Antisemitism or political purge? Stalin’s Jewish policies revisited

Abstract

ABSTRACT The persecution of Jews under Stalin’s regime has been widely taken as proof that antisemitism was an innate element of Stalinism. Reexamination of the tyrant’s Jewish policies, domestic and international, would however reveal that Stalin can hardly be defined as antisemitic. The political purge of Jews was predominately caused by his fear of the growing national sentiments of Soviet Jewry following the establishment of the State of Israel (to which he gave decisive support), and driven by his paranoiac desire for internal subservience and political conformity in the context of the early Cold War.