Bloodlands

As the pressure from the Soviet Union built, Berman finally allowed the security services to follow the anti- Jewish line in 1950. Polish Jews fell under special suspicion as American or Israeli spies. This was not without a certain awkwardness, as those building the cases against Polish Jews were sometimes themselves Polish Jews. The Polish security apparatus itself was purged of some of its Jewish officers. Because this often involved Jews purging other Jews, the relevant department of the security apparatus was informally called the bureau of “self- extermination.” It was directed by Jozef Swiatlo, whose own sister had left for Israel in 1947.³¹

Yet Berman, Minc, and Bierut held on, maintaining that they were the proper Poles, the proper communists, the proper patriots, both to an incredulous society and to a doubting Stalin. Although Jews, communists and otherwise, were forced to stifle the memory of the Holocaust, there was no public campaign in Poland in those years against Zionists and cosmopolitans. Making concessions and relying on the loyalty of his friend Bierut, Berman was able to maintain that in Poland the main danger came from the Polish, not the Jewish, national deviation. When in July 1951 Gomulka was finally arrested, the two security officers who came for him, as he likely remembered, were men of Jewish origin.

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In the years 1950–1952, as the Poles dragged their feet, the Cold War became a military confrontation. The Korean War sharpened Stalin’s concerns about American power.

In the early 1950s, the Soviet Union seemed to be in a much stronger position than it had been before the war. The three powers then presented as encircling the Soviet Union—Germany, Poland, and Japan—had all been substantially weakened. Poland was now a Soviet satellite whose minister of defense was a Soviet officer. Soviet troops had reached Berlin, and remained. In October 1949 the Soviet occupation zone of Germany had been transformed into the German Democratic Republic, a Soviet satellite ruled by German communists. East Prussia, the formerly German district on the Baltic Sea, had been divided between communist Poland and the USSR itself. Japan, the great threat of the 1930s, had been defeated and disarmed. Yet here the Soviet Union had not contributed to the victory, and so took little part in the occupation. The Americans were building military bases in Japan and teaching the Japanese to play baseball.³²

Even in defeat, Japan had changed the politics of east Asia. The Japanese incursion in China in 1937 had, in the end, only aided the Chinese communists. In 1944 the Japanese had mounted a successful ground offensive against the Chinese nationalist government. This made no difference to the outcome of the war, but it did fatally weaken the nationalist regime. Once the Japanese surrendered, their forces were withdrawn from the Chinese mainland. Then the Chinese communists had their moment, much as Russia’s communists had thirty years before. Japan in the Second World War played the role that Germany had played in the First World War: having failed to win a great empire for itself, it served as the handmaiden to a communist revolution in a neighbor. The People’s Republic of China was declared in October 1949.³³

Although in Washington Chinese communism looked like the continuation of a world communist revolution, it was ambivalent news for Stalin. Mao Zedong, the leader of the Chinese communists, was not a personal client of Stalin, as were many of the east European communists. Although Chinese communists accepted the Stalinist version of Marxism, Stalin had never exercised personal control of their party. Stalin knew that Mao would be an ambitious and unpredictable rival. “The battle of China,” he said, “isn’t over yet.” In making policy in east Asia, Stalin had now to ensure that the Soviet Union maintained its position of leader of the communist world. This concern arose first with respect to Korea, where a communist state had also just been established. Japan, which had ruled Korea since 1905, withdrew after the war. The Korean peninsula was then occupied by the Soviet Union in the north and the United States in the south. North Korean communists established a people’s republic in North Korea in 1948.³⁴

In spring 1950 Stalin had to decide what to say to Kim Il-Sung, the North Korean communist leader, who wished to invade the southern part of the peninsula. Stalin knew that the Americans considered Korea beyond the “defensive perimeter” they were constructing in Japan and the Pacific, because the secretary of state had said as much in January. The US Army had withdrawn from the peninsula in 1949. Kim Il-Sung told Stalin that his forces would quickly overcome the South Korean army. Stalin gave Kim Il-Sung his blessing for war, and sent Soviet arms to the North Koreans, who invaded the South on 25 June 1950. Stalin even dispatched several hundred Soviet Koreans from Soviet central Asia to fight on the North Korean side—the same people who had been deported by order of Stalin only thirteen years earlier.³⁵

The Korean War looked very much like an armed confrontation between the communist and capitalist worlds. The Americans responded quickly and firmly, sending troops from Japan and elsewhere in the Pacific, and were able to push the North Koreans across the original border. In September, Truman approved NSC-68, a secret and formal confirmation of the American grand strategy of containment of communism throughout the world—an idea formulated by George Kennan. In October, the Chinese intervened on the side of the North Koreans. Until 1952 the United States and its allies were making war against communist North Korea and communist China, with American tanks battling Soviet-made tanks, and American aircraft engaging Soviet-made fighters.

Stalin seemed to fear a broader war, perhaps a war on two fronts. In January 1951, Stalin called together the leaders of his east European satellites, and ordered them to build up their armies in preparation for a war in Europe. In 1951 and 1952, the troop strength of the Red Army doubled.³⁶

During precisely these years, in 1951 and 1952, the idea that Soviet Jews were undercover agents of the United States seems to have gained resonance in Stalin’s mind. Defied in Berlin, frustrated in Poland, and embattled in Korea, Stalin faced again, at least in his own increasingly troubled imagination, encirclement by enemies. As in the 1930s, so in the 1950s, it was possible to see the Soviet Union as the object of an international plot, masterminded no longer from Berlin, Warsaw, and Tokyo (with London in the background) but from Washington (with London in the background). Stalin apparently believed that a Third World War was inevitable, and reacted to what he saw as the coming threat much as he had in the late 1930s.

In some respects, the international situation could seem more threatening now than then. The Great Depression had at least brought poverty to the capitalist world. But by the early 1950s it seemed that the countries liberated by the Western powers would undergo a quick economic recovery. In the 1930s, the capitalist powers were divided against one another. As of April 1949, the most important of them were united in a new military alliance, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, or NATO.³⁷

Stalin found a way in July 1951 to turn his own security services against an imagined Jewish plot inside the Soviet Union. The narrative of the plot, as it emerged in the second half of that year, had two parts: Russians who might have been seen as anti-Jewish had been murdered, and their murders had been covered up by the Soviet security apparatus.

One of the supposed victims was Aleksandr Shcherbakov, the wartime propagandist who had claimed that Russian people were “bearing the main burden” of the war. He had overseen the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, and had purged newspapers of Jewish journalists at Stalin’s orders. The other was Andrei Zhdanov, Stalin’s purifier of Soviet culture, who had blocked the publication of the Black Book of Soviet Jewry. Their deaths were supposedly the beginning of a wave of Jewish medical terrorism, sponsored by American paymasters, which was to end only with the slaughter of the Soviet leadership.

One of the ostensible murderers was the Jewish doctor Yakov Etinger, who had died in police custody in March 1951. Viktor Abakumov, director of the MGB, had supposedly failed to report on this plot, because he was himself involved in it. In order to prevent his own role from being known, he had deliberately killed Etinger. Because Abakumov had killed Etinger, Etinger had been unable to confess to the full range of his crimes.³⁸

A first outline of these extraordinary claims was presented in a denunciation of Abakumov sent to Stalin by Abakumov’s MGB subordinate Mikhail Riumin. The choice of Etinger played to Stalin’s worries. Etinger had been arrested not as part of any medical plot but as a Jewish nationalist. By his clever initiative, Riumin had linked Jewish nationalism, Stalin’s recent anxiety, with medical murder, one of his traditional preoccupations. None of Riumin’s particular claims, of course, made very much sense. Shcherbakov had died the day after he had insisted, against doctors’ orders, on taking part in a Victory Day parade. Zhdanov, too, had ignored doctors’ orders to rest. As for Etinger, the Jewish doctor in question, he had been killed not by Abakumov but by Riumin himself, in March 1951. Riumin had exhausted Etinger by the unceasing interrogations known as the