Postwar

But the Poles were able to resist Soviet pressure to conduct full-scale public witch-hunts on the Hungarian model. The decimation of the exiled Polish Communist Party, at Stalin’s hands in Moscow ten years earlier, had given Bierut a foretaste of his own probable fate if Poland too entered the vortex of arrests, purges and trials. The Poles were fortunate in their timing too: delays in preparing the dossier on Gomulka—he had refused to break under interrogation or sign a fabricated confession—meant that Stalin died and his henchman Beria was killed before a Polish trial could be mounted. Finally, some Soviet leaders undoubtedly judged it imprudent in these early years to tear the Polish Communist leadership apart in full public view.

No such inhibitions applied in Czechoslovakia, however, where the biggest show trial of them all was to be staged in Prague in November 1952. A major Czech show trial had been planned from 1950, in the immediate wake of the Rajk and Kostov purges. But by the time it was finally mounted, the emphasis had shifted. Tito was still the enemy and accusations of espionage for the West still figured prominently in the indictments. But of the fourteen defendants at the ‘Trial of the Leadership of the Anti-State Conspiracy Centre’, eleven were Jews. On the very first page of the charge sheet it was made abundantly clear that this was no accident. The ‘Trotskyite-Titoite bourgeois-nationalist traitors and enemies of the Czechoslovak people’ were also, and above all, ‘Zionists’.

Stalin was an anti-Semite and always had been. But until the Second World War his dislike for Jews was so comfortably embedded in his destruction of other categories of person—Old Bolsheviks, Trotskyites, Left- and Right-deviationists, intellectuals, bourgeois and so on—that their Jewish origin seemed almost incidental to their fate. In any case, it was a matter of dogma that Communism had no truck with racial or religious prejudice; and once the Soviet cause was attached to the banner of ‘anti-Fascism’, as it was from 1935 until August 1939 and again from June 1941, the Jews of Europe had no greater friend than Josef Stalin himself.

That last claim is only partly ironic. The European Communist parties, especially those of central and eastern Europe, counted significant numbers of Jews among their members. The Jews of inter-war Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Romania were an oppressed and disliked minority. Young, secular Jews had few political options: Zionism, Bundism,[54] Social Democracy (where it was legal) or Communism. As the most uncompromisingly anti-national and ambitious of these, Communism had a distinctive appeal. Whatever its passing defects, the Soviet Union offered a revolutionary alternative at a time when central and eastern Europe appeared to be facing a choice between an authoritarian past and a Fascist future.

The appeal of the USSR was further accentuated by the experience of war. Jews who found themselves in Soviet-occupied Poland after the Germans attacked in 1939 were frequently deported eastwards and many died of disease and hardship. But they were not systematically exterminated. The advance of the Red Army through Ukraine and Byelorussia into the Baltic States, Romania, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland and Germany saved the remaining Jews in these lands. It was the Red Army that liberated Auschwitz. Stalin most certainly did not fight the Second World War for the Jews; but had Hitler won—had the Germans and their collaborators remained in control of the territories they had captured up to the Battle of Stalingrad—millions more Jews would have been exterminated.

When the Communist parties took over in eastern Europe, many of their leading cadres were of Jewish origin. This was particularly marked at the level just below the top: the Communist police chiefs in Poland and Hungary were Jewish, as were economic policy makers, administrative secretaries, prominent journalists and Party theorists. In Hungary the Party leader (Matyas Rakosi) was Jewish; in Romania, Czechoslovakia and Poland the Party leader was not Jewish but most of the core leadership group were. Jewish Communists throughout the Soviet bloc owed everything to Stalin. They were not much welcome in the countries to which they had returned, often after long exile: neither as Communists nor as Jews. Experience of war and occupation had made the local populations even more resentful of the Jews than before (‘Why have you come back?’ one neighbor asked Heda Margolius when she escaped from the Auschwitz death march and made her way back to Prague at the very end of the war[55]); the eastern European Jewish Communists could be counted on, more perhaps than anyone else, to do Stalin’s bidding.

In the first post-war years Stalin displayed no hostility to his Jewish subordinates. At the United Nations the Soviet Union was an enthusiastic supporter of the Zionist project, favoring the creation of a Jewish state in the Middle East as an impediment to British imperial ambitions. At home Stalin had looked favorably on the work of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, formed during the war to mobilize Jewish opinion in the USSR and (especially) abroad behind the Soviet struggle against the Nazis. Soviet Jews, like many others under Moscow’s rule, fondly supposed that the more ecumenical mood of the war years, when Stalin sought and accepted help from any likely quarter, would translate into easier times after victory.

In fact, the opposite happened. Before the war had even ended Stalin, as we have seen, was exiling whole nations to the east and doubtless harbored similar plans for the Jews. As in central Europe, so in the lands of the Soviet Union: even though Jews had lost more than anyone else, it was easy and familiar to blame those same Jews for everyone else’s sufferings. The wartime invocation of the banner of Russian nationalism brought Soviet rhetoric a lot closer to the Slavexclusivist language of old-time Russian anti-Semites; this was certainly not to the regime’s disadvantage. For Stalin himself it represented a return to familiar territory, his own anti-Jewish instincts underscored by his observation of Hitler’s successful exploitation of popular anti-Semitism.

For various reasons it had always suited the Soviet purpose to downplay the distinctively racist character of Nazi brutality: the massacre of Ukrainian Jews at Babi Yar was officially commemorated as the ‘murder of peaceful Soviet citizens’, just as the post-war memorial at Auschwitz confined itself to general references to ‘victims of Fascism’. Racism had no place in the Marxist lexicon; dead Jews were posthumously assimilated into the same local communities that had so disliked them when they were alive. But now the presumptively cosmopolitan qualities of Jews—the international links from which Stalin had hoped to benefit in the dark months following the German attack—began once more to be held against them as the battle lines of the Cold War settled into place and international wartime contacts and communications became in Stalin’s eyes a retroactive liability.

The first victims were the Jewish leaders of the wartime Anti-Fascist Committeeitself. Solomon Mikhoels, its prime mover and a major figure in Russia’s Yiddish Theatre, was murdered on January 12th 1948. The arrival in Moscow of Israeli Ambassador Golda Meir on September 11th 1948 was the occasion for spontaneous outbursts of Jewish enthusiasm, with street demonstrations on Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur and chants of ‘Next Year in Jerusalem’ outside the Israeli legation. This would have been provocative and unacceptable to Stalin at any time. But he was rapidly losing his enthusiasm for the new State of Israel: whatever its vaguely socialist proclivities it clearly had no intention of becoming a Soviet ally in the region; worse, the Jewish state was demonstrating alarmingly pro-American sensibilities at a sensitive moment. The Berlin blockade had just begun and the Soviet split with Tito was entering its acute phase.

On September 21st 1948 Pravda published an article by Ilya Ehrenburg indicating clearly the change of line on Zionism. From January 1949 articles began to appear in Pravda attacking ‘cosmopolitans without a fatherland’, ‘unpatriotic groups of theater critics’, ‘rootless cosmopolitans’, ‘persons without identity’ and ‘passportless wanderers’. Yiddish schools and theatres were shut down, Yiddish newspapers banned and libraries closed. The Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee itself had been suppressed on November 20th 1948. Its remaining leaders, artists, writers and government functionaries were arrested the following month and kept in prison for three years. Pressured under torture to confess to an ‘anti-Soviet’ conspiracy, they were clearly being prepared for a show trial.

The security forces colonel who conducted the investigation, Vladimir Komarov, sought to broaden the charges out to encompass a large-scale Jewish conspiracy against the USSR directed from Washington and Tel Aviv. As he put it to Solomon Lozovsky, one of the prisoners: ‘Jews are low, dirty people, all Jews are lousy bastards, all opposition to the Party consists of Jews, Jews all over the Soviet Union are conducting an anti-Soviet whispering campaign. Jews want to annihilate all Russians.’[56] Such overt anti-Semitism might have been embarrassing even to Stalin, however; in the end the fifteen defendants (all Jewish) were secretly tried in the summer of 1952 by a Military Tribunal. All but one were executed; the sole survivor, Lina Shtern, received ten years in prison.

Meanwhile the anti-Semitic tide was gathering strength in the satellite states. In Romania, where a substantial part of the Jewish population had survived the war, an anti-Zionist campaign was launched in the autumn of 1948 and sustained with varying degrees of energy for the next six years. But the size of the Romanian