“Half-Breed” Jews in Post-war Soviet Union: Negotiating a Buffer-Zone Identity

My paper presents an anthropological exploration of the “intermediary” identity of people of mixed parentage (Jewish/non-Jewish, usually Russian) in a big multi-ethnic city of St. Petersburg (then Leningrad), particularly, in the intelligentsia milieu, in the period known as “fully-developed socialism” (1960–1980s). In a deeply “racialized” late Soviet society ethnicity played a crucial role in the state politics of biopower; mandatory ascription of ethnicity to all Soviet citizens (birth certificates and the passport system) defined ethnicity-based “rules of access,” primarily with regard to higher education and employment. As a deeply interiorized concept, ethnicity also played a significant role in various contexts of local everyday practice. The late Soviet regime had a pervasive desire to “fix” people in their identity positions, which importantly included ethnicity, as well as to rigidly associate these positions with certain types of social agency (or the lack thereof). In large “cosmopolitan” cities like Leningrad one can speak of “the Jewish racial slot” created both “from above” and on the level of grass-root interactions: Specific “gaze,” as a set of significant distinctions made Jews consistently aware of their “otherness.” This “gaze” was so much more important due to the virtual lack of any other resources for the construction of the Jewish identity (religion, languages, culture). While “half-breed” Jews, as the derogatory phrase goes (Russ. polukrovki, literally “half-bloods”), was not officially articulated as a specific ethnicity position, people of mixed Jewish—non-Jewish parentage could potentially fall into either category depending on the specific context of social interaction. Put differently, such people found themselves caught in a perpetual “buffer-zone,” facing the indeterminacy as to whether they would be considered “us” or “them” in each particular social situation. This “situational” character of their identity, or the lack of complete “intelligibility” on either side of the ethnic divide, foregrounds the importance of anthropological examination of “micropolitics” of everyday life, where this identity was recognized, negotiated, and manipulated. Based on several hundred interviews recorded in St. Petersburg from Jews, non-Jews, and people of mixed parentage, this paper will address issues such as: the social version of “hypodescent,” both official and popular (i.e. placing half-Jews into the less socially privileged position of “Jews”) and the frequent interiorization of the discriminatory logic of the system on the part of half-Jews, also on the basis of “blood mythology”; the more “protean” identity of half-Jews that gave them additional possibilities of “passing” as representatives of the “title nation,” i.e. disrupting the logic and the rules of the discriminatory system; the significant spheres of social practice, both public and private, where this identity can be seen “in the making”: early socialization, higher education, job placement and (later) immigration. By addressing specific political, economic and ideological realities of the late Soviet Union my paper will also emphasize a failure of the Soviet modernization project, which among other things implied full “erasure” of ethnic differences in the body of the “new historical entity, the Soviet people.”