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

During the war Solomon Mikhoels and his partner in the Jewish Antifascist Committee, the writer Shakhno Epshtein, boldly deplored anti-Semitism within as well as outside the USSR. The Soviet press omitted such outbursts. Soviet Germanophobia broadened into xenophobia; patriotism narrowed into Russian chauvinism. A stream of reports reached the party protesting that ethnic Russians were underrepresented in the arts, education, and medicine. What Ezhov had done in the NKVD was now done in every official sphere: Jews were restricted. For example, few documents state this, but most memories agree that from 1944 a ceiling, usually 10 percent, was set for admitting Jews to higher education.

Statistics of ethnic affiliation were kept at every level of Soviet society and leave no room for doubt that in the postwar period Stalin discriminated against Jews. In 1945 Jews held about 12 percent of the senior posts in the bureaucracy, the economy, the mass media, and education; by the end of 1951 they had less than 4 percent. By 1950 only 8 of over 1,100 delegates to the Supreme Soviet were Jewish. By the end of 1951 there was just one Jew among over 1,000 party secretaries.¹⁴ Wherever Soviet officials had contact with foreigners, as in the news agency TASS, Jews were dismissed. Ivan Maisky, former ambassador to London, awaited arrest. In Nazi Germany only a Goering could declare, “I decide who of my subordinates is a Jew.” In the USSR Jews were self-certified. Kaganovich declared he was a member of the leadership not the Jewish community; Litvinov declared himself an ethnic Russian.

Russian literary circles radiated schadenfreude at the discrediting of the Jews: Fadeev abolished the Jewish section of the Union of Writers as joyfully as he had created it. The censors pulped anthologies of Jewish poetry and books about Jews in the revolution. As in the 1930s, literary critics bore the brunt. A report prepared for Malenkov and Stalin in 1949 accused “an anti-patriotic bourgeois-aesthete group . . . only 15 percent Russians” of monopolizing criticism in literature and the theater.

In the 1890s, Russian writers had periodically grumbled that they were the victims of Jewish literary and theatrical critics. Even Anton Chekhov had confided to his notebook in 1897, “Writers like Leskov . . . cannot please our critics, because our critics are almost all Jews who don’t know the core of Russian life and are alien to its spirit, forms, humor.” In 1949 Sergei Vasiliev composed “Without Whom Can One Live Well in Russia,” a viciously chauvinist parody of a famous nineteenth-century poem by Nikolai Nekrasov, “Who Lives Well in Russia.” Vasiliev wrote of “twelve vicious eggheads of our Soviet criticism” and endowed them with typically Jewish names: Gurevich, Berstein, Finkelstein, Munblit, Holzmann. Vasiliev accused them of corrupting Russian literature with decadent and imperialist influences from such figures as James Joyce and Rudyard Kipling, and of supporting dubious Russian poets like Akhmatova and Pasternak. The parody ends with the Jews being taken by the ear and thrown out of literature “in the Russian way of Lenin and Stalin.” Vasiliev’s poem was not printed but was set in type and read out, after approval from state security officials, to a meeting of the Union of Writers.¹⁵

For some time Jews remained in the MGB, including Raikhman, Eitingon, and Grigulevich, but eventually they too would go.¹⁶ Had Jewish composers and filmmakers been purged, Russian music and cinema would have become a wasteland. The nationally important work of the Soviet Academy of Sciences and the conscience of some academicians also inhibited the anti-Semitic purge. In physics, the proportion of Jewish graduates had increased during the war from around 50 to 98 percent, and the atomic bomb project then exempted them from dismissal. Kaganovich and Mekhlis hung on to power, but their spheres of action were narrowed, and the Jewish wives of satraps such as Molotov, Andrei Andreev, and Stalin’s secretary Poskriobyshev were demoted, exiled, or shot, a fate that their husbands apparently accepted without protest.

In propaganda the USSR was still portrayed as the home of European Jews, or at least non-Zionist Jews. Odessa was in 1950 the last city in Europe where Yiddish could be heard on the streets. Stalin dithered. On the one hand, since his first treatise on the subject in 1913, Stalin had maintained that the Jews were not a nationality, since they had no homeland, and must therefore assimilate. On the other, he created on the Manchurian border an alternative Zion, an autonomous Jewish territory, Birobidjan, where he settled a few thousand token Jews.