The Whisperers

down. A campaign against ‘formalism’ and other ‘decadent Western influences’ in Soviet music led to the official blacklisting of several composers (including Shostakovich, Khachaturian and Prokofiev) charged with writing music that was ‘alien to the Soviet people and its artistic taste’. In January 1947, the Politburo issued a decree against a History of European Philosophy (1946) by G. F. Aleksandrov, the head of Agitprop (the Central Committee’s Department of Agitation and Propaganda), accusing the book of having undervalued the Russian contribution to the Western philosophical tradition. Aleksandrov was soon removed from his post. Later that year, in July 1947, the Central Committee published an ominous letter censuring the scientists Nina Kliueva and her husband Grigorii Roskin for ‘obeisances and servility before foreign and reactionary bourgeois Western culture unworthy of our people’. The scientists had been accused of giving information about their cancer research to the Americans during a tour of the USA in 1946. On their return they were dragged before an ‘honour court’, a newly founded institution to examine acts of an anti-patriotic nature in the Soviet establishment, where they were made to answer hostile questions before 800 spectators.55

As the Cold War intensified, fear of foreigners took hold of society. The American journalist Harrison Salisbury recalls returning to Moscow as a foreign correspondent in 1949. None of the Russians he had known from his previous stay in 1944 would acknowledge him. He wrote to his old acquaintances Ehrenburg and Simonov, but not even they replied to him. In 1944, it seemed to Salisbury, the country had been poor, but, compared with the 1930s, there was a new mood of freedom and a buoyant atmosphere that arose from the people’s hopes for victory. By contrast, in 1949 the country had reverted to a state of fear, and there was a

complete severance of any kind of ordinary human relations between Russians and foreigners which, in turn, simply reflected the impressive xenophobia of the Soviet government and the degree to which they had made it plain to all Russians that the most certain, if not the quickest, way to obtain a one-way ticket to Siberia or places even more distant lay in having anything to do with a foreigner.

The briefest of contacts with foreigners could lead to arrest for espionage. The Soviet jails were filled with people who had been on trips abroad. In February 1947, a law was passed to outlaw marriages between Soviet citizens and foreigners. Police kept watch over hotels, restaurants and foreign embassies, on the lookout for Soviet girls who met with foreign men.56

After the foundation of Israel, in May 1948, and its alignment with the USA in the Cold War, the 2 million Soviet Jews, who had always remained loyal to the Soviet system, were portrayed by the Stalinist regime as a potential fifth column. Despite his personal dislike of Jews, Stalin had been an early supporter of a Jewish state in Palestine, which he had hoped to turn into a Soviet satellite in the Middle East. But as the leadership of the emerging state proved hostile to approaches from the Soviet Union, Stalin became increasingly afraid of pro-Israeli feeling among the Soviet Jews. His fears intensified as a result of Golda Meir’s arrival in Moscow in the autumn of 1948 as the first Israeli ambassador to the USSR. Everywhere she went she was cheered by crowds of Soviet Jews. On her visit to a Moscow synagogue on Yom Kippur (13 October), thousands of people lined the streets, many of them shouting ‘Am Yisroel chai’ (‘The People of Israel live!’) – a traditional affirmation of national renewal to Jews throughout the world but to Stalin a dangerous sign of ‘bourgeois Jewish nationalism’ that subverted the authority of the Soviet state.57

The enthusiastic reception of Meir prompted Stalin to step up the anti-Jewish campaign that had in fact been underway for many months. In January 1948, Solomon Mikhoels, the director of the Jewish Theatre in Moscow and the leader of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (JAFC), was killed in a car accident arranged by the MVD. The JAFC had been established in 1942 to attract Western Jewish aid for the Soviet war effort, but for many of the Soviet Jews who had joined it, among them leading writers, artists, musicians, actors, historians and scientists, its broader aim was to encourage Jewish culture in the USSR. The immediate post-war years were relatively favourable for this goal. In 1946, Mikhoels was awarded the Stalin Prize. Jewish plays were often broadcast on the radio. The JAFC developed a major project to commemorate the Nazi destruction of the Soviet Jews: a collection of documents edited by Vasily Grossman and Ilia Ehrenburg known as The Black Book. Stalin had hoped to use the JAFC to curry favour with the nascent Jewish state in the Middle East. But as it became clear that the new state would more likely be allied to the USA, he changed his attitude. The MGB was instructed to build up a case against the JAFC as an ‘anti-Soviet nationalist organization’. The publication of The Black Book was postponed indefinitely. After the murder of Mikhoels, the Jewish Theatre was closed down. In December 1948, over a hundred JAFC members were arrested, tortured to confess to their ‘anti-Soviet activities’ and executed or sent to labour camps.58

In the Soviet literary world the assault against the Jews took the form of a campaign against ‘cosmopolitans’. The term was first coined by the nineteenth-century literary critic Vissarion Belinsky to refer to writers (‘rootless cosmopolitans’) who lacked or rejected national character. It reappeared in the war years, when Russian nationalism and anti-Jewish feelings were both on the rise. For example, in November 1943, Fadeyev attacked the Jewish writer Ehrenburg for coming from ‘that circle of the intelligentsia that understands internationalism in a vulgar cosmopolitan sense and fails to overcome the servile admiration of everything foreign’.59 After 1945, the term appeared with increasing regularity in the Soviet literary press.

The campaign against the ‘cosmopolitans’ began when Fadeyev forwarded a letter he had received from an obscure journalist (Natalia Begicheva) to Stalin on 10 December 1948. Originally written as a denunciation to the MVD, the letter claimed that there was a group of ‘enemies’ at work within the literary establishment, and cited as the leaders of this ‘anti-patriotic group’ seven critics and writers, all but one of them Jewish. Under pressure from Stalin, Fadeyev made a speech in the Writers’ Union on 22 December. He attacked a group of theatre critics, naming four of the six Jews denounced by Begicheva (Altman, Borshchagovsky, Gurvich and Iuzovsky), who, Fadeyev claimed, were ‘trying to discredit our Soviet theatre’. It was a relatively moderate speech: Fadeyev was apparently reluctant to play the role of Stalin’s henchman. Once a decent man, Fadeyev had been reduced to a trembling alcoholic by the moral compromises he had been forced to make. Stalin kept up the pressure, enlisting Pravda to attack Fadeyev for not being vigilant enough against the ‘cosmopolitans’, and putting rumours out that he was about to be replaced as the leader of the Writers’ Union. Unable to resist any longer, Fadeyev gave his endorsement to an anonymous article in Pravda on 29 January 1949 (‘About One Anti-Patriotic Group’) which, in language strongly reminiscent of the rhetoric of the Great Terror, denounced several theatre critics as ‘rootless cosmopolitans’ and accused them of fomenting a ‘bourgeois’ literary conspiracy to sabotage the healthy principles of ‘national pride’ in Soviet literature.60 All the critics named were Jews. The article was almost certainly written by the Party hack and Pravda journalist David Zaslavsky. A former Menshevik and active Zionist until he joined the Bolsheviks in 1921, Zaslavsky had written several hatchet jobs for Stalin to expiate his sins and expedite his rise into the Soviet elite.*

Fadeyev at the Writers’ Union, 22 December 1948. Far left: Simonov. Next to him: Ehrenburg. The banner under the portrait reads: ‘Glory to the Great Stalin!’

The Pravda article was soon followed by a series of attacks on ‘rootless cosmopolitans’ in the rest of the Soviet press. Stalinists competed with each other to denounce the ‘anti-patriotic groups’ which they claimed were undermining Soviet poetry, music, art and cinema.61 For the Jews named by these vicious articles, the consequences were harsh. Many lost their jobs, or were expelled from the Party or their union, effectively depriving them of their livelihood. Some were arrested. A few saved themselves by confessing their ‘mistakes’ or by distancing themselves from the ‘rootless cosmopolitans’. Of the theatre critics denounced by Fadeyev, only one man was arrested, Iogann Altman, the victim of an ugly article, filled with hatred and thinly veiled anti-Semitism, in the journal Soviet Art. ‘In the name of the Soviet people, we pronounce that the Altmans of this world pollute Soviet culture like living corpses,’ it declared. ‘We must get rid of their rotten stench to purify the air.’ Altman was denounced in the Writers’ Union by Anatoly Sofronov, a fanatical supporter of the anti-Semitic campaign and a major power in the Union during the long absences of the alcoholic Fadeyev. Expelled from both the