“Who is a Fascist?” Jews, Nazis and Stalinist Anti-Fascism

Abstract

The struggle against global fascism constituted a central thrust of Soviet and Comintern policy throughout the Stalin Revolution and the early 1930s. Yet even as Soviet leaders and policy makers railed against Nazi and Fascist enemies abroad, contemporaneous anti-fascist discourses produced within the Soviet Union revealed highly contradictory and ambivalent depictions of internal enemies who supposedly aligned themselves with the global fascist movement. This article focuses upon one of the most controversial manifestations of Soviet anti-fascist politics through an analysis of visual and rhetorical depictions of alleged Jewish fascists in Soviet Yiddish and Russian publications from Moscow and Minsk during the 1930s. It examines how depictions of alleged Jewish fascist collaborators, produced largely by Jewish actors in Yiddish public discourses during the 1930s, served to reinscribe “traditional” and non-Bolshevik Jewish groups – including religious Jews, Zionists, and capitalist class enemies – as intractable existential political enemies. As depictions of alleged Jewish fascist collaborators migrated to the Russian press during the Great Terror, they focused with increasing singularity on the alleged fascist collaboration of Jewish Bolsheviks and, above all, Trotskyists. Increasingly bestial and demonic in representation, such images not only highlighted the alleged political unreliability of Jews across the political spectrum, but also served to depict Jewish enemies as being intrinsically, inherently, and biologically outside of the acceptable Soviet body politic.