Stalin and His Hangmen: The Tyrant and Those Who Killed for Him

Stalin nevertheless surprised the world. On May 26, 1947, he abolished the death penalty, except for collaborators with the Germans. In no country has capital punishment been so often and so briefly abolished as in Russia: twice in the eighteenth century by the Empresses Elizabeth and Catherine, once, unofficially, by Tsar Alexander I, once by the provisional government in February 1917, and once in the 1920s. This time the state abstained from executions for nearly three years. The substitute sentence, twenty-five years’ hard labor, was imposed very frequently— nearly 37,000 sentences in 1948 as opposed to 12,000 in 1946—so that the mortality of those convicted of capital crimes actually rose, since around 3 percent of such prisoners died each year.

Jews and Cosmopolitans

BUT 1947 was to be the calm before the storm. Although Stalin had in 1931 pronounced anti-Semitism to be “like cannibalism” and he would continue to condemn it even up to his death, he nevertheless turned on the USSR’s Jews.

Stalin’s anti-Semitism was not like Hitler’s or that of the Tsar’s governors. It had no racial, let alone religious, basis and it took root slowly. The Leninists he had exterminated were Leninists first and Jews second, but Stalin’s rise to power was interpreted by the Russians who took control of party and secret police as the repression of a Jewish cabal. When Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Radek were ousted and then killed, the party was Aryanized; when Iagoda was replaced by Ezhov and Beria, the NKVD too was purged of Jews. For Stalin Jews became associated with polyglot intellectuals who resisted political direction. After Hitler, Stalin began to suspect them as internationally recognized martyrs, a people who might seek protection from the whole world, not just from the USSR. Once the State of Israel emerged and the Jews of the USSR acquired an alternative homeland, Zionism became a crime and all Jews suspects.

Stalin’s anti-Semitism showed itself in his personal life. His elder son, Iakov, and his daughter, Svetlana, both had liaisons with Jews. Iulia Meltser, Iakov’s wife, and Aleksei Kapler, Svetlana’s admirer, were made to suffer. The seventeen-year-old Svetlana was yelled at: “Couldn’t you find yourself a Russian?!” Svetlana’s first husband, Grigori Morozov, who introduced her to his friends, prominent Jews, was seized by the police in May 1947. The couple’s passports were replaced with new ones that canceled their marriage. Svetlana then married Zhdanov’s son in 1949, and Stalin told her, “Zionists used your first husband to trap you. . . . The whole older generation is infected with Zionism, and they’re teaching the younger generation.”

Some of Stalin’s in-laws, married to the Svanidzes and Alliluevs, whom he had shot, were Jewish. Other Alliluevs, Nadezhda’s sisters-in-law, were friendly with the critic Lidia Shatunovskaia, who was in Solomon Mikhoels’s circle. Stalin’s dislike of Jews was fed by fear that details of his private life would be leaked abroad, but above all by his hatred of any element that had bonds with foreigners. For Stalin, the Jews experienced no proper class struggle; even when they abjured their religion, their ethos and solidarity survived. Stalin had been ambiguous about exploiting the Holocaust even for purposes of propaganda. He had imprisoned and murdered Erlich and Alter, the Polish Jews who had wanted to rally Jews in Britain and America to the Soviet cause. He had been reluctant to let the only internationally known Soviet Jew, Solomon Mikhoels, accompany the Yiddish poet Yitzak Fefer to extract from American Jews $45 million toward the USSR’s war effort.

Even during the war, atrocities against Jews were rarely mentioned; the Nazis were portrayed as bent on exterminating all Soviet citizens. References to Jews were eliminated from the published text of a diary found on a German corpse in September 1941:

Stalin’s conversation with the Polish president, Sikorski, the ambassador to Moscow, Stanisław Kot, and General Anders on December 3, 1941, the day before Erlich and Alter were rearrested by Beria’s Colonel Leonid Raikhman, is also revealing:

Anders: I think I shall have about 150,000 men at my disposal, but a lot of Jews don’t want to serve in the army.

Stalin: Jews are bad soldiers.

Sikorski: The Jews joining the army include a lot of black-marketeers and smugglers. They’ll never make good soldiers. I don’t need that sort of people in the Polish army. . . .

Stalin: Yes, Jews are bad soldiers.¹³