On this date, August
12, 1952, 13 prominent Jewish intellectuals were murdered in Moscow, Russia,
Soviet Union. This case is also known as The Night of The Murdered Poets. I
will post information about the Soviet Dictator, Joseph Stalin and antisemitism
from Wikipedia and other links.
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Out of the Red Shadows : Anti-Semitism in
Stalin's Russia
By Gennadi V. Kostyrchenko
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Though
communist leaders including Joseph Stalin publicly denounced antisemitism,
instances of antisemitism on Stalin's part have been witnessed by contemporaries
and documented by historical sources.
Early
years
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 around the start of the 20th century, Stalin appears unlikely to have
been stirred by antisemitism 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 Labour 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:
Not less interesting is the composition of the congress from the standpoint of nationalities. Statistics showed that the majority of the Menshevik faction consists of Jews—and this of course without counting the Bundists—after which came Georgians and then Russians. On the other hand, the overwhelming majority of the Bolshevik faction consists of Russians, after which come Jews—not counting of course the Poles and Letts—and then Georgians, etc. For this reason one of the Bolsheviks observed in jest (it seems Comrade Aleksinsky) that the Mensheviks are a Jewish faction and the Bolsheviks a genuine Russian faction, so it would not be a bad idea for us Bolsheviks to arrange a pogrom in the party.
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Joseph Stalin on Killing People [PHOTO SOURCE: http://www.pinterest.com/glachance/quotes/]
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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 Lenin's Soviet after the Russian Revolution ran counter to the centuries
of antisemitism under the Romanovs.
The
Council of People's Commissars
adopted a 1918 decree condemning all antisemitism and calling on the workers
and peasants to combat it. Lenin continued to speak out against antisemitism.
Information campaigns against antisemitism 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 party—a 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 Stalin and 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 Secretary)—the 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 Jewish and half Jewish Politburo members Grigory
Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev against Jewish 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
antisemitic outbursts even before Lenin's death.
Nevertheless,
following Lenin's death in early 1924, another large scale campaign against
antisemitism was again conducted in 1927–1930, under Stalin's leadership.
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Joseph
Stalin (left) & Adolf Hitler (right) [PHOTO SOURCE: http://www.agoravox.tv/IMG/jpg/tumblr_m9npybzZyk1qirhm0o1_500.jpg]
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1930s
Stalin's
1931 condemnation of antisemitism
On
12 January 1931, Stalin gave the following answer to an inquiry on the subject
of the Soviet attitude toward antisemitism from the Jewish News Agency in the
United States:
National and racial chauvinism is a vestige of the misanthropic customs characteristic of the period of cannibalism. Anti-semitism, as an extreme form of racial chauvinism, is the most dangerous vestige of cannibalism.Anti-semitism is of advantage to the exploiters as a lightning conductor that deflects the blows aimed by the working people at capitalism. Anti-semitism is dangerous for the working people as being a false path that leads them off the right road and lands them in the jungle. Hence Communists, as consistent internationalists, cannot but be irreconcilable, sworn enemies of anti-semitism.In the U.S.S.R. anti-semitism is punishable with the utmost severity of the law as a phenomenon deeply hostile to the Soviet system. Under U.S.S.R. law active anti-semites are liable to the death penalty.
Establishment
of Jewish Autonomous Oblast
To
offset the growing Jewish national and religious aspirations of Zionism 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.
Great
Purge
Stalin's
harshest period of mass repression, the so-called Great Purge
(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. Although many of Great Purge victims were ethnic or religious Jews,
they were not specifically targeted as an ethnic group during this campaign
according to Mikhail Baitalsky, Gennady Kostyrchenko, David Priestland, Jeffrey
Veidlinger, Roy Medvedev and Edvard
Radzinsky.
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Stalin and Ribbentrop at the signing of the
Non-Aggression Pact, 23 August 1939
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Nazi-Soviet
rapprochement and the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact
Main
article: Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact
During
his meeting with Ribbentrop, Stalin promised him to get rid
of the "Jewish domination", especially among intellectuals. After
dismissing Maxim Litvinov 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 historians, antisemitic trends in the Kremlin's policies could be
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 rapprochement with Nazi Germany. The percentage of
Jews in positions of power dropped to 6% in 1938, and to 5% in 1940.
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Joseph Stalin on Happiness Quote [PHOTO SOURCE: https://dancingczars.wordpress.com/2014/03/06/crimea-votes-to-join-russia-accelerating-ukraine-crisis-of-course-they-did/]
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After
World War II
Further
information: Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee and
Night of the Murdered Poets
The
experience of the Holocaust, which wiped out some six million Jews in Europe under Nazi occupation, and left
millions more homeless and displaced, contributed to growing
concern about the situation of the Jewish people worldwide. However, 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 assassinated on Stalin's personal orders in Minsk. His murder
was disguised as a hit-and-run car accident. Mikhoels was taken to MGB dacha and killed,
along with his non-Jewish colleague Golubov-Potapov, under supervision of
Stalin's Deputy Minister of State Security Sergei
Ogoltsov. Their bodies were then dumped on a road-side in Minsk.
Despite
Stalin's willingness to support Israel early on, various historians suppose
that antisemitism 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
After the foundation of Israel in May 1948, and its alignment with the USA in the Cold War, the 2 million Soviet Jews, who had always remained loyal to the Soviet system, were portrayed by the Stalinist regime as a potential fifth column. Despite his personal dislike of Jews, Stalin had been an early supporter of a Jewish state in Palestine, which he had hoped to turn into a Soviet satellite in the Middle East. But as the leadership of the emerging state proved hostile to approaches from the Soviet Union, Stalin became increasingly afraid of pro-Israeli feeling among Soviet Jews. His fears intensified as a result of Golda Meir's arrival in Moscow in the autumn of 1948 as the first Israeli ambassador to the USSR. On her visit to a Moscow synagogue on Yom Kippur (13 October), thousands of people lined the streets, many of them shouting Am Yisroel chai ('The people of Israel live!')—a traditional affirmation of national renewal to Jews throughout the world but to Stalin a dangerous sign of 'bourgeois Jewish nationalism' that subverted the authority of the Soviet state.
Historians
Albert S. Lindemann and Richard S. Levy observe that "When, in October
1948, during the high holy days, thousands of Jews rallied around Moscow's
central synagogue to honor Golda Meir, the first Israeli ambassador, the
authorities became especially alarmed at the signs of Jewish disaffection.
". Jeffrey Veidlinger writes that "By October 1948, it was obvious that
Mikhoels was by no means the sole advocate of Zionism among Soviet Jews. The
revival of Jewish cultural expression during the war had fostered a general
sense of boldness among the Jewish masses. Many Jews remained oblivious to the
growing Zhdanovshchina and the threat to Soviet Jews that the
brewing campaign against 'rootless cosmopolitans' signaled. Indeed,
official attitudes toward Jewish culture were ambivalent during this period. On
the surface, Jewish culture seemed to be supported by the state: public efforts
had been made to sustain the Yiddish theater after Mikhoels's death, Eynikayt was still publishing on
schedule, and, most important, the Soviet Union recognized the establishment of
a Jewish state in Palestine. To most Moscow Jews, the state of Soviet Jewry had
never been better.
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 antisemitism:
"Judging by absolutely indisputable and obvious indications, the
reappearance of antisemitism is not coming from below, not from the masses. . .
but is directed from above, by someone's invisible hand. Antisemitism is coming
from some high-placed persons who have taken up posts in the leading party
organs. . . The ninety-year-old scientist wrote Stalin a second letter in
mid-February, again mentioning the growing antisemitism. In March, Gamaleya
died, still having received no answer.
During
the night of 12–13 August 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 1 December 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 wrote that according to [MVD] General Sudoplatov, "simultaneously all Jews
were removed from the leadership of the security services, even those in very
senior positions. In February the anti-Jewish expulsions were extended to
regional branches of the MGB. A secret directive was distributed to all
regional directorates of the MGB on 22 February, ordering that all Jewish
employees of the MGB be dismissed immediately, regardless of rank, age or
service record. . . .".
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.
Fadeyev insisted that "There is no anti-Semitism in the Soviet
Union", despite the evidence "that at least eight leading Jewish
figures in the Red Army and in government had been arrested on what appeared to
be trumped-up charges. Yiddish-language newspapers had been suppressed. Schools
that taught Hebrew had been closed. . . ."
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Stalin Versus Mario [PHOTO SOURCE: http://hitlerparody.wikia.com/wiki/File:Mario_and_Stalin_Comparison_1_by_DrSVH.jpg]
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The
Doctors' Plot
Main
article: Doctors' plot
On
13 January 1953, the Soviet Union's TASS 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 physicians—most of them
Jewish—who 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 a plan by
Stalin to send all of the Jews to Siberia, similar to other ethnic groups.
Only Stalin's death the same year relieved the fear.
Similar
purges against Jews were organised in Eastern Bloc countries (see Prague
Trials).
During
this time Soviet Jews were dubbed as persons of Jewish ethnicity. A dean of Marxism-Leninism
department at one of Soviet Universities explained the policy to his students:
One of you asked if our current political campaign can be regarded as antisemitic. Comrade Stalin said: "We hate Nazi not because they are Germans, but because they brought enormous suffering to our land". Same can be said about the Jews.
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| Iosif Dzhigashvili (better known as Josef Stalin) with Lazar Kaganovich. |
Associates
and family
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."
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". Kapler was convicted to ten years of hard labor
in Gulag on the
charges 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.
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.
Nikita
Khrushchev wrote in his memoirs that
A hostile attitude toward the Jewish nation was a major shortcoming of Stalin's. In his speeches and writings as a leader and theoretician there wasn't even a hint of this. God forbid that anyone assert that a statement by him smacked of antisemitism. Outwardly everything looked correct and proper. But in his inner circle, when he had occasion to speak about some Jewish person, he always used an emphatically distorted pronunciation. This was the way backward people lacking in political consciousness would express themselves in daily life—people with a contemptuous attitude toward Jews. They would deliberately mangle the Russian language, putting on a Jewish accent or imitating certain negative characteristics [attributed to Jews]. Stalin loved to do this, and it became one of his characteristic traits.
He
further professed that Stalin frequently made antisemitic comments after World
War II.
Analyzing
various explanations for Stalin's perceived antisemitism in his book The
Lesser Terror: Soviet State Security, 1939–1953, historian Michael Parrish
posits that
It has been suggested that Stalin, who remained first and foremost a Georgian throughout his life, somehow became a 'Great Russian' and decided that Jews would make a scapegoat for the ills of the Soviet Union. Others, such as the Polish writer Aleksander Wat (himself a victim), claim that Stalin was not an antisemite by nature, but the pro-Americanism of Soviet Jews forced him to follow a deliberate policy of antisemitism. Wat's views are, however, colored by the fact that Stalin, for obvious reasons, at first depended on Jewish Communists to help carry out his post-war policies in Poland. I believe a better explanation was Stalin's sense of envy (an occupational hazard for Marxists), which consumed him throughout his life. He also found in Jews a convenient target. By late 1930, Stalin, as [his daughter's] memoirs indicate, was suffering from a full-blown case of antisemitism.
On
the other hand, in Esau's Tears: Modern Anti-Semitism and the Rise of the
Jews, historian Albert S. Lindemann observes that
Determining Stalin's real attitude to Jews is difficult. Not only did he repeatedly speak out against anti-Semitism but both his son and daughter married Jews, and several of his closest and most devoted lieutenants from the late 1920s through the 1930s were of Jewish origin, for example Lazar Moiseyevich Kaganovich, Maxim Litvinov, and the notorious head of the secret police, Genrikh Yagoda. There were not so many Jews allied with Stalin on the party's right as there were allied with Trotsky on the left, but the importance of men like Kaganovich, Litvinov, and Yagoda makes it hard to believe that Stalin harbored a categorical hatred of all Jews, as a race, in the way that Hitler did. Scholars as knowledgeable and diverse in their opinions as Isaac Deutscher and Robert Conquest have denied that anything as crude and dogmatic as Nazi-style anti-Semitism motivated Stalin. It may be enough simply to note that Stalin was a man of towering hatreds, corrosive suspicions, and impenetrable duplicity. He saw enemies everywhere, and it just so happened that many of his enemies—virtually all his enemies—were Jews, above all, the enemy, Trotsky.Jews in the party were often verbally adroit, polylingual, and broadly educated—all qualities Stalin lacked. To observe, as his daughter Svetlana has, that 'Stalin did not like Jews,' does not tell us much, since he 'did not like' any group: His hatreds and suspicions knew no limits; even party members from his native Georgia were not exempt. Whether he hated Jews with a special intensity or quality is not clear.
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“The Jews are not a nation!” – Joseph Stalin
[PHOTO SOURCE: http://izquotes.com/quote/268866]
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INTERNET SOURCE: http://www.themoscowtimes.com/news/article/why-and-how-stalin-hated-jews/343318.html
Why and How Stalin Hated Jews
- By Karen Dukess
- Feb. 01 1995 00:00
Spotting
the Jews among the Bolshevik revolutionaries is an ugly game. And usually it is
monarchists and reactionaries who play it as they try to prove that the
overthrow of the great Russian empire was an international Jewish conspiracy.
In "Stalin Against the Jews," Arkady Vaksberg, an investigative
journalist and lawyer, enters the arena. But he has a different purpose in
mind. Vaksberg pinpoints the positioning of Jews in the ranks of the Soviet
elite under Stalin not in order to show how much power rested in Jewish hands.
He is trying to prove that Stalin consciously promoted and praised Jews in
order to hide his own calculated, virulent and deadly anti-Semitism.
Drawing on exhaustive research into previously inaccessible KGB archives, on interviews with scores of perpetrators and victims of the anti-Semitic purges, as well as on his own experiences as a Soviet Jew in the 1950s, Vaksberg documents the evolution of Stalin's personal animosity toward Jews. He maintains it was a vendetta that took root not in the 1940s, as was previously believed, but in the years after the 1917 Revolution, when every one of Stalin's competitors for power was Jewish, and many of them better educated than he.
In great detail -- perhaps too much for the reader not already well-versed in the complicated history of Soviet Jewry -- Vaksberg chronicles the fate of Soviet Jews of the Stalin era. He moves from the rise and bloody demise of the Jewish Antifascist Committee, which was dedicated to raising money in the West for the Soviet war effort and was later persecuted as a hotbed of traitorous Zionists, to the orchestrated murder in a "car crash" of the great director, actor and Jewish leader Solomon Mikhoels. He recounts Stalin's covert plan to deport the entire Soviet Jewish population to Siberia, and the overtly anti-Semitic "Doctors' Plot" of the 1950s. Throughout, it becomes clear that Stalin's methods of persecution were far more subtle and devious than the historical precedent of whipping Cossacks into the frenzy of a pogrom.
Vaksberg shows how Stalin was a master of duplicity. Every time the leader unleashed a new wave of anti-Jewish persecution, he would simultaneously award a prominent Jew the prestigious Order of Lenin. While nameless thousands of innocent Jews were being arrested and shot, the faithful Jews among Stalin's lackeys were being promoted to positions such as gulag camp commandant. A genius at mixing up the cards, Stalin would let it be known that the firing and demoting of Jews was not only acceptable but expected, while also making grand public statements denying the existence of anti-Semitism, which he called "the lowest form of cannibalism," in the international workers' state.
A typical example of Stalin's double-edged maneuverings concerned "Freilekhs," a play directed by Solomon Mikhoels at the end of World War II at Moscow's Jewish Theater. The play, a vivid and moving work devoid of the usual ideological drivel, was the hit of the season and was nominated for the Stalin Prize in 1946. But the Committee on the Arts, well aware of the prevailing mood, tried to scupper the play's chances by arranging for the publications of anonymous critical letters and negative reviews. This damaging material was given to Stalin, who, of course, had the final say on the prizewinners.
"But Comrade Stalin was much more cunning, and smarter, than his toadying lackeys," Vaksberg writes. "He knew how to blow smoke into people's eyes. Stalin supported the play, which he had not even seen ... No one doubted that the prize was totally deserved. But it had nothing to do with art. Its aim was to serve as ammunition against any spoken or unspoken accusations of anti-Semitism."
And the prize could not save Mikhoels. He was killed two years later.
"Stalin Against the Jews" is rendered more potent since Vaksberg does not hesitate to name the many Jews who were faithful to Stalin. He holds them accountable for their crimes against both Russians and Jews. The book leaves little doubt that, despite the contentions of many devout Stalinists, the anti-Semitism that flourished in the Soviet Union was not only sanctioned but fueled from above.
Turning to the current situation, Vaksberg describes today's "neo-anti-Semites" -- those who think the October Revolution was the dirty work of Jews, yet dream of the reanimation of the Soviet Union -- to be the heirs and successors of Stalin. As they see it, it was Jews and Lenin, one of whose ancestors was a Jew, who destroyed the great Russian empire, while Stalin recreated it, both geographically and spiritually.
Yet ultimately, Vaksberg finds hope in the low intellectual level of today's Russian anti-Semites. Quoting a letter he received stating that "all Russian Jews work for the Zionists and imperialists," Vaksberg writes that "this sort of ignorant babble of the neo-Stalinist anti-Semitic wave will not find great responsiveness among the Russian masses, who have learned to think for themselves."
To hear this from a man who has taken such pains to document the details of the absurd and evil campaign against Jews in the Soviet Union is reassurance indeed.
Stalin Against the Jews, by Arkady Vaksberg. Translated by Antonina W. Bouis. Knopf. 295 pages. $24.
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