Stalin and antisemitism

The accusation that Joseph Stalin was antisemitic is much discussed by historians. Although part of a movement that included Jews and rejected antisemitism, he privately displayed a contemptuous attitude toward Jews on various occasions that were witnessed by his contemporaries, and are documented by historical sources. In 1939, he reversed Communist policy and began a cooperation with Nazi Germany that included the removal of high profile Jews from the Kremlin. As dictator of the Soviet Union, he promoted repressive policies that conspicuously impacted Jews shortly after World War II, especially during the anti-cosmopolitan campaign. At the time of his death, Stalin was planning an even larger campaign against Jews. According to his successor Nikita Khrushchev, Stalin was fomenting the doctors' plot as a pretext for further anti-Jewish repressions.

Early years

Born in Gori, Georgia (then in the Russian Empire) and educated at an Orthodox seminary in Tiflis (Tbilisi) before becoming a professional revolutionary and a Marxist around the start of the 20th century, Stalin appears unlikely to have been stirred by antisemitism in his early years and met only a limited number of revolutionaries of Jewish origin during his first years of political activity.Pinkus, Benjamin (1990). ''The Jews of the Soviet Union: The History of a National Minority''. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 143–144. . Although active in the Bolshevik faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, he did not attend a party congress until 1905.

Although Jews were active among both the Social Democratic Bolshevik and the Menshevik factions, Jews were more prominent among the Mensheviks. Stalin took note of the ethnic proportions represented on each side, as seen from a 1907 report on the Congress published in the ''Bakinsky rabochy'' (''Baku Workman''), which quoted a coarse joke about "a small pogrom" (погромчик) Stalin attributed to then-Bolshevik Grigory Aleksinsky:

Not less interesting is the composition of the congress from the standpoint of nationalities. Statistics showed that the majority of the Menshevik faction consists of Jewsand this of course without counting the Bundistsafter which came Georgians and then Russians. On the other hand, the overwhelming majority of the Bolshevik faction consists of Russians, after which come Jewsnot counting of course the Poles and Lettsand then Georgians, etc. For this reason one of the Bolsheviks observed in jest (it seems Comrade Aleksinsky) that the Mensheviks are a Jewish faction and the Bolsheviks a genuine Russian faction, so it would not be a bad idea for us Bolsheviks to arrange a small pogrom in the party.

1917 to 1930

Although the Bolsheviks regarded all religious activity as counter-scientific superstition and a remnant of the old pre-communist order, the new political order established by Lenin's Soviet after the Russian Revolution ran counter to the centuries of antisemitism under the Romanovs.

The Council of People's Commissars adopted a 1918 decree condemning all antisemitism and calling on the workers and peasants to combat it.Pinkus, Benjamin (1990). ''The Jews of the Soviet Union: The History of a National Minority''. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. p. 85. . Lenin continued to speak out against antisemitism. Information campaigns against antisemitism were conducted in the Red Army and in the workplaces, and a provision forbidding the incitement of propaganda against any ethnicity became part of Soviet law. State-sponsored institutions of secular Yiddish culture, such as the Moscow State Jewish Theater, were established in Soviet Russia and the Soviet Union during this time, as were institutions for other minorities.

As People's Commissar for Nationalities, Stalin was the cabinet member responsible for minority affairs. In 1922, Stalin was elected the first-ever General Secretary of the party—a post not yet regarded as the highest in the Soviet government. Lenin began to criticize Stalin shortly thereafter.

In his December 1922 letters, the ailing Lenin (whose health left him incapacitated in 1923–1924) criticized Stalin and Dzerzhinsky for their chauvinistic attitude toward the Georgian nation during the Georgian Affair. Eventually made public as part of Lenin's Testament—which recommended that the party remove Stalin from his post as General Secretary—the 1922 letters and the recommendation were both withheld from public circulation by Stalin and his supporters in the party: these materials were not published in the Soviet Union until de-Stalinization in 1956.

After the incapacitated Lenin's death on 21 January 1924, the party officially maintained the principle of collective leadership, but Stalin soon outmaneuvered his rivals in the Central Committee's Politburo. At first collaborating with Jewish and half-Jewish Politburo members Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev against Jewish arch-rival Leon Trotsky, Stalin succeeded in marginalizing Trotsky. By 1929, Stalin had also effectively marginalized Zinoviev and Kamenev as well, compelling both to submit to his authority. The intransigent Trotsky was forced into exile.

When Boris Bazhanov, Stalin's personal secretary who had defected to France in 1928, produced a memoir critical of Stalin in 1930, he alleged that Stalin made crude antisemitic outbursts even before Lenin's death.

1930s

Stalin's 1931 condemnation of antisemitism

On 12 January 1931, Stalin gave the following answer to an inquiry on the subject of the Soviet attitude toward antisemitism from the Jewish News Agency in the United States:

National and racial chauvinism is a vestige of the misanthropic customs characteristic of the period of cannibalism. Anti-semitism, as an extreme form of racial chauvinism, is the most dangerous vestige of cannibalism.

Anti-semitism is of advantage to the exploiters as a lightning conductor that deflects the blows aimed by the working people at capitalism. Anti-semitism is dangerous for the working people as being a false path that leads them off the right road and lands them in the jungle. Hence Communists, as consistent internationalists, cannot but be irreconcilable, sworn enemies of anti-semitism.

In the U.S.S.R. anti-semitism is punishable with the utmost severity of the law as a phenomenon deeply hostile to the Soviet system. Under U.S.S.R. law active anti-semites are liable to the death penalty.Joseph Stalin
"Reply to an Inquiry of the Jewish News Agency in the United States".
''Works'', Vol. 13, July 1930 – January 1934. Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1954. p. 30.

Establishment of Jewish Autonomous Oblast

To offset the growing Jewish national and religious aspirations of Zionism and to successfully categorize Soviet Jews under Stalin's nationality policy, an alternative to the Land of Israel was established with the help of Komzet and OZET in 1928. The Jewish Autonomous Oblast with the center in Birobidzhan in the Russian Far East was to become a "Soviet Zion". Yiddish, rather than "reactionary" Hebrew, would be the national language, and proletarian socialist literature and arts would replace Judaism as the quintessence of culture. Despite a massive domestic and international state propaganda campaign, the Jewish population there never reached 30% (as of 2003 it was only about 1.2%). The experiment ground to a halt in the mid-1930s, during Stalin's first campaign of purges, as local leaders were not spared during the purges.

Great Purge

Stalin's harshest period of mass repression, the Great Purge (or Great Terror), was launched in 1936–1937 and involved the execution of over a half-million Soviet citizens accused of treason, terrorism, and other anti-Soviet crimes. The campaign of purges prominently targeted Stalin's former opponents and other Old Bolsheviks, and included a large-scale purge of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, repression of the ''kulak'' peasants, Red Army leaders, and ordinary citizens accused of conspiring against Stalin's administration. Figes, Orlando (2007). ''The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin's Russia''. New York: Metropolitan. pp. 227–315 . Although many of Great Purge victims were ethnic or religious Jews, they were not specifically targeted as an ethnic group during this campaign according to Mikhail Baitalsky, Gennady Kostyrchenko, David Priestland, Jeffrey Veidlinger, Roy Medvedev and Edvard Radzinsky.Edvard Radzinsky. ''Stalin'' (in Russian). Moscow, Vagrius, 1997.
available online
Translated version: "Stalin", 1996, (hardcover), 1997, (paperback) Ch. 24

German–Soviet rapprochement and the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact

During his meeting with Nazi Germany's foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop, Stalin promised him to get rid of the "Jewish domination", especially among the intelligentsia. After dismissing Maxim Litvinov as Foreign Minister in 1939, Stalin immediately directed incoming Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov to "purge the ministry of Jews", to appease Hitler and to signal Nazi Germany that the USSR was ready for non-aggression talks.

Antisemitic trends in Stalin's policies were fueled by his struggle against Leon Trotsky and his global base of support.Etinger, Iakov (1995). "The Doctors' Plot: Stalin's Solution to the Jewish Question". In Yaacov Ro'i, ''Jews and Jewish Life in Russia and the Soviet Union''. London: Frank Cass. , pp. 103–6.

In the late 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s far fewer Jews were appointed to positions of power in the state apparatus than previously, with a sharp drop in Jewish representation in senior positions evident from around the time of the beginning of the late 1930s rapprochement with Nazi Germany. The percentage of Jews in positions of power dropped to 6% in 1938, and to 5% in 1940.Gennady Коstyrchenko "Stalin's secret policy: Power and Antisemitism"("Тайная политика Сталина. Власть и антисемитизм" Москва, "Международные отношения", 2003)

Relocation and deportation of Jews during the war

Following the Soviet invasion of Poland, Stalin began a policy of deporting Jews to the Jewish Autonomous Oblast and other parts of Siberia. Throughout the war, similar movements were executed in regions considered vulnerable to Nazi invasion with the various target ethnic groups of the Nazi genocide. When these populations reached their destinations, work was oftentimes arduous and they were subjected to poor conditions due to lack of resources caused by the war effort.

After World War II

The experience of the Holocaust, which resulted in the murder of approximately six million Jews in Europe under Nazi occupation, and left millions more homeless and displaced, contributed to growing concern about the situation of the Jewish people worldwide. However, the trauma breathed new life into the traditional idea of a common Jewish peoplehood and became a catalyst for the revival of the Zionist idea of creating a Jewish state in the Middle East.

The Jewish Autonomous Oblast experienced a revival as the Soviet government sponsored the migration of as many as 10,000 Eastern European Jews to Birobidzhan in 1946–1948.Weinberg, Robert (1998). ''Stalin's Forgotten Zion: Birobidzhan and the Making of a Soviet Jewish Homeland''. Berkeley: University of California Press. pp. 72–75. . In early 1946, the Council of Ministers of the USSR announced a plan to build new infrastructure, and Mikhail Kalinin, a champion of the Birobidzhan project since the late 1920s, stated that he still considered the region to be a "Jewish national state" that could be revived through "creative toil."

Israel

From late 1944 onward, Joseph Stalin adopted a pro-Zionist foreign policy, apparently believing that the new country would be socialist and would speed the decline of British influence in the Middle East. Accordingly, in November 1947, the Soviet Union, together with the other Soviet bloc countries voted in favor of the United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine, which paved the way for the creation of the State of Israel. On May 17, 1948, three days after Israel declared its independence, the Soviet Union officially granted ''de jure'' recognition of Israel, becoming only the second country to recognise the Jewish state (preceded only by the United States' ''de facto'' recognition) and the first country to grant Israel ''de jure'' recognition. In the 1948 Arab–Israeli War, the Soviet Union supported Israel with weaponry supplied via Czechoslovakia.

Nonetheless, Stalin began a new purge by repressing his wartime allies, the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee. In January 1948, Solomon Mikhoels was assassinated on Stalin's personal orders in Minsk. His murder was disguised as a hit-and-run car accident. Mikhoels was taken to MGB dacha and killed, along with his non-Jewish colleague Golubov-Potapov, under supervision of Stalin's Deputy Minister of State Security Sergei Ogoltsov

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