(Bloomberg Opinion) -- In testimony before Congress this week, Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman, an Army officer with more than 20 years of service, told lawmakers that he had heard the president try to pressure Ukraine’s president to unearth dirt on a political rival. In response, the president’s allies have decided to make an issue of Vindman’s birthplace. They say his infanthood in Kiev — he left at age 3 — reveals something about his character and his allegiances. They are right, but in exactly the wrong way.
Here, you should pardon the expression, are some facts and a little bit of history. When Vindman was born on June 6, 1975, Ukraine was enveloped in the Soviet Union. At birth, Vindman would have been added temporarily to his parents’ internal passports, a document that all Soviet citizens were required to carry starting at 16, mostly to make sure they were not residing somewhere without official permission.
That passport contained the infamous “fifth line” or “pyati punkt,” in Russian, which had been created under Josef Stalin and listed the holder’s “nationality.” Vindman was born in Ukraine, but that line would not have said “Ukrainian” unless his parents had chosen to defy the law. It would have said “Jew.”
In the Soviet Union, Jews were considered separate and apart from other nationalities, especially in two of the republics, Russia and Ukraine, where the local party enforcers were particularly happy to do the Kremlin’s dirty work. You could be born in Minsk or Pinsk, or Omsk or Tomsk, or even Alexandrovsk or Petropavlovsk, and if you were born to Jewish parents, your passport was likely stamped “Jew.”
When I first learned this, upon arriving in Moscow in May 1983 as a reporter for the Associated Press, I was outraged. I saw it like the Nazi’s yellow star. I couldn’t imagine how Jewish people could stand it.
Until one day, I put that question to Naum Meiman, a Jewish mathematician who was part of Andrei Sakharov’s circle of dissidents. The answer was simple and humbling.
He didn’t want “Russian,” or any other so-called Soviet nationality, in his passport. Russians didn’t consider him Russian, officially or otherwise, and he didn’t want the label. “I’m a Jew who is forced to live in Russia, not a Russian,” he said more than once.
I am certainly not speaking for Vindman, whom I do not know, but I have never met a Jew who fled the Soviet Union and felt any kind of loyalty to the country — one where Jews were spurned from birth and then imprisoned within the state’s borders until it decided to allow them to leave. In those days, the Soviet Union revoked émigré’s citizenships, in what was supposed to be a final act of deep humiliation, but was invariably a badge of pride.
“Here we have a U.S. national security official who is advising Ukraine while working inside the White House, apparently against the president’s interest,” Fox News host Laura Ingraham told viewers Monday.
The circumstances of Vindman’s birth argue for a different interpretation. They show him to be part of a tradition of 20th century Eastern European Jews who suffered under tyrannies of the left and the right. These people fled the first chance they had to a country that would accept them as fellow citizens, one where they would not be constantly questioned about their loyalties. For many decades, that country was the United States.
To contact the editor responsible for this story: David Shipley at davidshipley@bloomberg.net
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Andrew Rosenthal is the former editorial page editor of the New York Times, where he participated in one Pulitzer Prize and was a finalist for another. He has held fellowships at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and at the University of Pennsylvania. In 2018, he published “The New York Times Book of Politics.”
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