Bloodlands

member, Kliment Voroshilov, was heard to exclaim: “Now we too have our own homeland!”¹¹

In late 1948 and early 1949, public life in the Soviet Union veered toward anti-Semitism. The new line was set, indirectly but discernibly, by Pravda on 28 January 1949. An article on “unpatriotic theater critics,” who were “bearers of stateless cosmopolitanism,” began a campaign of denunciation of Jews in every sphere of professional life. Pravda purged itself of Jews in early March. Jewish officers were cashiered from the Red Army and Jewish activists removed from leadership positions in the communist party. A few dozen Jewish poets and novelists who used Russian literary pseudonyms found their real or prior names published in parentheses. Jewish writers who had taken an interest in Yiddish culture or in the German murder of Jews found themselves under arrest. As Grossman recalled, “Throughout the whole of the USSR it seemed that only Jews thieved and took bribes, only Jews were criminally indifferent towards the sufferings of the sick, and only Jews published vicious or badly written books.”¹²

The Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee was formally dissolved in November 1948, and more than a hundred Jewish writers and activists were arrested. The writer Der Nister, for example, was arrested in 1949, and died in police custody the following year. His novel The Family Mashber contained a vision that now seemed prophetic, as Soviet practices seemed to converge with Nazi models: “a heavily laden freight train with a long row of uniformly red cars, its black wheels rolling along, all turning at the same speed while seeming to be standing still.” Jews across the Soviet Union were in a state of distress. The MGB reported the anxieties of the Jews in Soviet Ukraine, who understood that the policy must come from the top, and worried that “no one can say what form this is going to take.” Only five years had passed since the end of the German occupation. For that matter, only eleven years had passed since the end of the Great Terror.¹³

Soviet Jews now risked two epithets: that they were “Jewish nationalists” and “rootless cosmopolitans.” Although these two charges might have seemed mutually contradictory, since a nationalist is someone who emphasizes his roots, within a Stalinist logic they could function together. Jews were “cosmopolitans” in that their attachment to Soviet culture and the Russian language was supposedly insincere. They could not be counted upon to defend the Soviet Union or the Russian nation from penetration by various currents coming from the west. In this guise, the Jew was inherently attracted to the United States, where Jews (as Stalin believed Jews thought) could go and become rich. American industrial power was obvious to the Soviets, who used Studebaker automobiles to deport their own populations. Technological superiority (and simple ruthlessness) had also been on display at the end of the war in Japan, in the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

America’s power was visible as well during the blockade of Berlin in the second half of 1948. Germany was still occupied by the four victorious powers: the Soviets, Americans, British, and French. Berlin, which lay within the Soviet zone, was under joint occupation. The western Allies had announced that they would introduce a new German currency, the Deutschmark, in the zones they controlled. The Soviets blockaded west Berlin, with the evident goal of forcing west Berliners to accept supplies from the Soviets, and thus accept Soviet control of their society. The Americans then undertook to supply the isolated city by air, which Moscow claimed could never work. In May 1949, the Soviets had to give up the blockade. The Americans, along with the British, proved capable of supplying thousands of tons of supplies by air every day. In this one action, goodwill, prosperity, and power were all on display. As the Cold War began, America and Americans seemed able to do what none of Moscow’s previous rivals had: to present a universal and attractive vision of life. It was all well and good to lump the Americans with the Nazis as members of the same reactionary “camp,” but Jews (and others, of course) would find such an association implausible.

Soviet Jews were also called “Zionists,” in that they might prefer Israel, the Jewish national state, to the Soviet Union, their homeland. Israel after the war, like Poland or Latvia or Finland before the war, was a national state that might attract the loyalty of a diaspora nationality within the Soviet Union. In the interwar period, Soviet policy had first sought to support all nationalities in their cultural development, but then turned sharply against certain national minorities, such as the Poles, Latvians, and Finns. The Soviet Union could offer education and assimilation to Jews (as to all other groups), but what if those educated Soviet Jews, after the establishment of Israel and the triumph of the United States, sensed a better alternative elsewhere?

A Soviet Jew could appear to be both a “rootless cosmopolitan” and a “Zionist,” insofar as Israel, in the emerging Soviet view, was seen as an American satellite. A Jew attracted to America might support America’s new client; a Jew attracted to Israel was supporting Israel’s new patron. Either way, or both ways, Soviet Jews were no longer dependable citizens of the Soviet Union. So, perhaps, it appeared to Stalin.

Now that Jewishness and Jewish connections with the United States were suspect, Viktor Abakumov, head of the MGB, tried to find a way to make the former activists of the dissolved Anti-Fascist Committee into agents of American espionage. In some sense, the job was easy. The Committee had been created to allow Soviet Jews to speak to world Jewry, so its members could easily be called both Jewish nationalists and cosmopolitans. Yet this logic did not immediately seem to justify a mass terror action, or the model of the national operations of 1937– 1938. Abakumov found himself frustrated from above. Without Stalin’s express approval, he could not drag any truly important Jews into the plot, let alone begin anything like a mass operation.

During the national operations of 1937–1938, no member of the politburo had belonged to any of the targeted nationalities. Matters would be different for any prospective Jewish operation. In 1949, Lazar Kaganovich was no longer Stalin’s closest associate and no longer his presumed successor, but he was still a member of the Soviet politburo. Any claim of Jewish nationalist penetration of top Soviet organs (on the analogy of Polish nationalist penetration of 1937–1938) would have to begin with Kaganovich. Stalin refused to allow Kaganovich, the only Jewish politburo member, to be investigated. At this time, five of the 210 full and candidate members of the central committee of the Soviet communist party were men of Jewish origin; none of them was investigated.

Abakumov’s search for Jewish spies did reach the families of politburo members. Polina Zhemchuzhina, Molotov’s wife, was arrested in January 1949. She denied the charges of treason. In his one act of rebellion, Molotov abstained from the vote to condemn his wife. Later, though, he apologized: “I acknowledge my heavy sense of remorse for not having prevented Zhemchuzhina, a person very dear to me, from making her mistakes and from forming ties with anti-Soviet Jewish nationalists such as Mikhoels.” The next day she was arrested. Zhemchuzhina was sentenced to forced labor, and Molotov divorced her. She spent five years in exile in Kazakhstan, among kulaks, the kind of people her husband had helped to deport in the 1930s. It seems that they helped her to survive. Molotov, for his part, lost his position as commissar for foreign affairs. He had been appointed to the job in 1939, in part because he (unlike his predecessor Litvinov) was not Jewish, and Stalin had then needed someone with whom Hitler would negotiate. He lost the same job in 1949, at least in part because his wife was Jewish.¹⁴

Those people who were investigated were not very cooperative. When fourteen more or less unknown Soviet Jews were finally chosen to be tried in May 1952, the result was an unusual sort of judiciary chaos. Only two of the accused confessed to all of the charges during the investigations; the rest admitted only some of the charges or denied them all. Then, during the trial itself, every single one of them claimed to be innocent. Even Itzik Fefer, a police informant all along, and during the trial a witness for the prosecution, refused in the end to cooperate. Thirteen of the fourteen defenders were sentenced to death in August 1952 and executed. Although the trial created a precedent for executing Jews for spying for the Americans, it was of little political value. The people in question were too little known to arouse much interest, and their comportment was inappropriate for a show trial.¹⁵

If Stalin indeed wanted a spectacular Jewish affair, he would have to look elsewhere.

* * *

Communist Poland looked like a promising place for an anti-Semitic show trial, though in the end one never took place. The Jewish question was even more sensitive in Warsaw than in Moscow. Poland had been the home to more than three million Jews before the war; by 1948 it had been remade as a nationally homogeneous ethnic Polish state ruled by communists—some of whom were of Jewish origin. Poles were co-opted by formerly German property in the west and formerly Jewish property in the cities—the Polish language developed words meaning “formerly German” and “formerly Jewish,” applied to property. Yet while Ukrainians and Germans were deported from communist Poland, Jews were actually deported to Poland: about one hundred thousand from the Soviet Union. Poles could hardly fail to notice that the highest ranks