Antisemitism in the Soviet Union
Following the 1917 February Revolution in Russia, all legal restrictions on Russian Jews were lifted. However, the previous legacy of antisemitism was continued and furthered by the Soviet state, especially under Joseph Stalin. After 1948, antisemitism reached new heights in the Soviet Union, especially during the anti-cosmopolitan campaign, in which numerous Yiddish-writing poets, writers, painters and sculptors were arrested or killed. This campaign culminated in the so-called doctors' plot, in which a group of doctors were subjected to a show trial for supposedly having plotted to assassinate Stalin. Although repression eased after Stalin's death, persecution of Jews would continue until the late 1980s.
History
Before the revolution
Under the rule of the tsars, Russian Jews were classified as inorodtsy, although Judaism was recognized as a legitimate religion. Most Jews were confined to the Pale of Settlement, and by the end of the 19th century, they numbered roughly five million. Within the Pale, they experienced prejudice and persecution, often in the form of discriminatory laws, such as restrictions on property rights and occupations. Despite a relaxation of some constraints in the 1860s as a result of the government reforms of Alexander II, by the end of the decade, antisemitism had acquired a systematic form. The conservative press blamed increasing radicalism on the Jews. Following the assassination of Alexander II in 1881, widespread pogroms targeted Jews in the Pale. Local officials enabled the pogroms or failed to stop them, and some of the perpetrators and victims believed that the pogroms were sanctioned at the highest level of government. Although the new tsar, Alexander III, viewed the pogroms as justified, he did not endorse popular violence. On the other hand, the right-wing press contributed to an atmosphere of sanctioned antisemitism.In response to this oppression, many Jews either emigrated from the Russian Empire or joined radical political parties, such as the Jewish Bund, the Bolsheviks, the Socialist Revolutionary Party, and the Mensheviks. There were also numerous antisemitic publications of the era which gained widespread circulation.
After the revolution
February Revolution and Provisional Government
The Russian Provisional Government cancelled all restrictions imposed on the Jews by the tsarist government, in a move parallel to the Jewish emancipation in Western Europe that had taken place during the 19th century abolishing Jewish disabilities.The Bolsheviks
The October Revolution saw the Bolsheviks take power. The breakdown of other Jewish groups after the revolution gave the Yevsektsiya more sway over Jewish communities which facilitated the destruction of traditional Jewish life, the Zionist movement, and Hebrew culture. In 1918, the Yevsektsiya was established to promote Marxism, secularism and Jewish assimilation into Soviet society, and supposedly bringing communism to the Jewish masses.In March 1919, Lenin delivered a speech "On Anti-Jewish Pogroms" where he denounced antisemitism as an "attempt to divert the hatred of the workers and peasants from the exploiters toward the Jews". The speech was in line with the previous condemnation of the antisemitic pogroms perpetrated by anti-Bolshevik forces during the Russian Civil War. In 1914, Lenin had said "No nationality in Russia is as oppressed and persecuted as the Jews".
However, pogroms continued during 1918-1920, carried out by both the Red and White armies. The Red Guard participation shocked Bolshevik leadership and tempered the expectations of a reduction of antisemitism. Russian historian Dmitri Volkogonov wrote that Lenin, despite his rhetoric, did not see antisemitic incidents in the Red Army as a major concern and did not call for the perpetrators to be punished.
In August 1919, Jewish properties, including synagogues, were seized by the Soviet government and many Jewish communities were dissolved. The anti-religious laws against all expressions of religion and religious education were being taken out on all religious groups, including the Jewish communities. Many rabbis and other religious officials were forced to resign from their posts under the threat of violent persecution. This type of persecution continued on into the 1920s.
Under Stalin
was elected General Secretary of the Soviet Union following a power struggle with Leon Trotsky after Lenin's death. Those who knew Stalin, such as Nikita Khrushchev, suggest that Stalin had long harbored negative sentiments toward Jews that had manifested themselves before the 1917 Revolution. As early as 1907, Stalin wrote a letter differentiating between a "Jewish faction" and a "true Russian faction" in Bolshevism. Stalin has been described as resorting to antisemitism in some of his arguments against Trotsky, who was a Russian of Jewish descent. Stalin's secretary Boris Bazhanov stated that Stalin made crude antisemitic outbursts even before Lenin's death.The official stance of the Soviet government under Joseph Stalin in 1934 was to oppose antisemitism "anywhere in the world" and claimed to express "fraternal feelings to the Jewish people", praising the Jewish contributions towards international socialism. Stalin adopted antisemitic policies which were reinforced with his anti-Westernism. Antisemitism, as historian and anthropologist Raphael Patai and geneticist Jennifer Patai Wing put it in their book The Myth of the Jewish Race, was "couched in the language of opposition to Zionism". Since 1936, in the show trial of "Trotskyite-Zinovievite Terrorist Center", the suspects, prominent Bolshevik leaders, were accused of hiding their Jewish origins under Slavic names.
On 3 May 1939, Stalin fired foreign minister Maxim Litvinov, who was closely identified with the anti-Nazi position. The move opened Stalin's way to close ties with the Nazi state, as well as a quiet campaign removing Jews in high Soviet positions.
After World War II, antisemitism escalated openly as a campaign against the "rootless cosmopolitan". In his speech titled "On Several Reasons for the Lag in Soviet Dramaturgy" at a plenary session of the board of the Soviet Writers' Union in December 1948, Alexander Fadeyev equated the cosmopolitans with the Jews. In this anti-cosmopolitan campaign, many leading Jewish writers and artists were killed. Terms like "rootless cosmopolitans", "bourgeois cosmopolitans", and "individuals devoid of nation or tribe" appeared in newspapers. The Soviet press accused cosmopolitans of "groveling before the West", helping "American imperialism", "slavish imitation of bourgeois culture" and "bourgeois aestheticism". Victimization of Jews in the USSR at the hands of the Nazis was denied, Jewish scholars were removed from the sciences, and emigration rights were denied to Jews. Stalin's antisemitic campaign ultimately culminated in the Doctors' plot in 1953. According to Patai and Patai, the Doctors' plot was "clearly aimed at the total liquidation of Jewish cultural life". Communist antisemitism under Stalin shared a common characteristic with Nazi and fascist antisemitism in its belief in a "Jewish world conspiracy".
Soviet Moldovan dissident Mikhail Makarenko, who left Fascist Romania in 1939 due to rising antisemitism, said that antisemitism in the USSR was strong, despite the Soviet propaganda efforts to portray the Union as a country with no racism.
Soviet antisemitism extended to policy in the Soviet Occupation Zone of Germany. As described by the historian Norman Naimark, officials in the Soviet Military Administration in Germany by 1947–48 displayed a "growing obsession" with the presence of Jews in the military administration, particularly in the Cadres Department's Propaganda Administration. Jews in German universities who resisted Sovietisation were characterized as having "non-Aryan background" and being "lined up with the bourgeois parties".
Scholars such as Erich Goldhagen have said that following the death of Stalin, the policy of the Soviet Union towards Jews and the Jewish question became more discreet, with indirect antisemitic policies over direct physical assault. Goldhagen wrote that despite being famously critical of Stalin, Nikita Khrushchev did not view Stalin's antisemitic policies as "monstrous acts" or "rude violations of the basic Leninist principles of the nationality policy of the Soviet state".
Some historians have said that Stalin conceived of a plan for the mass deportations of Jews right before his death in 1953. This came after a slew of antisemitism attacks and tension between the Soviet Union and Israel. While there is no written record of it, many have pointed out that Soviet leaders at the time reported on the plot and some Soviet accounts seem to reference a plan for mass expulsion. Despite this, some historians have cast doubt on the historicity of this plot, such as by pointing to the lack of written sources in declassified documents from Stalin's time.
Under Brezhnev
Antisemitism in the Soviet Union again peaked during the rule of Leonid Brezhnev, following Israeli victory in the 1967 Six-Day War. "Anti-Zionist" propaganda, including the film Secret and Explicit, was often antisemitic in nature. Many of Brezhnev's close advisors, most principally Mikhail Suslov, were also fervent antisemites. Jewish emigration to Israel and the United States, which had been allowed in limited numbers under the rule of Khrushchev, once more became heavily restricted, primarily due to concerns that Jews were a security liability or treasonous. Would-be emigrants, or refuseniks, often required a vyzov, or special invitation from a relative living abroad, for their application to be even considered by the Soviet authorities. In addition, in order to emigrate, one needed written permission from all immediate family members. The rules were often stretched in order to prevent Jews from leaving, and opportunities for appeal were rarely permitted. Substantial fees were also required to be paid, both to emigrate and as "reimbursement".Institutional racism against Jews was widespread in the Soviet Union under Brezhnev, with many sectors of the government being off-limits. Following the failure of the Dymshits–Kuznetsov hijacking affair, in which 12 refuseniks unsuccessfully attempted to hijack a plane and flee west, crackdowns on Jews and the refusenik movement followed. Informal centres for studying the Hebrew language, the Torah and Jewish culture were closed.
Immediately following the Six-Day War in 1967, the antisemitic conditions drove many Soviet Jews to seek to emigrate to Israel. A Jewish-Ukrainian radio engineer, Boris Kochubievsky, sought to move to Israel. In a letter to Brezhnev, Kochubievsky stated:
Within the week he was called in to the KGB bureau and without questioning, was taken to a mental institution in his hometown of Kiev. This was not an isolated incident; the aftermath of the Six-Day War affected almost all of the Jewish population within the Soviet Union. Jews who had been subject to assimilation under previous regimes now possessed a new sense in vigour and revival in their Jewish faith and heritage. On February 23, 1979, a six-page article was distributed throughout the cities of Moscow and Leningrad, which criticized Brezhnev and seven other individuals for being "Zionist". The article contained traces of deep-rooted antisemitism in which the anonymous author, a member of the Russian Liberation Organization, set out ways to identify Zionists; these included "hairy chest and arms", "shifty eyes", and a "hook-like nose".
A major stride was made in the United States in regards to helping the Soviet Jews on 18 October 1974, when Senator Henry M. Jackson, National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger, Senator Jacob Javits and Congressman Charles Vanik met to discuss the finalization of the "Jackson–Vanik amendment" which had been in limbo in the United States Congress for nearly a year. After the meeting, Jackson told reporters that a "historic understanding in the area of human rights" had been met and while he did not "comment on what the Russians have done there been a complete turnaround here on the basic points". The amendment set out to reward the Soviet Union for letting some Soviet Jews emigrate.
On February 22, 1981, in a speech lasting over 5 hours, Brezhnev denounced antisemitism in the Soviet Union. While Lenin and Stalin had expressed much of the same views in various statements and speeches, this was the first time that a high-ranking Soviet official had done so in front of the entire Party. Brezhnev acknowledged that antisemitism existed within the Eastern Bloc and saw that many different ethnic groups existed whose "requirements" were not being met. For decades, people of different ethnic, or religious backgrounds were assimilated into Soviet society and denied the right or resources for education or for the practice their religion, as they had previously done. Brezhnev made it official Soviet policy to provide these ethnic groups with these "requirements" and cited a fear of the "emergence of inter-ethnic tensions" as the reason. The announcement of the policy was followed with a generic but significant Party message;
While the issue of antisemitism seemed to have been raised casually and almost accidentally, it was very much calculated and planned, in line with usual Party practice. At this time, the Soviet Union was under global pressure to address many human rights violations that were taking place within their borders, and the statement responded to the inquiries of countries such as Australia and Belgium. While the Party seemed to be taking a hard stance against antisemitism, the fact remained that antisemitic propaganda had long been circulated in the Soviet Union, making immediate changes extremely difficult. Furthermore, Jewish organizations in Washington D.C. were calling attention to the problems of Soviet Jewry to American leaders.
Antisemitism, however, remained widespread both within and outside the Communist Party; antisemitic media continued to be published with the assent of the government, while antisemitic propaganda spread throughout cities in the Soviet Union during the late 1970s. Mikhail Savitsky's 1979 painting, Summer Theatre, depicted a Nazi extermination camp guard and Jewish prisoner grinning between a pile of Russian corpses.