Until recently I hadn’t even heard the name of Lazar Ran. Ran was born into a jewish family in Latvia (1) and chose to emigrate to the Soviet Union sometime before 1932. In order to attend the People’s Art School in Vitebsk – set up the jewish modernist artist Marc Chagall in 1918 - in what is now Belarus. (2) In 1932 Ran began his career as an official government artist in Minsk in the service of Joseph Stalin.
By the time the Wehrmacht invaded Belarus in 1941; Ran had gone up in the world as he had been sent to Moscow itself to continue his career as a propagandist for the Soviet Union, but had left his wife and children in Minsk. He subsequently discovered that they had died during the German occupation at some time between 1941 and 1944 of unknown causes. (3)
Although Ran obviously decided to claim that they had been ‘murdered by the Nazis’ even though as far as I am aware: there is no evidence for this assertion other than that they seem to have died during the German occupation of Belarus.
Ran was a functionary of the government of the Soviet all of his life up until his death. He primarily drew sketches of Belarussian peasants and celebrated the cultural achievements of the Soviet Union in his official art, but privately from the 1950s onwards he drew somewhat abstract sketches that celebrated his jewishness. (4)
Per the prevailing narrative, these are claimed by his advocates to have been works of ‘spiritual resistance’ to the Stalinist persecution of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee and jewish writers who had become enamoured with Zionist ideology during their travels to the West on behalf of the Soviet Union during the Second World War. (5)
What this leaves out however is that while it is true that Ran privately drew ‘subversive sketches’: we don’t actually know when he drew them and the likelihood would have been that these would have drawn sometime after Stalin died in 1953.
To draw them before this date would have been an almost automatic death sentence for Ran as a ‘rootless cosmopolitan’ and/or ‘saboteur’ and since he probably wasn’t that brave. It is likely that these sketches were done later after Nikita Khrushchev formally initiated de-Stalinization in February 1956.
This would also fit nicely into the general trend in Soviet jewry with the 1920s to the 1940s being the high watermark of jewish support for the Soviet Union and from the 1950s onwards this began to tail off as Zionism – vis-à-vis the creation of the state of Israel – emerged as a viable and increasingly more attractive alternative to assimilationist Marxist orthodoxy.
Thus, Soviet jewry, especially the younger generations, increasingly began to pine after the promised land of Israel and fantasized about it being the solution to the real and imagined domestic shortcomings of life in the Soviet Union.
This widespread adherence to Zionism and increasing agitation for special privileges for jews in regards to exit visas from the Soviet Union so that they could go to Israel. Should be placed alongside the fact that many of these same jews were also Stalin’s willing executioners or were the privileged children of them, but suddenly when something better came along. These same war criminals, murderers and faceless bureaucrats decided that they were ‘oppressed’ by the fact that the Soviet government – per Marxist ideology – required that the jews be treated like anyone else and stop agitating for a special status and perks as a ‘national minority’.
In other words when jews were on top and were the day-to-day governing elite of the Soviet Union subject only to the whims and paranoia of Stalin. Then everything was fine and they believed they weren’t ‘oppressed’ because they were the oppressors.
When the situation was levelled somewhat and a significant fraction of the jewish-dominated governing elite had been killed by Stalin’s pre and post war purges. Then swathes of Soviet jewry suddenly decided that while they had formerly been devout Marxists who exclaimed they were ‘world citizens’ and ‘proletarians’ rather than jews. Now claimed they were part of the eternally oppressed jewish people subject to a despotic totalitarian government that was preventing their ‘national liberation’.
This is seen in the art of Ran in so far as his official government art, especially from the period of Stalin’s rule, lionized the Belarussian workers, their history – although he always placed jews in an conspicuous and important role where in any way feasible a-la his painting of Francisk Skarina who first translated the Bible into Belorussian in 1520 with his jewish consultant – and also projected a utopian vision of the Soviet Union to his audience. (6)
Yet in the years after Stalin’s death Ran’s work, especially that which he kept private, focused on the ‘oppression’ of the jews. This was both in terms of the so-called ‘Holocaust’, which Ran obsessed over as he believed rightly or wrongly that his wife and children had been killed by the Third Reich as part of it.
Ran’s post war work also stressed the ‘suffering’ of the jews as well as their unique character as a people, which he displayed in his habit of using traditional Biblical symbolism as well as Yiddish as a medium of expression in his work.
In addition Ran also obsessed over the idea of the jews as a fractured and therefore powerless community (i.e. the Diaspora) and represented this in his art by portraying Biblical symbols and Yiddish characters as either shattered or part of a damaged whole. Thus, symbolising the harm wrought upon the innocent jewish community by their erstwhile enemies. (7)
Never in Ran’s art do we see any kind of critical examination of jewish history or identity, which might have led Ran to the more reasonable conclusion that jews were not the perpetually innocent victims of non-jews, but rather tended to be the aggressors who were subject to period popular backlashes for their actions but have always refused to concede, let alone learn from, their mistakes.
Yet had Ran acknowledged this: he would have also had to deal with the fact that as someone who chose to serve and make a career in Stalin’ government. And thus therefore he himself was partially responsible for the murderous backlash to Stalin’s genocidal policies that he believed killed his wife and children.
This is the essence of the jewish mentality: it is everyone else’s fault but mine, because if I were to admit it could have been my fault then my egotistical self-description and self-belief would simply collapse.
References
(1) http://www.pghcitypaper.com/pittsburgh/short-list-dec-22-29/Content?oid=1972823
(2) http://talezuborev.com/books/lazar-ran-en.pdf, p. 2
(3) http://www.pghcitypaper.com/pittsburgh/short-list-dec-22-29/Content?oid=1972823
(4) Ibid.
(5) http://shalompittsburgh.org/lazar-ran
(6) http://talezuborev.com/books/lazar-ran-en.pdf, pp. 3-5
(7) Ibid., pp. 6-12