Bloodlands

In February 1953, the Soviet leadership was drafting and redrafting a collective Jewish self-denunciation, including phrases that might have come straight from Nazi propaganda. It was to be signed by prominent Soviet Jews and published in Pravda. Vasily Grossman was among those intimidated into signing the letter. In vicious press attacks, it suddenly emerged that his recently published novel of the war, For a Just Cause, was not patriotic enough. For a Just Cause was a vast novel of the Battle of Stalingrad, mostly within Stalinist conventions. (Now Grossman’s perspective changed. In its sequel, his masterpiece Life and Fate, Grossman would have a Nazi interrogator contemplate the future: “Today you’re appalled by our hatred of the Jews. Tomorrow you may make use of our experience yourselves.”) In the latest known draft of the letter, of 20 February 1953, the signatories were to affirm that there were “two camps,” progressive and reactionary, among Jews. Israel was in the reactionary camp: its leaders were “Jewish millionaires connected with American monopolists.” Soviet Jews were also to acknowledge that “the nations of the Soviet Union and above all the great Russian nation” had saved humanity and the Jews.⁵²

The letter condemned imperialism generally and the Jews of the doctors’ plot by name. In Stalinist terms, it could be read as a justification, or even an invitation, to a large-scale purge of Soviet Jews who were not sufficiently anti-imperialist. The Soviet citizens who were to sign the letter would have had to identify themselves as Jews (not all of them were seen as such, or saw themselves as such), and as leaders of a community that was clearly in danger. Ilya Ehrenburg, like Grossman a Soviet writer of Jewish origin, had allowed Stalin to sign his name over polemical articles about Israel. Now, however, he hesitated to endorse such a document. He wrote a disingenuous letter to Stalin, asking him what to do. He mounted the same sort of defense as had Berman and the Polish-Jewish communists a few years earlier: since Jews are not a nation, and we personally are loyal communists, how can we take part in a campaign against ourselves as representatives of some collective national entity known as Jewry?⁵³

Stalin never replied. He was found in a coma on 1 March 1953 and died four days later. What Stalin had wanted can only be guessed; he might not have been entirely sure himself; he might have been awaiting the response of Soviet society to the first probes. Plagued by mortality and doubts about the succession, worried by the influence of Jews in the Soviet system, and fighting a Cold War against a powerful enemy that he understood only dimly, he turned to the traditional means of self-defense: trials and purges. Judging by the rumors circulating at the time, Soviet citizens had no trouble imagining the possible outcomes: doctors would have been show-tried with Soviet leaders who were their supposed allies; remaining Jews would have been purged from the state police and the armed forces; the thirty-five thousand Soviet Jewish doctors (and perhaps scientists as well) might have been deported to camps; and perhaps even the Jewish people as such would have been subject to forced removal or even mass shootings.⁵⁴

Such an action, had it taken place, would have been one more in a series of national operations and ethnic deportations, which had begun in 1930 with the Poles and then continued through the Great Terror and during and after the Second World War. All of this would have been in line with Stalin’s previous practice, and would have fit a traditional logic. The national minorities to be feared and punished were those with apparent connections to the non-Soviet world. Though it had brought death to 5.7 million Jews, the war had also contributed to the establishment of a Jewish national homeland, beyond the reach of Stalin. Like the enemy nations of the 1930s, the Jews now had reasons for grievance inside the Soviet Union (four years of purges and official antiSemitism), an external protector outside the Soviet Union (Israel), and a role to play in an international struggle (led by the United States). The precedents were clear and the logic was known. But Stalinism was coming to an end.

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Taking into account all the trials in the Soviet Union and eastern Europe, and all the people who died in police custody, Stalin killed no more than a few dozen Jews in these last years of his life. If he did indeed want one final national terror operation, which is far from clear, he was unable to see it to completion. It is tempting to imagine that only his death prevented this outcome, that the Soviet Union was hurtling toward another national purge on the scale of the 1930s, but the evidence is very mixed. Stalin’s own actions were surprisingly hesitant, and the reactions of his organs of power slow.

Stalin was not the master of his country in the 1950s as he was in the 1930s, and it was no longer the same country. He had become more a cult than a personality. He visited no factories, farms, or government offices after the Second World War, and made only three public speeches between 1946 and 1953. By 1950 Stalin no longer led the Soviet Union as a lone tyrant, as he had for most of the previous fifteen years. In the 1950s the key members of the politburo met regularly during his long absences from Moscow, and had their own networks of clients in the Soviet bureaucracies. Like the Great Terror of 1937–1938, a mass death purge of Jews would have created possibilities for upward mobility in Soviet society generally. But it was not at all clear that Soviet citizens, antiSemitic though many of them certainly were, would have wanted such an opportunity at such a price.⁵⁵

What was most striking was the fussiness of it all. During the Great Terror, Stalin’s suggestions were transformed into orders, the orders into quotas, the quotas into corpses, the corpses into numbers. Nothing of the kind happened in the Jewish case. Though Stalin spent much of the last five years of his life preoccupied with Soviet Jews, he was unable to find the security chief who could make the right kind of case. In the old days, Stalin rid himself of security chiefs after they had completed some sort of mass action, and then blamed them for its excesses. Now officers of the MGB, perhaps understandably, seemed hesitant to commit the excesses in the first place. First Stalin had Abakumov work the case, although Lavrenty Beria was in overall charge of state security. Then he let Abakumov be denounced by Riumin, who in his turn fell in November 1952. Riumin’s successor had a heart attack on his first day on the job. Finally the investigation was taken up by S. A. Goglidze, a client of Beria.⁵⁶

Stalin had lost his once total power to draw people into his fictitious world. He found himself threatening security chiefs, rather than instructing them. His subordinates understood that Stalin wanted confessions and coincidences that could be presented as proof. But they were constantly hindered by a certain attention to bureaucratic propriety and even, in some measure, to law. The judge who sentenced the members of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee advised the defendants of their right to appeal. In the persecutions of Soviet Jews, security chiefs sometimes had trouble making their subordinates—and, perhaps most important, the defendants— understand what was expected of them. Interrogations, though brutal, did not always produce the kind of evidence that was needed. Torture, though it took place, was a last resort, and one upon which Stalin had personally to insist.⁵⁷

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Stalin was right to be concerned about the influence of the war and of the West, and about the continuation of the Soviet system as he had formed it. In the years after the Second World War, far from all Soviet citizens were eager to accept that the 1940s had justified the 1930s, that the victory over Germany had retrospectively justified the repressions of Soviet citizens. That, of course, had been the logic of the Great Terror at the time: that a war was coming, and so dangerous elements had to be removed. In Stalin’s mind, a coming war with the Americans likely justified another round of preemptive repressions in the 1950s. It is not at all clear that Soviet citizens were willing to take that step. Although many went along with the anti-Semitic hysteria of the early 1950s, refusing for example to see Jewish doctors or to take medicine from Jewish pharmacists, this was not an endorsement of a return to mass terror.

The Soviet Union lasted almost four decades after Stalin’s death, but its security organs never again organized a famine or a mass shooting. Stalin’s successors, brutal though they were, abandoned the practice of mass terror in the Stalinist sense. Nikita Khrushchev, who eventually triumphed in the struggle for Stalin’s succession, released most of the Ukrainian prisoners he had sent to the Gulag a decade before. It was not that Khrushchev was personally incapable of mass killing: he had been bloodthirsty during the Terror of 1937–1938 and the reconquest of western Ukraine after the Second World War. It was rather that he believed that the Soviet Union could no longer be run in the same fashion. He even revealed some of Stalin’s crimes in a speech to a party congress in February 1956, although he emphasized the suffering of communist party elites rather than the groups who had suffered in far larger numbers: peasants, workers, and the members of the national minorities.

East European states remained satellites of the Soviet Union, but none of them moved beyond show trials (the prelude to the Great Terror of the late 1930s) to mass killing. Most of them (Poland was an exception) collectivized agriculture, but never denied peasants the right to private plots. There was no starvation in the