Liza Luchanskiy was born to a poor, Yiddish-speaking family in Berdichev, the historic, heavily Jewish city deep in the Pale of Settlement. Lured by Soviet promises of equality, she became a communist true believer, working her way up to serve on a committee in Siberia that targeted so-called enemies of the revolution.
But her zeal wasn’t enough to save her or her similarly devoted husband, Josef.
They were swept up during the frenzy of Stalin’s Great Terror, from 1937 to 1939. Josef was shot by a firing squad in 1938, and Liza was exiled by cattle car to Karaganda, Kazakhstan.
Luchanskiy was sentenced to eight years in the vast network of forced-labor camps on the southern edge of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin’s fearsome gulag. Enduring extreme cold, hunger and exhaustion, which afflicted her health ever after, Luchanskiy never let go of her faith in communism, her grandson says.
“She never blamed the system, only Stalin,” says Vilen Molotov-Luchanskiy, an internist who today heads the Jewish Cultural Center in Karaganda.
As many as 1.2 million Soviet citizens — spanning practically all the ethnic groups nationwide — were worked to death or near death in the 75 camps that made up Karaganda. Among them were many Jews, including many rabbis.
The heart of the Karaganda slave labor machine was the railroad hub of Karaganda city, in central Kazakhstan. Once the camps were closed and emptied, it became a virtual “city of ex-convicts.”
Visiting the city today, remnants of that era can be felt still in the collective psyche and in the identity of the Jews that remain, making the Karagandan community among the more unusual in the diaspora. It might be the least assimilated Jewish community in Kazakhstan, which has some 15,000 to 20,000 Jews, because so many of Karaganda’s Jews are children or grandchildren of rabbis and other traditional Jews sent to the Karaganda labor camps.
The purges of the late 1930s injected large numbers of Jews into Kazakhstan. Before that, the few Jews in Kazakhstan either were descendants of Russian Jewish soldiers who settled in the area in the 19th century or of Silk Road Bukharian Jews.
Jewish life pulsates today in Karaganda, which has 1,500 registered Jews. Chabad-Lubavitch opened its second day school in Kazakhstan in the city. There is a rabbi in town. The community hosts an annual festival for Jewish youth that draws some 200 participants from around the region. Last Purim, some Jews from Karaganda took a four-hour bus ride to the Kazakh capital, Astana, to celebrate the holiday at a synagogue there.
But Karaganda’s Jews are best known for the painful history of the gulag. When Karaganda’s Jews travel to other ex-Soviet republics, the mere mention of their hometown — now Kazakhstan’s third-largest city — typically elicits the same reaction.
“ ‘Your family was in this camp?’ That’s what they know about Karaganda,” says Bela Kamenetskaya, the head of the local Hesed welfare office. “If they come here, they expect it to look like Auschwitz. They’re surprised to see we have streets, city squares and an airport.”
Jews in Karaganda say they share a special bond with their neighbors because they all suffered together.
“The pain that every family suffered unites us even today,” says David Bitsadze, a taxi driver.