i

STALIN & THE JEWISH ANTI-FASCIST COMMITTEE: A

HISTORY OF THE EMOTIONS INTERPRETATION

by

IAN DOYLE

IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF THE

REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MA IN EUROPEAN HISTORY

DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY

NATIONAL UNIVERSITY OF IRELAND, MAYNOOTH

Supervisor of Research: Dr John Paul Newman

May 2015

MA

ii

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction

1. Stalin’s Emotional Regime

Stalin’s Emotional Regime

The National Question

Soviet Patriotism

Postwar Anti-Semitism

Conclusion

2. The Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (1941-1945)

Emotional Refuge or Stalinist Apparatus?

Conclusion

3. Stalin & the JAC (1945-1953)

Representing Soviet Jews

1948

The JAC Trial

Conclusion

Conclusion

Bibliography

iii

1

9

10

18

23

29

32

34

38

50

53

56

61

65

71

74

79

iii

Acknowledgements

Projects like this are not made by one person alone and I am lucky to have

had such enthusiastic people help along the way. First and foremost I would

like to thank my supervisor, Dr John Paul Newman, for all of his support

and guidance, and for the confidence he placed in me. His invaluable

comments transformed my idea into a coherent and thoughtful piece.

I would also like to express my gratitude to the wider Department of History

in Maynooth University, especially to Dr David Lederer and Professor

Filipe Ribeiro de Meneses for their help over the past two years. I would

also like to thank Mr John Bradley for the devotion and assistance he gave

me during my time in Maynooth. He will be sadly missed.

I would not have made it this far without my friends and, particularly, my

classmates who were always there for me when I needed help. Thanks to

Adrian, Aoife, Carol, Jacob and Laura.

Serena Fox provided input from beginning to end, putting up with me in the

process. She deserves many thanks for I could not have done it without her.

Finally, I would like to thank my parents and grandparents for their

contributions, especially my mother, Catherine, for her endless dedication,

love and encouragement.

1

INTRODUCTION

2

In the 1930s the Soviet Union employed a nationalities policy that, in

practice, differed from its theory. Joseph Stalin’s writings on the topic taught

that the nations of the USSR should be encouraged and allowed to develop;

a necessary stage on the path to socialism. In practice, however, nationalistic

acts could be met with a harsh response following Stalin’s ‘national in form,

socialist in content’ doctrine. The trend of strong reactions to such

nationalism was halted after June 1941; Hitler’s betrayal of Stalin and

invasion of the Soviet Union called for unity within the country. Stalin

would now tolerate some nationalism as long as it contributed to the war

effort. To boost such contributions the regime established five anti-fascist

committees in early 1942: one each for Slavs, women, scientists, youths and

Jews. Each committee was to appeal its target audience for political,

monetary and material support for the Soviet war effort against Nazi

Germany. The Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (JAC) was to appeal to Jews

in the Soviet Union and abroad, especially the USA, by employing

specifically Jewish themes. The JAC was responsible to the Soviet

Information Bureau (Sovinformburo) and its deputy, Solomon Lozovsky.

The committee was chaired by Solomon Mikhoels, a famous Jewish actor

(best known for his performance as King Lear) and director of the Moscow

State Jewish Theatre.

Under the leadership of Mikhoels during the Great Patriotic War the JAC

flourished, benefitting both the Soviet Union and Jewish culture. Some

members of the JAC, before the war, feared that their Jewish culture was

dying out due to widespread assimilation. This fear was even more acute for

Jews using the Yiddish language. The members of the JAC who worked in

3

Yiddish experienced particular hardship seeking employment in the 1920s

and 1930s. Some of these men spent time abroad looking for work in

Yiddish communities but eventually returned to the Soviet Union as it had

the largest Yiddish speaking population. The JAC’s work during the war put

some of this fear to rest as committee members began to publish their works

in Yiddish, which brought a much needed revival of their language and

culture.

Despite the success of the JAC during the war years, the postwar period was

severely different. At the end of the Second World War it seemed that the

JAC may no longer be necessary; after all, it was established with the

purpose of securing foreign Jewish aid for the Soviet war effort. With the

war concluded, the JAC should have disbanded. However, the end of the

war also concluded the relaxed atmosphere that the Jewish minority

enjoyed; acts that could be considered nationalistic were now once again out

of the question. The committee would have to realise this if it wanted to

continue in any capacity. In fact, it continued to perform and even expanded

its functions; for example, it became involved in the issue of resettling Jews.

The JAC also contributed to another Jewish problem in the postwar years. It

was in these years that the regime placed a stronger emphasis on Soviet

patriotism, which was becoming closely linked to Russian nationalism. In

other words, the Russian population of the Soviet Union was the primary

national group, with Ukrainians and Belarusians occupying the second and

third places respectively. Soviet Jews, under the leadership of the JAC, felt

that the Jewish people had been the biggest victims of Nazi Germany’s

4

attempt at European domination. This idea ran counter to the official

narrative in which the Soviet people as a whole, with Russians to the

forefront, suffered immensely. The JAC’s efforts to publish The Black Book,

a book containing many accounts of Nazi atrocities against the Jews, was

just one way in which they contradicted the official narrative and brought

themselves into conflict with the regime.

The year 1948 is of enormous significance to the history of the JAC. In

January of that year Solomon Mikhoels was found dead in Minsk,

seemingly the victim of an automobile accident. In fact, he was murdered on

Stalin's orders. It seems that Stalin feared the charismatic chairman and his

popularity amongst Soviet Jews. Prior to 1948 Soviet Jewish citizens had no

external homeland for which they could be accused of showing loyalty.

Upon the establishment of the Jewish state of Israel Soviet Jews became a

diaspora nationality which meant that they had a homeland outside of the

Soviet Union. Their loyalty was now under suspicion as they could

potentially be considered a fifth column in a future war; Stalin believed that

a war with the USA was coming and that Israel would side with them

against the Soviet Union. It is for these reasons that Stalin’s postwar policies

were laced with anti-Semitism. Therefore, in November the JAC was

officially disbanded and in the following months certain leading figures of

the JAC were arrested. Their trial began behind closed doors in 1952 after

three years of imprisonment, interrogation and torture. Thirteen of the

fifteen defendants were executed in August 1952.

Before continuing I would like to clarify my central aims: I will prove that

5

the JAC was used as an emotional refuge by many of its members, and; I

will demonstrate that emotions played a pivotal role in Stalin’s postwar anti-

Semitic policies and in the JAC’s own work. I must now turn to recent work

on the history of emotions to lay the groundwork for my investigation.

The history of emotions began in earnest in 2001 with William M. Reddy’s

The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions

(Cambridge, 2001). In this book Reddy sets out his ideas regarding the

history of emotions and develops his concept of emotives. An emotive is ‘a

type of speech act... which both describes... and changes... the world,

because emotional expression has an exploratory and a self-altering effect

on the activated thought material of emotion.’1 In other words, an emotional

expression can have two effects: it can confirm or disconfirm the emotion

and; it can intensify or weaken the emotion. However, more relevant to this

study is Reddy’s introduction of the terms emotional regime and emotional

refuge. An emotional regime is ‘the set of normative emotions and the

official rituals, practices, and emotives that express and inculcate them’ and

it is ‘a necessary underpinning of any stable political regime.’2

An

emotional refuge is ‘a relationship, ritual, or organisation (whether informal

or formal) that provides safe release from prevailing emotional norms and

allows relaxation of emotional effort, with or without an ideological

justification, which may shore up or threaten the existing emotional

regime.’3

1 William M. Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions

(Cambridge, 2001), p. 128. 2 Ibid., p. 129.

3 Ibid.

6

In 2002 Barbara Rosenwein first published her thoughts on the history of

emotions and introduced the term emotional community,4 an idea which she

developed further in her book Emotional Communities in the Early Middle

Ages (New York, 2006). An emotional community is, more or less, the same

as a social community, such as a family, a factory, or a monastery but:

The researcher looking at them seeks above all to uncover systems of

feeling, to establish what these communities (and the individuals

within them) define and assess as valuable or harmful to them (for it

is about such things that people express emotions); the emotions that

they value, devalue, or ignore; the nature of the affective bonds

between people that they recognise; and the modes of emotional

expression that they encourage, tolerate, and deplore.5

In many ways Rosenwein’s community is similar to Reddy’s regime but she

developed this idea to compensate for the flaws she saw in the emotional

regime. The emotional communities approach allows for a plurality that the

emotional regime does not. Rosenwein complained that Reddy could only

see the regime and the refuge but nothing else in between or outside. Her

own approach was to be much more inclusive of human emotional life. Her

second concern is that Reddy seems to have moulded his ideas for

application to the modern state, a relatively recent invention. Such an

approach is not easily applied to the Middle Ages (Rosenwein’s area of

expertise) or earlier.6

Jan Plamper has commented that since Reddy introduced the term emotional

regime over a decade ago, many scholars have employed the term without

understanding its full meaning. Most people understand it simply as

‘emotional norms’ rather than ‘the ensemble of prescribed emotives [original

4 Barbara H. Rosenwein, ‘Worrying about Emotions in History’ in The American Historical

Review, cvii (2002), p. 842. 5 Barbara H. Rosenwein, ‘Problems and Methods in the History of Emotions’ in Passions in

Context: Journal of the History and Philosophy of Emotions, i (2010), p. 11. 6 Ibid., pp 22-23.

7

emphasis] together with the appropriate rituals and other symbolic

practices.’7

Aware of the pitfalls pointed out by Rosenwein and armed with Plamper’s

warning, I aim to employ William Reddy’s framework for the history of

emotions to outline Stalin’s emotional regime and the ways in which the

JAC became an emotional refuge.

The first chapter will establish Stalin’s emotional regime and will determine

the mood of high Stalinism, the period from the end of the Second World

War until Stalin’s death in 1953. To do this I will look at the reasons behind

Stalin’s nationalities policy, his policy of intense Soviet patriotism, and his

postwar downward spiral into anti-Semitism. This chapter will pay

particular attention to the emotional aspects of each policy.

The second chapter will be dedicated to the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee.

It will outline and describe the purpose of the committee and the work it

carried out. It will become clear that committee members were divided over

their work and that two factions existed within the JAC. One side would

focus on Jewish issues while the other concentrated on more general Soviet

work. This ambivalence would come to define the JAC, especially through

its chairman, Solomon Mikhoels.

With chapter one having set the postwar atmosphere, this third, and final,

chapter will demonstrate how the committee came into conflict with Stalin

7 Jan Plamper, The History of Emotions: An Introduction (Oxford, 2015), p. 265.

8

and will detail how and why the JAC was punished. The third chapter will

continue with Mikhoels struggle and how it changed in the years after the

war. This change was central to the downfall of the JAC.

9

CHAPTER 1

STALIN’S EMOTIONAL

REGIME

10

The aim of this first chapter is to establish an outline of Stalin’s emotional

regime. This will involve setting out which emotions the regime both valued

and deplored and what channels it made available for people to display (or

not display) the appropriate emotions. I want to show that Stalin had a

vested interest in the emotions of his subjects and that he built his emotional

regime to control and manipulate certain emotions in an effort to more

successfully mobilise his people. To do this I will be utilising scholarship on

emotions in the USSR; on emotional rituals and practices offered by the

state; on Stalin’s teachings on the national question; on the role of Soviet

patriotism; and on postwar anti-Semitism.

Stalin’s Emotional Regime

To begin a construction of Stalin’s emotional regime we must consider what

emotions were involved in everyday life. Mark D. Steinberg noted that

emotional and social life in Russia in the years between the 1905 revolution

and the October Revolution in 1917 were characterised by uncertainty,

anxiety and melancholy. The revolutionary spirit of 1905 had enchanted

many but when this did not translate into successful reform many became

disillusioned. Many people lamented the loss of past hopes and values and

hoped that the future would illuminate their lives.1 Sheila Fitzpatrick has

contributed much to the history of emotions in the Soviet Union. In 2001

she published her findings on the history of vengeance and ressentiment.

She briefly explains ressentiment as a hostile feeling borne from the

memory of a past transgression that the offended party wishes to rectify. She

also explains that it contains elements of the weak seeking vengeance over

1 Mark D. Steinberg, ‘Melancholy and Modernity: Emotions and Social Life in Russia

Between the Revolutions’ in Journal of Social History, xli (2008), pp 820-821.

11

the strong. In the thirty years her study is based on she concludes that

ressentiment was first aimed at the imperial elites, then at communist elites

after the revolution and, after the Second World War, at the Jews.2

Fitzpatrick has also worked on happiness in the Soviet Union. Her study,

which looks at the years before the Second World War, concludes that in

Stalin’s emotional regime happiness was a responsibility and that a lack of

public expressions of happiness could be construed as disloyalty. There was

a taboo on personal happiness as it had ‘petty-bourgeois’ links. In the same

study she finds that ‘grief and melancholy were not “Soviet” emotions in the

1930s’ because the regime emphasised happiness and success. Nevertheless,

grief and melancholy were tolerated as long as the regime was not blamed

for causing them.3 The regime even controlled the expression of laughter. It

was safe to laugh at something if it was officially sanctioned; for instance, it

was acceptable to laugh at enemies. It was also important to engage in group

laughter as it confirmed one’s loyalty to the regime because of the

importance the regime placed on involvement in public rituals and

ceremonies. Laughing as a form of conformity appealed to many people

because of its anonymity; laughter was safe whereas words could land

someone in trouble.4 Therefore, it is clear that the regime had a stake in

controlling the emotions of its people and providing them with the

appropriate models of expression.

2 Sheila Fitzpatrick, ‘Vengeance and Ressentiment in the Russian Revolution’ in French

Historical Studies, xxiv (2001), p. 586. 3 Sheila Fitzpatrick, Happiness and Toska: An Essay in the History of Emotions in Pre-war

Soviet Russia’ in Australian Journal of Politics and History, l (2004), pp 370-371. 4 Natalia Skradol, ‘Laughing with Comrade Stalin: An Analysis of Laughter in a Soviet

Newspaper Report’ in The Russian Review, xlviii (2009), pp 27-34.

12

It is not enough to simply describe which emotions were allowed and

encouraged under Stalinism, the historian must also describe what systems

or codes were in place that determined how these emotions were expressed.5

In 2005 Joanna Bourke published her cultural history of fear and concluded

that ‘fear is manipulated by numerous organisations with a stake in creating

fear while promising to eradicate it.’6 This is certainly true of Stalinism. In

Stalin’s Soviet Union people were able to use the state to settle private

disputes: ‘it turns out that everybody has immediate access to the apparatus

of legitimate coercion (i.e., the state) and frequently uses it against other

members of society.’7 Jan T. Gross called this the ‘privatisation of the

public domain’ and found it to be one of the central characteristics of

totalitarianism; this meant that ‘the fate of each individual is placed “in the

hands” of the collectivity.’8 For Gross, this was where the real power behind

totalitarianism lay; the state was freely available for its citizens and acted

almost immediately for them.

Denunciation was the chief method that kept this system going. A

denunciation simultaneously allowed the state to collect important

information about its citizens and favourably settle private disputes for the

person making the denunciation.

The overwhelming majority of Soviet citizens practised obedience to

the party line, but that did not give them any sense of security. And

this was not because they were all inflicted with paranoia. They had

reason to be afraid, because their freedom or incarceration was

5 Plamper, The History of Emotions, p. 265.

6 Joanna Bourke, Fear: A Cultural History (London, 2005), p. 385.

7 Jan T. Gross, ‘A Note on the Nature of Soviet Totalitarianism’ in Soviet Studies, xxxiv

(1982), p. 374. 8 Ibid., p. 375.

13

effectively at the discretion of any [original emphasis] of their fellow

citizens.9

In the Soviet Union citizens had the ability to have anybody arrested,

something Gross called the ‘great equaliser of Soviet citizens.’10

Everyone

had the ability to destroy others at their disposal but were powerless to

protect themselves. Gross declared that this privatisation of the public

domain was the ‘most important structural feature of twentieth-century

totalitarianism’ and it certainly played an instrumental role in Stalin’s

emotional regime.11

Recently some historians have argued that trust and distrust were two

essential tools of the Soviet Union and that the interaction between them

goes a long way towards explaining the stability and dynamism of the

Soviet government. Alexey Tikhomirov claims

That capturing the monopoly on defining, objectifying and

disturbing trust and distrust enabled the state and party to mould a

“regime of forced trust.” Its life force was based on simultaneously

satisfying the basic human need for trust – in order to generate faith

in the central power (above all, the leaders of state and party) – and

maintaining a high level of generalised distrust.12

In the practice of letter-writing the Soviet state created an avenue for direct

contact with its citizens.13

By availing of these services a trust was implied

in the party which allowed citizens to feel secure.14

However, when the

Bolsheviks seized power in 1917 they began to tear down those social

institutions that had maintained trust under tsarism. They murdered the tsar

and eradicated the institution of the tsar by murdering his family and ending

9 Ibid.

10 Ibid.

11 Ibid.

12 Alexey Tikhomirov, ‘The Regime of Forced Trust: Making and Breaking Emotional

Bonds between People and State in Soviet Russia, 1917-1941’ in The Slavonic and East

European Review, xci (2013), p. 80. 13

Ibid., p. 110. Tikhomirov points out that this was not an emotional refuge. 14

Ibid., p. 79.

14

the Romanov line; the centuries-old symbol of authority in Russia had been

removed. The church was displaced, as was the family which was replaced

by the state: citizens were expected to subordinate family ties to their ties

with the party and state.15

They removed the old imperial methods of

maintaining trust so as to impose their own communist methods; instead of

creating a society of trust they ended up establishing one of generalised

distrust:

Distrust formed a system of coordinates with its own harsh rules of

behaviour and rhetoric, cruel methods of control and oversight and

its singular practices of inclusion and exclusion within which a

subject could find protection and defence, could identify dangers and

opportunities and find meaning in his/her existence and could

collaborate with the regime.16

Distrust was essential in forming and maintaining the ‘emotional bonds’

between the people and the state. In societies where distrust dominates over

trust the state has great power to mobilise its population in a negative

fashion. This facilitated Stalin's fixation with enemies greatly.17

So, before the party could generate the trust of the people it needed to create

generalised distrust. The forced imposition of collectivisation, forced

industrialisation, the Great Terror and the willingness to use state violence

often and firmly all contributed to this atmosphere of distrust. The

Bolsheviks also removed the possibility of political alternatives meaning

that ‘society was forced to accept the Bolshevik regime and rely on it to

15

Geoffrey Hosking, Trust and Distrust in the USSR: An Overview’ in The Slavonic and

East European Review, xci (2013), p. 6. See also: Tikhomirov, ‘The Regime of Forced

Trust’, p. 89. 16

Tikhomirov, ‘The Regime of Forced Trust’, p. 83. 17

Ibid.

15

organise daily life. The population was given no other choice.’18

It was

forced to trust the regime.

As noted above the Bolsheviks had removed the tsar but Stalin realised the

importance that a tsar-figure held so it was necessary to recreate it within

the Soviet state. Party and state leaders were soon represented as village

elders or ‘little fathers’ (an affectionate term for the tsar) and as post-

revolutionary society was searching for something or someone to trust in the

people leapt at this opportunity. Soon after, citizens were addressing letters

to specific party and state leaders in their search for trust.19

The Soviet

population had little faith in local party and state organs and usually by-

passed this level in favour of writing directly to the centre. Firstly, this led

the leaders at the centre to assume the roles of patrons or protectors.

Secondly, this situation provided an opportunity for the centre; they

encouraged this idealisation of the centre and attributed its political faults to

local organs. In the regime of forced trust the ‘sacralisation of the central

power’ and the representation of party and state leaders as patrons and

protectors were two essential points.20

Jan Plamper has said that ‘in the

Soviet Union there was a connection between centrality and sacrality: no

place was more sacrally charged than society’s centre.’21

The regime's

authority was partly based on this sacrality.22

Learning how to speak the emotional language of the regime was very

important for Soviet citizens:

18

Ibid., p. 86. 19

Ibid., pp 89-92. See also: Hosking, ‘Trust and Distrust in the USSR’, pp 16-17. 20

Ibid., pp 101-102. 21

Jan Plamper, The Stalin Cult: A Study in the Alchemy of Power (Yale, 2012), p. 88. 22

Ibid., p. xvi.

16

Through public expression of emotional language, an individual

acquired the opportunity to overcome isolation and loneliness,

sadness and distrust, identifying himself or herself with the life-

affirming structures of constructing the Soviet state, the Soviet

people and the Soviet New Person.23

By creating a society of distrust the regime directly increased expression of

‘negative’ emotions which meant that it needed to establish a system that

could effectively manage the emotions of its citizens.24

This is why Stalin’s

emotional regime began to emerge. This new emotional language of

Stalinism was most widely employed in citizens' letters to the leaders at the

centre. Using the correct emotional language they had two goals: firstly, to

create emotional ties, and therefore, trust with the state; and secondly, to

attempt to improve their lives. Citizens’ letters often described their lives as

being below the standards set by the centre in the hope that their problems

would be solved.25

Stalin had once again forced the Soviet population to

trust in the regime:

Without public expression of loyalty, enthusiasm and love for the

leaders, one should not count on the state and the party to provide

empathy and salvation.26

This type of emotional regime had two noticeable effects in the Soviet

Union. Firstly, it led to a drastic increase in denunciations as people tried to

demonstrate their loyalty to the regime. Secondly, it led to a tragic increase

in suicide, or at least an increase in suicidal feelings.27

It is not surprising

that a regime that prioritised fear, distrust and terror should have led to such

an outcome.

23

Tikhomirov, ‘The Regime of Forced Trust’, p. 109. 24

Ibid., p. 107. 25

Ibid., pp 109-110. 26

Ibid., p. 112. 27

Ibid., pp 112-113.

17

Self-criticism was another pillar of the Stalinist emotional regime. In verbal

or written form the self-criticism ritual was a type of apology; the accused

was expected to confirm that the party's indictment was correct and had to

show an awareness of the political significance of his/her mistakes. This did

not necessarily save the accused from punishment but it could help. From an

examination of Nikolai Bukharin's self-criticism session, Glennys Young

was able to extract information about Stalin’s emotional regime. First of all,

Bukharin broke with tradition and failed to use his session at the February-

March Plenum of 1937 to perform self-criticism. Instead, Bukharin began to

use emotional language and expression, an attempt to influence the feelings

of the Central Committee members favourably towards him. In the period

before his execution when Bukharin felt Stalin was going to have him killed,

he wrote letters to Stalin declaring his love for the Soviet leader.28

But

Stalin would not show leniency to such a powerful opponent and now that

Bukharin had broke with the self-criticism ritual, an opportunity was at hand.

Young then develops his idea of emotional hermeneutics, in this Stalinist

context, as a:

Political practice incorporating the following assumptions: that there

is a difference between surface and underlying emotions; that careful

interpretation of an individual’s words and affective expression,

placed in proper ideological context, is essential to the process of

unmasking to get at this deep emotional reality; and that emotions,

especially those lurking below the surface, have political meaning.29

At party tribunals these ideas would be enforced so that ‘double-dealers’

could be unmasked and punished, and also to teach people about the

importance of vigilance. If the enemy's surface could betray his inner evil

28

Glennys Young, ‘Bolsheviks and Emotional Hermeneutics: The Great Purges, Bukharin

and the February-March Plenum of 1937’ in Mark D. Steinberg & Valeria Sobol (eds),

Interpreting Emotions in Russia and Eastern Europe (DeKalb, 2011), pp 128-137. 29

Ibid., p. 129.

18

the ability to discover the inner essence of an individual was of paramount

importance. For Bukharin this meant that his outward display of love for

Stalin was interpreted as an inner hatred of Stalin, the Soviet Union and

socialism. Mikoyan defined the party as ‘trust’ and to an extent he was not

wrong.30

The party had established a societal system in which distrust was

dominant but which forced citizens to trust and believe in the party. From

this perspective Bukharin’s behaviour had ‘damaged the very essence of the

party.’31

In the second chapter I intend to show that the Jewish Anti-Fascist

Committee was an emotional refuge; and so it has been necessary in this

first chapter to outline the emotional regime that the committee provided

refuge from. This section has also demonstrated that emotions and, more

importantly, the control of emotions were very important to the Stalinist

regime. In short, Stalin was devising a code of behaviour for Soviet citizens

that bound them to party and state.

The National Question

Stalin’s emotional regime began to take shape after 1917 and then quickly

developed after he succeeded Lenin as leader of the Communist Party;

however his code of behaviour for the nations of the USSR had earlier

origins. In the pre-revolutionary years Stalin published many articles

concerning the national question and he occasionally wrote on this topic

after the October Revolution. His major works in this field were ‘Marxism

and the National Question’, written in 1913, and in 1929 he wrote ‘The

National Question and Leninism’, which was, more or less, an update of the

30

Ibid., pp 137-138. 31

Ibid., p. 138.

19

1913 article. Both of these articles contain his definition of a ‘nation’. A

nation, as devised by Stalin, was ‘a historically constituted, stable

community of people formed on the basis of a common language, territory,

economic life, and psychological make-up manifested in a common

culture.’32

Stalin had been an admirer of the great multinational state before the

October Revolution and he held onto this admiration in the post-

revolutionary years. This is clear as he always put the Soviet state above any

of its nationalities. As the nations were political realities, which could not be

ignored, Stalin was prepared to give them some freedom to develop, mostly

in cultural and linguistic terms.33

This was only the beginning and he spends

a significant amount of time outlining the future of the national minorities of

the Soviet Union. Before national differences could be eradicated and the

progress of socialism furthered each national minority would have to be

nurtured. The victory of socialism worldwide would lead to a gradual

merging of nations and languages but at this stage, the stage of socialism in

one country, this merging was not feasible. The nations were saved from the

oppression of tsarist imperialism by the Soviet revolution and now they

were to be given a period of development.

In the 1929 article he even quoted Lenin to justify his writings: ‘The

October Revolution, however, by breaking the old chains and bringing a

number of forgotten peoples and nationalities on to the scene, gave them

32

Joseph Stalin, ‘Marxism and the National Question (1913), available at Marxist Internet

Archive (http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1913/03a.htm#s1) (20

May 2014). 33

Erik Van Ree, ‘Stalin and the National Question’ in Revolutionary Russia, vii (1994), p.

229.

20

new life and a new development.’34

With the help of the Soviet Union,

according to Stalin, national minorities had been freed from oppression,

allowed to develop their national cultures and they began to strengthen

‘friendly, international’ ties among the peoples of the Soviet Union which

led to stronger mutual cooperation ‘in the work of building socialism’.

Towards the end of ‘The National Question and Leninism’ Stalin declares

that the Communist Party will continue to support such a policy because of

its importance in strengthening socialist nations.

He finished the article by promoting national languages. Schools and

teachers, the administration, the press, theatre, cinema, music, and so on, all

needed to utilise the national language. Stalin saw this as the only scenario

for the successful cultural, political and economic development of the Soviet

nations.35

The language factor is important, not just for cultural

development, but for the development of communism. The nations would

need to learn their native languages if they were to engage and defeat the

bourgeois elements of their own nations.36

Stalin reiterated many times that

the nations needed to develop; members of the various national groups must

have taken note of this and that it was how Stalin expected them to behave.

These two articles also tell us something about Stalin's opinion of the Jews.

According to Stalin a nation could only exist if all five defining

characteristics were present simultaneously. A people had to share a

language, a territory, an economy and a culture if they were to be designated

34

Joseph Stalin, The National Question and Leninism (1929), available at Marxist Internet

Archive (http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1929/03/18.htm) (20 May

2014). 35

Ibid. 36

Yuri Slezkine, ‘The USSR as a Communal Apartment, or How a Socialist State

Promoted Ethnic Particularism’ in Slavic Review, liii (1994), p. 418.

21

a nation. In Stalin’s mind the Jewish people of the world did not constitute a

nation as they were spread out across the globe inhabiting many territories,

speaking many languages and engaging in various economies. Stalin

concedes that they may have still possessed a ‘common destiny’ based on

their religion and psychological make-up:

But how can it be seriously maintained that petrified religious rituals

and fading psychological relics affect the destiny of these Jews more

powerfully than the living social, economic and cultural environment

that surrounds them?37

Stalin’s point here was not only that a community must have all of the

defining characteristics present to become a nation but that a nation could

not be distinguished by one single factor, re-emphasising that all

characteristics were required. He vehemently denies that such a group of

people could form a nation:

What sort of nation, for instance, is a Jewish nation which consists of

Georgian, Daghestanian, Russian, American and other Jews, the

members of which do not understand each other (since they speak

different languages), inhabit different parts of the globe, will never

see each other, and will never act together, whether in time of peace

or in time of war?!38

Stalin tried to alleviate this problem in 1934 by designating Birobidzhan as

a Jewish autonomous region. Soviet Jews were encouraged to resettle there

but poor conditions and the distance from Moscow (Birobidzhan is located

in the Far East near the border with China) meant that this project was met

with little success.39

37

Stalin, ‘Marxism and the National Question’ (1913). 38

Ibid. 39

Joshua Rubenstein & Vladimir P. Naumov (eds) & translated by Laura Esther Wolfson,

Stalin’s Secret Pogrom: The Postwar Inquisition of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee

(London, 2001), p. 11.

22

Stalin’s dealings with the Jewish Labour Bund (a popular Jewish socialist

movement) also teach us how he viewed people of the Jewish faith. He

explains that because of assimilation the Jewish people in Russia have no

right to call for national-cultural autonomy. Stalin claims that ninety-six

percent of Russian Jews, of which there were between five and six million,

worked in trade, industry and urban institutions, and, as a group, tended to

live in towns. The other four percent of Russian Jews were the only ones

with a connection to the land, by means of agricultural work. ‘In brief, the

Jewish nation is coming to an end’;40

as a result there would be nobody to

claim national-cultural autonomy for. A community could not become a

nation without Stalin’s defining features but if there was no ‘stable

community of people’41

a nation could never emerge.

After a quick recap of the Bund’s history Stalin explained that people had

come to believe that it was the only body representing the Jewish proletariat.

It then developed a framework for achieving national cultural autonomy.42

This set off alarm bells for Stalin because he had determined that ‘national

autonomy leads to nationalism.’43

Stalin also criticised the Bund for

believing that an institution for cultural affairs would protect a Jewish nation

from national persecution because history had shown Stalin that the

opposite was true. If old, well-established institutions could not achieve

such an outcome Stalin doubted the ability of a young and ‘feeble’

institution for cultural affairs to do so. Another Bund project that caught

Stalin’s negative attention was its attempts to ascertain special status for

particular Jewish features. It wanted the Sabbath enshrined in law so that

40

Stalin, ‘Marxism and the National Question’ (1913). 41

Ibid. 42

Ibid. 43

Ibid.

23

Jewish workers were guaranteed their right to observe it. It also sought

special status for the Jewish language of Yiddish which should be

‘championed with “exceptional persistence,”’ another form of Jewish

particularism.

Preservation of everything Jewish, conservation of all [original

emphasis] the national peculiarities of the Jews, even those that are

patently harmful to the proletariat, isolation of the Jews from

everything non-Jewish, even the establishment of special hospitals –

that is the level to which the Bund has sunk!44

Stalin’s views on the Bund in some ways foreshadow his future dealings

with the JAC as it attempted something similar to the Bund three decades

later. Stalin reacted furiously to the Bund’s demands when he was writing

essays in the pre-revolutionary years. His response to the JAC when he was

leader of the Soviet Union would be much more severe.

Becoming familiar with Stalin’s writings on the national question serves

many purposes. Firstly, we see in these writings early examples of Stalin’s

anti-Semitism. Secondly, the construction of his emotional regime aimed to

educate citizens on the proper use of emotions and, in the same way,

Stalin’s nationalities policy aimed to teach the Soviet nations how to

progress from culturally-backward nations into modern socialist nations.

Soviet Patriotism

Stalin’s answer to the national question was to promote the development of

the Soviet nations but his postwar push for Soviet patriotism created

problems. In practice Soviet patriotism looked a lot like Russian nationalism

which meant that nationalistic activity by other Soviet nations was not

44

Ibid.

24

permitted. This would prove to be a hindrance to the development of nations.

Stalin pursued Russocentrism and Soviet patriotism after the war because

‘the nation form... appeared to possess an enviable power to forge affective

ties and shared identities among its people’ which would increase the state’s

ability to mobilise its population.45

Stalin hoped that Soviet patriotism

would pervade all aspects of society, imbuing his citizens with a sense of

pride in their socialist homeland; thereby creating a population of

completely loyal citizens.

In April 1947 the regime prepared a document about the promotion of

Soviet patriotism and why such a venture was important. The document

began with the overthrow of capitalism in 1917 when construction of a

socialist society began and the Soviet Union reached full political and

economic independence from the capitalist West. Work could now begin on

removing the last ‘remnants of capitalism’ from the minds of Soviet citizens.

These remaining ‘bourgeois habits’ were not compatible with the new

socialist society and were considered very dangerous. People harbouring

such habits were said to show adulation towards the West and towards

modern bourgeois culture. Removing these remnants from people’s minds

was of paramount importance as it would lead to the successful education of

communist awareness and teach citizens to love their homeland

unconditionally.46

45

Ronald Grigor Suny, ‘Thinking About Feelings: Affective Dispositions and Emotional

Ties in Imperial Russia and the Ottoman Empire’ in Steinberg & Sobol (eds) Interpreting

Emotions in Russia and Eastern Europe (DeKalb, 2011), p. 111. 46

No author, ‘Action Plan to Promote Ideas of Soviet Patriotism Among the Population’ (18

April 1947), RGASPI. F. 17. Op. 125. AD 503. L. 40-48. Available at

http://www.alexanderyakovlev.org/fond/issues-doc/69334 (4 December 2014).

25

The document is divided up into multiple sections, each of which explains

how a certain aspect of society (e.g. the press) should promote Soviet

patriotism. The first section is dedicated to defining Soviet patriotism, why

citizens should be proud of their socialist state and why patriotism is

important. Workers involved in party organisation, in the press, in

propaganda, in the sciences and in culture were expected to constantly

remind the population of the meaning of Soviet patriotism. A Soviet patriot

was to understand that the construction of a socialist society was superior to

that of a bourgeois society, to feel pride in the USSR as a socialist homeland,

and to be completely dedicated to the party. Press organs and other

institutions were expected to show why citizens should be proud of their

country. Under the leadership of the Bolshevik party the Soviet people built

the first socialist society – the ‘most perfect society system.’ They achieved

the ‘genuine flowering of democracy’; they eradicated the problem of

national oppression and helped forge a multi-national state based on

equality and the friendship of peoples; they liberated women from the

oppression of the previous regime; they defeated the imperial armies of

Germany and Japan. Their greatest pride was to be reserved for the

Bolshevik party itself but the Soviet people were to be especially proud of

Lenin and Stalin as great geniuses in the areas of advanced revolutionary

theory.47

The document states that all political work must demonstrate, on a continual

basis, how the Soviet people have contributed more to humanity than

anyone else. The outstanding people of the Soviet Union are responsible for

opening up the new socialist epoch in human history which saved the world

47

Ibid. Covers all quotes and information in paragraph.

26

from Hitler’s fascists; the document makes it clear that the Nazis would

have defeated their enemies if not for the socialist USSR. The socialist

homeland is described as a ‘guiding beacon for all humanity’ and stands at

the head of all other peoples in the ‘struggle for progress.’ It was also

necessary to show that worship of bourgeois culture was incompatible with

love for the socialist homeland. Love for the Soviet Union implied a

recognition that national oppression was a serious bane on the progress of

world civilisation. As the capitalist and bourgeois West thrived on national

oppression there could be no compromise between the two sides.48

The document then goes on the offensive. All propaganda, political and

cultural work was to show that the capitalist West was parasitic and

exploitative, that it was oppressive towards society and national minorities,

that the freedoms it professed to offer were nothing but lies, and that it

covered up its domination of minorities. The document calls for the

‘ideological poverty of bourgeois culture’ to be aggressively exposed, as

should its ‘rottenness’ and reactionary behaviour. Such work was to

demonstrate the advantages that socialism had over capitalism. It was

necessary to show the Soviet population that the bourgeois world was

spiritually impoverished and that it was deforming and crippling people by

putting ‘moneybags’ and profit ahead of the interests of the people.

Propaganda work was expected to show that the mores of capitalist societies

had been defiled and that the people of the bourgeois world had been

morally degraded. Once again it was not enough to simply deride capitalism,

the Soviet Union had to be showered with praise, as did its inhabitants; it

was necessary to ‘emphasise the moral superiority and spiritual beauty of

48

Ibid. Covers all quotes and information in paragraph.

27

the Soviet people.’ Inhabitants of the USSR are described as ‘outstanding’

and as the ‘most advanced peoples of modernity.’ This was based on what

they have actually contributed to humanity and not on any ‘racist or

nationalistic fictions, which are alien to the Soviet peoples.’ The love and

pride that people had for the Soviet Union was based on achievements and

was ‘void of national limits.’ Furthermore, the Soviet peoples recognised

the achievements of other peoples as they knew that they were valuable

contributions to world culture.49

Whether in film, novels, plays, poetry,

education or propaganda Soviet society was to be placed on a pedestal while

capitalism was to be viciously attacked.50

It is clear from this document that the regime wanted to create loyal Soviet

citizens who would have no sympathy or love for the capitalist West and

who would love their socialist homeland unconditionally. In an effort to

bind people to the state the regime praised the people for their part in the

construction of socialism and celebrated the achievements of the Soviet

Union. It then created a dark image of the West as a rotten and depraved

society. By contrasting these two images the regime hoped that people could

only be repulsed by the West; therefore, they had to believe in Stalin’s

USSR and all that it represented.

To make the plans detailed in the document on Soviet patriotism a reality,

the Communist Party’s central newspaper, Pravda, published numerous

articles which successfully utilise Stalin’s teachings on both Soviet

patriotism and on the national question. An article from January 1948

described Soviet patriotism as the ‘deep love and dedication of the people to

49

Ibid. Covers all quotes and information in paragraph. 50

Ibid.

28

the party of Lenin-Stalin.’ The Soviet Union is described as a utopia where

there was no discrimination along national lines: in fact, national minorities

were given the freedom to develop their cultures. The socialist society that

Stalin envisaged was to be built in the communist spirit of trust, friendship

and mutual respect. Such ideas led to the ‘moral-political unity of peoples’

in the USSR, something that they were encouraged to be proud of.51

An article from later in January provided an overview of how such Soviet

principles could be practiced effectively, using the Ukrainian soviet as an

example. A central aspect of the Soviet experience was the fraternity of

ethnically diverse workers which was built on ‘cooperation, mutual aid,

sincere trust and friendship.’ The October Revolution had liberated all the

peoples of Russia from the chains of capitalism which gave nationalities the

freedom to develop their cultures. The Great Russian people were the first to

travel the path towards communism, but their Ukrainian brothers were right

behind them. ‘Under the star of Soviet power’ the Ukrainian SSR made

some great achievements: the Ukrainian people could now govern

themselves and they were free to maintain and develop their own economy

and culture.52

In May 1948 Pravda published an article that perfectly encapsulated the

Stalinist principles of Soviet patriotism and national politics. It praised the

Soviet ideology, the ‘ideology of equality and the friendship of peoples.’

Stalin preached that every nation was unique and that these unique

characteristics were added to the ‘treasury of world culture.’ The October

Revolution of 1917 reinvigorated the spirit of the nations of Russia and they

51

Pravda, 12 January 1948. Covers all quotes and information in paragraph. 52

Pravda, 26 January 1948. Covers all quotes and information in paragraph.

29

‘achieved unprecedented flowering’ by following the ‘national in form,

socialist in content’ creed. It was imperative that the regime turn its citizens

away from the ‘degrading and corrupt bourgeois culture’ and to educate

them to be cultured Soviet and socialist people whose chief characteristic

was their ‘deep respect for culture and the historic past of other peoples.’53

The article describes Soviet patriotism as having ‘harmoniously combined’

national traditions with the interests of workers. The main aim of the party’s

nationalities policy was to assist those nations who were economically and

culturally behind so that they could reach the same advanced level as the

regions of central Russia. The article claims that this goal was achieved

rather quickly. Unsurprisingly the article finishes by criticising capitalism

and praising socialism. Capitalism was responsible for cultural degradation,

whereas socialism revitalised cultures and gave them the means to develop.

The Soviet Union was the ‘mighty stronghold of happiness, friendship and

progressive peoples’ and was the ‘beacon of world civilisation and

culture.’54

This article is important as it includes many elements of Stalin’s

postwar plan: the praising of Soviet ideology; the criticism of capitalist

culture; promoting Soviet patriotism; and explaining Stalinist national

policies.

Postwar Anti-Semitism

The final piece in Stalin’s postwar plan was anti-Semitism. This began with

an anti-cosmopolitan campaign, launched just after the war, which

amounted to a thinly-veiled attack on Soviet Jewry; in the last years of

tsarism ‘cosmopolitan’ had become largely synonymous with ‘Jew’ so

53

‘Other peoples’ refers to all Soviet cultures. 54

Pravda, 15 May 1948. Covers all quotes and information in paragraph. Covers all quotes

and information in paragraph.

30

people could easily make the connection. The ‘cosmopolitan’ was

conceptualised as all characteristics foreign to the ‘Russian nature’ and the

Jew in the form of the cosmopolitan was the prime enemy.55

Cosmopolitanism became a ‘cultural betrayal of the interests of the

society.’56

In tandem with this, Andrei Zhdanov began a new cultural policy in 1946, a

policy of extreme anti-Westernism that was to be strictly adhered to. This

was known as Zhdanovshchina. It was aimed at the intelligentsia and their

harmful Western influences to prevent any subversion.57

Anti-Semitism

would play a large part in this period of Great Russian chauvinism and

starting in 1948 the victims of these campaigns were disproportionately

Jewish.58

There were three main aims of these campaigns. Firstly, they were used to

suppress any calls for Jewish political and cultural autonomy and to set up

Jews as scapegoats for the poor state of the country in the postwar years.

Secondly, the regime was striving for complete domination of society and

the intelligentsia was a major obstacle to this so the leadership needed to

remove influential circles of the Soviet intelligentsia. And, finally, it was a

way for the regime to achieve its goal of political and ideological isolation

from the West.59

As well as this, cosmopolitans, and Zionists, were now

enemies of the regime. The leadership could now construct conspiracies

from within and from outside the Soviet Union, allowing them to maintain

55

Frank Grüner, ‘“Russia’s battle against the foreign”: the anti-cosmopolitan paradigm in

Russian and Soviet Ideology’ in European Review of History, xvii (2010), pp 444-447. 56

Elena Zubkova, Russia After the War: Hopes, Illusions, and Disappointments, 1945-

1957, translated by Hugh Ragsdale (New York, 1998), p. 136. 57

Grüner, ‘“Russia’s battle against the foreign”’ p. 450 58

Ibid., p. 452. 59

Ibid., pp 453-455.

31

the image that the country was ‘politically besieged.’60

So, by positioning

Soviet Jews as a link between internal and external enemies Stalin was able

to justify his postwar anti-Semitic policies.61

An article from April 1949 described cosmopolitanism as an ‘ideological

weapon’ that the USA was using to achieve world domination and that that

the exploiting classes were using to justify and conceal their aggressive

policies. The bourgeoisie used it to disguise their efforts to seize foreign

territories, new colonies and markets. The only way to achieve these

imperialist aims was to ‘unleash a new world war.’ All of this was aimed at

the Americans, who embodied imperialism and cosmopolitanism. They did

not care for the interests of their own people; the American government

could ‘recognise only the interests of its own purses.’ The development of

this ‘shield of cosmopolitanism’ was to aid the imperialists in their struggle

against the growing strength of socialism.

In modern conditions cosmopolitanism is the ideology of American

domination of the world, the ideology of the suppression of freedom

and independence of peoples, big and small, the ideology of the

colonisation of Europe – and not just the European continent.62

This article was not written by Stalin but it perfectly reflects his world view

of the time. Having defeated Nazi Germany in the Second World War and

gained new satellite states in Eastern Europe, the USA viewed the Soviet

Union as its primary enemy, in both military and ideological terms. Instead

of risking all-out war with the USSR the Americans opted to employ a

longer, slower, and more covert method; that of cosmopolitanism. Stalin

represented the Soviet Union and its utopian ideal of the ‘friendship of

60

Robert Service, Stalin: A Biography (London, 2004), p. 343. 61

Roy Medvedev, Let History Judge: The Origins and Consequences of Stalinism (Oxford,

1989), p. 804. 62

Pravda, 7 April 1949. Quotes earlier in this paragraph are also from this source.

32

peoples’ and so could only be opposed to such an ideology as

cosmopolitanism. It was the Communist Party and its leaders who were

leading the struggle against the imperialists.63

To survive, the Soviet Union

would need to develop its own ideological weapons (In February 1953 alone

Pravda declared that vigilance,64

propaganda and agitation,65

and

Leninism66

were all ideological weapons of the Communist Party).

The aim of anti-Semitism may seem obvious but, for Stalin, it could be used

for more than just attacking his Jewish population. By implementing the

anti-cosmopolitan campaign Stalin was able to rekindle popular anti-

Semitism and could link Soviet Jews to the USA. This would allow him to

create an international conspiracy in which Soviet Jews, backed by America,

were planning to dismantle the USSR and would give him enough popular

support to take action.

Conclusion

The aim of this chapter has been to establish the Stalinist emotional regime,

but also to determine the atmosphere of high Stalinism and Stalin’s

nationalities policy, and the important role that emotions played in each.

Broadly, we can say that Stalin’s emotional regime created a scenario of

perpetual distrust and fear which left the regime as the only viable outlet for

people to trust in. Recent work on the history of emotions in the Soviet

Union has shown that the regime had an interest in emotions, which it either

encouraged (public displays of happiness, laughing at enemies); tolerated in

certain circumstances (it was acceptable to express grief if the regime was

63

Ibid. 64

Pravda, 8 February 1953. 65

Pravda, 11 February 1953. 66

Pravda, 22 February 1953.

33

not the cause); or deplored (personal happiness). The Soviet state wanted to

create in its citizens a love for the USSR, or at least a trust in the central

leadership. Stalin’s nationalities policy focused on the development of the

cultures of national minorities in an attempt to endear the various national

groups to the Soviet state. Soviet patriotism was used to emphasise the

achievements of the USSR and its peoples in order to imbue Soviet citizens

with a love for their homeland. The post-war policies of anti-Semitism and

anti-cosmopolitanism represent the darker side of the Stalinist emotional

regime. Stalin needed the spectre of an enemy, real or perceived, to mobilise

his population to a certain end. In this case the perceived enemy was the Jew.

These policies were Stalin’s way of controlling fear and anger.

34

CHAPTER 2

THE JEWISH ANTI-

FASCIST COMMITTEE

(1941-45)

35

Global Yiddish culture was in a poor state in the 1920s, and this was only

getting worse. This narrative was tragically personified by Peretz Markish,

Leyb Kvitko, David Bergelson and David Hofshteyn; each had left the

USSR in the 1920s, and moved to locations that contained a sizeable

population of Yiddish-speakers. Sooner or later, they all returned as they

were unable to find suitable employment as Yiddish writers abroad. The

USA had millions of Yiddish-speaking immigrants but offered few

prospects; as did Poland because many anti-Semitic restrictions were in

place. In the developing Jewish community in Palestine, Hebrew was

prioritised while Yiddish was (sometimes violently) discouraged. These four

Yiddish writers ‘came to regard the Soviet Union as the only country where

they could still find a large enough readership to make a living.’1

However, they soon realised that Stalin’s USSR was no Yiddish utopia.

They now had to fall in line with the ideological demands of the regime and

engage in Stalinist propaganda and denunciation. According to Joshua

Rubenstein, Stalin’s plan was to encourage Yiddish writers and to make

them follow his ‘national in form, socialist in content’ creed in an effort to

create a secular Yiddish culture that would ‘wean Jews from their religious

and cultural ties.’2 Even though Yiddish was still the official language of the

Jewish minority, native speakers were being turned away from the new

‘Soviet Yiddish’ culture because of the Stalinist nature of new cultural

products.3

1 Rubenstein, Stalin’s Secret Pogrom, pp 4-5.

2 Ibid., p. 5

3 Ibid., p. 6.

36

Considering that Stalin had somewhat soured the culture that these Yiddish

writers were trying to contribute to and to make a living from, it is possible

that, if given the chance, they would work to restore their Yiddish culture.

Prior to the establishment of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee and the

involvement of figures like Solomon Mikhoels, a Jewish committee to

combat fascism was proposed by Viktor Alter and Henryk Erlich. They had

been leaders of the Bund in Poland and were arrested in late 1939 after

denunciation. They were released in 1941 so that the regime could utilise

their Western contacts and their support for the Soviet war effort. However,

their proposals for a Jewish anti-fascist organisation were turned down

because Stalin was not prepared to permit an independent and international

Jewish body come into existence. Consequently, Erlich and Alter were

imprisoned once again, this time in solitary confinement. Sadly, in May

1942 Erlich committed suicide while Alter was executed in early 1943.4

The idea that a Jewish organisation could contribute to the Soviet war effort

still seemed promising to Stalin. Subsequently, the JAC was unveiled on 7

April 1942 but this was a different animal to the internationally-focused

organisation proposed by Erlich and Alter. It was to be supervised by the

regime and it was ‘meant to function as an obedient tool in the hands of the

Soviet government.’5 The aim of the committee’s foreign activities was to

promote a more positive image of the USSR among American Jews and in

US public opinion. Their appeals to non-Soviet Jews were centred on the

themes of Jewish national unity and the struggle against Hitler.6

4 Ibid., pp 9-10.

5 Shimon Redlich, ‘The Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee in the Soviet Union’ in Jewish

Social Studies, xxxi (1969), p. 29. 6 Ibid., p. 30.

37

Within the newly-formed committee there were two factions. The first

comprised of typical Stalinist functionaries who viewed their work at the

JAC as a temporary assignment; they mostly engaged in Soviet propaganda

and literature but not in anything specifically Jewish. Members of this

faction included Solomon Lozovsky, Ilya Ehrenburg, Lina Shtern and Boris

Shimeliovich. Lozovsky, as Deputy Chief of the Soviet Information Bureau

(Sovinformburo)7 was the JAC ‘watchdog’ who served as a link between

higher authorities and the committee. Itsik Fefer (who was also an NKVD

informant) and Shakno Epshteyn (the JAC’s executive secretary) regularly

informed Lozovsky about the committee’s work. The second faction was

made up of Yiddish writers and intellectuals who viewed the committee in

an entirely different light. ‘They considered the preservation of Jewish

literature and culture in Soviet Russia as the basis for their own spiritual

existence.’8 This group included Solomon Mikhoels, a leading actor and

director of the Moscow State Jewish Theatre; Yiddish poets Markish,

Hofshteyn and Kvitko; and David Bergelson, a Yiddish novelist. These lines

of division were not set in stone but were porous, meaning that a single

member of the committee could often empathise with both sides. For

example, Mikhoels, as we will see, exuded Jewish and Yiddish qualities

while also promoting Stalinist ideals. Nevertheless, the power of the

Yiddish intellectual faction was quite significant.

While the committee was officially set up to influence foreign public

opinion it quickly became the USSR’s leading Jewish cultural site and an

important centre for Yiddish publishing. It seems that the JAC added the

7 The Sovinformburo was set up as a news agency soon after the German invasion in 1941

to control the flow of information. All five anti-fascist committees answered to the

Sovinformburo. 8 Redlich, ‘The Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee in the Soviet Union’, p. 32.

38

revival of Jewish culture in the Soviet Union to its list of priorities.

Mikhoels, the committee’s chairman, even became the ‘unofficial

representative of Soviet Yiddish culture during the war years.’9 The rest of

this chapter will document the ideological struggle between both factions.

Emotional Refuge or Stalinist Apparatus?

In February 1942 Lozovsky sent a list of goals prepared by Epshteyn and

Mikhoels that would guide the JAC in its work to Alexander Shcherbakov,

director of the Sovinformburo and Lozovsky’s boss. All of these aims were

geared towards the battle with fascism, but nearly all fifteen of the listed

goals would require the promotion of Jewish culture, and in some cases

Yiddish culture. These aims can roughly be divided into four categories.

The first category concerned the collection of information. The JAC wanted

‘concrete information about the situation of Jews’ in occupied Europe and

occupied lands in the western parts of the Soviet Union. The committee also

planned to compile information about Soviet Jews who were contributing to

the war effort. They also believed that it was necessary to periodically report

on the committee’s progress.10

The second category was the Jewish involvement in anti-fascist movements.

The committee wanted to ‘promote, in every way possible, the creation of

Jewish anti-fascist committees abroad’ and to ‘develop a broad anti-fascist

campaign among the Jewish population abroad.’11

Such work was important

given the current situation.

9 Ibid., p. 32.

10 Shimon Redlich, Document 10 in War, Holocaust and Stalinism: A Documented History

of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (Luxembourg, 1995), pp 196-197. 11

Ibid.

39

The third category aimed to raise awareness of the Jewish involvement in

the war. Publications, such as pamphlets and brochures, were utilised to

illustrate Hitler's atrocities against the Jews and to demonstrate how Jews

were participating in the war. The committee also wanted to write and

publish small pieces on ‘Jewish heroes’ of the war and they were interested

in publishing illustrated collections on the themes of ‘Jews in the Great

Patriotic War’ and ‘The fascists are annihilating the Jewish people.’12

The fourth, and contextually most important, category also contained the

theme of anti-fascism but the main method of employing it was through

various Jewish mediums. The committee planned to design posters and

cartoons about Hitler’s atrocities and about Jewish participation in the war;

these were to contain texts written by Jewish poets. They also wanted

Jewish writers and other public figures to prepare radio addresses aimed at

foreign audiences. They planned to produce films based on the Jewish

struggle against fascism and on the atrocities committed against Jews by the

Nazi regime. As well as those plans, they wanted to work with Jewish

publishers to draw up collections of anti-fascist songs and to translate some

of the best anti-fascist works into Yiddish. While all of the points in this

category contribute to the JAC’s anti-fascist movement, they all

simultaneously aimed to salvage the ailing Soviet Jewish culture.13

From the regime’s point of view the fifteenth, and final, point on the JAC's

list of goals was the most important, and sits outside the other four

categories. The JAC planned to ‘organise a campaign for financial

contributions, especially in the United States, to buy medicine and warm

12

Ibid. 13

Ibid.

40

clothing for the Red Army and people evacuated from regions occupied by

the Germans.’ Using such a committee to aid the Red Army was an enticing

prospect for the regime.

It seems that the JAC would have a dual purpose: it would serve the

regime’s propaganda machine while serving its own Jewish members by

allowing them to work on Jewish topics and use the Yiddish language, for

those who spoke it.

Early on the JAC recognised the importance of a Yiddish newspaper for its

aim of rejuvenating the Jewish culture in Russia, but also for the regime; the

committee was prepared to allow their newspaper to publish Soviet

propaganda in order to achieve its own goals. Many prominent Jews began

appealing to the authorities to publish a Yiddish newspaper before the

formal establishment of the JAC and some of those who petitioned to the

Sovinformburo would later sit on the JAC’s executive committee. There

were several aspects to their appeals. In July 1941 a group of Jewish writers

(including Markish, Bergelson and Kvitko) wrote that ‘a Yiddish newspaper

in Moscow will play a major role in organising the Jewish masses for the

support of our homeland.’14

Many Jews had moved to more central areas of

the country, in and around Moscow, after the German invasion, the majority

of which only spoke Yiddish so ‘their interest in the Yiddish printed word is

very great indeed.’15

The JAC felt that it should provide the ideological

education that these masses required:

It is vitally necessary to publish a Yiddish newspaper in Moscow in

order to influence ideologically these masses which have undergone

14

Ibid., Document 13, p. 186. 15

Ibid., Document 14, p. 187.

41

such a terrible ordeal, and systematically to draw them into the

active struggle to defend the homeland.16

The committee wanted to properly educate citizens on ideological matters,

demonstrating that the JAC could be both Jewish and Soviet.

They also envisaged a great propaganda role for themselves:

In addition to serving the cultural-political needs of the great masses

of Jews inside the country, a Yiddish newspaper in Moscow would

also play an important propaganda role abroad: its voice would be

especially heeded by the Jewish community in England and the

Dominion, in the USA and other countries. The very fact of the

publication of a Yiddish newspaper in the capital of the USSR would

have great political significance. It would strengthen the sympathy of

all classes and sections of the Jewish population abroad, primarily in

the USA, towards the USSR and its pressing needs in the Great

Patriotic War against fascism.17

This last point may have decided the point as it would later become one of

the JAC’s main functions: to win support for the Soviet Union from abroad.

Also, a handwritten note left at the end of the document appealing for a

Yiddish newspaper stated that the paper should go ahead in limited form to

see if it had potential.18

By the end of September 1941 the publication of a

Yiddish newspaper received the backing of the Propaganda Department. It

was proposed that the newspaper should be published every week in

Moscow from 15 October 1941 with 10,000 copies of each issue.19

Despite

some initial setbacks, Eynikayt soon began publication.20

Just like the JAC itself, Eynikayt would serve the regime by publishing

propaganda abroad and serve the committee by allowing them to publish

articles and essays on specific Jewish topics.

16

Ibid. 17

Ibid. 18

Ibid., Document 14, p. 188. 19

Ibid., Document 15, p. 189. 20

Ibid., Document 17, p. 192.

42

Just like they had been involved in the efforts for a Yiddish newspaper,

many important Jewish figures were also involved in Jewish rallies prior to

the forming of the JAC. On 16 August 1941 members of the Jewish

intelligentsia (including future JAC members Mikhoels, Bergelson, Kvitko,

Markish, Zuskin and Epshteyn) wrote to Solomon Lozovsky proposing that

a Jewish rally be held in Moscow. The stated aim of such an event was to

‘mobilise world Jewish public opinion in the struggle against fascism and

for its active support of the Soviet Union in its Great Patriotic War of

liberation.’21

Speeches delivered at this rally (and later rallies) were a mix of

Jewish particularism and Stalinist rhetoric, maintaining the committee’s

raison d’être. Speakers frequently referred to the Jews as the main target of

Hitler’s Germany: ‘Hitler’s bloody regime has brutally planned the

complete and unconditional annihilation of the Jewish people by all means

available to the fascist executioners’ and ‘there has never been a period

comparable to the horror and calamity which fascism has brought to all

humanity, and with particular frenzy, to the Jewish people.’22

Alongside

these comments were others that were embedded with typical Stalinist

language: the Soviet Union was a ‘country where peoples have found a true

Motherland which has given them a wonderful life, freedom, happiness, and

a flowering of cultures’ and the ‘Jewish people found its place among the

great family of nations of the USSR.’23

Similar sentiments can be found in a speech made by Mikhoels at this rally.

At the beginning of his speech Mikhoels spoke of Hitler’s murder of

hundreds of thousands of Jews and that anti-Semitism was the foundation of

21

Ibid., Document 7, p. 173. 22

Ibid., Document 8, p. 175. 23

Ibid., pp 175-176.

43

Hitler’s regime: that ‘among his other evil deeds he has called for the total

annihilation of the Jewish people.’24

But the latter part of his speech

demonstrated that Mikhoels was also a proper Stalinist citizen:

In the new, free Soviet country a totally different generation of

people has grown up: a generation which has learned mankind’s

great progressive ideas; a generation which has learned the great

cultural riches of its people’s past and the past of all humanity; a

generation which thoroughly understands what a homeland is, for the

Soviet Union is the dear, beloved homeland of all Soviet peoples.25

He followed this with more statements about the ‘freedom of our Soviet

homeland’ and the importance of vigilance. In this one speech Mikhoels

demonstrated how to successfully employ the language of Stalinism.

Markish, Bergelson and Ehrenburg also made speeches at this rally but their

speeches differed from that of Mikhoels. Markish declared that it was time

for Jews to react aggressively to their dire situation and that they could not

allow their culture to be violently eroded by Hitler: ‘None of you can permit

our great history to be stained with the passive acceptance of death.’

Bergelson stated that ‘Hitler’s plan to annihilate peoples, first and foremost

the Jewish people [emphasis added], is as simple and cruel as the plan of a

cannibal.’26

Meanwhile, Ehrenburg maintained that ‘Hitler hates us more

than anything, and this makes us special.’27

All three of these speakers

echoed Mikhoels that Jews were the main target of Hitler’s regime but all

three failed to utilise the requisite Stalinist language. They were exploiting

the situation created by the war but these three did not understand Stalinism

as Mikhoels did. Mikhoels presented himself as a champion of the Jewish

24

Ibid., Document 9, p. 177. 25

Ibid., p. 178. 26

Ibid., p. 180. 27

Ibid., p. 182.

44

people and as reliable Soviet citizen: he was serving both the state and his

nation.

The JAC had been formed prior to the second Jewish rally, which was held

in May 1942, and it continued the efforts of the first rally: to make citizens

of the USSR aware of the atrocities being committed by the Germans,

paying special attention to the atrocities aimed at the Jewish people. As a

Jewish group combating fascism such statements were in line with their

prescribed functions. The following were all statements heard at this rally:

‘Great is the misfortune of the Jewish people’; ‘the most atrocious of all is

the cruelty they practice on our Jewish brothers and sisters’; ‘the sword of

fascism, broken but not yet defeated, is still drawn against all peoples and

primarily against the Jews.’28

The sacrifices being made by the Jewish

people of the Soviet Union became a more prominent theme in May 1942

than it had been nine months previously:

Time and again we have given the world evidence of our self-

sacrifice in the cause of preserving the existence of our people.

Many were the Jews who donned shrouds in order to survive as Jews.

Today Jews must draw upon their tradition of self-sacrifice in order

to survive as Jews. Only in this way can the existence of our people

be preserved in these cruel times.29

Continuing with this sentiment Bergelson added that ‘we ourselves must

avenge this blood. None of us is exempt from this sacred duty; none of us

can evade the duty to engage in a self-sacrificing struggle against fascism.’30

The previous rally saw Mikhoels attempt to compensate for his Jewish

remarks by employing Stalinist language, for example, discussing the

Stalinist friendship of peoples. However, the second rally lacked the same

28

Ibid., Documents 24-25, pp 202-204. 29

Ibid., Document 25, p. 204. 30

Ibid.

45

emphasis on conforming to the regime’s standards, even by Mikhoels. The

speakers did, however, mention the Soviet army frequently; the progression

of the war had changed the focus from conforming to the regime’s national

policy to praising the Red Army but, most of the comments made about the

Red Army refer only, or particularly, to its Jewish soldiers.

The second rally vividly demonstrated that Hitler led a violent and bloody

regime. Many speakers at the first rally noted that the German invasion had

spilled a lot of Soviet blood but discussion of Jewish blood became more

prominent at the second rally. One comment stated that ‘there is Jewish

blood mixed in with the sacred Soviet blood which has been shed for the

liberation of the homeland’ while another urged Jews to ‘fight to the last

drop of blood.’31

At the first rally Mikhoels deemed it unnecessary to delve

too deep into the specifics of Nazi violence yet here he painted a vivid

picture:

Fellow Jews of the entire world! Even though we are separated by

the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, the oceans of blood for which the

Nazis are responsible – the blood of our mothers and children, of our

brothers and sisters – these oceans of innocent blood have confirmed

the blood ties between us.

He continued:

Do you not feel the terrible reproach in the fixed stare of the stiff

bodies of our brothers who were tortured to death by the cruel

enemy, that heartless marauder and instigator of pogroms? Do you

not hear the groans of our aged mothers, the weeping of our children,

their final, faint sounds before their lacerated bodies give up the

ghost?32

Mikhoels used such language and imagery in order to demonstrate what

type of enemy they were dealing with and by using such methods, reach a

31

Ibid., Document 24, pp 202-203. 32

Ibid., Document 25, p. 203.

46

larger audience; it is hard to deny that his appeals were much more poignant

and passionate than those of his colleagues.

The speeches presented at the third Jewish rally were closer to those given

at the original rally in 1941. At least two of the speakers noted the special

attention that Hitler paid to the Jews as he spread his violence throughout

Europe. Mikhoels stated that ‘among all the heinous crimes and violence

committed against nations the most flagrant are the crimes committed

against the Jewish people’; while a rabbi announced: ‘Hitler, the venomous

leech, is sucking Jewish blood... Hitler, let his name be cursed and erased

from memory forever, mercilessly set about to annihilate the entire Jewish

people – children and old people, men and women.’33

However, the

speakers at this rally spoke with a better understanding of Stalinism than at

the previous two rallies. At the beginning of his speech Mikhoels declared

that ‘we have gathered together at a time of glory and greatness of our

Homeland – the Country of Soviets; at a time of dazzling victories of the

heroic Red Army; at a time of triumph of Stalin's genial policy.’ Other

comments included ‘we are proud of our Soviet people’; ‘we Jews, loyal

sons of our Soviet country’; and ‘the Soviet nation will burn out fascism.’34

From an analysis of these three rallies it should be noted that the Jewish

intelligentsia made good use of the relaxation of the campaign against

nationalist deviation during the war but many still remained faithful to their

Soviet identities.

This same ambivalence is also present in the minutes of the committee’s

second plenary session. The session looked at the committee’s past work

33

Ibid., Document 30, pp 216-217. 34

Ibid.

47

and members argued over what their future work should focus on: ‘There is

so much to be done, so many people to help. How can we do this? It is clear

that the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee has done a lot, has done what it

could. But, what could it do?’35

In this session of February 1943 speakers made suggestions for the

committee’s future work which exceeded the power given to them by the

Sovinformburo. The issue of resettling Jews who had been displaced by the

war was raised by some members. Peretz Markish said that ‘the Jewish

Anti-Fascist Committee should continue to expand its activity’ and believed

that ‘the Committee has a direct responsibility to assist in the resettlement of

these masses.’36

Another member echoed this statement but added that ‘the

Committee will have to concern itself with this, because Jews don’t have

any other body to represent them.’37

This is a significant statement as it

suggests the committee has a larger responsibility to the Jews of the Soviet

Union and that it represented them. Markish suggests that the committee

should do everything in its power to help Soviet Jewry, going above and

beyond its prescribed functions. Fefer was very diplomatic in his response

to such suggestions:

In our discussions we haven’t dealt sufficiently with our work

abroad. This remains our task in the future. Not all of our comrades

have realised what the functions of the committee are. It is

impossible to demand that it overlap other Soviet organisations.

Nevertheless, there are questions to which we cannot remain

indifferent. The Committee should take the necessary initiative. For

example, letters from numerous evacuees reach the Committee.

However, the Committee could and should relay them to the

appropriate authorities.38

35

Ibid., Document 28, p. 209. 36

Ibid., p. 210. 37

Ibid., pp 209-210. 38

Ibid., p. 212.

48

Fefer wanted to help his fellow Jews but was aware that acting on such

suggestions could create trouble for the committee so he suggested that they

should opt for a middle ground.

Shakno Epshteyn took a more conservative approach:

The basic objective of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee has been

and remains to mobilise and activate the Jewish masses world-wide

for the struggle against fascism. Our work in the past has

concentrated upon this objective and this should be the essence of

our work in the future as well.

It seems Epshteyn did not want to rock the boat and felt that the committee

should stick to the tasks it had set itself from the beginning. Finally,

Mikhoels gave his opinion on the comments made at the session:

The functions and scope of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee’s

activity were not, apparently, understood by everyone as they should

have been. Some wanted to add even more functions. Thus it was

lost sight of that the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee is a fighting unit,

which has a single purpose, to consolidate all its forces for the

struggle against fascism. That is its only task. It is the basis which

defines all its activity.39

From this statement we get the impression that Mikhoels comprehensively

understood the committee’s functions and that they should not be exceeded.

Yet, later, at the same session, he spoke of a letter he received from a

woman whose father had just died and he recalled the grief and loneliness

she described to him. Somewhat opposed to his original statement Mikhoels

noted that:

What’s characteristic is the fact that it occurred to this woman that

she has someone to turn to. There are many people suffering because

of the war, and we cannot turn away from them, and say that they are

no concern of ours. We must take part in their fate, raise a question

39

Ibid., p. 213.

49

about them, but all this is still a side issue. Our basic task – is the

destruction of Hitler’s regime.40

It is unusual that at first he states that the only task of the committee was to

aid in the fight against fascism and then shortly after that they should begin

to deal with issues on the side, such as the problem of relocating evacuees.

His desire to help his fellow Jews may have been in conflict with his

identity as a loyal Soviet citizen. Through this plenary session we see that

Mikhoels personified the ambivalence of the JAC. He felt it was his duty to

help his fellow Jews but he knew that this was beyond the scope of the

committee’s original, Stalinist functions. In any case the regime was not

satisfied with such dialogue within the committee. A secret document

written in the months after the second plenary session points to the ‘flagrant

political blunders’ made at the session.41

Conflict between the JAC and

Stalin’s regime was emerging as early as the first half of 1943.

One of the JAC’s self-styled goals was to campaign abroad, mostly in

America, for financial aid that was to provide the Red Army and evacuees

with much needed provisions. The Soviet Union needed to improve its

image in America after revelations of the deaths of Erlich and Alter. In

March 1943 the Soviet regime began preparations to send Mikhoels and

Fefer to the USA on a mission that would satisfy both goals. In the seven

months they would spend abroad most of it was spent giving speeches in

American cities but they also spent time in Canada and Mexico and then

visited England on their return journey to the USSR. While controversy

surrounded some of their meetings with representatives of American Jewish

groups, Mikhoels and Fefer were also met with genuine enthusiasm and

40

Ibid., p. 214. 41

Ibid., Document 29, p. 214.

50

interest: as Soviets they had just defeated the Wehrmacht at Stalingrad and

as Jews they were victims of Hitler’s genocidal policies. The highlight of

this visit was a rally at the Polo Grounds in New York which was attended

by fifty-thousand people. Mikhoels and Fefer gave their speeches on the

Red Army in Yiddish while many of the American speakers spoke

favourably about the Soviet Union.42

Pravda commented that ‘this was the

first such rally in the USA wholly devoted to the Soviet Union and was

imbued with deep emotion and sympathy toward the Soviet people and the

Soviet government.’43

The positive reaction at home seems to suggest that

the mission was a success. It is noteworthy that just before they left for

America, Mikhoels revealed in a letter to his wife that he did not trust

Fefer.44

Fefer was among the most loyal and conformist Yiddish poets who

kept other Yiddish writers in check, ideologically. Mikhoels did not want

him to accompany him abroad but Fefer was selected to go by the regime

because it could rely on him.45

Conclusion

Prior to the Second World War members of the Soviet Jewish intelligentsia

feared that assimilation and Stalin’s efforts were eroding their culture; for

those who worked with the Yiddish language this fear was even more

pronounced. After Hitler broke his pact with Stalin and invaded the Soviet

Union in June 1941, reports from the occupied areas soon made it clear that

Hitler reserved a special violence for Jewish people. Within the USSR the

42

Rubenstein, Stalin’s Secret Pogrom, pp 14-17. 43

Redlich, Document 88 in War, Holocaust and Stalinism, p. 307. 44

Ibid., Document 86, p. 306. (Fefer had been working as an informant for Soviet

intelligence and he went on to cooperate with the authorities when the JAC was under

investigation). 45

Rubenstein, Stalin’s Secret Pogrom, pp 13-14.

51

Jewish intelligentsia came together, offering their services to fight fascism.

While Soviet patriotism and a simple fear of an invading army may explain

this jump to action, it is difficult to exclude the existential threat that the

Germans posed to the Jews. Therefore, the war simultaneously threatened

the destruction of Soviet Jewish culture and offered an opportunity to save

that culture. In an effort to ensure unity of cause, Stalin relaxed his

campaign against overt nationalism which many prominent Jews recognised

and their subsequent appeals led to the formation of the Jewish Anti-Fascist

Committee. As a Soviet organ it was designed strictly to aid the war effort;

led by Soviet Jews and Yiddish speakers the JAC became a Jewish

institution with the power to give life to a dying culture.

The committee members enjoyed the JAC as an emotional refuge, at least

for a few short years, but it applied more so to its members who worked in

the Yiddish language. We already know that an emotional refuge is a

‘relationship, ritual, or organisation (whether informal or formal) that

provides safe release from prevailing emotional norms and allows relaxation

of emotional effort, with or without an ideological justification, which may

shore up or threaten the existing emotional regime.’46

Stalin’s emotional

regime was geared towards creating loyal Soviet citizens and, in theory, it

offered cultural development to national minorities which, in practice, was

not always the case. The JAC did allow for cultural development during the

war and, therefore, allowed a ‘safe release from prevailing emotional

norms.’47

46

Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling, p. 129. 47

Ibid.

52

While an emotional refuge certainly can threaten an emotional regime, it

can also ‘shore up’48

a regime. During the Great Patriotic War the JAC

carried out much propaganda work for the regime along with its own work.

By promoting Soviet patriotism and other Stalinist propaganda (promoting

the friendship of peoples, for example) they were strengthening the Stalinist

emotional regime. Their work shored up the emotional regime because

Soviet patriotism ultimately aimed to make people feel certain emotions:

pride and love for the USSR. Therefore, the JAC was both an emotional

refuge and a part of the Stalinist apparatus.

Essentially, the JAC was an ambivalent organisation. On the one hand, it

was an integral part of the Stalinist regime during the war because it played

a massively important propaganda role both at home and abroad and was

successful in procuring substantial aid for the Soviet war effort. Many of its

members, especially Mikhoels, displayed proper Soviet qualities in their

work. On the other hand, many committee members had their Jewish

identities re-awakened by Hitler’s murderous anti-Semitism. This may have

led them to include nationalistic sentiments in their works (or at least that is

how the regime would come to see it, despite such comments being an

intrinsic part of their work) and also made them feel duty-bound to help

their Jewish compatriots who had suffered greatly in the war. It was difficult,

if not impossible, to be both a loyal Stalinist and a champion of the Jews.

One would have to win out over the other.

48

Ibid.

53

CHAPTER 3

STALIN & THE JAC

(1945-1953)

54

The end of the war signalled a change for the JAC. The relaxed atmosphere

of the war years was now tightened and the Soviet Union began to isolate

itself once again. The chauvinisation of power had begun back at the end of

the 1930s and periods of intense patriotic propaganda often brought with

them periods of hardship for the smaller Soviet nations.1 Fefer recognised

this change and in 1946 he left the Jewish propaganda poem, ‘I am a Jew’,

out of an anthology.2 The regime considered closing the JAC down as early

as 1946 and in that August the committee’s supervision changed hands. The

Sovinformburo and Lozovsky were replaced by the Foreign Relations

Department of the Central Committee and Mikhail Suslov. Suslov was a

typical Stalinist and the Central Committee would prove to be less open

than the Sovinformburo. Suslov began to collect reports of the JAC’s work

to comb them for reasons to disband the committee. Suslov’s own report

was quite damning. Sent to Stalin and the Politburo, it declared that the JAC

had served its wartime purpose but had now become ‘politically

damaging’.3

He accused the JAC members of Jewish nationalism and

Zionism and recommended that the committee be liquidated. However,

Stalin did not give the go-ahead just yet as he might need the committee in

the coming crisis over Palestine. The JAC could be used as a ‘face’ for

Soviet Jewry.4

The Soviet war experience increased Stalin’s fear of enemies, home and

abroad. The Second World War inflicted invasion and occupation upon the

socialist homeland but internally the Soviet population became more

1 Gennadii Kostyrchenko, Tainaia politika Stalina: Vlast i antisemitizm (Stalin’s Secret

Policy: Power and Anti-Semitism) (Moscow, 2003), p. 249. 2 Rubenstein, Stalin’s Secret Pogrom, p. 25.

3 Ibid., pp 31-32.

4 Ibid.

55

nationalistic.5 After the war Stalin attempted to meld Soviet patriotism with

Russian nationalism (Russian figures, such as Peter the Great, were much

more prominent in discourse than non-Russian figures).6 Stalin had already

taken action against national groups during the war which would continue in

the postwar years. When interpreting the Soviet Union in the 1930s,

Norman Naimark remarked that the need for homogeneity was the reason

for embarking on campaigns of national violence.7 The postwar years were

very similar. Stalin would not permit confusion over the Soviet war

experience; Stalin needed Russians to be the ‘greatest victors and the

greatest victims, now and forever.’8 He needed a version of the war that

elevated Russians but marginalised Jews and all other Soviet ethnic

minorities. The war had to begin with the German invasion of the USSR in

June 1941 and not with the joint Nazi-Soviet invasion of Poland in 1939.

The new territories gained by the Soviet Union as a result had to be

presented as always having been Soviet and the regime could in no way be

portrayed as the aggressor. Jews as the main victims of Nazi aggression

could also not be tolerated. The Soviet invasion of Poland had to be

forgotten, as did the fact that the Soviet Union was totally unprepared for

the German invasion. As Timothy Snyder has pointed out: ‘The murder of

Jews was not only an undesirable memory in and of itself; it called forth

other undesirable memories. It had to be forgotten.’9

The need for

homogeneity had returned and the official version of events aimed to

5 Norman M. Naimark, Fires of Hatred: Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth-Century Europe

(Cambridge, 2001), p. 89. For the Jewish population see Jeffrey Veidlinger, ‘Soviet Jewry

as a Diaspora Nationality: the “Black Years” Reconsidered’ in East European Jewish

Affairs, xxxiii (2003), p. 21. 6 David L. Hoffman, Stalinist Values: The Cultural Norms of Soviet Modernity, 1917-1941

(London, 2003), p. 165. 7 Norman M. Naimark, Stalin’s Genocides (Princeton, 2010), p. 94.

8 Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (London, 2010), p. 341.

9 Ibid., p. 345.

56

‘celebrate the Communist Party’s wartime successes and provide an

inspirational image of exemplary unity and popular heroism.’10

Supporting the Soviet war effort was the official aim of the JAC and the

reason it was established, so it stood to reason that it would disband at the

war’s end. This did not happen and, in fact, the JAC took on more

responsibilities, responsibilities unsanctioned by the regime. The committee

came into conflict with the regime when their work began to run counter to

the official narrative.

Representing Soviet Jews

In the last two years of the war, and in the years after, the JAC received

many letters from Jews expressing concerns for the future. The Soviet

Jewish population now viewed the committee as a national Jewish

organisation which they could turn to in order to seek help for problems

caused by the war. The JAC responded to these letters with enthusiasm and

began forming new roles for itself, pushing it further and further away from

the regime.

In many letters to the JAC we are able to see how ordinary Jewish people

viewed the committee and what they believed its purpose to be. In 1944 a

theatre critic, fighting at the front, wrote to Mikhoels about his experience in

Mogilev-Podolsk. Many people in the area recorded their experience of

Nazi atrocities in journals and collected other documentation and material

relating to the atrocities. Due to language barriers the stories of people from

Mogilev-Podolsk would not be heard by a wider audience. The critic writing

10

Nina Tumarkin, The Living and the Dead: The Rise and Fall of the Cult of World War II

in Russia (New York, 1994), p. 50.

57

the letter demanded ‘an urgent visit by representatives of the Jewish Anti-

Fascist Committee’ so that ‘an entire “Klondike” of incriminating materials’

and other urgent matters could be attended to. The critic obviously viewed

the JAC as the first outlet to air Jewish problems.11

A Jewish kolkhoz member after returning to his local area found that 135 of

his fellow Jews had been killed by the Germans through local collaboration

and was welcomed with a general hostility towards Jews. This kolkhoz

member called on the JAC to investigate the situation. A group of factory

workers in Rubtsovsk sent a letter to Mikhoels in July 1945 after an increase

in anti-Semitic attacks. ‘An incredible moral depression, oppressing us to

the utmost, forces us to turn to you with a request to dispel our doubts, calm

us all down, and to take appropriate measures.’ The factory workers wanted

the JAC to send a commission to Rubtsovsk to investigate their claims of

anti-Semitism.12

An engineer wrote to Mikhoels in January 1946 lamenting

that many Jews had left their native language and culture behind and that the

war had left many Jews without living quarters. This person hoped, as did

all examples cited, that the JAC would have the answers.13

As the JAC received so many letters asking for its help, the committee was

inadvertently becoming a Jewish representative body. One person wrote to

the JAC commending their work informing the world about the condition of

the Soviet Jewish population, the crimes the Nazis committed against them,

and also how Jews contributed to the Soviet war effort. The author of this

letter was not satisfied with the committee’s work at home; they complained

about the many misconceptions about Jews but especially that the people of

11

Redlich, Document 34 in War, Holocaust and Stalinism, pp 225-226. 12

Ibid., Document 39, pp 228-230. 13

Ibid., Document 41, pp 233-235.

58

the Soviet Union were unaware of the role that Jews played in the Great

Patriotic War:

To our great shame and regret it must be stated that very many in our

country have a false idea of the part played by Jews in the Great

Patriotic War. Indeed, there are general misconceptions about a lot

of things relating to Jews, for example, about the actual proportion of

Jews in government institutions as compared with the general urban

population; about the social structure of the Jewish population; about

the contribution of Jews in new inventions, production processes,

and armaments in general.14

The writer wanted the JAC to do more to combat this because it was feeding

popular anti-Semitism:

I think that an organisation which was formed to struggle against

fascism, and especially a Jewish anti-fascist organisation, cannot

overlook such phenomena. It should take measures to disseminate

information about the true situation of things no less than it does in

connection with Jewish public opinion abroad.15

This one letter is very emblematic of the time. The Second World War had

left the Jews of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe in a terrible situation

but it had also rekindled their sense of loyalty to each other and of Jewish

nationalist sentiments. As a national Jewish organisation, aggrieved Jews

saw the committee as the first port-of-call for their problems. Another wrote

of the JAC that:

We see in you the representatives of a great nation – a nation of

genius and martyrdom. We express, through you, our hope for

national distinctiveness and national cultural autonomy... You are the

sole representatives in the USSR of this wonderful people and only

you can further the preservation of this great nation of Prophets,

innovators, and martyrs.16

This last letter perfectly sums up how Soviet Jews viewed the JAC as their

representative.

14

Ibid., Document 42, pp 236-237. 15

Ibid. 16

Ibid., Document 44, pp 239-240.

59

Recognising this newly developing responsibility some JAC members

began to act on what they saw as their duty. Mikhoels and Epshteyn (and

Fefer after Epshteyn’s death) took it upon themselves to speak for the Jews

of the Soviet Union. They sent letters to various Soviet officials in their

efforts to help their fellow Jews which contain several recurring themes.

Issues raised by this ‘triumvirate’17

include shelter and housing,18

clothing19

and the distribution of aid.20

Many Jews returning to their native towns or

villages could expect to find their homes destroyed or occupied by non-

Jewish locals and some were not even able to make it home such was the

dislocation caused by the war.

The problem with aid distribution was that the JAC felt it was not going to

the right people. Jewish communities abroad were sending aid to the Soviet

Union without regard to nationality but they mostly sent it to regions with

significant Jewish populations, hoping that they could help their Soviet

brothers in some way. The JAC argued that other nationalities, such as the

Poles or the Armenians, were involved in the distribution of aid among their

own countrymen, something that was being denied the Jews.21

The JAC

wanted the distribution system altered so that aid would go where it was

required, and to help more Jewish people:

From the many letters and declarations we continue to receive from

different parts of the USSR, it is clear that the neglect of the Jewish

population in the distribution of foreign aid is continuing and is

taking on the character of a gross violation of Soviet principles, and

is humiliating the very people who suffered so much at the hands of

the fascists.22

17

Rubenstein, Stalin’s Secret Pogrom, p. 262. 18

Redlich, Document 46 in War, Holocaust and Stalinism, pp 243-244. 19

Ibid., Document 61, p. 260. 20

Ibid., Documents 46, 50, 51, pp 243-249. 21

Ibid., Document 50, pp 246-247. 22

Ibid., Document 51, pp 248-249.

60

The above quotation was included in a letter sent to Molotov by Mikhoels

and Epshteyn on 28 October 1944. The very next day Molotov sent

instructions to the People’s Commissariat for State Control to investigate

the claims made by the JAC, but he also noted that the JAC ‘was not created

to handle such matters and the committee apparently does not have a

completely accurate understanding of its functions.’23

The regime took note

of the committee’s conversation to expand its functions at a plenary session

in February 1943 and something similar was happening here. The proposal

was rejected.

Not satisfied with the previous outcome the aid distribution issue was

tackled once more. In August 1945 Mikhoels and Fefer wrote to Malenkov

to ‘abolish the present procedure of depersonalising financial and material

assistance sent to the USSR by foreign Jewish organisations’ and to ‘give

these organisations the possibility of sending their assistance directly to

their designated objectives.’24

On this time of asking their proposal was also

turned down:

Inasmuch as they have again raised this issue, one must conclude

that they want foreign Jewish philanthropic organisations to be able

to send material assistance directly to the Jewish population of our

country... The proposal by Comrades Mikhoels and Fefer is

unacceptable, for it makes gifts to the Soviet Union conform to the

customs of capitalist countries. Its implementation will give foreign

philanthropic organisations the opportunity to use philanthropy as a

means to spread bourgeois ideological propaganda in our country. In

addition, it is improper to implement such a proposal because

singling out Jews from the general population of the Soviet Union

for special treatment will create conditions for anti-Semitism.25

Did this contribute to what would eventually become Stalin’s anti-

cosmopolitan campaigns? Perhaps, because two years later, in 1947, a letter

23

Ibid., Document 52, p. 249. 24

Ibid., Document 57, pp 255-257. 25

Ibid., Document 58, pp 258-259.

61

to Zhdanov stated that organisations in the USA ‘are trying to gain the

opportunity of carrying out Zionist activities among the Jewish population

of the Ukraine as a condition of its aid.’26

With the onset of the Cold War

Stalin believed that a war with the USA lay ahead; a similar scenario

happened in the 1930s when he believed that a war with Germany was

coming, a war which did arrive. Many of Stalin’s actions hereafter were

considered preparations for war.

The influx of letters that the JAC received and the expectations contained

within them led some of the committee’s members to leave behind the

Stalinist aims originally set out for the JAC. They instead pursued many

Jewish issues, in the process becoming a representative of Soviet Jewry. The

faction of Yiddish intellectuals was now dominating the committee.

Previously they believed that preserving Yiddish culture was their spiritual

aim but now they were involved in helping Jews who had suffered through

the war, a more immediate and important task.

1948

1948 was the year in which the regime finally took action against the JAC.

These actions took place in stages, the first of which took place in January.

During the Great Patriotic War Mikhoels ‘exhibited the rare quality of

retaining profoundly Jewish loyalties even as he served the regime and was

a Soviet patriot.’27

However, soon after the war’s end he was ‘unable to let

the mass murder of the Jews pass into historical oblivion, and unwilling to

submerge the special suffering of the Jews into that of Soviet peoples

26

Ibid., Document 63, pp 262-263. 27

Rubenstein, Stalin’s Secret Pogrom, p. 36.

62

generally.’28

So, in the postwar years Mikhoels used the JAC as a platform

to pursue Jewish interests; he was now more devoted to his Jewish identity

than to his Soviet one. He was involved in both of the committee’s major

postwar campaigns. Mikhoels played a leading role in the efforts to

establish a Jewish autonomous region in the Crimea and in the Black Book

project, a book documenting the atrocities of the Nazi regime against the

Jews of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. He continued his war-time

efforts involving the distribution of aid and became a major voice in the

Zionist movement. He retained his global Jewish contacts and often sought

to participate in foreign Jewish congresses.29

Mikhoels was becoming the

Jewish saviour that people expected him to be.

Mikhoels was rewarded many times for his theatre work, as both an actor

and director, despite his new reputation. However, he was smart enough to

realise that this was a decoy. If the regime was accused of taking action

against its Jewish population it could point to Mikhoels and how he, a Jew

working with the Yiddish language, was rewarded for his efforts. Since he

and Fefer had returned from their trip abroad in 1943 Mikhoels began to

fear for his life.30

In January 1948 he was sent to Minsk to review a play and

was invited to meet with the head of the Belarusian state police. The next

day he was found dead and his death had been made to look like a traffic

accident; but it was Stalin who ordered the killing.31

As an actor and a very

outspoken Soviet Jew, Mikhoels could not be trusted to perform correctly in

a show trial. He was too dangerous to the regime so they had to murder him

28

Snyder, Bloodlands, p. 340. 29

Veidlinger, ‘Soviet Jewry as a Diaspora Nationality’, pp 9-11. 30

Rubenstein, Stalin’s Secret Pogrom, p. 36. 31

Snyder, Bloodlands, p. 339.

63

outright instead of pursuing the usual channels.32

He was murdered because

his Jewish identity was overpowering his identity as a Soviet citizen.

The second event of 1948 that would impact the JAC occurred in May when

Israel formally became a state. This would prove to have profound effects

on the Jewish population of the Soviet Union. Stalin had initially hoped that

it might become part of the Soviet bloc or, at least, friendly towards the

Soviet Union. It soon became clear that the newly formed state was

gradually siding with the West, especially the USA. Stalin had never made

any direct attacks against the Jewish population but now that Israel had

come into play the Soviet Jewish population became a diaspora nationality.

This means that Soviet Jewry now had a home outside the borders of the

Soviet Union. Expressions of Jewish nationalism had previously been

disapproved of but now they could be interpreted as declarations of loyalty

to a foreign government. What were once acts of cultural development were

now criminal acts of ‘bourgeois nationalism.’33

In September 1948 Golda Meir (Meyerson) arrived in Moscow as part of an

Israeli mission to the Soviet Union. Meir and the rest of the Israeli

delegation received a huge welcome from Soviet Jews, an unprecedented

spectacle in Stalin’s Russia where society was ‘well-rehearsed and

ritualised’34

The Israeli Embassy in the Soviet Union was actively

advocating Jewish national interests and encouraging emigration to Israel,

both of which were incompatible with a loyal Soviet attitude. The Soviet

leadership was now under the impression that the Jewish population, as a

whole, was no longer loyal to the Soviet Union and that they represented a

32

Rubenstein, Stalin’s Secret Pogrom, p. 39. 33

Veidlinger, ‘Soviet Jewry as a Diaspora Nationality’, pp 5-6. 34

Ibid., p. 13.

64

potential fifth column.35

Other nationalities had been persecuted because of

the same conditions. It seemed rather ominous for Soviet Jewry.

Soon after Israel was established the JAC received many letters appealing

for them to aid the new state of Israel in some way. Many others faulted the

committee for not acting soon enough and that they were failing in their

‘sacred duty’36

:

At the present moment, I can confidently say that the entire Jewish

population of the Soviet Union is indignant at your nonchalant

attitude towards events in Palestine. If you call yourself the Jewish

Anti-Fascist Committee, then you and the Committee you head

should be the first to call the Jewish people to arms and not wait for

an angry letter like this one.37

This is just one letter amongst many but the collective feelings of Soviet

Jewry are quite clear. They were happy that Israel had been created and

were proud that the USSR had officially recognised the new state. They felt

the need to help their brothers in Israel and expected the JAC to act on these

needs.38

The committee had become a national Jewish body that the Jewish

population believed represented them; the committee was expected to act on

their behalf. The JAC responded within a Stalinist framework. They

recognised that some of the appeals that they received were bourgeois

nationalistic in nature39

and they reacted by offering to help the regime in

the education of Soviet patriotism through its newspaper, Eynikayt.40

Even

though they were exhibiting exceptional Soviet behaviour in this regard it

was not enough to save them from their other crimes.

35

Ibid., pp 13-14 36

Redlich, Document 144 in War, Holocaust and Stalinism, p. 379. 37

Ibid., Document 155, pp 386-387. 38

Ibid., Document 160, pp 393-397. 39

Ibid., Document 163, pp 400-404. 40

Ibid., Document 161, pp 397-398.

65

The last stage of the committee’s disastrous year began in November when

the JAC was officially disbanded, based on claims that it functioned as a

centre of anti-soviet propaganda and that it regularly supplied anti-soviet

information to foreign intelligence services.41

In late 1948 and early 1949

many leading members of the JAC were arrested on charges of conducting

spy work for foreign intelligence services and for spreading nationalist

propaganda. Fifteen members would eventually go on trial in 1952, almost

four years after the original arrests. For the regime the time between the

arrests and the trial was an administrative nightmare. Documents pertaining

to the investigation into were improperly stored and much went unexplored.

Many documents from the JAC archive incurred damage as they were stored

in a wet basement. In August 1951 Semyon Ignatyev noted that nearly all

documented confessions of those arrested had been lost since the

investigation ended a year earlier. Ignatyev, therefore, implored the

reopening of the case.42

While the regime was trying to get its affairs in

order the arrested JAC members languished in prison, suffering frequent

interrogations and beatings.

The JAC Trial

The trial began on 8 May 1952 and the sentence was announced on 18 July

1952. It was held behind closed doors in the Lubyanka prison complex. The

trial was not reported on in the press. The outside world was unaware of

what was happening inside. Only two of the defendants pleaded guilty in

41

No author, ‘Politburo Decision to Shut Down the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee’ (20

November 1948), RGASPI. F. 17. Op. 162. D. 39. L. 140. Available at

http://www.alexanderyakovlev.org/almanah/inside/almanah-doc/78 (2 November 2014). 42

Semyon Ignatyev, ‘Note from Minister of State Security S.D. Ignatyev About Necessary

Resumption of Investigation of JAC Case’ (24 August 1951), CA FSB. Archival collections.

Available at http://www.alexanderyakovlev.org/almanah/inside/almanah-doc/84 (2

November 2014).

66

full and some maintained that they were wholly innocent. For much of the

investigation period and trial Fefer aided the prosecution but even he

relented towards the end, claiming his previous testimony was incorrect.

Lozovsky played a very interesting, but tragic, part in the trial; he turned

many of the accusations on their heads, proving them utterly baseless and

even implicitly compared the trial to the Grand Inquisition. As a result of

such testimony the presiding judge, Alexander Chepstov, soon realised that

the charges had been fabricated and even made attempts to stall proceedings,

but ultimately failed. He was ordered to convict and execute the defendants;

in fact, such an outcome had been arranged before the trial began.43

The trial sentence is of great importance; it summarised the trial and showed

how the regime planned to punish those it felt threatened by in the postwar

world. The court declared that Lozovsky was a ‘clandestine enemy’ of the

regime and that he began to use the JAC as a means to bring together Jewish

nationalists who shared his condemnation of the Soviet Union’s current

national policy. As Deputy Director of the Sovinformburo Lozovsky was

the committee’s supervisor. He selected Solomon Mikhoels as chairman and

Shakno Epshteyn as secretary, both ‘ardent Jewish nationalists.’ Their job

was to hire other prominent Jewish nationalists (Fefer, Kvitko, Markish,

Bergelson, Shtern, Shimeliovich, Yuzefovich, Zuskin) to carry out ‘anti-

Soviet nationalistic activity.’44

43

Rubenstein, Stalin’s Secret Pogrom, pp 55-60. 44

Ibid., pp 484-485.

67

This group that Lozovsky allegedly assembled was to carry out ‘hostile

nationalistic activity’ under the guise of the JAC and also to create links

with Jewish nationalists in America.45

Soon after the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee was organised, its

directors, under the cover of carrying out the tasks of the committee,

began to unfurl a program of nationalist activity and established

contact with Jewish nationalistic organisations in America. They

began sending information to these organisations about the economy

of the USSR, as well as slanderous information about the situation of

Jews in the USSR, expecting in this way to obtain material aid from

Jewish bourgeois circles and enlist their support in carrying out

nationalistic activity in the USSR.46

Like most of the accusations, this was simply not true.

After this all-encompassing comment, the court moved on to other, more

specific, crimes of the JAC. The first target was the Mikhoels-Fefer trip to

America in 1943. Apparently, Lozovsky sent Mikhoels and Fefer to the

USA to become friendly with Jewish nationalist circles, using the JAC and

their anti-fascist struggle as a convenient cover story. They were also

accused of giving secret information to the Americans while over there. One

of the conditions of American aid was the settlement of Jews in the Crimea

and the establishment of a Jewish republic there.47

According to the court

the so-called Crimea project was one of the pillars of the committee’s guilt

(the other being The Black Book). When Mikhoels and Fefer returned from

America they, along with Epshteyn and Shimeliovich, drafted a letter to the

regime inquiring about the possibility of resettling Jews in the Crimea with

a view to establishing a Jewish republic there. Lozovsky edited this letter

and then it was sent directly to Stalin; the court condemned this letter.48

The

45

Ibid. 46

Ibid., p. 485. 47

Ibid., pp 485-486. 48

Ibid., p. 486.

68

authors of the letter discuss the dispersal of Jews across the USSR, the

inability of many to return to their homes, the lack of a significant Jewish

Soviet culture, and new expressions of anti-Semitism.

Leaving the huge mass of this population in a dispersed state,

without political and cultural education in its native language will

create a free field for the intrigues of alien and hostile influences.49

The JAC believed that the creation of a Jewish republic in the Crimea, as a

site to resettle Jews dislocated by the war would solve the national problem

in the USSR. While territories of the USSR were occupied by the Germans

they were subjected to anti-Jewish propaganda, the sentiments of which

remained in some parts of the population after liberation. This new anti-

Semitism was the first problem, but it gave rise to another. The experience

of ‘fascist bestiality’ and the growth of popular anti-Semitism led to

increased nationalism amongst the Jewish population. By establishing a

Jewish republic in the Crimea the targets of anti-Semitism would be

removed and Jewish nationalistic sentiments would be sated; two birds, one

stone.50

The regime did not have the same view; it believed that the Crimean project

had been initiated by the committee’s links to Jewish nationalists in

America. In other words the regime believed that the USA wanted to

establish a ‘beachhead’ in the Crimea that it could use as a platform for the

eventual destruction of the USSR.51

The court stated that the Yiddish writers and journalists who were brought

into the JAC as correspondents were used to gather classified information

49

Redlich, Document 64 in War, Holocaust and Stalinism, pp 264-267. 50

Ibid. 51

Rubenstein, Stalin’s Secret Pogrom, p. 57.

69

regarding industry, science and new buildings. The expert commission also

found that much of the material sent abroad by the committee was classified

and contained state secrets. The activity that the JAC conducted at home

was also condemned. The newspaper Eynikayt, the publishing house Der

emes and Yiddish literary anthologies were all considered to be part of a

propaganda campaign against Soviet national policy. It did not sit well with

the court, or the regime, that the JAC seemed to place the Jewish people

above all others. The committee’s work

Spread the notion that that the Jews as a nation are separate and

different and the false thesis of the exceptional nature of the Jewish

people as a people who displayed exceptional heroism in the struggle

against fascism and who supposedly had made exceptional

contributions in labour and science.52

The court believed that the JAC was knowingly rousing Jewish nationalism,

and Zionism, in the USSR by promoting the idea of Jewish unity and by

commenting on rising anti-Semitism.

When the case finally reached trial in 1952 the prosecution used The Black

Book as one of its main pieces of evidence. In 1947 Georgy Aleksandrov,

head of the Propaganda Department, wrote to Zhdanov about The Black

Book:

In reading the book, especially the first section concerning the

Ukraine, one gets a false picture of the true nature of fascism and its

organisations. Running through the whole book is the idea that the

Germans plundered and murdered Jews only [emphasis added]. The

reader unwittingly gets the impression that the Germans fought

against the USSR for the sole purpose of destroying the Jews. It is as

if the Germans simply treated the Russians, Ukrainians, Belorussians,

Lithuanians, Latvians, and other nationalities in a condescending

manner.53

52

Ibid., p. 487. 53

Redlich, Document 131 in War, Holocaust and Stalinism, pp 365-366.

70

Aleksandrov took issue with what he interpreted as the elevation of Jewish

suffering and sacrifice above all other Soviet nationalities. Aleksandrov

disagrees that the Germans prioritised harming Jews over anyone else and

claims that the Special State Commission proved that ‘Hitler’s ruthless

slaughters were carried out equally’ against the various national groups of

the Soviet Union, Russians and Jews alike. Finally, he advised that The

Black Book should not be published.54

From this one document we can see

how the JAC came into conflict with the regime. They collected stories from

witnesses of Hitler’s crimes against Jews in lands that were occupied by the

Germans, as well as diaries and letters. It seemed, to the regime, that they

were assembling a topos of works demonstrating the Nazi desire to destroy

the Jewish people. As this went against Stalin’s officially sanctioned version

of the Great Patriotic War the JAC could not go unpunished.

The court made a special point about The Black Book during the sentencing

of the trial. Led by the JAC, with Lozovsky’s permission, in coordination

with Jewish nationalists in the USA and Israel, the nationalistic Black Book

was published in 1946 in the USA.

In this book the Jews are set off in a category separate and opposed

to other peoples; the contribution of the Jews to world civilisation is

exaggerated; attention is paid exclusively to the losses borne by the

Jews during the Second World War; and the idea is presented that

fascism supposedly represented a threat to the Jews alone, and not to

all peoples and to world civilisation.55

With these words the court legally ratified the official Soviet narrative of the

Great Patriotic War. Anyone opposed to this narrative could be put to death;

thirteen out of fifteen defendants were executed on 12 August 1952.

Solomon Bregman collapsed into a coma before the trial was completed and

54

Ibid. 55

Rubenstein, Stalin’s Secret Pogrom, p. 487.

71

died in a prison infirmary in January 1953 and Lina Shtern was exiled.56

They were punished despite carrying out their prescribed functions.

Conclusion

The arrest, the pre-trial detention, the trial, and the execution of the JAC

members were not reported in the Soviet press at all. Therefore, the trial

seems to have failed the regime. A trial behind closed doors was never

going to further mobilise Soviet society against the Jewish minority. The

Yiddish culture had been dealt a severe blow and the JAC had been

punished but for Stalin, this was not enough. It seemed that a show trial

would be needed to satisfy Stalin.57

This seems to be why the Doctors’ Plot

was engineered. In early 1953 many doctors (most of whom were Jewish)

were arrested and accused of medical terrorism. The plot went as far back as

the death of Alexander Shcherbakov in May 1945 and also included the

death of Andrei Zhdanov in August 1948. One JAC member was mentioned

in the Doctors’ Plot; Boris Shimeliovich allegedly gave orders to many

high-ranking Soviet doctors to kill Soviet leaders. This indicates that Stalin

and his associates intended to link the Doctors’ Plot with the earlier case of

the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee. Stalin died on 5 March 1953 and so did

the future of the Doctors’ Plot.58

Details of the next step in the Plot are very

sketchy and most ideas are merely educated guesses. It is likely that a new

round of purges was on the cards and Stalin probably would have performed

the show trial his anti-Semitic campaign needed. Beyond that it is difficult

to know.59

56

Ibid., pp 491-492. 57

Ibid., p. 61. 58

Grüner, ‘“Russia’s battle against the foreign”’, p. 456. 59

Rubenstein, Stalin’s Secret Pogrom, p. 62. See also Grüner, ‘“Russia’s battle against the

72

We should note that Stalin’s crusade against the Jews was not an isolated

incident; it was part of a larger xenophobic campaign that also persecuted

Ukrainians, Armenians, Tatars and Kazakhs.60

That being said, it did take

on its own particular features. Stalin aimed for homogeneity within the

Soviet Union which is why he deported so many national groups but the

Jewish problem had the potential to be more than just an exercise in ethnic

cleansing. Stalin ‘was more pragmatic than anti-Semitic’,61

only using anti-

Semitism when it could be used as a means to an end; in the postwar years

Stalin was able to gain from it. The USA was the primary enemy in the new

Cold War and by linking this external enemy to the internal enemy, by way

of cosmopolitanism, Stalin could employ anti-Semitism to attack his

enemies.62

By the end of the war the JAC and many of its members, particularly

Mikhoels, were struggling to reconcile their two identities. After the war

Mikhoels’ Jewish identity took priority over his Soviet one; he was not

prepared to forget his Jewish identity in order to be a proper Soviet citizen;

the Holocaust was too difficult to forget. At the same time, the committee

sought to further Jewish interests, forgetting its Stalinist functions. As a

result, the JAC took on projects, such as the Black Book and the Crimean

proposal, which directly challenged the regime. In Stalin’s eyes the Soviet

Jewish nationality had ‘betrayed their benevolent [Soviet] masters and

foreign”’, p. 457. 60

David Brandenberger, ‘Stalin’s Last Crime? Recent Scholarship on Postwar Soviet

Antisemitism and the Doctor’s Plot in Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian

History, vi (2005), p. 204. 61

Gennadii Kostyrchenko, Out of the Red Shadows: Anti-Semitism in Stalin’s Russia

(1995), pp 30-31. 62

Stalin rarely acted directly against his ultimate enemy and did not want to take on

America directly. The Doctors’ Plot and the earlier JAC Case were indirect ways of

attacking the USA and made it harder to trace the line back to Stalin as the instigator. It also

allowed him to eliminate internal enemies in the process. See Jonathan Brent & Vladimir P.

Naumov, Stalin’s Last Crime: The Doctor’s Plot (London, 2003), p. 333.

73

undermined the stability of the state and the safety of its people.’63

Stalin

became unable to trust the Jewish minority and viewed them as a threat to

the very existence of the Soviet Union. The fear and anger that he had spent

the early postwar years cultivating against the Jews had now

‘metastasised’64

into resentment and hatred. Jews presented too great a

threat to be ignored, they had to be destroyed before they could initiate the

destruction of the USSR.65

The murder of Mikhoels, the disbanding of the

JAC, the trial and execution of JAC members, and the Doctors’ Plot

conspiracy all stemmed from Stalin’s fear and hatred of Jews.66

Stalin’s

emotional regime (and political regime) felt threatened by the JAC, an

emotional refuge, and needed to eliminate it.

63

Ronald Grigor Suny, ‘Why We Hate You: The Passions of National Identity and Ethnic

Violence’ paper presented at Berkeley Program in Soviet and Post-Soviet Studies (2004), p

41. [Soviet] is used to replace ‘Ottoman’ in the original. To clarify, Suny’s article is about

the role of emotions in the Armenian genocide but there are enough parallels between it and

the role of emotions in Stalin’s persecution of the Jews to discuss it here. The end result

was different (over one million Armenians were killed, whereas a few dozen Jews were) but

the emotions that influenced events are roughly the same. 64

Ibid. 65

Ibid. 66

This fear and hatred of Jews was not based on racial terms, as Hitler’s was, but on the

threat they posed as potential traitors. Some scholars believe that Stalin was not anti-

Semitic because he did not believe in racism (Hiroaki Kuromiya, ‘Stalin and his Era’ in The

Historical Journal, l (2007), p. 271.) but the point is irrelevant here. There is much

evidence that points to Stalin’s personal anti-Semitism but even if this wasn’t true his

postwar policies were anti-Semitic. In theory he may not have been anti-Semitic but in

practice he certainly was.

74

CONCLUSION

75

Stalin’s emotional regime was built to control the emotions of his

population; it determined which emotions were acceptable and which ones

were not, and it laid out the required methods of emotional expression. It

aimed to force citizens to trust the Stalinist regime and to make them love

the Soviet Union and socialism. Both Stalin’s nationalities policy and Soviet

patriotism campaign were central to his emotional regime. The nationalities

policy encouraged nations to develop and flourish; it was hoped that they

would react favourably to the USSR as a result of this generosity. Soviet

patriotism was a relentless propaganda barrage that demonstrated the merits

of socialism and the success of the Soviet Union, and contrasted this picture

with that of the morally corrupt capitalist West. Such propaganda aimed to

make Soviet citizens proud of their achievements as socialists and to make

them love their homeland.

Through his emotional regime Stalin was able to conjure up fear and anger.

The anti-cosmopolitan campaign began soon after the end of the Second

World War and it quickly became clear that it was targeting Jews. The aim

of this campaign was to link Jews (an internal enemy associated with the

country’s problems) to the USA (an external enemy and the USSR’s only

major ideological and military rival). This campaign induced both fear and

anger in Soviet citizens towards Jewish people. Stalin meant for this to

happen as it was a prerequisite for unleashing his violence toward them; the

population had to be adequately prepared to justify such attacks.

When the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee was formed in early 1942 its

members were able to work in Yiddish and concentrate on Jewish matters, a

task the regime encouraged them to do in order to win support from Jewish

76

communities abroad. Such work was severely restricted before the war

which meant that during the Great Patriotic War the JAC functioned as an

emotional refuge. An emotional refuge can threaten or support an emotional

regime; during the war the JAC’s Soviet propaganda work supported the

regime.

In most of the JAC’s work there was a certain ambivalence present; the

Jewish part of them wanted to do all it could to preserve Jewish culture in

the USSR while the Soviet part tried to limit the influence of the Jewish part

and engaged in typical Soviet work. At Jewish rallies Mikhoels spoke as a

Jew and a Soviet patriot. Eynikayt produced articles on specific Jewish

matters but also published Soviet propaganda. At a committee plenary

session speakers were divided over helping Jews (outside the committee’s

original aims) and continuing their anti-fascist work only. All three

examples show the struggle between the Jewish and Soviet identities. The

JAC chairman, Solomon Mikhoels, vividly embodied this ideological

struggle; he was finding it increasingly difficult to be both Soviet and

Jewish.

Soon after the war’s end, the Jewish identity began to dominate over the

Soviet one, for both Mikhoels and the JAC. However, the atmosphere of the

postwar years was not the same as during the war; the campaign against

nationalism had been reigned in during the war so that national groups, such

as the Jews, could appeal to their compatriots and diaspora communities to

aid the war effort but with the war over such help was no longer necessary.

Mikhoels and the committee were not prepared to let the horrors of the

Holocaust fade out of history and the JAC became a type of platform from

77

which several Jewish projects were launched. The Black Book was

organised to provide a Jewish history of the Second World War and the

Crimean proposal was presented as a solution to the resettlement issue. This

work no longer supported Stalin’s regime and was now unacceptable.

Mikhoels lost his life because he would not bow to the regime’s suppression

of the Holocaust and Jewish suffering.

Almost a year after Mikhoels was murdered the JAC was shut down and

many of its members were arrested. After almost four years behind bars

fifteen committee members were tried and convicted of being Jewish

nationalists and of sending secret information about the USSR to their

contacts abroad. Thirteen were executed in August 1952. Led by Mikhoels,

the committee’s work was now seen to endanger the Soviet Union; it was

imperative for Stalin to bring about the demise of Mikhoels and the JAC.

Therefore, emotions did play a pivotal role in the relationship between

Stalin and the JAC; emotions guided the actions of both. The JAC worked

on Jewish matters during the war and published significant amounts of

material in Yiddish because many members had felt their culture slipping

through their fingers before the war. The committee could not sit idly by

while their Jewish brothers, who had endured great hardship during the war,

continued to experience this in the postwar years and while their collective

suffering was being excluded from Soviet history. It seems that Stalin

always held a hatred of Jews but after the war he began to fear Soviet Jews

because of the damage he believed that they could and would bring to the

Soviet Union. He responded to the perceived Jewish threat the way he

responded to most threats; with hate, aggression, violence and vengeance.

79

Bibliography

Primary

Books

Redlich, Shimon, War, Holocaust and Stalinism: A Documented History of

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