On November 22, 1924, the sentence was handed down to the Zionists arrested in Homel. Since the group had been particularly active and included members from various cities, investigator Lantsevitsky decided to present it as the uncovered Central Committee of the Jugend Ferband. Although the cell was not actually any kind of “central committee,” many of its members received harsh punishments from the OGPU’s Special Council — three years in the Solovki concentration camps.

Even before the sentencing, the arrested came up with a ruse. The young men and women submitted marriage registration requests through the prison office. It was believed that the one who received a lighter sentence would “pull along” their newlywed spouse. However, seeing through this maneuver, the Chekists declared that husbands and wives would be assigned based on the harshest sentence. The authorities dug up more compromising material on the young women and gave them heavier terms, and the new husbands didn’t manage to lighten their wives’ sentences — instead, they received terms just as harsh. Investigator Lantsevitsky bluntly commented after receiving the petitions: “Why should it necessarily be wives following their husbands? If the husbands are so devoted, let them go to Solovki.”

Having heard terrible things about the camp on the White Sea, the Zionists requested visits with their relatives. But despite promises made by the prison warden, the meetings never occurred — not until the day of transfer. On the designated day, Avraham Vigderson refused to leave his cell, demanding the visitation with his mother that was his legal right. The guards had to carry the young man out of the cell by his arms and legs. Vigderson saw his mother only when the truck carrying him and his comrades pulled out of the prison gates. Feiga Yakovlevna was running after the vehicle, crying out: “My son! My precious son!”

Thus began a long period of prisons, exiles, and labor camps in Vigderson’s life. But first came the journey from Homel to the transfer prison in Leningrad. There, Avraham happened to spend a few days in a cell with an experienced inhabitant of both Tsarist and Stalinist prisons — the prominent Menshevik Boris Bogdanov. Bogdanov was quite surprised to learn that the Zionists had an actual socialist party and even handed Avraham a note. In it, he wrote to the political prisoners in Solovki that members of the TS party and its youth wing, TS Jugend Ferband, could be considered allies. In the camps, such recognition from respected political inmates was of enormous value.

Upon arriving at Solovki, Avraham Vigderson was placed in the political camp — the so-called Savvatyevsky Skete, where several hundred socialists of various shades lived on one hectare of land surrounded by barbed wire. On the grounds of the skete stood two buildings where political prisoners lived, often crammed many to a room. At Solovki, the Zionist prisoners organized a small commune, trying to maintain contact with the movement on the outside.

Vigderson remained in SLON (Solovki Special Purpose Camp) until the summer of 1925, when a decree was issued to end the detention of political prisoners there. He served out the remainder of his sentence in the Verkhneuralsk political prison, where many inmates from Solovki were transferred. Conditions in Verkhneuralsk, run by the former Latvian Rifleman Duppor, were even harsher than at Solovki. The former Solovki prisoners were immediately banned from moving freely and prevented from exchanging books or notes.

Nonetheless, Avraham Lazarevich, along with his comrades, reestablished the TS faction bureau and continued theoretical work even while imprisoned. As a skilled theorist, Vigderson was tasked with developing the question of agrarianization and industrialization of the Jewish masses in the USSR.

When his prison term ended in October 1927, Vigderson — along with Galina Gushanskaya, Sara Kositskaya, Bentzion Starosta, and Ginda Malkova — was immediately exiled to Semipalatinsk as a socially dangerous element. In the spring of 1928, Vigderson had to part ways with his friends when he was sent to the small town of Karkaralinsk. In Karkaralinsk, located 220 kilometers from Karaganda, about fifteen Zionists were serving exile, some of whom petitioned to have their punishment replaced with deportation to Palestine.

But according to GPU records, even in the remote Kazakh steppe, Avraham Vigderson continued holding political discussions with fellow Zionists and delivering lectures. Realizing that fighting the communists alone was futile, he called on TS youth to join forces with another organization — Hashomer Hatzair. Yet even in such conditions, certain Zionists could not let go of their personal ambitions, and various factions continued to clash.

In 1930, Vigderson, who was banned from living in nine major Soviet cities, arrived in Voronezh. Along with Kursk, this city in the RSFSR became a gathering place for former Zionist prisoners. Together with prominent TS members — David Brailovsky, Boris Galperin, Mendel Rogov, Anatoly Ovseevich, and others — Avraham Lazarevich quickly came under surveillance by the Voronezh branch of the OGPU.

After four months in the city, on August 18, 1930, Vigderson was arrested once again. According to the investigation documents, Vigderson and his comrades had attempted to publish an underground journal intended to become a unifying center for Zionists still at large. The group was also accused of organizing an illegal mutual aid fund and a library containing banned literature, as well as holding regular “gatherings” in each other’s apartments, where political debates took place.

According to informant reports, Avraham Vigderson and his companions openly stated that the October Revolution of 1917 had not been completed and that instead of tsarist or Provisional Government rule, the country had fallen under the oppression of Bolshevik dictatorship. These views were expressed not only within their circle but were also circulated in Voronezh through printed and handwritten materials.

Vigderson was held in custody for six months. Even while on prison bunks, the inmates in Voronezh managed to organize symposiums on topics such as the building of a working Palestine, the Arab-Jewish conflict, the “productivization” of Jews (transition to non-commercial occupations), and Bolshevik dictatorship. “Prison mail” was used: notes circulated illegally between cells. This continued until a matchbox filled with cigarette-paper notes covered in symposium theses ended up in the investigator’s hands. The theses were added to the case evidence, and the Zionists received new sentences. For his participation in a Zionist group, Avraham Vigderson was sentenced to three years of exile in Turukhansk.

In 1933, the Zionist was finally able to return to his native Vinnitsa. His brother Yakov was once again in exile. The youngest brother, Yosef, who had also joined the Zionist movement after his brothers, managed to negotiate a “substitution” and emigrate to Palestine. In Vinnitsa, Avraham was joined by his longtime comrade Galina Gushanskaya, who had once married him. However, the police did not allow the Zionist to remain in his hometown for long. A few months later, leaving his pregnant wife in Vinnitsa, Vigderson moved to Konotop, where he found work as an accountant in the cooperative “Woodworker.” But the young parents’ happiness was short-lived. Due to hunger and poor nutrition, the infant’s body could not endure — their child died in infancy. Galina Mendelevna moved to join her husband in Konotop, and in 1936, fortune smiled on them again: their daughter Deborah was born.

They withdrew from Zionist activity; their militant past was forgotten. Vigderson and his wife’s views had not changed in the slightest, but realistically assessing the conditions of Chekist terror and the abundance of informants, they understood: any kind of organized work was out of the question. Nevertheless, on March 8, 1938, Avraham Lazarevich was arrested once again by the 4th Department of the Chernihiv Regional Directorate of the NKVD. A week later, he was formally charged under Articles 54-8 and 54-11 of the Criminal Code of the Ukrainian SSR. The Zionist was accused not only of belonging to a counterrevolutionary organization but also of plotting terrorist acts against members of the Soviet government and the Communist Party.

Notably, the first interrogation on such serious charges took place only a month and a half after his arrest. During that initial interview with the investigator, Vigderson insisted that since his last release, he had engaged in no Zionist activity. However, during a second interrogation, held two months later on June 13, 1938, Avraham Lazarevich began to give a confession. He stated that, after locating his brother Yakov in Sloviansk in the Donbas, he had once again joined the Tseirei Zion (Socialist Zionists). The only evidence in the hands of the investigators was his “sincere confession” and excerpts from the interrogation protocols of fellow Zionists Solomon Kaufman-Vygodsky and Borukh Kogan, who were also involved in the same case. They too initially denied everything but months later “confessed” that, together with Avraham Vigderson, they had founded an underground Zionist cell in Konotop in 1935.

Some time later, the course of the case changed again. After the joint decree of the USSR Council of People’s Commissars and the Central Committee of the VKP(b) on November 17, 1938, titled “On arrests, prosecutorial oversight, and the conduct of investigations,” the total lawlessness of the NKVD was partially curbed, and prosecutorial oversight regained its significance. In the protocol dated December 14, 1938, concerning the presentation of the investigation materials, it was noted that Vigderson had retracted his previous testimony. However, during all those months, the Chekists had been systematically abusing the detainee, turning the interrogation room into a genuine torture chamber.

Although the indictment spoke not only of Avraham Lazarevich’s membership in a counterrevolutionary organization but also of his alleged involvement in 1937 in Kyiv in a group that was planning a terrorist act against members of the government and VKP(b) leadership, he was not sentenced to the highest punishment.

In the autumn of 1939, the Zionist was presented with a ruling from the NKVD’s Special Council sentencing him to five years in a corrective labor camp, followed by loss of civil rights.

Vigderson served his sentence in the infamous Ivdel camp in the Urals. In 1943, in the midst of the Soviet-German war, his sentence was extended “until further notice.” It was only in September 1946 that the Zionist was released from the camp. He returned to Konotop and found work in the accounting department of the local district industrial cooperative.

Throughout the years in the camp, he had no idea that his daughter, little Deborah, had died shortly after his arrest. His wife was afraid to write to him about it, fearing that Avraham Lazarevich would lose all hope. He also knew nothing of his brother Yakov, who had been arrested in 1938 and sentenced under the “first category”—that is, he had been executed.

According to Vigderson, after his release from Ivdel, he had no contact with any Zionists. He and his wife Galina, who had also returned from evacuation to Konotop after the war, worked as accountants and spoke with virtually no one. However, even after all those years of torment, the authorities did not leave them alone.

Avraham Vigderson was arrested for the last time on May 6, 1949, when a new wave of arrests of former political prisoners swept across the USSR. The episode began when his brother Yosef, who was by then living in Tel Aviv, learned of Avraham’s release and sent him a letter in Konotop. The brothers were extremely cautious in their correspondence, but Yosef could not help mentioning the fierce battles for Israel’s independence. The contents of his letters were immediately intercepted by the Chekists, who were monitoring correspondence. They also took note that a parcel containing a pair of shoes and men’s underwear had been sent to Vigderson from Tel Aviv by the “Mutual Aid Union of Jews of Latvia and Estonia”—a bourgeois-nationalist organization by Soviet standards.

The renewed investigation in 1949 was based on old materials. Vigderson did not admit guilt in any anti-Soviet activity, but the Chekists promptly pulled out his own signed testimony from the 1938 file. “I state that during the interrogations I gave false testimony to the investigators, both regarding myself and others, as I had been driven into an incoherent state by those interrogating me,” Avraham Lazarevich pleaded in vain, trying to obtain justice from Stalin’s lawless enforcers. But the MGB had a very different goal: to banish all potentially disloyal citizens “to the middle of nowhere.” The expected ruling followed: “Vigderson, Avraham Lazarevich, for belonging to an anti-Soviet terrorist organization, is to be exiled to Krasnoyarsk Krai.” Along with his wife, Galina Mendelevna, he was deported from Konotop to the Taseyevsky District of Krasnoyarsk Krai. The Zionist was released from exile only in July 1954, under an amnesty. When the USSR began revisiting cases of the repressed, Vigderson’s two most recent imprisonments were deemed unlawful, and he was officially rehabilitated.

Altogether, Avraham Vigderson spent 26 years in prisons and labor camps. In the late 1950s, he moved to a village in the Leningrad region, and he and Galina immediately began applying for permission to emigrate to Eretz Yisrael. Avraham’s heroic wife passed away in 1965 after a long illness, and Avraham Lazarevich finally repatriated alone in 1969.

From his first days in Israel, the elderly man felt a deep sense of obligation. Settling at the home of his wife’s brother, Nisan Gushansky, the Zionist-socialist often said, “You built a kibbutz here and founded a factory, while I sat in prison. I must work harder than you to make up the gap and repay at least part of my debt to this country.” And indeed, he accumulated thousands of additional work hours, never taking a vacation, and often harvesting fruit in the orchards of Yagur after his regular job.

As a Prisoner of Zion from the USSR, he felt a duty to help fellow Soviet emigrants. In a 1978 letter requesting to be removed from kibbutz membership, he wasn’t concerned for himself but for Anatoly Altman (whom he had taken under his wing), who was imprisoned in the USSR in connection with the “Hijacking Case.” Asking to use the postal address of Kibbutz Yagur, the Zionist wrote: “I am registered in all institutions and bodies as a relative of Altman, and I don’t want to alarm him with any changes that could dampen his spirits.”

Shortly before his death, he wrote in his diary: “I look up at the summit of Mount Carmel… I see our children joyfully playing in the middle of the street. And when I see all the progress in our community—construction, development, good people, most of whom are working—my heart fills with joy, contentment, and happiness.” The heart of the Zionist stopped beating on January 6, 1982.




Bibliography and Sources:

1. Memoranda on the exposure of the Zionist underground and interrogation protocols of Zionists, 08.01–15.07.1938 – OGA SBU, Kyiv, f.16, d.224(234);
2. Materials on Zionists from 1923–1924, OGA SBU, Kyiv, f.13, op.1, d.413, vol.4 (parts 1–3);
3. Avraham Vigderson (02/02/1904 – 06/01/1982): memoirs, Kibbutz Yagur Archives website;
4. Interview No. (129)22 Vigderson, Avraham (ויגדרזון, אברהם), Oral History Center of the Hebrew University (interviewer – Yisrael Mintz; 1978).