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According to historian Iakov Etinger, many Soviet state purges of the 1930s were anti-Semitic in nature, and after more intense anti-Semitic policy toward the end of World War II,<ref name="roi103"/> Stalin in 1946 allegedly said privately that "every Jew is a potential spy."<ref name="brent184">{{Harvnb|Brent|Naumov|2004|p=184}}</ref><ref name="roi103"/> A few years later, after purportedly ordering the development of bombers capable of reaching America and supposedly convinced that [[Harry Truman]] was Jewish, Stalin reportedly remarked in private that "we will show this Jewish shopkeeper how to attack us!"<ref>{{citation|last=Brackman|first=Roman|title=The Secret File of Joseph Stalin: A Hidden Life|publisher=Frank Cass Publishers|year=2001|isbn=0714650501|p=384}}</ref>
According to historian Iakov Etinger, many Soviet state purges of the 1930s were anti-Semitic in nature, and after more intense anti-Semitic policy toward the end of World War II,<ref name="roi103"/> Stalin in 1946 allegedly said privately that "every Jew is a potential spy."<ref name="brent184">{{Harvnb|Brent|Naumov|2004|p=184}}</ref><ref name="roi103"/> A few years later, after purportedly ordering the development of bombers capable of reaching America and supposedly convinced that [[Harry Truman]] was Jewish, Stalin reportedly remarked in private that "we will show this Jewish shopkeeper how to attack us!"<ref>{{citation|last=Brackman|first=Roman|title=The Secret File of Joseph Stalin: A Hidden Life|publisher=Frank Cass Publishers|year=2001|isbn=0714650501|p=384}}</ref>

According to historian Konstantin Polivanov Stalin's own philosophical development in the direction of Russian Imperial idea and anti-Semitism that paved the way to the [[Great Purge|repressions]] of 1930's 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 1920's, but was suddenly released in 1930 and allowed to resume his academic career <ref>http://www.electroniclibrary21.ru/philosophy/losev/03.shtml</ref>.


By the end of the 1940s the Communist leadership of the former USSR had liquidated almost all Jewish organizations, including Yevsektsiya. Despite the official Soviet opposition to antisemitism, critics of this period characterize it as an antisemitic regime, pointing out the [[Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact|Non-Aggression Pact]] with [[Nazi Germany]]--though a pact made for power reasons and not anti-Semitic ones, the relatively high Jewish casualties in the [[Great Purge]]s, and Soviet hostility toward Jewish religious and cultural institutions--a hostility, however, that was applied with practically equal force against all religious and non-communist cultural institutions, the notable exception being the Christian Orthodox Church during World War II, or the "[[Great Patriotic War]]" as it was known there.
By the end of the 1940s the Communist leadership of the former USSR had liquidated almost all Jewish organizations, including Yevsektsiya. Despite the official Soviet opposition to antisemitism, critics of this period characterize it as an antisemitic regime, pointing out the [[Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact|Non-Aggression Pact]] with [[Nazi Germany]]--though a pact made for power reasons and not anti-Semitic ones, the relatively high Jewish casualties in the [[Great Purge]]s, and Soviet hostility toward Jewish religious and cultural institutions--a hostility, however, that was applied with practically equal force against all religious and non-communist cultural institutions, the notable exception being the Christian Orthodox Church during World War II, or the "[[Great Patriotic War]]" as it was known there.

Revision as of 14:04, 1 November 2009

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While communism officially has no place for antisemitism, interpretations suggesting that Joseph Stalin exhibited antisemitism have been put forth by different historians and other sources. British historian Nikolai Tolstoy writes that Stalin, not trusting anybody, felt threatened by a vast Jewish conspiracy.[1] Some of Stalin's associates were Jews, including Lazar Kaganovich. Many of his friends and family had Jewish spouses, including his daughter Svetlana and his son Vasily.[2]

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[3] As early as 1907, Stalin wrote a letter differentiating between a "Jewish faction" and a "true Russian faction" in Bolshevism.[4][3] Stalin's secretary Boris Bazhanov stated that Stalin made crude anti-Semitic outbursts even before Lenin's death.[5][3]

1930s

Stalin's letter : “Reply to an Inquiry of the Jewish News Agency in the United States" dated January 12, 1931 indicated his official position of the Soviet Union:

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. [6]

To offset the growing Jewish national and religious aspirations of Zionism and to successfully categorize Soviet Jews under Stalin's nationality, 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. Jewish leaders were arrested and executed, and Yiddish schools were shut down.

According to some critics, anti-Semitic trends in the Kremlin's policies were fueled by the exile of Leon Trotsky.[7][3] Pravda published cartoons portraying Leon Trotsky as a red demonic figure ruining Stalin's Russia, and eventually Trotsky fled Russia, eventually moving to Mexico. He was eventually murdered on Stalin's orders by a group of assassins. 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.

After dismissing Maxim Litvinov as Foreign Minister in 1939,[8] Stalin immediately directed incoming Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov to "purge the ministry of Jews", possibly to signal Nazi Germany that the USSR was ready for non-aggression talks.[9][10][8]

At the Yalta Conference in 1945, U.S President Franklin D. Roosevelt asked Stalin, what he thought of Zionism:

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.[11]

According to historian Iakov Etinger, many Soviet state purges of the 1930s were anti-Semitic in nature, and after more intense anti-Semitic policy toward the end of World War II,[3] Stalin in 1946 allegedly said privately that "every Jew is a potential spy."[12][3] A few years later, after purportedly ordering the development of bombers capable of reaching America and supposedly convinced that Harry Truman was Jewish, Stalin reportedly remarked in private that "we will show this Jewish shopkeeper how to attack us!"[13]

According to 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 1930's 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 1920's, but was suddenly released in 1930 and allowed to resume his academic career [14].

By the end of the 1940s the Communist leadership of the former USSR had liquidated almost all Jewish organizations, including Yevsektsiya. Despite the official Soviet opposition to antisemitism, critics of this period characterize it as an antisemitic regime, pointing out the Non-Aggression Pact with Nazi Germany--though a pact made for power reasons and not anti-Semitic ones, the relatively high Jewish casualties in the Great Purges, and Soviet hostility toward Jewish religious and cultural institutions--a hostility, however, that was applied with practically equal force against all religious and non-communist cultural institutions, the notable exception being the Christian Orthodox Church during World War II, or the "Great Patriotic War" as it was known there.

After World War II

Further information: Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee and Night of the Murdered Poets

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 and encouraged his supporters to serve in the Israeli armed forces. Despite his recognition of Israel in 1948 and support from Israel's Mapam party, many campaigns and purges were organized at home that could be interpreted as antisemitic.[11] 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. [15] 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 US interests.

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." [16]

The night of August 12-13, 1952, in the event known 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.

The antisemitic campaign of 1948-1953 against so-called "rootless cosmopolitans," destruction of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, the fabrication of the "Doctors' plot," the rise of "Zionology" were officially carried out under the banner of "anti-Zionism," but the use of this term could not obscure the antisemitic content of these campaigns,[original research?] and by the mid-1950s the state persecution of Soviet Jews emerged as a major human rights issue in the West and domestically.

The Doctors plot

Main article: Doctors' plot

On January 13, 1953, TASS announced "the unmasking of a terrorist group of doctors-poisoners." Satirical magazine Krokodil published antisemitic feuilletons and caricatures, Pravda published materials on arrested "spies"', almost all of whom were Jews. 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. [17]

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 rumours, that all Jews would be sent to Siberia. Only Stalin's death the same year relieved the fear.[17]

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. [17]

Associates

A few in Stalin's inner circle were Jews or had spouses who were Jews including Lazar Kaganovich.[2]

Some members of Stalin's circle that were purged also included Jews, including Nikolai Yezhov's wife, Polina Zhemchuzhina (Vyacheslav Molotov's wife) and Bronislava Poskrebysheva.[2]

Family life

Stalin's daughter Svetlana fell in love with a Jew, Alexei Kapler. Stalin disapproved.[18] He was exiled to Vorkuta on the charge of being an 'English spy'. She 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. His son Yakov also married a Jewish woman, Yulia Meltzer, and though Stalin disapproved at first, began to grow fond of her. Lavrentiy Beria's son noted that his father could list Stalin's affairs with Jewish women.[2]

References

  1. ^ Nikolai Tolstoy. Stalin's Secret War. Holt, Rinehart and Winston (1981). p. 27f.
  2. ^ a b c d Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar. New York: Random House Inc. 2003.
  3. ^ a b c d e f Ro'i, Yaacov , Jews and Jewish Life in Russia and the Soviet Union, Routledge, 1995, ISBN 0714646199, page 103-6
  4. ^ Montefiore, Simon Sebag, Young Stalin, Random House, Inc., 2008, ISBN 1400096138, page 165
  5. ^ Kun, Miklós, Stalin: An Unknown Portrait, Central European University Press, 2003, ISBN 9639241199, page 287
  6. ^ Joseph Stalin. Works, Vol. 13, July 1930-January 1934, Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1955, p. 30
  7. ^ Rappaport, Helen, Joseph Stalin: A Biographical Companion, ABC-CLIO, 1999 ISBN 1576070840, page297
  8. ^ a b Herf, Jeffrey (2006), The Jewish Enemy: Nazi Propaganda During World War II and the Holocaust, Harvard University Press, p. 56, ISBN 0674021754
  9. ^ Resis, Albert (2000), "The Fall of Litvinov: Harbinger of the German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact", Europe-Asia Studies, 52 (1): 35
  10. ^ Moss, Walter, A History of Russia: Since 1855, Anthem Press, 2005, ISBN 1843310341, page 283
  11. ^ a b A. Kramer (2003), "Stalin and Zionism", International Marxist Tendency
  12. ^ Brent & Naumov 2004, p. 184
  13. ^ Brackman, Roman (2001), The Secret File of Joseph Stalin: A Hidden Life, Frank Cass Publishers, p. 384, ISBN 0714650501
  14. ^ http://www.electroniclibrary21.ru/philosophy/losev/03.shtml
  15. ^ Template:Ru icon Как убивали Mихоэлса (How Mikhoels was killed). Moskovskiy Komsomolets September 6, 2005
  16. ^ Recorded by Vice-Chair of the Sovmin Vyacheslav Malyshev. Source - newspaper Nezavisimaya Gazeta, September 29, 1999.
  17. ^ a b c Template:Ru iconEdvard Radzinsky. Сталин, Moscow, Vagrius, 1997, ISBN 5-264-00574-5
    • Available online
    • Translation: "Stalin", 1996, ISBN 0-385-47397-4 (hardcover), 1997, ISBN 0-385-47954-9 (paperback) Ch. 24
  18. ^ N. Tolstoy, ibib., page 24

See also

Further reading

  • Arkady Vaksberg, Antonina Bouis, "Stalin Against The Jews", 1994, ISBN 0-679-42207-2
  • Louis Rapoport, "Stalin's War Against the Jews", 1990, ISBN 0-02-925821-9
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