Solomon Dolnik
1901 – 1986
Solomon Borisovich Dolnik was born in 1901 in the town of Rudnya, Mogilev Governorate. His family was deeply devoted to the ideals of Zionism and carefully preserved Jewish traditions. For many years, Solomon’s father regularly donated to the Jewish National Fund (Keren Kayemeth LeIsrael) and cherished a lifelong dream of immigrating to Palestine. Solomon’s older brothers and sisters actively participated in Jewish social and political life as members of the Kadima and Tzeirei Zion organizations.
In the turbulent year of 1917, sixteen-year-old Solomon himself joined Kadima. Four years later, he became involved in the HeHalutz movement. This organization aimed to prepare Jewish youth, both ideologically and practically, for agricultural labor and the settlement of the Holy Land.
However, by the mid-1920s, Soviet policy toward the Jewish national movement had become significantly more repressive. Zionist organizations were dismantled and banned. At this critical moment, the Dolnik family decided to fulfill their long-cherished dream and emigrate to Palestine.
Solomon, however, was unable to leave with his family, as he was serving in the Red Army at the time. Left alone in the USSR, he focused on his education. Solomon graduated from a military topographic school and subsequently completed his studies at a land surveying faculty. His qualification as a surveying engineer would shape his professional life for decades to come.
Solomon’s professional career involved frequent assignments, geodetic surveys, and expeditions to various regions of the country. During Stalin’s purges, his itinerant lifestyle apparently proved to be a lifesaving factor: Solomon managed to avoid the close scrutiny of the NKVD, whose officers were searching for “class enemies,” primarily in major cities.
During the German-Soviet War, his professional expertise proved to be in particularly high demand. Holding an officer’s rank, Solomon was assigned to the Transbaikal Front, where he served as a military topographer, providing the army with accurate maps.
After the war, Solomon returned to civilian work in his field, but the social and political climate in the country deteriorated sharply. During the late Stalinist period and the early years of Khrushchev’s Thaw, state-sponsored antisemitism gained momentum in the USSR, directly affecting the position of Jewish professionals. Solomon repeatedly encountered prejudice and discrimination in the workplace. In 1954, as a result of intrigues by the management, he was unlawfully dismissed from the Moscow-based GIPROVUZ Institute (State Institute for the Design of Higher Educational Institutions). His superiors presented the matter as though Solomon had failed to complete an official assignment. In reality, however, the management had deliberately engineered the situation by ignoring his letters and reports sent during business trips.
During these years, Solomon watched with deeply concealed sorrow as Soviet Jews rapidly lost their national identity, language, and connection to their historical roots. As he later recalled, hope for a revival of Jewish national and cultural life emerged in 1948 with the establishment of the State of Israel. Some of his fellow Jews rediscovered the synagogue and began attending it as a kind of social club. Solomon cautiously sought to encourage them to recognize the importance of studying Jewish history and culture.
He also regularly visited the Lenin Library, where he read foreign Yiddish-language newspapers and periodicals from Poland, France, and the United States, as well as literature on Jewish history. Solomon took notes from these publications and used them to compile a card index documenting the most important events and figures in Jewish history.
After retiring in 1956, Solomon attempted to fulfill the principal goal of his life: to reunite with his family living in Israel. He repeatedly applied for permission to leave the Soviet Union, supported by invitations from his brother, but each application was rejected. Nevertheless, Solomon refused to give up. His unsuccessful attempts to immigrate to Israel only strengthened his determination to take action within the country.
A turning point in Solomon’s outlook came in 1957, when Moscow hosted the Sixth World Festival of Youth and Students. For the first time, official representatives of Israel appeared on the streets of the Soviet capital. Observing the reactions of Soviet citizens – ranging from tears of joy among local Jews to open hostility and aggressive anti-Israeli propaganda from Communist Party activists – Solomon came to realize just how destructive silence and passivity were for the Jewish population of the USSR.
Struggling through radio interference, Solomon began listening to broadcasts from the Voice of Israel radio station, taking notes and copying news reports and historical accounts by hand. During Jewish holidays, he would come to the Moscow Choral Synagogue and, blending into the crowd of worshippers, discreetly slip these handwritten notes into the pockets of their coats and jackets. Unfortunately, some recipients handed them over to the KGB, and the notes subsequently appeared during the investigation as material evidence of the “nationalist agitation” allegedly conducted by Dolnik.
Solomon’s personal library contained Jewish literature, including the Jewish Encyclopedia and Heinrich Graetz’s History of the Jews. He continued acquiring books from secondhand booksellers and offering them to acquaintances to read. Many were afraid and declined.
A significant breakthrough in Solomon’s educational activities came in 1959, when he met Ezra Morgulis, a Jewish activist and former prisoner of Stalin’s labor camps. They met in a cafeteria, where Ezra noticed a copy of the Israel Bulletin lying on Solomon’s table. They were also brought together by their shared distrust and dislike of a third man sitting at their table. As Solomon recalled, the man turned out to be an “assimilationist” and a “petty bourgeois”: “…an accountant, retired. Content with his life. …had covered the walls of his room in his new apartment with certificates of merit he had received. Boasted that his daughter had married a Russian and done well for herself…” As the accountant spoke about his happy life, Solomon exchanged glances with Ezra, who was still a stranger to him, and immediately sensed that they were kindred spirits. Joining forces, they would soon transform the spontaneous distribution of leaflets into systematic underground activity.
In 1960, Dolnik applied his engineering skills to establish the technical foundations of an underground printing operation. Under conditions of strict state control over printing equipment, he built homemade duplicating machines, hectographs, and photocopying devices, using readily available household components and optical equipment. For security reasons, only a small circle of trusted, like-minded individuals from the older generation was involved in the work, including Mairim Bergman, Lazar Braker, and Feiga Kogan.
The underground printing operation they established launched a publishing effort of extraordinary scale for its time. Its greatest achievement was the translation and reproduction of Leon Uris’s novel Exodus, which had become a manifesto of Jewish national revival, as well as Marek Edelman’s book about the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. The group also published series of booklets on the history of Jewish communities, essays on Jewish culture, collections of poetry, and biographies of prominent Jews, including scientists such as Ary Sternfeld, a pioneer of space exploration.
Drawing on his professional expertise, Solomon produced and reproduced Russian-language maps of Israel. In addition, members of the group searched city telephone directories for Jewish surnames and mailed holiday greeting cards to these addresses for Rosh Hashanah and Passover.
Over six years of continuous activity, from 1960 to 1966, Solomon and Ezra’s underground group produced more than forty different books and booklets. Their distribution network expanded far beyond Moscow, with channels for delivering samizdat literature established in Leningrad, Riga, Minsk, Smolensk, Rostov-on-Don, and Tbilisi.
In May 1966, the underground educational network’s years of activity were brought to an end following a KGB operation involving the infiltration of informants. During a search of Solomon’s Moscow apartment, KGB officers confiscated material evidence of his work: a sack of illegally produced samizdat literature, photographic film, homemade printing presses, and an Israeli flag.
Solomon was placed in the Lefortovo pretrial detention center. Despite his advanced age and the constant psychological pressure exerted by investigators, he demonstrated remarkable resilience. Neither during interrogations nor at his closed trial did Solomon reveal the name of a single member of their organization, and he categorically refused to admit any guilt.
Having failed to break the underground activist behind bars, the Soviet repressive apparatus launched a public smear campaign against him. In February 1967, the newspaper Izvestia published a scathing satirical article entitled “The Fall.” In an attempt to discredit Solomon in the eyes of the public, the authorities accused him not merely of distributing literature but of “espionage” and “passing classified geodetic tables to Israeli intelligence.” The accusation was so absurd that a joke later circulated among political prisoners that Solomon had “revealed the Pythagorean theorem to the Israelis.”
The court sentenced him to four years of imprisonment under Article 70 of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR (“anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda”). Solomon served his sentence in the Mordovian labor camps (Mordovlag). Despite the extremely harsh camp conditions, he earned the deep respect of political prisoners of widely differing views through his kindness, remarkable resilience, and ability to maintain his composure even in the most difficult circumstances. In 1970, he completed his entire prison sentence and was released without ever signing a single document expressing repentance or agreeing to cooperate with the authorities.
A year later, Solomon and his wife finally received the long-awaited permission to leave the Soviet Union and immigrated to Israel, fulfilling the dream of his youth. However, in his ancestral homeland, the veteran of Jewish resistance faced a new and unexpected ordeal.
By the early 1970s, the movement for the emigration of Soviet Jews had become a mass public movement, and a new wave of activists had overshadowed the memory of the early underground activists of the 1960s, who had operated under conditions of almost complete isolation. Soviet propaganda allegations accusing Solomon of “espionage,” along with internal intrigues and tensions among Jewish immigrants, created an atmosphere of suspicion and distrust surrounding his name.
Unwilling to accept the distortion of history and the suppression of his fellow activists’ achievements, Solomon continued doing what he knew best: publishing. In his home workshop, he personally bound, designed, and reproduced multivolume autobiographical collections of documents and memoirs entitled The Call of the Times: A Galut Odyssey.
Each copy of this publication was both a historical record and a unique handcrafted work of art. Solomon covered the book bindings with brightly colored decorative paper, drew the title pages by hand, and carefully selected illustrative materials. The pages contained original photographs of underground activists, copies of KGB interrogation records, pages from his own indictment, and surviving examples of the earliest Soviet Jewish booklets and maps of Israel produced in the 1960s. Solomon donated these books to archives and libraries and presented them to researchers free of charge, gradually restoring historical justice.
Solomon Borisovich Dolnik died in 1986. His life will remain in history as an example of the extraordinary dedication of a man who fearlessly resisted the totalitarian apparatus and laid the foundations for the revival of Jewish national identity in the USSR.
24.09.2026
Author: Mikhail Krivitsky
Translated by Lena Lores
Bibliography and Sources
1. Dolnik S. Underground Moscow Zionist Samizdat. Memoirs // Nasha Strana. 1976. December 24, 31; 1977. January 7.
2. Jewish Emigration in Light of New Documents / Ed. by B. Morozov. Tel Aviv. 1998.
3. Zelenina G. S. Solomon Dolnik, the Man of Books: A Zionist Among Zionists // Shagi / Steps. 2025. Vol. 11. No. 2. Pp. 48–75.
4. Kostyrchenko G. V. Stalin’s Secret Policy: Power and Antisemitism. Moscow. 2001.
5. Rakhlin F. The Prophecy of Ezra Morgulis // Proza.ru. https://proza.ru/2013/11/14/1338
6. Dolnik S. The Call of the Times: A Galut Odyssey. In 4 Parts (Parts 1; 1.2; 2; 3). Tel Aviv; Jaffa. 1972–1977.
7. Gitelman Z. Y. A Century of Ambivalence: The Jews of Russia and the Soviet Union, 1881 to the Present. Bloomington. 2001.
8. Golden P. O Powerful Western Star!: American Jews, Russian Jews and the Final Battle of the Cold War. Jerusalem. 2012.
9. Jews in the Soviet Union: A History. In 6 Vols. / Ed. by G. Estraikh and D. Engel. New York. 2022–2025.
10. Pinkus B. The Jews of the Soviet Union: The History of a National Minority. Cambridge. 1988.
11. Ro’i Y. The Struggle for Soviet Jewish Emigration, 1948–1967. Cambridge. 1991.
12. Slezkine Y. The Jewish Century. Princeton. 2004.