[Stalin’s] fear of western penetration [after World War II] featured even more strongly in the purge of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (JAFC). The JAFC was one of a number of anti-fascist organisations set up by the Soviets during the Great Patriotic War. Its job was to rally support for the USSR among Soviet Jews and among Jews abroad. The committee was chaired by Solomon Mikhoels, a famous actor and director, and included many prominent Soviet-Jewish artistes, intellectuals and scientists. The committee organised public rallies in Moscow, sponsored Yiddish publications, raised money abroad, and sought to highlight the plight of the Jews in the face of the Nazi onslaught. Within the Soviet Union it sought to encourage Jewish culture and identity, publicised the Nazi massacre of the Jews, and lobbied for the establishment of a Jewish Soviet Socialist Republic in the Crimea. As a result of their activities abroad committee members developed extensive connections with Jewish organisations, including Zionists working to establish the State of Israel. After the war Mikhoels argued for the development of the JAFC into a progressive Jewish organisation campaigning abroad in support of the Soviet Union. Within the communist party apparatus, however, various resolutions were tabled to wind the committee up after the war. The apparatchiks’ complaint was that while the organisation had played an important role during the war it had become too nationalistic and too Zionist. The committee, its critics argued, highlighted Jewish life in the USSR but not the culture of other nationalities, such as the Russians, and did not display a sufficient degree of Soviet patriotism.
The JAFC vigorously refuted these allegations, stressing its loyalty to the Soviet Union. In January 1948, however, Mikhoels was killed in Minsk, apparently as a result of a hit-and-run road accident but probably at the hands of the Soviet security forces. In March 1948 events took a further ominous turn with the submission of a report to Stalin by V.S. Abakumov, the head of the Soviet Security Ministry, stating that ‘the leaders of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, being active nationalists with pro-American leanings, in essence are conducting an anti-Soviet nationalistic campaign’. After providing extensive details of this alleged campaign Abakumov concluded by noting that his ministry had uncovered a number of American and English spies among recently arrested Jewish nationalists.
Despite this dire warning from his security chief, Stalin made no immediate move to close the committee down. Some analysts have suggested that the committee was protected by Zhdanov until his death in August 1948 but others have highlighted the restraining influence of Stalin’s own postwar alliance with Zionism.
After the war a de facto alliance developed between the Soviet Union and the nascent Israeli state. Although there was some sympathy for the calamity that had befallen European Jewry at the hands of the Nazis, the main Soviet motive was self-interest. The Soviets did not trust Arab nationalism, which they identified as being overly influenced by the British and Americans, and they saw Zionism as a useful counter to western influence in the Middle East.
Moscow’s preferred option for the settlement of the Palestine problem was the establishment of an independent, multinational state that would respect the interests of both Jews and Arabs. When it came to the crunch, however, the Soviets were prepared to vote for the partition of Palestine into Jewish and Arab states. Andrei Gromyko’s speech to the United Nations in May 1947 announcing the Soviet position was almost textbook Zionist propaganda:
During the last war, the Jewish people experienced exceptional sorrow and suffering . . . The Jews in territories where the Hitlerites held sway were subjected to almost complete physical annihilation . . . Large numbers of the surviving Jews of Europe were deprived of their countries, their homes, and their livelihood . . . Past experience . . . shows that no Western European state was able to provide adequate assistance for the Jewish people in defending its rights and its very existence . . . This . . . unpleasant fact . . . explains the aspirations of the Jews to establish their own state. It would be unjust not to take this into consideration and to deny the right of the Jewish people to realize this aspiration.
The foundation of Israel in May 1948 was quickly followed by the establishment of diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union. In September Tel Aviv’s first ambassador arrived in Moscow. Golda Meyerson (better known as Golda Meir who later became Prime Minister of Israel) reported home on 12 September that 20,000 people had celebrated the declaration of the State of Israel at a Moscow synagogue. On 6 October Meyerson reported that on Rosh Hashanah (Jewish New Year) huge crowds packed the Great Synagogue in Moscow and that in the street she was met by thunderous cheers and ‘cries’ in Hebrew. Other reports by her testify to the developing contacts between the Israeli embassy and members of the JAFC. In all probability it was these events that finally turned Stalin against the JAFC. Under no circumstances would he countenance independent political activity. The only displays of nationalism and patriotism allowed were those approved and sponsored by the Soviet state.
In November 1948 the Politburo finally resolved to disband the JAFC on the grounds that it was a centre of anti-Soviet propaganda that regularly submitted anti-Soviet information to foreign intelligence agencies. Although the resolution specified that ‘nobody should be arrested yet’ it wasn’t long before the leading members of the JAFC were rounded up. In the spring and summer of 1952 a secret trial was held of 15 JAFC officials and activists. Among those accused of Jewish nationalism, Zionism and espionage was S.A. Lozovskii, a former deputy commissar for foreign affairs, who had the misfortune to be given responsibility for the JAFC after the war, although he personally favoured winding up the committee. At the trial Lozovskii, whose political career as a Bolshevik included a spell as the head of the Comintern’s trade union section, retracted his confession and staunchly refuted the charges levelled against him. Lozovskii’s status and eloquence had its impact on the trial judge, Alexander Cheptsov, who attempted to get the investigation into the JAFC reopened. Even after he was pressured to sentence Lozovskii and 12 others to death (one of the accused had already died in prison, while another was found guilty and sentenced to three and a half years in a labour camp followed by five years in exile) Cheptsov allowed appeals for clemency – something that would have been unthinkable for a Stalinist judge to do in the 1930s.
One JAFC activist who got off relatively lightly was Polina Zhemchuzhina, [Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov’s Jewish wife. She was arrested along with all the others in January 1949 but Soviet investigators eventually decided to separate her case from the main JAFC trial and her punishment was a period of exile in Kazakhstan. When the issue of his wife’s expulsion from the party came up at the Politburo Molotov abstained, but he soon recanted and acceded to Stalin’s request that he divorce her. (The two were not reunited until after Stalin’s death.) Molotov’s punishment was his dismissal in March 1949 as Minister for Foreign Affairs but it was more of a sideways move than anything else. He continued to play a central role in the formulation of Soviet foreign policy and was placed in charge of a Politburo commission on foreign affairs. Molotov’s successor as Foreign Minister, former Deputy Foreign Minister Andrei Vyshinskii, frequently sought advice and input from his predecessor.
The purge and repression of the JAFC coincided with the onset of a Soviet domestic campaign against ‘rootless cosmopolitanism’ whose main theme was the necessity of combining proletarian internationalism with Soviet patriotism and a respect for Russian culture. Although not specifically aimed at Jews, the anti-cosmopolitan campaign had anti-Semitic connotations and took place in the context of virulent anti-Zionist propaganda that climaxed with a break in Soviet diplomatic relations with Israel in 1953. The campaign against Zionism and its alleged links with western imperialist sabotage and espionage activities within the USSR soon spread to the rest of the Soviet bloc. In November 1952, 14 former leaders of the Czechoslovak communist party, including its General Secretary, Rudolph Slansky, were tried publicly in Prague as members of an anti-state conspiracy with Zionist connections. Eleven of the 14 defendants, including Slansky, were Jewish. Three of the defendants received life imprisonment; the rest were executed, among them Slansky.
Stalin’s personal attitude towards the Jews is a matter of continuing controversy but the available evidence points towards Zhores Medvedev’s conclusion that he was not so much anti-Semitic as politically hostile to Zionism and Jewish nationalism, which he saw as threats to his power. Officially the Soviet state was opposed to all forms of racism, including anti-Semitism, and Stalin made many public statements to this effect. In his birthplace of Georgia there was no Jewish ghetto and the predominant tradition there was the assimilation of Jews, a policy Stalin favoured when he came to power in the USSR. Stalin was surrounded by Jewish officials, or officials with Jewish wives, and he continued to fête Jewish writers and artists even at the very height of the anti-Zionist campaign of the early 1950s. In December 1952 Stalin made the following highly revealing statement to the plenum of the Central Committee:
The more successful we are the more our enemies will try to damage us. Because of our great success our people have forgotten this and become complacent, thoughtless and conceited. Every Jew-Nationalist is an agent of American intelligence. Jew-Nationalists think that their nation was saved by the USA (there they can get rich, become bourgeois, etc). They consider themselves obligated to the Americans. Among the doctors there are many Jew-Nationalists.
As this quotation shows, Stalin’s political hostility to Zionism and Jewish nationalism tended to assume an ethnic dimension: some Jews were classified as enemies because of their politics but all Jews were politically suspect because of their race unless proven otherwise. This was evident in the ‘Doctors affair’ alluded to by Stalin – the last of the mythical conspiracies foiled by his security police.
The so-called ‘Doctors affair’ – some would call it a plot – began in July 1951 when a senior investigator of the Ministry of State Security, Lieutenant Colonel M.D. Ryumin, wrote to Stalin alleging that Dr Yakov Etinger – ‘a confirmed Jewish nationalist’ – had confessed that in 1945 he had used the cover of medical treatment to murder A.A. Shcherbakov, a much-loved member of the Politburo. Ryumin further stated that Etinger was involved in a broader terrorist conspiracy with a number of other doctors. Crucially, Ryumin claimed that his boss, Abakumov, had intervened during the interrogation of Etinger and closed the case. (Actually, Etinger had died during interrogation by Ryumin in March 1951 and it seems likely that he was attacking Abakumov as a means of covering his own back.)
Stalin responded by establishing a commission headed by Malenkov to investigate Ryumin’s allegations. Included among the commission’s members was Beria, Abakumov’s predecessor as Minister of State Security. The commission rapidly concluded that Abakumov was culpable. On 13 July 1951 the Central Committee issued a ‘closed’ letter to party organisations announcing that Abakumov had been removed from office and expelled from the party for failing to investigate Etinger’s confession. The letter further pointed out that in January 1951 the members of a Jewish anti-Soviet youth organisation had been arrested but Abakumov had hidden their terrorist plots from the government.
Abakumov was soon arrested and his ministry purged, with more than 40,000 people losing their jobs. In November 1951 state security officials submitted further reports to the Central Committee on the Doctors affair claiming that Zhdanov, who had died of heart failure in 1948, and other leading communists had been the victims of a murderous medical conspiracy. A year later this ‘plot’ scenario blossomed into a full-blown conspiracy theory. On 4 December 1952 the party Central Committee issued a declaration that a group of doctors working for British and American intelligence had conspired to use medical treatment to shorten the lives of leading members of the party and government. Only some of the accused doctors were identified as Jewish and the supposed conspiracy uncovered by the Central Committee was characterised as capitalist and imperialist rather than Zionist. However, when the plot was unveiled to the Soviet public by Pravda in January 1953 a distinctly anti-Jewish spin was put on the affair. The Pravda article, hand-corrected by Stalin prior to publication, claimed the doctors had been recruited to American intelligence via a Jewish bourgeois nationalist organisation and had received their instructions to assassinate Soviet leaders from Mikhoels, ‘the well-known Jewish bourgeois nationalist’.
Hundreds of Soviet physicians were arrested in 1952–1953. Among them was a core group of 37 doctors and their wives, including 17 Jews, who were implicated in the central conspiracy against the top Soviet leaders. Happily, all survived and were exonerated after Stalin’s death. The executed members of the JAFC were posthumously rehabilitated…
Jonathan Brent and Vladimir Naumov consider ‘The Doctors’ Plot: Stalin’s Last Great Criminal Conspiracy’ and paint a picture of a grand plot manipulated to the predetermined end of creating the conditions for a final cataclysmic confrontation in which all the Soviet dictator’s enemies would be eliminated. In other words, Stalin had in mind a re-enactment of the Great Terror of the 1930s; only this time he would finish the job. Brent and Naumov wax lyrical about Stalin’s abilities as a grand conspirator: ‘Stalin is Godot, absent from an empty landscape. We wait, we guess, we attribute motives, receive incomprehensible communications, but in the end he will not reveal himself, and there is no direct way toward understanding him as a “person”.’
This credits Stalin with a subtlety and foresight which he never possessed. What was actually revealed by the JAFC and the Doctors affairs was the extent to which Stalin remained liable to believe in criminal conspiracies directed against his power and the dysfunctional impact his political paranoia had on his own regime. Whilst the repressions frightened people into passivity and compliance they also resulted in the murder or imprisonment of some of the most talented and loyal servants of the system.
