Stalin's Secret Pogrom: The Postwar Inquisition of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee by Joshua Rubenstein , Vladimir P. Naumov , Laura Esther Wolfson (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 573 writing a full-length study of the subject-matter of his Epilogue: how the subject of the Polish and Warsaw uprisings have been dealt with through out the varied political and intellectual circumstances of the post-1945 Polish republic. Indeed, nothing better sums up how far that subject tended to be swept under the carpet of Polish public life than the fact that theMonument to theJewish Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of April 1943 was erected in 1948, whereas the quite dramatic one to the Warsaw Uprising of 1944 was not unveiled until 1August 1989 on Krasinski Square on the edge of the Old City. London John P. Fox Rubenstein, Joshua and Naumov, Vladimir P. (eds). Stalin's SecretPogrom:The Postwar Inquisition of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee. Abridged edition. Translated by Laura Esther Wolfson. Yale University Press in associa tionwith theUnited States Holocaust Memorial Museum, New Haven, CT and London, 2005. xxvii + 415 pp. Illustrations.Notes. Index. ?14.99 (paperback). Under the impact of the German invasion and his new alliance with the Western powers, Stalin needed to fabricate a more acceptable Soviet im age for the changed circumstances. He dissolved Comintern with its slogan of world-revolution; he soft-pedalled Communist propaganda in favour of Russian patriotism; he re-established the Patriarch and re-opened churches to raise themorale of the largely peasant Red Army and, exploiting Ameri can-Jewish outrage at the Nazis' treatment of Europe's Jews, he created the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee JAC), headed by the actor/producer Solomon Mikhoels. In 1943,Mikhoels and fellow-JACmember, the poet Isaac Fefer (a KGB agent taskedwith making sureMikhoels didn't defect), toured themajor cities of theAmerican northeast, meeting such celebrities as Albert Einstein, Charlie Chaplin, Paul Robeson and a host of others, and raisingmoral and material support for the Soviet war effort. While this activity was valuable during the war, once the adversarial attitudes of theCold War had replaced thewarmth of theAlliance, such past success came to be seen as treachery. Stalin suspected the Soviet national minorities of disloyalty and he moved swiftlyto stifleany ideas of national expression that the war might have nourished. Ukrainians, Baits, Cauca sians and Crimeans were brutally suppressed, while Soviet Jewish cultural organizations were gradually extinguished by stealth and judicial process. Foreign policy dictated supporting the new State of Israel with the goal of removing theBritishmilitary presence in the region, but the ecstatic welcome 50,000 of Moscow's Jews gave to Golda Meir, Israel's first ambassador to theUSSR in 1948, prompted Stalin tomove faster.Mikhoels having already been murdered on Stalin's orders, a massive case was prepared against the Soviet Jewish intelligentsia. Leading theatre critics and writers were accused of 'rootless cosmopolitanism', composers and scientists were harassed, and the seeds of the infamous Doctors' Plot were sown. The members of the JAC were arrested on charges of bourgeois nationalism, the creation of an anti-Soviet 574 SEER, 86, 3, JULY 2008 nationalistic underground, treason, and spying on behalf of theUSA. Tried in secret in 1952, all but two of them (one was Fefer) were executed. Soon after Stalin's death the following year, the case was reopened and shown to have been 'a gross fabrication, and that the "confessions" of the defendants had been obtained through torture and refinedmistreatment' (p. xi). Reha bilitation, the prerogative of the Politburo, came two years later under strict secrecy, and itwas not made known to the public until 1988. This episode is among the best known indicators of Soviet Jewish policy, but for the firsttime in 2001 and now in paperback the transcript of the trial has been published, with a masterly and highly informative introduction by Joshua Rubenstein. Dismissing the proceedings as a 'fairy-tale' (p. 186), one of the chief defendants, the veteran revolutionary Solomon Lozovskii, described one of his tasks as a deputy foreignminister as providing propaganda mate rial in perfect English and Yiddish (for the largeAmerican readership). Told to find his staffhimself, he had hired people who were too old for active service and, more important,who had lived abroad, a logical approach that now backfired. He was accused of transforming the JAC into a centre of nationalistic...