remove my article, which had been accepted for publication there, from the forthcoming issue of the journal.

The director explained that articles by traitors to the motherland could not be published in domestic journals. Thirty years earlier the set of my “cosmopolitan” father’s book about the Danish writer Martin Andersen Neksø had been destroyed. He incriminated me for exactly what had been my father’s and my aunt’s charges 30 years earlier. The circle closed. Although my immigration to Israel was legal, I received the title of “traitor to the motherland.” I received this title by right, for I was indeed a traitor to that homeland. I did not consider the Soviet Union my homeland, despite the fact that I had been born there. By that time, I was studying Hebrew and Jewish history underground. So, at work I was called a “traitor to the motherland”. Thirty years before that, so was my father. In that country anyone could be a traitor — someone who loved his homeland, like my father, and someone who did not love it, like me.

Many years have passed and encyclopedias of the independent Ukraine published posthumous articles praising my father and aunt who were outstanding personalities in the Ukrainian art scene. Since I betrayed the Soviet Union, a country that no longer exists, it would seem that I was no longer labeled as a traitor to the fatherland: In the absence of a motherland, my betrayal was apparently automatically annulled. But I had a difficult relationship with Kiev: Because my relatives and myself were renegades there, I never came to Kiev again, fearing a new outbreak of mistrust toward my family on the part of the city. Doubts about my dislike of Kiev were there, but they disappeared, and here’s how it was.

Ukraine, including Kiev, were attacked by Russia. And many, and I among them, sided with the victims of the aggression. And many, and I among them, admired the courage of the Ukrainians. And many, and I among them, wished victory for the glorious Ukrainians over the imperialists and occupiers. But here on March 20, 2022, many Israelis, and I among them, received a history lesson from the president of Ukraine, who criticized the government of Israel for not helping Ukraine enough, calling on history to help and citing the rescue of Jews by Ukrainians during World War II. The president also argued that the fate of the Ukrainian people in this aggression was equivalent to the Holocaust.

And then I realized how one should study the history of Jewish-Ukrainian relations: Forget everything the Ukrainians have done to the Jews over the centuries and start writing this history from the moment President Volodymyr Zelensky led Ukraine in its just struggle against Russia. And here I noticed the support for the president’s position by some citizens of Ukraine in the form of an accusation against Jews on the Radio Liberty website: “There is no power in the Knesset to raise their hands and recognize the Holodomor as genocide (The Holodomor was a famine in 1932–1933 in the Ukrainian SSR that caused many millions of human casualties. – A. G.). Maybe because half of the heads of the repressive organs of the USSR were Jews.”

It turned out that the people who believed that the Jews were responsible for the Holodomor in Ukraine on the wave raised by Zelensky in the Knesset were not so few, far more than I would have liked to meet. This is how I learned that the Holodomor was a half-Jewish criminal event against Ukrainians. This was a new charge for me. In my day, Jews were not accused of this. There were many other accusations, but they were made during the period of Soviet state antisemitism. They were just as poorly substantiated, but they could be attributed to the work of Soviet propaganda. And this argument was already a propaganda commodity manufactured in the new, independent Ukraine.

In 2006 the Verkhovna Rada, the parliament of Ukraine, officially recognized the Holodomor of 1932–1933 as the genocide of the Ukrainian people. In the same year, the Security Service of Ukraine (SSU) for the first time made public the list of persons involved in organizing and carrying out the Holodomor and repressions in the republic in 1932–1933. It is said that there is no state antisemitism in contemporary Ukraine. Indeed, there are no explicit or implicit anti-Jewish restrictions.

However, the new Ukraine also lacks studies on the tragedy of Jewish-Ukrainian relations in the past. Silencing antisemitism is also antisemitism. Unexposed and uncondemned anti-Semitism remains among the people. Therefore, when the state security service of Ukraine shows its people a list of those responsible for the Holodomor, in which more than a third are Jews, it encourages antisemitism. How many Jewish names did it take to accuse the entire Jewish people for centuries of the murder of Jesus Christ? About as many as were on the SSU list.

And now, again, in the new, non-Soviet, even anti-Soviet Ukraine, there was the accusation of the Jews of the Holodomor of the Ukrainians, that is, of the genocide of the Ukrainian people. And this new bloody anti-Jewish libel is remembered in Ukraine even now that Israel is not fulfilling all the demands of the struggling Ukrainian people. When the Jewish people found themselves in Nazi-occupied Ukraine, there were about as many Ukrainian names of Jewish saviors from Nazism as there were Jewish names on that SSU list. If many more Ukrainian Jewish saviors had been found, a million and a half Jews would not have died in the Holocaust in Ukraine, a quarter of the Holocaust victims. And when I found out about this new accusation against the Jewish people, I remembered the former, still Soviet Kiev, and a lot of other old Ukrainian-Jewish history and realized that solidarity has its limits.

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Alex Gordon is a native of Kiev, Ukraine, and graduate of the Kiev State University and the Technion in Haifa (Doctor of Science, 1984). He immigrated to Israel in 1979. He is a Full Professor (Emeritus) of Physics in the Faculty of Natural Sciences at the University of Haifa and at Oranim, the Academic College of Education. He is the author of eight books and about 500 articles in print and online, and has been published in 62 journals in 14 countries in Russian, Hebrew, English, and German.