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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.<ref name="Stalin 2003"/>
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.<ref name="Stalin 2003"/>
According to literary historian ], Stalin's own philosophical development in the direction of Russian Imperial idea and anti-Semitism that paved the way to the ] of 1930s that largely purged Jews from the Soviet government, was influenced by the anti-Semitic writings by the anti-revolutionary and anti-Marxist Russian philosopher ]. Losev was incarcerated in the 1920s, but was suddenly released in 1930 and allowed to resume his academic career.<ref>http://www.electroniclibrary21.ru/philosophy/losev/03.shtml</ref> Similar accusations were also expressed by Leonid Katsis and Dmitry Shusharin in a series of articles.<ref>http://books.google.com/books?id=Ix9qK4GeXo8C&pg=PA51&lpg=PA51&dq=%D0%BA%D0%BE%D0%BD%D1%81%D1%82%D0%B0%D0%BD%D1%82%D0%B8%D0%BD+%D0%BF%D0%BE%D0%BB%D0%B8%D0%B2%D0%B0%D0%BD%D0%BE%D0%B2+%D1%81%D1%82%D0%B0%D0%BB%D0%B8%D0%BD&source=bl&ots=blpQTM9RrC&sig=2q5U2eik6smwPoFXzCS2wgG_gro&hl=uk&ei=cdGmS-uwO4Oclgeus-mZAg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=5&ved=0CBwQ6AEwBA#v=onepage&q=&f=false</ref>
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
Those who knew Stalin, such as Khrushchev, suggest that Stalin had long harbored negative sentiments toward Jews that had manifested themselves before the 1917 Revolution. As early as 1907, Stalin wrote a letter differentiating between a "Jewish faction" and a "true Russian faction" in Bolshevism.
When Boris Bazhanov, Stalin's personal secretary during the 1920s, defected to France and produced a memoir critical of Stalin, he alleged that Stalin made crude anti-Semitic outbursts even before Lenin's death. According to Stalin's biographer Robert Tucker, "Stalin despised anything weak and small, and pre-Revolution Russian Jews were just so for him".
1930s
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 Agency in the United States:
In answer to your inquiry:
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.
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.
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.
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.
There are disagreements among historians and scholars about anti-Semitism and the place of Soviet Jews during this campaign of purging. 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. On the other hand, the Catholic University of America historian Jerry Muller writes that Soviet Jews were overrepresented among both victims and perpetrators.
The Oxford University historian David Priestland writes that "Jews, as an ethnic group, had not been victimized by the Soviet regime before World War II, and were not specifically targeted by the 1936-38 Great Terror." By contrast, the Russian politilogist Yakov Yakovlevich Etinger (adopted son of the executed Yakov Gilyarievich Etinger) has characterized many Soviet purges of the 1930s as tainted with anti-Semitism.
The notion that Stalin and his agents deliberately provoked anti-Semitic discrimination as part of the Terror is not shared by most specialists on the purges. . . . If Jews suffered disproportionately during the purges of the 1930s, it can be attributed largely to their heavy representation among the groups that were hardest hit—intellectuals and Party members. This is not to say that anti-Semitism was absent during this period. In fact, as Robert C. Tucker notes, hostility toward Jews became increasingly noticeable during the Great Terror. Social hostility, however, should not be equated with the type of genocide imagined by . Students of the Soviet Union's other national minorities have held that ethnic persecution was a pervasive aspect of Soviet policies toward non-Russians in general. Only recently have specialists on the Jewish minority, such as Igor Krupnik, come to realize that 'Jewish policy was a fairly integrated component of Soviet nationalities policy. Several other peoples were purged and promoted in roughly the same way, while a few had a far more tragic record of persecution by the communist state.'
German-Soviet rapproachment and the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact
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 critics, anti-Semitic trends in the Kremlin's policies were fueled by the exile of Leon Trotsky. Some writers, such as Paul Johnson, point to this as the main turning point in Stalin's anti-Semitism. In foreign policy, however, the official position of the Soviet Union towards Zionism in the late 1930s changed to a more favourable one. The official Soviet Encyclopedia claimed that Jewish migration to Palestine had become a "progressive factor" because many of the immigrants were left-wing Labor Zionists who could be used against pro-British Arabs.
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.
According to literary historian Konstantin Polivanov, Stalin's own philosophical development in the direction of Russian Imperial idea and anti-Semitism that paved the way to the repressions of 1930s that largely purged Jews from the Soviet government, was influenced by the anti-Semitic writings by the anti-revolutionary and anti-Marxist Russian philosopher Alexei Losev. Losev was incarcerated in the 1920s, but was suddenly released in 1930 and allowed to resume his academic career. Similar accusations were also expressed by Leonid Katsis and Dmitry Shusharin in a series of articles.
In principle I support Zionism, but there are difficulties with solving the Jewish question. Our experiment in Birobidzhan failed, because the Jews prefer to live in cities.
In 1947, Stalin joined the United States in supporting the creation of Israel, and supported Israel in the 1948 Arab–Israeli War with weaponry supplied via Czechoslovakia. Despite his recognition of Israel in 1948 and support from Israel's Mapam party, many campaigns and purges were organized at home that were antisemitic in nature. The subject has been widely covered in Edvard Radzinski's biography of Stalin. Stalin began this 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
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.
In November 1948, Soviet authorities launched a campaign to liquidate what was left of Jewish culture. The 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.
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 fate befell the Moscow State Jewish Theater.
In a December 1, 1952 Politburo session, Stalin announced: "Every Jewish nationalist is a potential agent of the American intelligence. Jewish nationalists think that their nation was saved by the USA."
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:
I was alone with Fadeev and the translator. I was not nervous but was certainly unsure of myself and somewhat tentative. I began by saying that I had been instructed to bring formal charges against the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. That was a mouthful, and I had to pinch myself figuratively to believe that I said what I had said.
It was translated, and then Fadeev thought about it for a while and then nodded and told me to go ahead.
'Do you want to take notes?' I asked him.
'Do you have notes?' he wanted to know.
'Under these circumstances, no, of course.'
'Then I don't need notes. Do any of the French comrades know what this is about?'
'No. It's absolutely secret. I was instructed that it must be absolutely secret.'
'Very well. Go ahead.' He was neither friendly nor unfriendly. He was absolutely calm and passive.
I plunged right in. 'Our National Committee charges the leadership of the Soviet Union with anti-Semitism, the violation of a basic socialist ethic and a grave threat to the world Communist movement.'
I had worked that one out for myself, and when I finished, I reserved the right to be nervous and a little scared. It was my own decision to put a little elegance into the charge, to give it at least a minimum of literary flavor, and while I had heard about the respect one Communist Party has for another, I was not very certain that it worked in practice. Fedeev, I had been told, was a member of the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union.
He worked on what I had said, his eyes half closed, humming softly to himself, a nervous habit, I felt; and then he said, simply: 'There is no anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union.'
'No more than that?'
The translator put the question to him.
'There is no anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union.'
As I look back, I am amazed by my anger and irritation. Before I left, I had been well briefed in New York on the evidence our party had. There was 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. . . .
On January 13, 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 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 Radzinsky 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.
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
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 anti-Semite by nature, but the pro-Americanism of Soviet Jews forced him to follow a deliberate policy of anti-Semitism. 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 memoirs indicate, was suffering from a full-blown case of anti-Semitism.
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.
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.
Muller, Jerry Z. (2010). Capitalism and the Jews. Princeton: Princeton University Press. p. 143. ISBN 9780691144788.
Priestland, David (2009). The Red Flag: A History of Communism. New York: Grove Press. p. 282. ISBN 9780802119247.
Veidlinger, Jeffrey (2000). The Moscow State Yiddish Theater: Jewish Culture on the Soviet Stage. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press. pp. 10-11. ISBN 9780253337849.
^ Herf, Jeffrey (2006), The Jewish Enemy: Nazi Propaganda During World War II and the Holocaust, Harvard University Press, p. 56, ISBN0674021754
^ Gennady Коstyrchenko "Stalin's secret policy: Power and Antisemitism"("Тайная политика Сталина. Власть и антисемитизм" Москва, "Международные отношения", 2003)
Figes, Orlando (2008). The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin's Russia. New York: Picador USA. p. 493. ISBN 9780312428037.
Lindemann, Albert S. & Richard S. Levy (2010). Antisemitism: A History. New York: Oxford University Press. p. 187. ISBN 9780199235032.
Pinkus, Benjamin (1990). The Jews of the Soviet Union: The History of a National Minority. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. p. 193. ISBN 9780521389266.
Fast, Howard (1994). Being Red: A Memoir. Armon, New York: M. E. Sharpe. pp. 217-218. ISBN 9781563244995.
Ro'i, Yaacov (1980). Soviet Decision Making in Practice: The USSR and Israel, 1947-1954. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Transaction Books. p. 373. ISBN 9780878552672.
^ Edvard Radzinsky. Stalin (in Russian). Moscow, Vagrius, 1997. ISBN 5-264-00574-5
Translation: "Stalin", 1996, ISBN 0-385-47397-4 (hardcover), 1997, ISBN 0-385-47954-9 (paperback) Ch. 24
^ Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar. New York: Random House Inc. 2003.
Parrish, Michael. The Lesser Terror: Soviet State Security, 1939-1953. Westport Connecticut: Greenwood Press. p. 197. ISBN 9780275951139.
Lindemann, Albert (2000). Esau's Tears: Modern Anti-Semitism and the Rise of the Jews. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. p. 454. ISBN 9780521795388.
"То, что Каплер – еврей, раздражало его, кажется, больше всего."
N. Tolstoy, ibib., p. 24.
Montefiore, Simon Sebag (2005). Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar. New York: Random House. p. 267. ISBN 9781400076789.
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
