Stalin's antisemitism
Encyclopedia
Though communist leader Joseph Stalin
initially denounced antisemitism, numerous instances of Stalin's antisemitism, manifested in the executions and deportations of Jews, have been witnessed by contemporaries and documented by historical sources.
The world's largest empire, imperial Russia was a multiethnic state dominated by the Romanov dynasty. Its expansion over the centuries absorbed various ethnic groups. As elsewhere in Europe
, anti-Semitic policies were adopted by the monarchy. In 1791, under Catherine the Great, Jews were largely restricted to the Pale of Settlement
. The May Laws
, enacted in 1882 under Alexander III
, promoted further discrimination. Russia's anti-Semitic pogroms
, sporadic during the 1800s, were particularly bloody under Nicholas II in 1903-1906, and were apparently directed against the Jews by the imperial authorities.
Born in Gori, Georgia
(then in the Russian Empire) and educated at an Orthodox
seminary in Tiflis (Tbilisi) before becoming a professional revolutionary and a Marxist
at the turn of the century, Stalin appears unlikely to have been stirred by anti-Semitism
in his early years and met only a limited number of revolutionaries of Jewish origin during his first years of political activity. Although active in the Bolshevik
faction of the Russian Social Democratic Party, he did not attend a party congress until 1905.
Although Jews were active among both the Social Democratic Bolshevik and the Menshevik
factions, Jews were more prominent among the Mensheviks. Stalin took note of the ethnic proportions represented on each side, and, in a 1907 report on the Congress published in the Bakinsky rabochy (Baku
Workman), included a coarse joke, purportedly made by then-Bolshevik Grigory Aleksinsky:
's Soviet after the Russian Revolution ran counter to the centuries of anti-Semitism under the Romanovs.
The Council of People's Commissars adopted a 1918 decree condemning all anti-Semitism and calling on the workers and peasants to combat it. Lenin continued to speak out against anti-Semitism. Information campaigns against anti-Semitism were conducted in the Red Army
and in the workplaces, and a provision forbidding the incitement of propaganda against any ethnicity became part of Soviet law. State-sponsored institutions of secular Yiddish culture, such as the Moscow State Jewish Theater
, were established in Soviet Russia and the Soviet Union during this time, as were institutions for other minorities.
As People's Commissar for Nationalities, Stalin was the cabinet member responsible for minority affairs. In 1922, Stalin was elected the first-ever General Secretary
of the partya post not yet regarded as the highest in the Soviet government. Lenin began to criticize Stalin shortly thereafter.
In his December 1922 letters, the ailing Lenin (whose health left him incapacitated in 1923-1924) criticized the Georgian Stalin and the Polish Dzerzhinsky
for their chauvinistic attitude toward the Georgian nation during the Georgian Affair
. Eventually made public as part of Lenin's Testament
which recommended that the party remove Stalin from his post as General Secretarythe 1922 letters and the recommendation were both withheld from public circulation by Stalin and his supporters in the party: these materials were not published in the Soviet Union until de-Stalinization
in 1956.
After the incapacitated Lenin's death on 21 January 1924, the party officially maintained the principle of collective leadership, but Stalin soon outmaneuvered his rivals in the Central Committee's Politburo
. At first collaborating with Politburo members Grigory Zinoviev
and Lev Kamenev
against arch-rival Leon Trotsky
, Stalin succeeded in marginalizing Trotsky. By 1929, Stalin had also effectively marginalized Zinoviev and Kamenev as well, compelling both to submit to his authority. The intransigent Trotsky was forced into exile.
When Boris Bazhanov
, Stalin's personal secretary who had defected to France
in 1928, produced a memoir critical of Stalin in 1930, he alleged that Stalin made crude anti-Semitic outbursts even before Lenin's death.
Nevertheless, following Lenin's death in early 1924, another large scale campaign against anti-Semitism was again conducted in 1927-1930, under Stalin's leadership.
in the United States
:
This answer was subsequently published as an item in the Soviet newspaper Pravda
on November 30, 1936, and was again republished as part of a posthumous 1954 volume of Stalin's collected Works.
and to successfully categorize Soviet Jews under Stalin's nationality policy, an alternative to the Land of Israel
was established with the help of Komzet
and OZET
in 1928. The Jewish Autonomous Oblast
with the center in Birobidzhan
in the Russian Far East
was to become a "Soviet Zion". Yiddish
, rather than "reactionary" Hebrew
, would be the national language
, and proletarian socialist literature and arts
would replace Judaism as the quintessence of culture. Despite a massive domestic and international state propaganda
campaign, the Jewish population there never reached 30% (as of 2003 it was only about 1.2%). The experiment ground to a halt in the mid-1930s, during Stalin's first campaign of purges, as local leaders were not spared during the purges.
(or Great Terror), was launched in 1936-1937 and involved the execution of over a half-million Soviet citizens accused of treason, terrorism, and other anti-Soviet
crimes. The campaign of purges prominently targeted Stalin's former opponents and other Old Bolsheviks, and included a large-scale purge of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union
, repression of the kulak
peasants, Red Army
leaders, and ordinary citizens accused of conspiring against the Stalinist government.
According to Mikhail Baitalsky
However, the Russian historian Gennady Kostyrchenko writes that some 29 thousand Jews, or 1% of the total ethnic Jewish Soviet population, were arrested in 1937-1938, and that this proportion of arrested Jews was comparable to the proportion of arrested ethnic Russians and ethnic Ukrainians.
The Oxford University historian David Priestland writes that "Jews, as an ethnic group, [were not] victimized by the Soviet regime before World War II
, and were not specifically targeted by the 1936-38 Great Terror."
The Indiana University
historian Jeffrey Veidlinger has written that
Historian Roy Medvedev
observes that Stalin's 1930s purges "noticeably reduced the number of Latvia
ns, Estonians
, Finns, Poles
and Hungarians within the Soviet elite, but this can be explained by the fact that Latvia, Estonia, Finland, [and] Hungary. . . were not part of the Soviet Union and could not serve as a source of new cadres. The number of Germans and Jews in the elite was also reduced, although many Jews continued to hold leadership posts in the party and government."
as Foreign Minister in 1939, Stalin immediately directed incoming Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov
to "purge the ministry of Jews", to appease Hitler and to signal Nazi Germany that the USSR was ready for non-aggression talks.
According to some critics, anti-Semitic trends in the Kremlin's policies were fueled by the exile of Leon Trotsky
.
In the late 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s far fewer Jews were appointed to positions of power in the state apparatus than previously, with a sharp drop in Jewish representation in senior positions evident from around the time of the beginning of the late 1930s rapproachment with Nazi Germany. The percentage of Jews in positions of power dropped to 6% in 1938, and to 5% in 1940.
, contributed to growing concern about the situation of the Jewish people worldwide. Ironically, the trauma breathed new life into the traditional idea of a common Jewish peoplehood
and became a catalyst for the revival of the Zionist idea of creating a Jewish state in the Middle East.
The Jewish Autonomous Oblast experienced a revival as the Soviet government sponsored the migration of as many as ten thousand Eastern European Jews to Birobidzhan in 1946-1948. In early 1946, the Council of Ministers of the USSR announced a plan to build new infrastructure, and Mikhail Kalinin
, a champion of the Birobidzhan project since the late 1920s, stated that he still considered the region as a "Jewish national state" that could be revived through "creative toil."
In the meantime, Stalin also warmed to the idea of Israel
as a Jewish state. In 1947, the Soviet Union joined the United States
in supporting the partition of British Palestine into Jewish and Arab states, and supported Israel in the 1948 Arab–Israeli War with weaponry supplied via Czechoslovakia
.
Nonetheless, Stalin began a new purge with repressing his wartime allies, the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee
. In January 1948, Solomon Mikhoels
was murdered in a purported car accident in Minsk
. According to documents unearthed by historian Gennady Kostyrchenko, the organizers of the assassination were L.M. Tsanava and S. Ogoltsov, and the "direct" murderers were Lebedev, Kruglov and Shubnikov.
Despite Stalin's willigness to support Israel early on, various historians suppose that anti-Semitism in the late 1940s and early 1950s was motivated by Stalin's possible perception of Jews as a potential "fifth column
" in light of a pro-Western Israel in the Middle East. Orlando Figes
suggests that
Historians Albert S. Lindemann and Richard S. Levy observe that
Jeffrey Veidlinger writes that
In November 1948, Soviet authorities launched a campaign to liquidate what was left of Jewish culture. The leading members of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee
were arrested. They were charged with treason, bourgeois nationalism
and planning to set up a Jewish republic in Crimea
to serve American interests. The Museum of Environmental Knowledge of the Jewish Autonomous Oblast (established in November 1944) and The Jewish Museum in Vilnius (established at the end of the war) were closed down in 1948. The Historical-Ethnographic Museum of Georgian Jewry, established in 1933, was shut down at the end of 1951.
In Birobidzhan, the various Jewish cultural institutions that had been established under Stalin's earlier policy of support for "proletarian Jewish culture" in the 1930s were closed down between late 1948 and early 1949. These included the Kaganovich Yiddish Theater, the Yiddish publishing house, the Yiddish newspaper Birobidzhan, the library of Yiddish and Hebrew books, and the local Jewish schools. The same happened to Yiddish theaters all over the Soviet Union, beginning with the Odessa Yiddish Theater and including the Moscow State Jewish Theater.
In early February 1949, the Stalin Prize-winning microbiologist
Nikolay Gamaleya
, a pioneer of bacteriology
and member of the Academy of Sciences, wrote a personal letter to Stalin, protesting the growing anti-Semitism:
The ninety-year-old scientist wrote Stalin a second letter in mid-February, again mentioning the growing anti-Semitism. In March, Gamaleya died, still having received no answer.
During the night of August 12–13, 1952, remembered as the "Night of the Murdered Poets
" (Ночь казнённых поэтов), thirteen of the most prominent Yiddish writers of the Soviet Union
were executed on the orders of Stalin. Among the victims were Peretz Markish
, David Bergelson
and Itzik Fefer.
In a December 1, 1952 Politburo session, Stalin announced: "Every Jewish nationalist is the agent of the American intelligence service. Jewish nationalists think that their nation was saved by the USA. . . They think they are indebted to the Americans. Among doctors, there are many Jewish nationalists."
A notable campaign to quietly remove Jews from positions of authority within the state security services was carried out in 1952-1953. The Russian historians Zhores
and Roy Medvedev
write that
The outside world was not ignorant of these developments, and even the leading members of the Communist Party USA
complained about the situation. In the memoir Being Red, the American writer and prominent Communist Howard Fast
recalls a meeting with Soviet writer and World Peace Congress delegate Alexander Fadeyev during this time:
information agency announced the unmasking of a conspiracy of so-called "doctors-poisoners" who had covertly attempted to decapitate the Soviet leadership. The accused doctors were all senior physiciansmost of them Jewishwho had allegedly confessed to planning and successfully carrying out heinous assassinations, including the covert murders of such high-profile Soviet citizens as writer Alexander Shcherbakov (died 1945) and politician Andrey Zhdanov (died 1948). The alleged conspirators were accused of acting on behalf of both the American and British intelligence services and an anti-Soviet international Jewish bourgeois-nationalist organization.
As Western press accused the Soviet Union of antisemitism, the Central Committee of Communist Party decided to organise a propagandistic trick, a collective letter by the Jewish public, condemning with fervour "the murderers in white overalls" and the agents of imperialism
and Zionism, and to assure there was no antisemitism in the USSR. The letter was signed by well-known scientists and culture figures, who had been forced to do so by the NKVD
.
However, the letter, initially planned to be published in February, 1953, remained unpublished. Instead of the letter, a vehement feuilleton "The Simple-minded and the Swindlers" was published in Pravda
, featuring numerous characters with Jewish names, all of them swindlers, villains, saboteurs, whom the naïve Russian people trust, having lost vigilance. What followed was a new wave of antisemitic hysteria and rumors that all Jews would be sent to Siberia. Only Stalin's death the same year relieved the fear.
Similar purges against Jews were organised in Eastern Bloc countries (see Prague Trials).
has claimed that Stalin was actually preparing for a new military conflict, and just repeated the 1937 purges to ensure an atmosphere of terror and absolute submissiveness. Radzinsky also viewed the persecution of Jews by Stalin as a means of provoking the US.
wrote in his memoirs that
He further professed that Stalin frequently made anti-Semitic comments after World War II.
Some of Stalin's associates were Jews or had Jewish spouses, including Lazar Kaganovich
. Many of them were purged, including Nikolai Yezhov
's wife and Polina Zhemchuzhina
, who was Vyacheslav Molotov
's wife, and also Bronislava Poskrebysheva
. Historian Geoffrey Roberts
points out that Stalin "continued to fête Jewish writers and artists even at the height of the anti-Zionist campaign of the early 1950s."
Analyzing various explanations for Stalin's perceived anti-Semitism in his book The Lesser Terror: Soviet State Security, 1939-1953, historian Michael Parrish posits that
On the other hand, in Esau's Tears: Modern Anti-Semitism and the Rise of the Jews, historian Albert S. Lindemann observes that
When Stalin's young daughter Svetlana
fell in love with prominent Soviet filmmaker Alexei Kapler, a Jewish man twenty-three years her elder, Stalin was strongly irritated by the relationship. According to Svetlana, "He (Stalin) was irritated more than anything else by the fact that Kapler was Jewish" and ordered the exile of Kapler to Vorkuta
on the charge of being an "English spy." Stalin's daughter later fell in love with Grigori Morozov, another Jew, and married him. Stalin agreed to their marriage after much pleading on Svetlana's part, but refused to attend the wedding, and ordered the arrest and imprisonment of the bridegroom's father in retaliation.
Stalin's son Yakov
also married a Jewish woman, Yulia Meltzer, and though Stalin disapproved at first, he began to grow fond of her. Stalin's biographer Simon Sebag Montefiore writes that Lavrenty Beria's son noted that his father could list Stalin's affairs with Jewish women.
Joseph Stalin
Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin was the Premier of the Soviet Union from 6 May 1941 to 5 March 1953. He was among the Bolshevik revolutionaries who brought about the October Revolution and had held the position of first General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union's Central Committee...
initially denounced antisemitism, numerous instances of Stalin's antisemitism, manifested in the executions and deportations of Jews, have been witnessed by contemporaries and documented by historical sources.
Background and early years
Europe
Europe is, by convention, one of the world's seven continents. Comprising the westernmost peninsula of Eurasia, Europe is generally 'divided' from Asia to its east by the watershed divides of the Ural and Caucasus Mountains, the Ural River, the Caspian and Black Seas, and the waterways connecting...
, anti-Semitic policies were adopted by the monarchy. In 1791, under Catherine the Great, Jews were largely restricted to the Pale of Settlement
Pale of Settlement
The Pale of Settlement was the term given to a region of Imperial Russia, in which permanent residency by Jews was allowed, and beyond which Jewish permanent residency was generally prohibited...
. The May Laws
May Laws
Temporary regulations regarding the Jews were proposed by minister of internal affairs Nikolai Ignatyev and enacted on May 15 , 1882, by Tsar Alexander III of Russia...
, enacted in 1882 under Alexander III
Alexander III of Russia
Alexander Alexandrovich Romanov , historically remembered as Alexander III or Alexander the Peacemaker reigned as Emperor of Russia from until his death on .-Disposition:...
, promoted further discrimination. Russia's anti-Semitic pogroms
Anti-Jewish pogroms in the Russian Empire
The term pogrom as a reference to large-scale, targeted, and repeated antisemitic rioting saw its first use in the 19th century.The first pogrom is often considered to be the 1821 Odessa pogroms after the death of the Greek Orthodox patriarch Gregory V in Constantinople, in which 14 Jews were killed...
, sporadic during the 1800s, were particularly bloody under Nicholas II in 1903-1906, and were apparently directed against the Jews by the imperial authorities.
Born in Gori, Georgia
Gori, Georgia
Gori is a city in eastern Georgia, which serves as the regional capital of Shida Kartli and the centre of the homonymous administrative district. The name is from Georgian gora , that is, "heap", or "hill"...
(then in the Russian Empire) and educated at an Orthodox
Orthodox Christianity
The term Orthodox Christianity may refer to:* the Eastern Orthodox Church and its various geographical subdivisions...
seminary in Tiflis (Tbilisi) before becoming a professional revolutionary and a Marxist
Marxism
Marxism is an economic and sociopolitical worldview and method of socioeconomic inquiry that centers upon a materialist interpretation of history, a dialectical view of social change, and an analysis and critique of the development of capitalism. Marxism was pioneered in the early to mid 19th...
at the turn of the century, Stalin appears unlikely to have been stirred by anti-Semitism
Anti-Semitism
Antisemitism is suspicion of, hatred toward, or discrimination against Jews for reasons connected to their Jewish heritage. According to a 2005 U.S...
in his early years and met only a limited number of revolutionaries of Jewish origin during his first years of political activity. Although active in the Bolshevik
Bolshevik
The Bolsheviks, originally also Bolshevists , derived from bol'shinstvo, "majority") were a faction of the Marxist Russian Social Democratic Labour Party which split apart from the Menshevik faction at the Second Party Congress in 1903....
faction of the Russian Social Democratic Party, he did not attend a party congress until 1905.
Although Jews were active among both the Social Democratic Bolshevik and the Menshevik
Menshevik
The Mensheviks were a faction of the Russian revolutionary movement that emerged in 1904 after a dispute between Vladimir Lenin and Julius Martov, both members of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party. The dispute originated at the Second Congress of that party, ostensibly over minor issues...
factions, Jews were more prominent among the Mensheviks. Stalin took note of the ethnic proportions represented on each side, and, in a 1907 report on the Congress published in the Bakinsky rabochy (Baku
Baku
Baku , sometimes spelled as Baki or Bakou, is the capital and largest city of Azerbaijan, as well as the largest city on the Caspian Sea and of the Caucasus region. It is located on the southern shore of the Absheron Peninsula, which projects into the Caspian Sea. The city consists of two principal...
Workman), included a coarse joke, purportedly made by then-Bolshevik Grigory Aleksinsky:
1917 to 1930
Although the Bolsheviks regarded all religious activity as counter-scientific superstition and a remnant of the old pre-communist order, the new political order established by LeninVladimir Lenin
Vladimir Ilyich Lenin was a Russian Marxist revolutionary and communist politician who led the October Revolution of 1917. As leader of the Bolsheviks, he headed the Soviet state during its initial years , as it fought to establish control of Russia in the Russian Civil War and worked to create a...
's Soviet after the Russian Revolution ran counter to the centuries of anti-Semitism under the Romanovs.
The Council of People's Commissars adopted a 1918 decree condemning all anti-Semitism and calling on the workers and peasants to combat it. Lenin continued to speak out against anti-Semitism. Information campaigns against anti-Semitism were conducted in the Red Army
Red Army
The Workers' and Peasants' Red Army started out as the Soviet Union's revolutionary communist combat groups during the Russian Civil War of 1918-1922. It grew into the national army of the Soviet Union. By the 1930s the Red Army was among the largest armies in history.The "Red Army" name refers to...
and in the workplaces, and a provision forbidding the incitement of propaganda against any ethnicity became part of Soviet law. State-sponsored institutions of secular Yiddish culture, such as the Moscow State Jewish Theater
Moscow State Jewish Theater
The Moscow State Jewish Theater, Russian language: Московский Государственный Еврейский Театр, also known by its acronym GOSET: ГОСЕТ) was a Yiddish theater company established in 1919 and shut down in 1948 by the Soviet authorities....
, were established in Soviet Russia and the Soviet Union during this time, as were institutions for other minorities.
As People's Commissar for Nationalities, Stalin was the cabinet member responsible for minority affairs. In 1922, Stalin was elected the first-ever General Secretary
General Secretary
The office of general secretary is staffed by the chief officer of:*The General Secretariat for Macedonia and Thrace, a government agency for the Greek regions of Macedonia and Thrace...
of the partya post not yet regarded as the highest in the Soviet government. Lenin began to criticize Stalin shortly thereafter.
In his December 1922 letters, the ailing Lenin (whose health left him incapacitated in 1923-1924) criticized the Georgian Stalin and the Polish Dzerzhinsky
Dzerzhinsky
Dzerzhinsky , Dzerzhinskaya , or Dzerzhinskoye may refer to:*Felix Dzerzhinsky , Communist revolutionary, founder of the Cheka*Ivan Dzerzhinsky , Russian composer...
for their chauvinistic attitude toward the Georgian nation during the Georgian Affair
Georgian Affair
The Georgian Affair of 1922 was a political conflict within the Soviet leadership about the way in which social and political transformation was to be achieved in the Georgian SSR...
. Eventually made public as part of Lenin's Testament
Lenin's Testament
Lenin's Testament is the name given to a document written by Vladimir Lenin in the last weeks of 1922 and the first week of 1923. In the testament, Lenin proposed changes to the structure of the Soviet governing bodies...
which recommended that the party remove Stalin from his post as General Secretarythe 1922 letters and the recommendation were both withheld from public circulation by Stalin and his supporters in the party: these materials were not published in the Soviet Union until de-Stalinization
De-Stalinization
De-Stalinization refers to the process of eliminating the cult of personality, Stalinist political system and the Gulag labour-camp system created by Soviet leader Joseph Stalin. Stalin was succeeded by a collective leadership after his death in March 1953...
in 1956.
After the incapacitated Lenin's death on 21 January 1924, the party officially maintained the principle of collective leadership, but Stalin soon outmaneuvered his rivals in the Central Committee's Politburo
Politburo
Politburo , literally "Political Bureau [of the Central Committee]," is the executive committee for a number of communist political parties.-Marxist-Leninist states:...
. At first collaborating with Politburo members Grigory Zinoviev
Grigory Zinoviev
Grigory Yevseevich Zinoviev , born Ovsei-Gershon Aronovich Radomyslsky Apfelbaum , was a Bolshevik revolutionary and a Soviet Communist politician...
and Lev Kamenev
Lev Kamenev
Lev Borisovich Kamenev , born Rozenfeld , was a Bolshevik revolutionary and a prominent Soviet politician. He was briefly head of state of the new republic in 1917, and from 1923-24 the acting Premier in the last year of Lenin's life....
against arch-rival Leon Trotsky
Leon Trotsky
Leon Trotsky , born Lev Davidovich Bronshtein, was a Russian Marxist revolutionary and theorist, Soviet politician, and the founder and first leader of the Red Army....
, Stalin succeeded in marginalizing Trotsky. By 1929, Stalin had also effectively marginalized Zinoviev and Kamenev as well, compelling both to submit to his authority. The intransigent Trotsky was forced into exile.
When Boris Bazhanov
Boris Bazhanov
Boris Georgiyevich Bazhanov , sometimes also spelled Bajanov, was a secretary in the Politburo and the personal secretary of the leader of the Soviet Union, Joseph Stalin from August 1923 through the end of 1925. Bazhanov held different positions at the Politburo from 1925 to 1928...
, Stalin's personal secretary who had defected to France
France
The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...
in 1928, produced a memoir critical of Stalin in 1930, he alleged that Stalin made crude anti-Semitic outbursts even before Lenin's death.
Nevertheless, following Lenin's death in early 1924, another large scale campaign against anti-Semitism was again conducted in 1927-1930, under Stalin's leadership.
Stalin's 1931 condemnation of anti-Semitism
On January 12, 1931, Stalin gave the following answer to an inquiry on the subject of the Soviet attitude toward anti-semitism from the Jewish News AgencyJewish Telegraphic Agency
The Jewish Telegraphic Agency is an international news agency serving Jewish community newspapers and media around the world. The JTA was founded on February 6, 1917, by Jacob Landau as the Jewish Correspondence Bureau in The Hague with the mandate of collecting and disseminating news among and...
in the United States
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
:
This answer was subsequently published as an item in the Soviet newspaper Pravda
Pravda
Pravda was a leading newspaper of the Soviet Union and an official organ of the Central Committee of the Communist Party between 1912 and 1991....
on November 30, 1936, and was again republished as part of a posthumous 1954 volume of Stalin's collected Works.
Establishment of Jewish Autonomous Oblast
To offset the growing Jewish national and religious aspirations of ZionismZionism
Zionism is a Jewish political movement that, in its broadest sense, has supported the self-determination of the Jewish people in a sovereign Jewish national homeland. Since the establishment of the State of Israel, the Zionist movement continues primarily to advocate on behalf of the Jewish state...
and to successfully categorize Soviet Jews under Stalin's nationality policy, an alternative to the Land of Israel
Land of Israel
The Land of Israel is the Biblical name for the territory roughly corresponding to the area encompassed by the Southern Levant, also known as Canaan and Palestine, Promised Land and Holy Land. The belief that the area is a God-given homeland of the Jewish people is based on the narrative of the...
was established with the help of Komzet
Komzet
Komzet was the Committee for the Settlement of Toiling Jews on the Land in the Soviet Union. The primary goal of the Komzet was to help impoverished and persecuted Jewish population of the former Pale of Settlement to adopt agricultural labor...
and OZET
OZET
OZET was public Society for Settling Toiling Jews on the Land in the Soviet Union in the period from 1925 to 1938. Some English sources use the word "Working" instead of "Toiling".- Background :...
in 1928. The Jewish Autonomous Oblast
Jewish Autonomous Oblast
The Jewish Autonomous Oblast is a federal subject of Russia situated in the Russian Far East, bordering Khabarovsk Krai and Amur Oblast of Russia and Heilongjiang province of China. Its administrative center is the town of Birobidzhan....
with the center in Birobidzhan
Birobidzhan
Birobidzhan is a town and the administrative center of the Jewish Autonomous Oblast, Russia. It is located on the Trans-Siberian railway, close to the border with the People's Republic of China....
in the Russian Far East
Russian Far East
Russian Far East is a term that refers to the Russian part of the Far East, i.e., extreme east parts of Russia, between Lake Baikal in Eastern Siberia and the Pacific Ocean...
was to become a "Soviet Zion". Yiddish
Yiddish language
Yiddish is a High German language of Ashkenazi Jewish origin, spoken throughout the world. It developed as a fusion of German dialects with Hebrew, Aramaic, Slavic languages and traces of Romance languages...
, rather than "reactionary" Hebrew
Hebrew language
Hebrew is a Semitic language of the Afroasiatic language family. Culturally, is it considered by Jews and other religious groups as the language of the Jewish people, though other Jewish languages had originated among diaspora Jews, and the Hebrew language is also used by non-Jewish groups, such...
, would be the national language
National language
A national language is a language which has some connection—de facto or de jure—with a people and perhaps by extension the territory they occupy. The term is used variously. A national language may for instance represent the national identity of a nation or country...
, and proletarian socialist literature and arts
Socialist realism
Socialist realism is a style of realistic art which was developed in the Soviet Union and became a dominant style in other communist countries. Socialist realism is a teleologically-oriented style having its purpose the furtherance of the goals of socialism and communism...
would replace Judaism as the quintessence of culture. Despite a massive domestic and international state propaganda
Propaganda
Propaganda is a form of communication that is aimed at influencing the attitude of a community toward some cause or position so as to benefit oneself or one's group....
campaign, the Jewish population there never reached 30% (as of 2003 it was only about 1.2%). The experiment ground to a halt in the mid-1930s, during Stalin's first campaign of purges, as local leaders were not spared during the purges.
Great Purge
Stalin's harshest period of mass repression, the so-called Great PurgeGreat Purge
The Great Purge was a series of campaigns of political repression and persecution in the Soviet Union orchestrated by Joseph Stalin from 1936 to 1938...
(or Great Terror), was launched in 1936-1937 and involved the execution of over a half-million Soviet citizens accused of treason, terrorism, and other anti-Soviet
Anti-Sovietism
Anti-Sovietism and Anti-Soviet refer to persons and activities actually or allegedly aimed against the Soviet Union or government power within the Soviet Union.Three different flavors of the usage of the term may be distinguished....
crimes. The campaign of purges prominently targeted Stalin's former opponents and other Old Bolsheviks, and included a large-scale purge of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union
Purge of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union
Purges with a "small-p" purge was one of the key rituals during which a periodic review of party members was conducted to get rid of the "undesirables"....
, repression of the kulak
Kulak
Kulaks were a category of relatively affluent peasants in the later Russian Empire, Soviet Russia, and early Soviet Union...
peasants, Red Army
Red Army
The Workers' and Peasants' Red Army started out as the Soviet Union's revolutionary communist combat groups during the Russian Civil War of 1918-1922. It grew into the national army of the Soviet Union. By the 1930s the Red Army was among the largest armies in history.The "Red Army" name refers to...
leaders, and ordinary citizens accused of conspiring against the Stalinist government.
According to Mikhail Baitalsky
However, the Russian historian Gennady Kostyrchenko writes that some 29 thousand Jews, or 1% of the total ethnic Jewish Soviet population, were arrested in 1937-1938, and that this proportion of arrested Jews was comparable to the proportion of arrested ethnic Russians and ethnic Ukrainians.
The Oxford University historian David Priestland writes that "Jews, as an ethnic group, [were not] victimized by the Soviet regime before World War II
World War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
, and were not specifically targeted by the 1936-38 Great Terror."
The Indiana University
Indiana University
Indiana University is a multi-campus public university system in the state of Indiana, United States. Indiana University has a combined student body of more than 100,000 students, including approximately 42,000 students enrolled at the Indiana University Bloomington campus and approximately 37,000...
historian Jeffrey Veidlinger has written that
Historian Roy Medvedev
Roy Medvedev
Roy Aleksandrovich Medvedev |Georgia]]) is a Russian historian renowned as the author of the dissident history of Stalinism, Let History Judge , first published in English in 1972...
observes that Stalin's 1930s purges "noticeably reduced the number of Latvia
Latvia
Latvia , officially the Republic of Latvia , is a country in the Baltic region of Northern Europe. It is bordered to the north by Estonia , to the south by Lithuania , to the east by the Russian Federation , to the southeast by Belarus and shares maritime borders to the west with Sweden...
ns, Estonians
Estonians
Estonians are a Finnic people closely related to the Finns and inhabiting, primarily, the country of Estonia. They speak a Finnic language known as Estonian...
, Finns, Poles
Poles
thumb|right|180px|The state flag of [[Poland]] as used by Polish government and diplomatic authoritiesThe Polish people, or Poles , are a nation indigenous to Poland. They are united by the Polish language, which belongs to the historical Lechitic subgroup of West Slavic languages of Central Europe...
and Hungarians within the Soviet elite, but this can be explained by the fact that Latvia, Estonia, Finland, [and] Hungary. . . were not part of the Soviet Union and could not serve as a source of new cadres. The number of Germans and Jews in the elite was also reduced, although many Jews continued to hold leadership posts in the party and government."
German-Soviet rapproachment and the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact
After dismissing Maxim LitvinovMaxim Litvinov
Maxim Maximovich Litvinov was a Russian revolutionary and prominent Soviet diplomat.- Early life and first exile :...
as Foreign Minister in 1939, Stalin immediately directed incoming Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov
Vyacheslav Molotov
Vyacheslav Mikhailovich Molotov was a Soviet politician and diplomat, an Old Bolshevik and a leading figure in the Soviet government from the 1920s, when he rose to power as a protégé of Joseph Stalin, to 1957, when he was dismissed from the Presidium of the Central Committee by Nikita Khrushchev...
to "purge the ministry of Jews", to appease Hitler and to signal Nazi Germany that the USSR was ready for non-aggression talks.
According to some critics, anti-Semitic trends in the Kremlin's policies were fueled by the exile of Leon Trotsky
Leon Trotsky
Leon Trotsky , born Lev Davidovich Bronshtein, was a Russian Marxist revolutionary and theorist, Soviet politician, and the founder and first leader of the Red Army....
.
In the late 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s far fewer Jews were appointed to positions of power in the state apparatus than previously, with a sharp drop in Jewish representation in senior positions evident from around the time of the beginning of the late 1930s rapproachment with Nazi Germany. The percentage of Jews in positions of power dropped to 6% in 1938, and to 5% in 1940.
After World War II
The experience of the Holocaust, which wiped out some six million Jews in Europe under Nazi occupation, and left millions more homeless and displacedSh'erit ha-Pletah
Sh'erit ha-Pletah is a biblical term used by Jewish survivors of the Nazi Holocaust to refer to themselves and the communities they formed following their liberation in the spring of 1945....
, contributed to growing concern about the situation of the Jewish people worldwide. Ironically, the trauma breathed new life into the traditional idea of a common Jewish peoplehood
Jewish peoplehood
Jewish peoplehood is the awareness of the underlying unity that makes an individual Jew a part of the Jewish people....
and became a catalyst for the revival of the Zionist idea of creating a Jewish state in the Middle East.
The Jewish Autonomous Oblast experienced a revival as the Soviet government sponsored the migration of as many as ten thousand Eastern European Jews to Birobidzhan in 1946-1948. In early 1946, the Council of Ministers of the USSR announced a plan to build new infrastructure, and Mikhail Kalinin
Mikhail Kalinin
Mikhail Ivanovich Kalinin , known familiarly by Soviet citizens as "Kalinych," was a Bolshevik revolutionary and the nominal head of state of Russia and later of the Soviet Union, from 1919 to 1946...
, a champion of the Birobidzhan project since the late 1920s, stated that he still considered the region as a "Jewish national state" that could be revived through "creative toil."
In the meantime, Stalin also warmed to the idea of Israel
Israel
The State of Israel is a parliamentary republic located in the Middle East, along the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea...
as a Jewish state. In 1947, the Soviet Union joined the United States
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
in supporting the partition of British Palestine into Jewish and Arab states, and supported Israel in the 1948 Arab–Israeli War with weaponry supplied via Czechoslovakia
Czechoslovakia
Czechoslovakia or Czecho-Slovakia was a sovereign state in Central Europe which existed from October 1918, when it declared its independence from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, until 1992...
.
Nonetheless, Stalin began a new purge with repressing his wartime allies, the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee
Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee
The Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee was formed on Joseph Stalin's order in Kuibyshev in April 1942 with the official support of the Soviet authorities...
. In January 1948, Solomon Mikhoels
Solomon Mikhoels
Solomon Mikhoels ; was a Soviet Jewish actor and the artistic director of the Moscow State Jewish Theater. Mikhoels served as the chairman of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee during the Second World War...
was murdered in a purported car accident in Minsk
Minsk
- Ecological situation :The ecological situation is monitored by Republican Center of Radioactive and Environmental Control .During 2003–2008 the overall weight of contaminants increased from 186,000 to 247,400 tons. The change of gas as industrial fuel to mazut for financial reasons has worsened...
. According to documents unearthed by historian Gennady Kostyrchenko, the organizers of the assassination were L.M. Tsanava and S. Ogoltsov, and the "direct" murderers were Lebedev, Kruglov and Shubnikov.
Despite Stalin's willigness to support Israel early on, various historians suppose that anti-Semitism in the late 1940s and early 1950s was motivated by Stalin's possible perception of Jews as a potential "fifth column
Fifth column
A fifth column is a group of people who clandestinely undermine a larger group such as a nation from within.-Origin:The term originated with a 1936 radio address by Emilio Mola, a Nationalist General during the 1936–39 Spanish Civil War...
" in light of a pro-Western Israel in the Middle East. Orlando Figes
Orlando Figes
Orlando Figes is a British historian of Russia, and Professor of History at Birkbeck, University of London.-Overview:Figes is the son of the feminist writer Eva Figes. His sister is the author and editor Kate Figes. He attended William Ellis School in north London from 1971-78...
suggests that
Historians Albert S. Lindemann and Richard S. Levy observe that
Jeffrey Veidlinger writes that
In November 1948, Soviet authorities launched a campaign to liquidate what was left of Jewish culture. The leading members of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee
Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee
The Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee was formed on Joseph Stalin's order in Kuibyshev in April 1942 with the official support of the Soviet authorities...
were arrested. They were charged with treason, bourgeois nationalism
Bourgeois nationalism
Bourgeois nationalism is a term from Marxist phraseology. It refers to the alleged practice by the ruling classes of deliberately dividing people by nationality, race, ethnicity, or religion, so as to distract them from possible class warfare...
and planning to set up a Jewish republic in Crimea
Crimea
Crimea , or the Autonomous Republic of Crimea , is a sub-national unit, an autonomous republic, of Ukraine. It is located on the northern coast of the Black Sea, occupying a peninsula of the same name...
to serve American interests. The Museum of Environmental Knowledge of the Jewish Autonomous Oblast (established in November 1944) and The Jewish Museum in Vilnius (established at the end of the war) were closed down in 1948. The Historical-Ethnographic Museum of Georgian Jewry, established in 1933, was shut down at the end of 1951.
In Birobidzhan, the various Jewish cultural institutions that had been established under Stalin's earlier policy of support for "proletarian Jewish culture" in the 1930s were closed down between late 1948 and early 1949. These included the Kaganovich Yiddish Theater, the Yiddish publishing house, the Yiddish newspaper Birobidzhan, the library of Yiddish and Hebrew books, and the local Jewish schools. The same happened to Yiddish theaters all over the Soviet Union, beginning with the Odessa Yiddish Theater and including the Moscow State Jewish Theater.
In early February 1949, the Stalin Prize-winning microbiologist
Microbiologist
A microbiologist is a scientist who works in the field of microbiology. Microbiologists study organisms called microbes. Microbes can take the form of bacteria, viruses, fungi, and protists...
Nikolay Gamaleya
Nikolay Gamaleya
Nikolay Fyodorovich Gamaleya was a Ukrainian physician and scientist who played a pioneering role in microbiology and vaccine research in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union.-Biography:...
, a pioneer of bacteriology
Bacteriology
Bacteriology is the study of bacteria. This subdivision of microbiology involves the identification, classification, and characterization of bacterial species...
and member of the Academy of Sciences, wrote a personal letter to Stalin, protesting the growing anti-Semitism:
The ninety-year-old scientist wrote Stalin a second letter in mid-February, again mentioning the growing anti-Semitism. In March, Gamaleya died, still having received no answer.
During the night of August 12–13, 1952, remembered as the "Night of the Murdered Poets
Night of the Murdered Poets
On August 12, 1952, thirteen Soviet Jews were executed in the Lubyanka Prison in Moscow, Russia as a result of charges of espionage based on forced, false confessions resulting from coercion and torture. This massacre is known as the Night of the Murdered Poets....
" (Ночь казнённых поэтов), thirteen of the most prominent Yiddish writers of the Soviet Union
Soviet Union
The Soviet Union , officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991....
were executed on the orders of Stalin. Among the victims were Peretz Markish
Peretz Markish
Peretz Davidovich Markish was a Soviet/Russian Jewish poet and playwright who wrote in Yiddish.Peretz Markish was born in Polonnoye in 1895. His distant ancestors lived in Spain. As a child he attended a cheder and sang in the choir of the local synagogue. He served as a private in the Russian...
, David Bergelson
David Bergelson
David Bergelson was a Yiddish language writer. Ukrainian-born, he lived for a time in Berlin, Germany. He moved back to the Soviet Union when Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany...
and Itzik Fefer.
In a December 1, 1952 Politburo session, Stalin announced: "Every Jewish nationalist is the agent of the American intelligence service. Jewish nationalists think that their nation was saved by the USA. . . They think they are indebted to the Americans. Among doctors, there are many Jewish nationalists."
A notable campaign to quietly remove Jews from positions of authority within the state security services was carried out in 1952-1953. The Russian historians Zhores
Zhores Medvedev
Zhores Aleksandrovich Medvedev is a Russian biologist, historian and dissident. His twin brother is the historian Roy Medvedev.-Biography:Zhores Medvedev and his twin brother Roy Medvedev were born on 14 November 1925 in Tbilisi, Georgia, USSR....
and Roy Medvedev
Roy Medvedev
Roy Aleksandrovich Medvedev |Georgia]]) is a Russian historian renowned as the author of the dissident history of Stalinism, Let History Judge , first published in English in 1972...
write that
The outside world was not ignorant of these developments, and even the leading members of the Communist Party USA
Communist Party USA
The Communist Party USA is a Marxist political party in the United States, established in 1919. It has a long, complex history that is closely related to the histories of similar communist parties worldwide and the U.S. labor movement....
complained about the situation. In the memoir Being Red, the American writer and prominent Communist Howard Fast
Howard Fast
Howard Melvin Fast was an American novelist and television writer. Fast also wrote under the pen names E. V. Cunningham and Walter Ericson.-Early life:Fast was born in New York City...
recalls a meeting with Soviet writer and World Peace Congress delegate Alexander Fadeyev during this time:
The Doctors' Plot
On January 13, 1953, the Soviet Union's TASSTelegraph Agency of the Soviet Union
The Telegraph Agency of the Soviet Union , was the central agency for collection and distribution of internal and international news for all Soviet newspapers, radio and television stations...
information agency announced the unmasking of a conspiracy of so-called "doctors-poisoners" who had covertly attempted to decapitate the Soviet leadership. The accused doctors were all senior physiciansmost of them Jewishwho had allegedly confessed to planning and successfully carrying out heinous assassinations, including the covert murders of such high-profile Soviet citizens as writer Alexander Shcherbakov (died 1945) and politician Andrey Zhdanov (died 1948). The alleged conspirators were accused of acting on behalf of both the American and British intelligence services and an anti-Soviet international Jewish bourgeois-nationalist organization.
As Western press accused the Soviet Union of antisemitism, the Central Committee of Communist Party decided to organise a propagandistic trick, a collective letter by the Jewish public, condemning with fervour "the murderers in white overalls" and the agents of imperialism
Imperialism
Imperialism, as defined by Dictionary of Human Geography, is "the creation and/or maintenance of an unequal economic, cultural, and territorial relationships, usually between states and often in the form of an empire, based on domination and subordination." The imperialism of the last 500 years,...
and Zionism, and to assure there was no antisemitism in the USSR. The letter was signed by well-known scientists and culture figures, who had been forced to do so by the NKVD
NKVD
The People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs was the public and secret police organization of the Soviet Union that directly executed the rule of power of the Soviets, including political repression, during the era of Joseph Stalin....
.
However, the letter, initially planned to be published in February, 1953, remained unpublished. Instead of the letter, a vehement feuilleton "The Simple-minded and the Swindlers" was published in Pravda
Pravda
Pravda was a leading newspaper of the Soviet Union and an official organ of the Central Committee of the Communist Party between 1912 and 1991....
, featuring numerous characters with Jewish names, all of them swindlers, villains, saboteurs, whom the naïve Russian people trust, having lost vigilance. What followed was a new wave of antisemitic hysteria and rumors that all Jews would be sent to Siberia. Only Stalin's death the same year relieved the fear.
Similar purges against Jews were organised in Eastern Bloc countries (see Prague Trials).
Radzinsky's hypothesis
The reasons for the anti-Semitic campaign remain unclear; some attribute this to Stalin’s alleged paranoia, while Stalin’s biographer Edvard RadzinskyEdvard Radzinsky
Edvard Stanislavovich Radzinsky is a Russian playwright, writer, TV personality, and film screenwriter. He is also known as an author of several books on history which were characterized as "folk history" by journalists and academic historians.-Biography:Edvard Stanislavovich Radzinsky was born...
has claimed that Stalin was actually preparing for a new military conflict, and just repeated the 1937 purges to ensure an atmosphere of terror and absolute submissiveness. Radzinsky also viewed the persecution of Jews by Stalin as a means of provoking the US.
Associates and family
Nikita KhrushchevNikita Khrushchev
Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev led the Soviet Union during part of the Cold War. He served as First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1953 to 1964, and as Chairman of the Council of Ministers, or Premier, from 1958 to 1964...
wrote in his memoirs that
He further professed that Stalin frequently made anti-Semitic comments after World War II.
Some of Stalin's associates were Jews or had Jewish spouses, including Lazar Kaganovich
Lazar Kaganovich
Lazar Moiseyevich Kaganovich was a Soviet politician and administrator and one of the main associates of Joseph Stalin.-Early life:Kaganovich was born in 1893 to Jewish parents in the village of Kabany, Radomyshl uyezd, Kiev Governorate, Russian Empire...
. Many of them were purged, including Nikolai Yezhov
Nikolai Yezhov
Nikolai Ivanovich Yezhov or Ezhov was a senior figure in the NKVD under Joseph Stalin during the period of the Great Purge. His reign is sometimes known as the "Yezhovshchina" , "the Yezhov era", a term that began to be used during the de-Stalinization campaign of the 1950s...
's wife and Polina Zhemchuzhina
Polina Zhemchuzhina
Polina Semyonovna Zhemchuzhina was a Soviet stateswoman and the wife of the Soviet premier Vyacheslav Molotov.Born Perl Karpovskaya to the family of a Jewish tailor in the village of Pologi, in the Aleksandrov uyezd of Yekaterinoslav Governorate , she joined the Russian Social Democratic Labour...
, who was Vyacheslav Molotov
Vyacheslav Molotov
Vyacheslav Mikhailovich Molotov was a Soviet politician and diplomat, an Old Bolshevik and a leading figure in the Soviet government from the 1920s, when he rose to power as a protégé of Joseph Stalin, to 1957, when he was dismissed from the Presidium of the Central Committee by Nikita Khrushchev...
's wife, and also Bronislava Poskrebysheva
Bronislava Poskrebysheva
Bronislava Solomonovna Metallikova - Poskrebysheva was born in Proskurov . She was the wife of Alexander Poskrebyshev, Joseph Stalin's personal assistant for many years....
. Historian Geoffrey Roberts
Geoffrey Roberts
Geoffrey Roberts is a British historian of the Second World War.Geoffrey Roberts was born in Deptford, south London in 1952. His father worked as a labourer at the local power station and his mother as a cleaner and tea lady...
points out that Stalin "continued to fête Jewish writers and artists even at the height of the anti-Zionist campaign of the early 1950s."
Analyzing various explanations for Stalin's perceived anti-Semitism in his book The Lesser Terror: Soviet State Security, 1939-1953, historian Michael Parrish posits that
On the other hand, in Esau's Tears: Modern Anti-Semitism and the Rise of the Jews, historian Albert S. Lindemann observes that
When Stalin's young daughter Svetlana
Svetlana Alliluyeva
Svetlana Iosifovna Alliluyeva , later known as Lana Peters, was the youngest child and only daughter of Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin and Nadezhda Alliluyeva, Stalin's second wife...
fell in love with prominent Soviet filmmaker Alexei Kapler, a Jewish man twenty-three years her elder, Stalin was strongly irritated by the relationship. According to Svetlana, "He (Stalin) was irritated more than anything else by the fact that Kapler was Jewish" and ordered the exile of Kapler to Vorkuta
Vorkuta
Vorkuta is a coal-mining town in the Komi Republic, Russia, situated just north of the Arctic Circle in the Pechora coal basin at the Usa River. Population: - Labor camp origins :...
on the charge of being an "English spy." Stalin's daughter later fell in love with Grigori Morozov, another Jew, and married him. Stalin agreed to their marriage after much pleading on Svetlana's part, but refused to attend the wedding, and ordered the arrest and imprisonment of the bridegroom's father in retaliation.
Stalin's son Yakov
Yakov Dzhugashvili
Yakov Iosifovich Dzhugashvili was one of Joseph Stalin's four children . Yakov was the son of Stalin's first wife, Ekaterina Svanidze...
also married a Jewish woman, Yulia Meltzer, and though Stalin disapproved at first, he began to grow fond of her. Stalin's biographer Simon Sebag Montefiore writes that Lavrenty Beria's son noted that his father could list Stalin's affairs with Jewish women.
See also
- Soviet Anti-Zionism
- History of the Jews in the Soviet UnionHistory of the Jews in the Soviet UnionThe history of the Jews in the Soviet Union is discussed in the following articles relating to specific regions of the former Soviet Union:*History of the Jews in Armenia*History of the Jews in Azerbaijan*History of the Jews in Belarus...
- Population transfer in the Soviet UnionPopulation transfer in the Soviet UnionPopulation transfer in the Soviet Union may be classified into the following broad categories: deportations of "anti-Soviet" categories of population, often classified as "enemies of workers," deportations of entire nationalities, labor force transfer, and organized migrations in opposite...
Further reading
- Arkady Vaksberg, Antonina Bouis (1994). Stalin Against The Jews. ISBN 0-679-42207-2
- Louis Rapoport (1990). Stalin's War Against the Jews. ISBN 0-02-925821-9
External links
- Stalin's Secret Pogrom: The Postwar Inquisition of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (introduction) by Joshua Rubenstein
- 50th anniversary of the Night of the Murdered Poets National Conference on Soviet Jewry (NCSJ) August 12, 2002, Letter from President Bush, links
- Seven-fold Betrayal: The Murder of Soviet Yiddish by Joseph Sherman
- Unknown History, Unheroic Martyrs by Jonathan Tobin Не умри Сталин в 1953 году... (If Stalin Had Not Died in 1953) by Yoav Karni (BBCBBCThe British Broadcasting Corporation is a British public service broadcaster. Its headquarters is at Broadcasting House in the City of Westminster, London. It is the largest broadcaster in the world, with about 23,000 staff...
in Russian language) - http://xeno.sova-center.ru/1ED6E3B/216049A/2161854 Russian political parties and antisemitism
- Mircea Rusnac, http://www.banaterra.eu/romana/rusnac-mircea-un-proces-stalinist-implicand-,,agenti-imperialisti%22-evrei-si-social-democrati