by Paul Johnson
There was really no pause in Soviet anti-Semitism, even during the war. It was very marked in the Red Army. ‘Anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union’, a former army captain stated, ‘is rampant to an extent that it is impossible for anyone never having lived in that accursed country to imagine.’82 Towards the end of the war, some government departments, notably the Foreign Ministry, were largely cleared of Jews and no more Jews were accepted as trainees. The post-war attack, of which the murder of Mikhoels in January 1948 was a foretaste, began the same year in September. It was signalled by an Ilya Ehrenburg article in Pravda—Stalin often made Non-Jewish Jews the agents of his anti-Semitism, rather as the SS used the Sonderskommandos—denouncing Israel as a bourgeois tool of American capitalism. The Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee was disbanded, Aynikayt closed and the Yiddish schools shut down. Then began a systematic attack on Jews, especially writers, painters, musicians and intellectuals of all kinds, using terms of abuse (‘rootless cosmopolitanism’) identical with Nazi demonology. Thousands of Jewish intellectuals, including the Yiddish writers Perez Markish, Itzik Fefer and David Bergelson, were murdered, as was any Jew who happened to catch Stalin’s eye, such as Lozowsky. The campaign was extended to Czechoslovakia, where on 20 November 1952 Rudolf Slánsky, the Czech party general secretary, and thirteen other leading Communist bosses, eleven of them Jews, were accused of a Troskyite-Titoist-Zionist conspiracy, convicted and executed. Supplying arms to Israel in 1948 (actually on Stalin’s own orders) formed an important element in the ‘proof’.83 The climax came early in 1953 when nine doctors, six of them Jews, were accused of seeking to poison Stalin in conjunction with British, US and Zionist agents. This show-trial was to have been a prelude to the mass deportation of Jews to Siberia, as part of a Stalinist ‘Final Solution’.84
Stalin died before the doctors came to trial and the proceedings were quashed by his successors. The plan for a mass deportation came to nothing. But it was significant that anti-Semitism was not one of the aspects of Stalin’s behaviour Nikita Khrushchev denounced in his famous Secret Session speech. As first secretary in the Ukraine he shared the endemic anti-Semitism there and, immediately after the war, had stopped returning Jewish refugees from claiming their old homes. ‘It is not in our interests’, he stated, ‘that the Ukrainians should associate the return of Soviet power with the return of the Jews.’85 Indeed there were several post-war Ukrainian pogroms under Khrushchev’s rule. Once in power, he switched the thrust of anti-Jewish propaganda from spying to ‘economic criminality’, large numbers of Jews, their names prominently displayed, being convicted and sentenced to death in nine show-trials. He closed down many synagogues, their total falling during his rule from 450 to sixty. He permitted the publication, by the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian Soviet Republic, of the notorious anti-Semitic tract, Judaism Without Embellishment, by the Communist Rosenberg, Trofim Kychko. The Khrushchev era witnessed an outbreak of blood libels, anti-Semitic riots and synagogue burning.
There was a brief respite for Soviet Jewry after Khrushchev’s fall in 1964. But, following the Six Day War in 1967, the campaign was openly resumed and intensified. In some respects Soviet anti-Semitism was very traditional. The Soviet rulers, like early medieval societies, like the Spaniards until the late fourteenth century, employed Jews in the economy until sufficient non-Jews had acquired the skills to replace them. The top Jewish Bolsheviks were nearly all murdered in the 1920s and 1930s. Thereafter Jews remained over-represented in the bureaucratic elites but never at the top political level: like the court Jews, they were allowed to help but never to rule. Even in the 1970s a Jew occasionally got as far as the Party Congress—there were four in 1971 and five in 1976—and it was not unknown for a Jew to be on the Central Committee. But such men had to earn their jobs by violent anti-Zionism. In 1966 Jews accounted for 7.8 per cent of academics, 14.7 per cent of doctors, 8.5 per cent of writers and journalists, 10.4 per cent of judges and lawyers and 7.7 per cent of actors, musicians and artists. But in every case the percentage was being pushed down by party and bureaucratic action. Thus Jews provided 18 per cent of Soviet scientific workers in 1947, only 7 per cent by 1970. As under the Tsars, the squeeze was applied particularly at the university level. The number of Jewish students declined in absolute terms, from 111,900 in 1968-9 to 66,900 in 1975-6, and still more heavily relative to the population as a whole. In 1977-8 not a single Jew was admitted to Moscow University.86
Soviet anti-Jewish policy, like Tsarist—and even Nazi policy in the 1930s—showed some confusions and contradictions. There were conflicting desires to use and exploit the Jews, to keep them prisoners, and also to expel them, the common factor in both cases being an anxiety to humiliate. Thus in 1971 Brezhnev decided to open the gates, and during the next decade 250,000 Jews were allowed to escape. But with every increase in emigration there was a sharp rise in trials of Jews, and the actual exit visa procedure itself was made as complex, difficult and shameful as possible. The need for a character-reference from the applicant’s place of work often led to a sort of show-trial there, in which the Jew was publicly discussed, condemned and then dismissed. So he was often jobless, penniless and liable to be gaoled for ‘parasitism’ long before the visa was granted.87
The exit procedures became more onerous in the 1980s, recalling the labyrinthine complexities of Tsarist legislation. Fewer visas were granted and it became common for a family to wait five or even ten years for permission to leave. The procedure could be summarized as follows. The applicant had first to get a visov, a legally attested invitation from a near-relative living in Israel, with an Israeli government guarantee to issue an entry visa. The visov entitled him to go to the Emigration Office and be issued with two questionnaires for each adult member of the family. The applicant filled these in, then added the following: an autobiography, six photographs, copies of university or other diplomas, a birth certificate for each member of the family, a marriage certificate if married, and, where parents, wife or husband were dead, the appropriate death certificates; a certificate showing possession of a legal residence; an officially certificated letter from any member of the family being left behind; a certificate from their place of work or, if not working, from the House Management Office of their place of residence; and a fee of 40 roubles (about $60). When all these had been handed in, the decision whether or not to grant a visa took several months. If a visa were granted (but not yet issued), the applicant had then to resign from work (if not already dismissed); get an official estimate of the cost of repairing his flat; pay the estimate; pay 500 roubles a head ($750) as a penalty for giving up Soviet citizenship; surrender his passport, Army Registration Card, employment record book and his flat-clearance certificate; and pay a further 200 roubles ($300) for the visa itself. Applicants refused a visa had the right to apply again at six-month intervals.88
The Soviet campaign against the Jews, after 1967 a permanent feature of the system, was itself conducted under the code-name of anti-Zionism, which became a cover for every variety of anti-Semitism. Soviet anti-Zionism, a product of internal divisions within the east European Jewish left, was in turn grafted on to Leninist anti-imperialism. At this point we need to retrace our steps a little, in order to show that the Leninist theory of imperialism, like Marx’s theory of capitalism, had its roots in anti-Semitic conspiracy theory.
The theory arose from the development of South Africa from the 1860s onwards, the outstanding example of the application of large-scale capital to transform a primitive into a modern economy. South Africa had been a rural backwater until the discovery of the diamond fields of Kimberley in the 1860s, followed by the goldfields of the Rand twenty years later, opened up its interior and mineral wealth. What made South Africa different was the use of a new institution, the mining finance house, to concentrate claims and to raise and deploy enormous capital sums in high-technology deep mining. The institution itself was invented by an Englishman, Cecil Rhodes. But Jews had always been involved in precious stones (espe
cially diamonds) and bullion, and they played a notable part both in the South African deep-level mines and in the financial system which raised the capital to sink them.89 Such men as Alfred Beit, Barney Barnato, Louis Cohen, Lionel Phillips, Julius Wehrner, Solly Joel, Adolf Goertz, George Albu and Abe Bailey turned South Africa into the world’s largest and richest mining economy. A second generation of mining financiers, led by Ernest Oppenheimer, consolidated and expanded the achievement.90
The rapid fortunes made (and sometimes lost) on the Rand by Jews aroused great jealousy and resentment. Among their critics was the left-wing polemicist J. A. Hobson, who went out to South Africa to cover the outbreak of the Boer War in 1899 for the Manchester Guardian. Hobson regarded the Jew as ‘almost devoid of social morality’, possessing a ‘superior calculating intellect, which is a national heritage’ allowing him ‘to take advantage of every weakness, folly and vice of the society in which he lives’.91 In South Africa he was shocked and angered by what he saw as the ubiquitous activity of Jews. The official figures, he wrote, stated there were only 7,000 Jews in Johannesburg but ‘The shop fronts and business houses, the market place, the saloons, the “stoops” of the smart suburban houses are sufficient to convince one of the large presence of the chosen people.’ He was particularly disgusted to find that the stock exchange was closed on the Day of Atonement. In 1900 he published a book, The War in South Africa: Its Causes and Effects, which blamed the war on ‘a small group of international financiers, chiefly German in origin and Jewish by race’. British troops were fighting and dying ‘in order to place a small international oligarchy of mine-owners and speculators in power in Pretoria’. ‘Not Hamburg,’ he wrote in disgust, ‘not Vienna, not Frankfurt but Johannesburg is the new Jerusalem.’92
Hobson’s explanation of the origin of the war was false. The fighting, as was foreseeable, was disastrous for the mine-owners. As for the Jews, the whole of modern history proved them strongly pacific by inclination and interest, especially in their capacity as financiers. But Hobson, like other conspiracy theorists, was not interested in facts but in the beauty of his concept. Two years later he expanded his theory into a famous book, Imperialism: A Study, which revealed international finance capital as the chief force behind colonies and wars. His chapter, ‘Economic Parasites of Imperialism’, the heart of his theory, contained this key passage:
Those great businesses—banking, brokering, bill discounting, loan floating, company promoting—form the central ganglion of international capitalism. United by the strongest bonds of organization, always in closest and quickest touch with one another, situated in the very heart of the business capital of every state, controlled, so far as Europe is concerned, chiefly by men of a single and peculiar race, who have behind them many centuries of financial experience, they are in a unique position to control the policy of nations. No great quick direction of capital is possible save by their consent and through their agency. Does anyone seriously suppose that a great war could be undertaken by any European state, or a great state loan subscribed, if the house of Rothschild and its connections set their face against it?93
When Lenin came to write his own thesis on the subject, at Zurich in the spring of 1916, he complained of a shortage of books. ‘However,’ he wrote, ‘I made use of the principal English work on imperialism, J. A. Hobson’s book, with all the care that, in my opinion, this work deserves.’94 Hobson’s theory, in fact, became the essence of Lenin’s own. The result, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916), laid down the standard doctrine on the subject for all states under Communism, from 1917 to the present day. Leninist theory, in one form or another, likewise formed the attitudes of many Third World states towards imperialism and colonialism, as they acquired independence in the 1950s and 1960s.
Granted the theory’s anti-Semitic roots, it was not difficult to fit into it the concept of Zionism as a form of colonialism and the Zionist state as an outpost of imperialism. There were, it was true, the awkward historical facts of Israel’s birth, with Stalin acting as one of the principal midwives. These in themselves demolished the Soviet theory of Zionism completely. But like many other facts in Soviet history, they were buried and forgotten by the official propagandists. In any case the entire history of anti-Semitism demonstrates how impervious it is to awkward facts. That ‘Zionism’ in practice stood for ‘the Jews’ became quickly apparent. The 1952 Slánsky trial was the first occasion in the history of Communism that the traditional anti-Semitic accusation of a world-wide Jewish conspiracy, with the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee and the Israeli government constituting the modern Elders of Zion, was put forward officially by a Communist government—an ominous milestone. The reality behind the scenes was even worse. The Jewish Deputy Foreign Minister Artur London, sentenced to life imprisonment but released in the ‘Prague Spring’ of 1968, was then able to reveal the anti-Semitic fury of the chief prosecutor, Major Smole: ‘[He] took me by the throat and in a voice shaking with hatred shouted: “You and your dirty race we shall exterminate it. Not everything Hitler did was right. But he exterminated Jews and that was a good thing. Far too many of them managed to avoid the gas chamber but we shall finish where he left off.” ’95
From the early 1950s, Soviet anti-Zionist propaganda, growing steadily in intensity and comprehensiveness, stressed the links between Zionism, the Jews in general, and Judaism. ‘Judaic sermons are the sermons of bourgeois Zionists,’ announced a Ukrainian-language broadcast from Korovograd, 9 December 1959. ‘The character of the Jewish religion’, the Kuibyshev newspaper Volszhskaya Kommuna wrote on 30 September 1961, ‘serves the political aims of the Zionists.’ ‘Zionism’, wrote Kommunist Moldavia in 1963, ‘is inseparably linked to Judaism…rooted in the idea of the exclusiveness of the Jewish people.’96 Hundreds of articles, in magazines and newspapers all over the Soviet Union, portrayed Zionists (i.e. Jews) and Israeli leaders as engaged in a world-wide conspiracy, along the lines of the old Protocols of Zion. It was, Sovietskaya Latvia wrote, 5 August 1967, an ‘international Cosa Nostra’ with ‘a common centre, a common programme and common funds’. The ‘Israeli ruling circles’ were only junior partners in its global plots.97
In the twenty years after the 1967 Six Day War, the Soviet propaganda machine became the main source for anti-Semitic material in the world. In doing so it assembled materials from virtually every archaeological layer of anti-Semitic history, from classical antiquity to Hitlerism. The sheer volume of the material, ranging from endlessly repetitive articles and broadcasts to full-scale books, began to rival the Nazi output. Trofim Kychko’s book, Judaism and Zionism (1968), spoke of the ‘chauvinistic idea of the God-chosenness of the Jewish people, the propaganda of messianism and the idea of ruling over the peoples of the world’. Vladimir Begun’s Creeping Counter-Revolution (1974) called the Bible ‘an unsurpassed textbook of bloodthirstiness, hypocrisy, treason, perfidy and moral degeneracy’; no wonder the Zionists were gangsters since their ideas came from ‘the scrolls of the “holy” Torah and the precepts of the Talmud’.98 In 1972 the Soviet embassy journal in Paris actually reproduced parts of a Tsarist anti-Semitic pamphlet put out in 1906 by the Black Hundred, who organized the pre-1914 pogroms. In this instance it was possible to take action in the French courts, which duly found the publisher (a prominent member of the French Communist Party) guilty of incitement to racial violence.99 Some of the Soviet anti-Semitic material, circulated at a very high level, almost defied belief. In a Central Committee memorandum of 10 January 1977, one Soviet anti-Semitic expert, Valery Emelianov, claimed that America was controlled by a Zionist-masonic conspiracy ostensibly led by President Carter but actually under the control of what he called the ‘B’nai Brith Gestapo’. The Zionists, according to Emelianov, penetrated goy society through the masons, each one of whom was an active Zionist informer; Zionism itself was based on ‘the Judaic-masonic pyramid’.100
The keystone of the new Soviet fantasy-edifice of anti-Semitism was provided in the 1970
s, when the charge that the Zionists were the racist successors of the Nazis was ‘proved’ by ‘evidence’ that Hitler’s Holocaust itself was a Jewish-Nazi conspiracy to get rid of poor Jews who could not be used in Zionist plans. Indeed, it was alleged, Hitler himself got his ideas from Herzl. The Jewish-Zionist leaders, acting on orders from the millionaire Jews who controlled international finance capital, helped the SS and the Gestapo to herd unwanted Jews either into the gas ovens or into the kibbutzim of the Land of Canaan. This Jewish-Nazi conspiracy was used as background by the Soviet propaganda machine to charges of atrocities against the Israeli government, especially during and after the Lebanon operations of 1982. Since the Zionists were happy to join with Hitler in exterminating their own discarded people, wrote Pravda on 17 January 1984, it was not surprising that they were now massacring Lebanese Arabs, whom they regarded as sub-human anyway.101
These sinister developments in the anti-Semitic policy of the Soviet government were more than a reversion to traditional Tsarist practice, though they included most of the familiar Tsarist mythology about Jews. For one thing, Tsarist governments always allowed the Jews escape through mass emigration. For another, the Soviet regime had a record second only to Hitler’s in exterminating entire categories of people for ideological purposes. The equation of Jews with Zionism, a capital offence in Soviet doctrine, would make it the easiest thing in the world for the Soviet leadership to justify in ideological terms extreme measures against Russia’s 1,750,000 Jews, such as reviving Stalin’s 1952-3 plan to deport them en masse to Siberia, or even worse.