“Our Day Will Come Too”

Young Zionists in the USSR in the 1920s could sometimes avoid arrest or administrative exile. As a rule, however, this required writing a letter of recantation to the press, publicly renouncing one’s views, and giving the security services the names of one’s comrades. This is precisely what can be seen in the case of Nuta Itskovich Barboy, presented in the J-Doc digital archive.

Barboy, who was born in 1909, was arrested on 20 January 1928 in the shtetl of Chernevtsy, Vinnytsia Oblast, Ukrainian SSR, as a member of HeHalutz.

The case materials contain excerpts from Nuta Barboy’s letters, seized during searches. They show that by this time the Chekists’ anti-Zionist campaign had already borne fruit: the organisation had effectively fallen apart, some of its leaders had left for Palestine, and the rest had gone underground.

The Chekists quickly broke the nineteen-year-old. Barboy gave a detailed account of his comrades and wrote a letter of recantation to the newspaper Der Shtern, condemning HeHalutz as a “deception for Jewish working youth” (folio 30).

In one of the letters written before his arrest, Nuta Barboy wrote with hope: “Never mind — our day will come too” (folio 5).

In the early 1970s, the refusenik Vladimir Meerovich Barboy, also a native of the shtetl of Chernevtsy, managed to leave the USSR for Israel after a series of arrests and repressions. He became the first Soviet professor to make aliyah. The details of Vladimir Barboy’s story are reflected in case files from the J-Doc digital archive.

Were Nuta and Vladimir Barboy merely namesakes, or were they relatives? At present, this has not been established. Perhaps one of our readers can help us answer this question.

Other case files concerning Zionist organisations in the USSR can be explored in the J-Doc digital archive.

Nuta Barboy’s case file: jdoc.org.il/items/show/3029

One of the KGB of the Ukrainian SSR files in which Vladimir Barboy appears: jdoc.org.il/files/show/651