'Stalin and the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee - A History of the Emotions Interpretation' by Ian Doyle

i
STALIN & THE JEWISH ANTI-FASCIST COMMITTEE: A
HISTORY OF THE EMOTIONS INTERPRETATION
by
IAN DOYLE
IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF THE
REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MA IN EUROPEAN HISTORY
DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY
NATIONAL UNIVERSITY OF IRELAND, MAYNOOTH
Supervisor of Research: Dr John Paul Newman
May 2015
MA

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Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1. Stalin’s Emotional Regime
Stalin’s Emotional Regime
The National Question
Soviet Patriotism
Postwar Anti-Semitism
Conclusion
2. The Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (1941-1945)
Emotional Refuge or Stalinist Apparatus?
Conclusion
3. Stalin & the JAC (1945-1953)
Representing Soviet Jews
1948
The JAC Trial
Conclusion
Conclusion
Bibliography
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1
9
10
18
23
29
32
34
38
50
53
56
61
65
71
74
79

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Acknowledgements
Projects like this are not made by one person alone and I am lucky to have
had such enthusiastic people help along the way. First and foremost I would
like to thank my supervisor, Dr John Paul Newman, for all of his support
and guidance, and for the confidence he placed in me. His invaluable
comments transformed my idea into a coherent and thoughtful piece.
I would also like to express my gratitude to the wider Department of History
in Maynooth University, especially to Dr David Lederer and Professor
Filipe Ribeiro de Meneses for their help over the past two years. I would
also like to thank Mr John Bradley for the devotion and assistance he gave
me during my time in Maynooth. He will be sadly missed.
I would not have made it this far without my friends and, particularly, my
classmates who were always there for me when I needed help. Thanks to
Adrian, Aoife, Carol, Jacob and Laura.
Serena Fox provided input from beginning to end, putting up with me in the
process. She deserves many thanks for I could not have done it without her.
Finally, I would like to thank my parents and grandparents for their
contributions, especially my mother, Catherine, for her endless dedication,
love and encouragement.

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In the 1930s the Soviet Union employed a nationalities policy that, in
practice, differed from its theory. Joseph Stalin’s writings on the topic taught
that the nations of the USSR should be encouraged and allowed to develop;
a necessary stage on the path to socialism. In practice, however, nationalistic
acts could be met with a harsh response following Stalin’s ‘national in form,
socialist in content’ doctrine. The trend of strong reactions to such
nationalism was halted after June 1941; Hitler’s betrayal of Stalin and
invasion of the Soviet Union called for unity within the country. Stalin
would now tolerate some nationalism as long as it contributed to the war
effort. To boost such contributions the regime established five anti-fascist
committees in early 1942: one each for Slavs, women, scientists, youths and
Jews. Each committee was to appeal its target audience for political,
monetary and material support for the Soviet war effort against Nazi
Germany. The Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (JAC) was to appeal to Jews
in the Soviet Union and abroad, especially the USA, by employing
specifically Jewish themes. The JAC was responsible to the Soviet
Information Bureau (Sovinformburo) and its deputy, Solomon Lozovsky.
The committee was chaired by Solomon Mikhoels, a famous Jewish actor
(best known for his performance as King Lear) and director of the Moscow
State Jewish Theatre.
Under the leadership of Mikhoels during the Great Patriotic War the JAC
flourished, benefitting both the Soviet Union and Jewish culture. Some
members of the JAC, before the war, feared that their Jewish culture was
dying out due to widespread assimilation. This fear was even more acute for
Jews using the Yiddish language. The members of the JAC who worked in

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Yiddish experienced particular hardship seeking employment in the 1920s
and 1930s. Some of these men spent time abroad looking for work in
Yiddish communities but eventually returned to the Soviet Union as it had
the largest Yiddish speaking population. The JAC’s work during the war put
some of this fear to rest as committee members began to publish their works
in Yiddish, which brought a much needed revival of their language and
culture.
Despite the success of the JAC during the war years, the postwar period was
severely different. At the end of the Second World War it seemed that the
JAC may no longer be necessary; after all, it was established with the
purpose of securing foreign Jewish aid for the Soviet war effort. With the
war concluded, the JAC should have disbanded. However, the end of the
war also concluded the relaxed atmosphere that the Jewish minority
enjoyed; acts that could be considered nationalistic were now once again out
of the question. The committee would have to realise this if it wanted to
continue in any capacity. In fact, it continued to perform and even expanded
its functions; for example, it became involved in the issue of resettling Jews.
The JAC also contributed to another Jewish problem in the postwar years. It
was in these years that the regime placed a stronger emphasis on Soviet
patriotism, which was becoming closely linked to Russian nationalism. In
other words, the Russian population of the Soviet Union was the primary
national group, with Ukrainians and Belarusians occupying the second and
third places respectively. Soviet Jews, under the leadership of the JAC, felt
that the Jewish people had been the biggest victims of Nazi Germany’s

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attempt at European domination. This idea ran counter to the official
narrative in which the Soviet people as a whole, with Russians to the
forefront, suffered immensely. The JAC’s efforts to publish The Black Book,
a book containing many accounts of Nazi atrocities against the Jews, was
just one way in which they contradicted the official narrative and brought
themselves into conflict with the regime.
The year 1948 is of enormous significance to the history of the JAC. In
January of that year Solomon Mikhoels was found dead in Minsk,
seemingly the victim of an automobile accident. In fact, he was murdered on
Stalin's orders. It seems that Stalin feared the charismatic chairman and his
popularity amongst Soviet Jews. Prior to 1948 Soviet Jewish citizens had no
external homeland for which they could be accused of showing loyalty.
Upon the establishment of the Jewish state of Israel Soviet Jews became a
diaspora nationality which meant that they had a homeland outside of the
Soviet Union. Their loyalty was now under suspicion as they could
potentially be considered a fifth column in a future war; Stalin believed that
a war with the USA was coming and that Israel would side with them
against the Soviet Union. It is for these reasons that Stalin’s postwar policies
were laced with anti-Semitism. Therefore, in November the JAC was
officially disbanded and in the following months certain leading figures of
the JAC were arrested. Their trial began behind closed doors in 1952 after
three years of imprisonment, interrogation and torture. Thirteen of the
fifteen defendants were executed in August 1952.
Before continuing I would like to clarify my central aims: I will prove that

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the JAC was used as an emotional refuge by many of its members, and; I
will demonstrate that emotions played a pivotal role in Stalin’s postwar anti-
Semitic policies and in the JAC’s own work. I must now turn to recent work
on the history of emotions to lay the groundwork for my investigation.
The history of emotions began in earnest in 2001 with William M. Reddy’s
The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions
(Cambridge, 2001). In this book Reddy sets out his ideas regarding the
history of emotions and develops his concept of emotives. An emotive is ‘a
type of speech act... which both describes... and changes... the world,
because emotional expression has an exploratory and a self-altering effect
on the activated thought material of emotion.’1
In other words, an emotional
expression can have two effects: it can confirm or disconfirm the emotion
and; it can intensify or weaken the emotion. However, more relevant to this
study is Reddy’s introduction of the terms emotional regime and emotional
refuge. An emotional regime is ‘the set of normative emotions and the
official rituals, practices, and emotives that express and inculcate them’ and
it is ‘a necessary underpinning of any stable political regime.’ 2
An
emotional refuge is ‘a relationship, ritual, or organisation (whether informal
or formal) that provides safe release from prevailing emotional norms and
allows relaxation of emotional effort, with or without an ideological
justification, which may shore up or threaten the existing emotional
regime.’3
1
William M. Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions
(Cambridge, 2001), p. 128.
2
Ibid., p. 129.
3
Ibid.

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In 2002 Barbara Rosenwein first published her thoughts on the history of
emotions and introduced the term emotional community,4
an idea which she
developed further in her book Emotional Communities in the Early Middle
Ages (New York, 2006). An emotional community is, more or less, the same
as a social community, such as a family, a factory, or a monastery but:
The researcher looking at them seeks above all to uncover systems of
feeling, to establish what these communities (and the individuals
within them) define and assess as valuable or harmful to them (for it
is about such things that people express emotions); the emotions that
they value, devalue, or ignore; the nature of the affective bonds
between people that they recognise; and the modes of emotional
expression that they encourage, tolerate, and deplore.5
In many ways Rosenwein’s community is similar to Reddy’s regime but she
developed this idea to compensate for the flaws she saw in the emotional
regime. The emotional communities approach allows for a plurality that the
emotional regime does not. Rosenwein complained that Reddy could only
see the regime and the refuge but nothing else in between or outside. Her
own approach was to be much more inclusive of human emotional life. Her
second concern is that Reddy seems to have moulded his ideas for
application to the modern state, a relatively recent invention. Such an
approach is not easily applied to the Middle Ages (Rosenwein’s area of
expertise) or earlier.6
Jan Plamper has commented that since Reddy introduced the term emotional
regime over a decade ago, many scholars have employed the term without
understanding its full meaning. Most people understand it simply as
‘emotional norms’ rather than ‘the ensemble of prescribed emotives [original
4
Barbara H. Rosenwein, ‘Worrying about Emotions in History’ in The American Historical
Review, cvii (2002), p. 842.
5
Barbara H. Rosenwein, ‘Problems and Methods in the History of Emotions’ in Passions in
Context: Journal of the History and Philosophy of Emotions, i (2010), p. 11.
6
Ibid., pp 22-23.

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emphasis] together with the appropriate rituals and other symbolic
practices.’7
Aware of the pitfalls pointed out by Rosenwein and armed with Plamper’s
warning, I aim to employ William Reddy’s framework for the history of
emotions to outline Stalin’s emotional regime and the ways in which the
JAC became an emotional refuge.
The first chapter will establish Stalin’s emotional regime and will determine
the mood of high Stalinism, the period from the end of the Second World
War until Stalin’s death in 1953. To do this I will look at the reasons behind
Stalin’s nationalities policy, his policy of intense Soviet patriotism, and his
postwar downward spiral into anti-Semitism. This chapter will pay
particular attention to the emotional aspects of each policy.
The second chapter will be dedicated to the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee.
It will outline and describe the purpose of the committee and the work it
carried out. It will become clear that committee members were divided over
their work and that two factions existed within the JAC. One side would
focus on Jewish issues while the other concentrated on more general Soviet
work. This ambivalence would come to define the JAC, especially through
its chairman, Solomon Mikhoels.
With chapter one having set the postwar atmosphere, this third, and final,
chapter will demonstrate how the committee came into conflict with Stalin
7
Jan Plamper, The History of Emotions: An Introduction (Oxford, 2015), p. 265.

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and will detail how and why the JAC was punished. The third chapter will
continue with Mikhoels struggle and how it changed in the years after the
war. This change was central to the downfall of the JAC.

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CHAPTER 1
STALIN’S EMOTIONAL
REGIME

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The aim of this first chapter is to establish an outline of Stalin’s emotional
regime. This will involve setting out which emotions the regime both valued
and deplored and what channels it made available for people to display (or
not display) the appropriate emotions. I want to show that Stalin had a
vested interest in the emotions of his subjects and that he built his emotional
regime to control and manipulate certain emotions in an effort to more
successfully mobilise his people. To do this I will be utilising scholarship on
emotions in the USSR; on emotional rituals and practices offered by the
state; on Stalin’s teachings on the national question; on the role of Soviet
patriotism; and on postwar anti-Semitism.
Stalin’s Emotional Regime
To begin a construction of Stalin’s emotional regime we must consider what
emotions were involved in everyday life. Mark D. Steinberg noted that
emotional and social life in Russia in the years between the 1905 revolution
and the October Revolution in 1917 were characterised by uncertainty,
anxiety and melancholy. The revolutionary spirit of 1905 had enchanted
many but when this did not translate into successful reform many became
disillusioned. Many people lamented the loss of past hopes and values and
hoped that the future would illuminate their lives.1
Sheila Fitzpatrick has
contributed much to the history of emotions in the Soviet Union. In 2001
she published her findings on the history of vengeance and ressentiment.
She briefly explains ressentiment as a hostile feeling borne from the
memory of a past transgression that the offended party wishes to rectify. She
also explains that it contains elements of the weak seeking vengeance over
1
Mark D. Steinberg, ‘Melancholy and Modernity: Emotions and Social Life in Russia
Between the Revolutions’ in Journal of Social History, xli (2008), pp 820-821.

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the strong. In the thirty years her study is based on she concludes that
ressentiment was first aimed at the imperial elites, then at communist elites
after the revolution and, after the Second World War, at the Jews.2
Fitzpatrick has also worked on happiness in the Soviet Union. Her study,
which looks at the years before the Second World War, concludes that in
Stalin’s emotional regime happiness was a responsibility and that a lack of
public expressions of happiness could be construed as disloyalty. There was
a taboo on personal happiness as it had ‘petty-bourgeois’ links. In the same
study she finds that ‘grief and melancholy were not “Soviet” emotions in the
1930s’ because the regime emphasised happiness and success. Nevertheless,
grief and melancholy were tolerated as long as the regime was not blamed
for causing them.3
The regime even controlled the expression of laughter. It
was safe to laugh at something if it was officially sanctioned; for instance, it
was acceptable to laugh at enemies. It was also important to engage in group
laughter as it confirmed one’s loyalty to the regime because of the
importance the regime placed on involvement in public rituals and
ceremonies. Laughing as a form of conformity appealed to many people
because of its anonymity; laughter was safe whereas words could land
someone in trouble.4
Therefore, it is clear that the regime had a stake in
controlling the emotions of its people and providing them with the
appropriate models of expression.
2
Sheila Fitzpatrick, ‘Vengeance and Ressentiment in the Russian Revolution’ in French
Historical Studies, xxiv (2001), p. 586.
3
Sheila Fitzpatrick, Happiness and Toska: An Essay in the History of Emotions in Pre-war
Soviet Russia’ in Australian Journal of Politics and History, l (2004), pp 370-371.
4
Natalia Skradol, ‘Laughing with Comrade Stalin: An Analysis of Laughter in a Soviet
Newspaper Report’ in The Russian Review, xlviii (2009), pp 27-34.

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It is not enough to simply describe which emotions were allowed and
encouraged under Stalinism, the historian must also describe what systems
or codes were in place that determined how these emotions were expressed.5
In 2005 Joanna Bourke published her cultural history of fear and concluded
that ‘fear is manipulated by numerous organisations with a stake in creating
fear while promising to eradicate it.’6
This is certainly true of Stalinism. In
Stalin’s Soviet Union people were able to use the state to settle private
disputes: ‘it turns out that everybody has immediate access to the apparatus
of legitimate coercion (i.e., the state) and frequently uses it against other
members of society.’7
Jan T. Gross called this the ‘privatisation of the
public domain’ and found it to be one of the central characteristics of
totalitarianism; this meant that ‘the fate of each individual is placed “in the
hands” of the collectivity.’8
For Gross, this was where the real power behind
totalitarianism lay; the state was freely available for its citizens and acted
almost immediately for them.
Denunciation was the chief method that kept this system going. A
denunciation simultaneously allowed the state to collect important
information about its citizens and favourably settle private disputes for the
person making the denunciation.
The overwhelming majority of Soviet citizens practised obedience to
the party line, but that did not give them any sense of security. And
this was not because they were all inflicted with paranoia. They had
reason to be afraid, because their freedom or incarceration was
5
Plamper, The History of Emotions, p. 265.
6
Joanna Bourke, Fear: A Cultural History (London, 2005), p. 385.
7
Jan T. Gross, ‘A Note on the Nature of Soviet Totalitarianism’ in Soviet Studies, xxxiv
(1982), p. 374.
8
Ibid., p. 375.

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effectively at the discretion of any [original emphasis] of their fellow
citizens.9
In the Soviet Union citizens had the ability to have anybody arrested,
something Gross called the ‘great equaliser of Soviet citizens.’10
Everyone
had the ability to destroy others at their disposal but were powerless to
protect themselves. Gross declared that this privatisation of the public
domain was the ‘most important structural feature of twentieth-century
totalitarianism’ and it certainly played an instrumental role in Stalin’s
emotional regime.11
Recently some historians have argued that trust and distrust were two
essential tools of the Soviet Union and that the interaction between them
goes a long way towards explaining the stability and dynamism of the
Soviet government. Alexey Tikhomirov claims
That capturing the monopoly on defining, objectifying and
disturbing trust and distrust enabled the state and party to mould a
“regime of forced trust.” Its life force was based on simultaneously
satisfying the basic human need for trust – in order to generate faith
in the central power (above all, the leaders of state and party) – and
maintaining a high level of generalised distrust.12
In the practice of letter-writing the Soviet state created an avenue for direct
contact with its citizens.13
By availing of these services a trust was implied
in the party which allowed citizens to feel secure.14
However, when the
Bolsheviks seized power in 1917 they began to tear down those social
institutions that had maintained trust under tsarism. They murdered the tsar
and eradicated the institution of the tsar by murdering his family and ending
9
Ibid.
10
Ibid.
11
Ibid.
12
Alexey Tikhomirov, ‘The Regime of Forced Trust: Making and Breaking Emotional
Bonds between People and State in Soviet Russia, 1917-1941’ in The Slavonic and East
European Review, xci (2013), p. 80.
13
Ibid., p. 110. Tikhomirov points out that this was not an emotional refuge.
14
Ibid., p. 79.

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the Romanov line; the centuries-old symbol of authority in Russia had been
removed. The church was displaced, as was the family which was replaced
by the state: citizens were expected to subordinate family ties to their ties
with the party and state.15
They removed the old imperial methods of
maintaining trust so as to impose their own communist methods; instead of
creating a society of trust they ended up establishing one of generalised
distrust:
Distrust formed a system of coordinates with its own harsh rules of
behaviour and rhetoric, cruel methods of control and oversight and
its singular practices of inclusion and exclusion within which a
subject could find protection and defence, could identify dangers and
opportunities and find meaning in his/her existence and could
collaborate with the regime.16
Distrust was essential in forming and maintaining the ‘emotional bonds’
between the people and the state. In societies where distrust dominates over
trust the state has great power to mobilise its population in a negative
fashion. This facilitated Stalin's fixation with enemies greatly.17
So, before the party could generate the trust of the people it needed to create
generalised distrust. The forced imposition of collectivisation, forced
industrialisation, the Great Terror and the willingness to use state violence
often and firmly all contributed to this atmosphere of distrust. The
Bolsheviks also removed the possibility of political alternatives meaning
that ‘society was forced to accept the Bolshevik regime and rely on it to
15
Geoffrey Hosking, Trust and Distrust in the USSR: An Overview’ in The Slavonic and
East European Review, xci (2013), p. 6. See also: Tikhomirov, ‘The Regime of Forced
Trust’, p. 89.
16
Tikhomirov, ‘The Regime of Forced Trust’, p. 83.
17
Ibid.

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organise daily life. The population was given no other choice.’18
It was
forced to trust the regime.
As noted above the Bolsheviks had removed the tsar but Stalin realised the
importance that a tsar-figure held so it was necessary to recreate it within
the Soviet state. Party and state leaders were soon represented as village
elders or ‘little fathers’ (an affectionate term for the tsar) and as post-
revolutionary society was searching for something or someone to trust in the
people leapt at this opportunity. Soon after, citizens were addressing letters
to specific party and state leaders in their search for trust.19
The Soviet
population had little faith in local party and state organs and usually by-
passed this level in favour of writing directly to the centre. Firstly, this led
the leaders at the centre to assume the roles of patrons or protectors.
Secondly, this situation provided an opportunity for the centre; they
encouraged this idealisation of the centre and attributed its political faults to
local organs. In the regime of forced trust the ‘sacralisation of the central
power’ and the representation of party and state leaders as patrons and
protectors were two essential points.20
Jan Plamper has said that ‘in the
Soviet Union there was a connection between centrality and sacrality: no
place was more sacrally charged than society’s centre.’21
The regime's
authority was partly based on this sacrality.22
Learning how to speak the emotional language of the regime was very
important for Soviet citizens:
18
Ibid., p. 86.
19
Ibid., pp 89-92. See also: Hosking, ‘Trust and Distrust in the USSR’, pp 16-17.
20
Ibid., pp 101-102.
21
Jan Plamper, The Stalin Cult: A Study in the Alchemy of Power (Yale, 2012), p. 88.
22
Ibid., p. xvi.

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Through public expression of emotional language, an individual
acquired the opportunity to overcome isolation and loneliness,
sadness and distrust, identifying himself or herself with the life-
affirming structures of constructing the Soviet state, the Soviet
people and the Soviet New Person.23
By creating a society of distrust the regime directly increased expression of
‘negative’ emotions which meant that it needed to establish a system that
could effectively manage the emotions of its citizens.24
This is why Stalin’s
emotional regime began to emerge. This new emotional language of
Stalinism was most widely employed in citizens' letters to the leaders at the
centre. Using the correct emotional language they had two goals: firstly, to
create emotional ties, and therefore, trust with the state; and secondly, to
attempt to improve their lives. Citizens’ letters often described their lives as
being below the standards set by the centre in the hope that their problems
would be solved.25
Stalin had once again forced the Soviet population to
trust in the regime:
Without public expression of loyalty, enthusiasm and love for the
leaders, one should not count on the state and the party to provide
empathy and salvation.26
This type of emotional regime had two noticeable effects in the Soviet
Union. Firstly, it led to a drastic increase in denunciations as people tried to
demonstrate their loyalty to the regime. Secondly, it led to a tragic increase
in suicide, or at least an increase in suicidal feelings.27
It is not surprising
that a regime that prioritised fear, distrust and terror should have led to such
an outcome.
23
Tikhomirov, ‘The Regime of Forced Trust’, p. 109.
24
Ibid., p. 107.
25
Ibid., pp 109-110.
26
Ibid., p. 112.
27
Ibid., pp 112-113.

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Self-criticism was another pillar of the Stalinist emotional regime. In verbal
or written form the self-criticism ritual was a type of apology; the accused
was expected to confirm that the party's indictment was correct and had to
show an awareness of the political significance of his/her mistakes. This did
not necessarily save the accused from punishment but it could help. From an
examination of Nikolai Bukharin's self-criticism session, Glennys Young
was able to extract information about Stalin’s emotional regime. First of all,
Bukharin broke with tradition and failed to use his session at the February-
March Plenum of 1937 to perform self-criticism. Instead, Bukharin began to
use emotional language and expression, an attempt to influence the feelings
of the Central Committee members favourably towards him. In the period
before his execution when Bukharin felt Stalin was going to have him killed,
he wrote letters to Stalin declaring his love for the Soviet leader.28
But
Stalin would not show leniency to such a powerful opponent and now that
Bukharin had broke with the self-criticism ritual, an opportunity was at hand.
Young then develops his idea of emotional hermeneutics, in this Stalinist
context, as a:
Political practice incorporating the following assumptions: that there
is a difference between surface and underlying emotions; that careful
interpretation of an individual’s words and affective expression,
placed in proper ideological context, is essential to the process of
unmasking to get at this deep emotional reality; and that emotions,
especially those lurking below the surface, have political meaning.29
At party tribunals these ideas would be enforced so that ‘double-dealers’
could be unmasked and punished, and also to teach people about the
importance of vigilance. If the enemy's surface could betray his inner evil
28
Glennys Young, ‘Bolsheviks and Emotional Hermeneutics: The Great Purges, Bukharin
and the February-March Plenum of 1937’ in Mark D. Steinberg & Valeria Sobol (eds),
Interpreting Emotions in Russia and Eastern Europe (DeKalb, 2011), pp 128-137.
29
Ibid., p. 129.

18
the ability to discover the inner essence of an individual was of paramount
importance. For Bukharin this meant that his outward display of love for
Stalin was interpreted as an inner hatred of Stalin, the Soviet Union and
socialism. Mikoyan defined the party as ‘trust’ and to an extent he was not
wrong.30
The party had established a societal system in which distrust was
dominant but which forced citizens to trust and believe in the party. From
this perspective Bukharin’s behaviour had ‘damaged the very essence of the
party.’31
In the second chapter I intend to show that the Jewish Anti-Fascist
Committee was an emotional refuge; and so it has been necessary in this
first chapter to outline the emotional regime that the committee provided
refuge from. This section has also demonstrated that emotions and, more
importantly, the control of emotions were very important to the Stalinist
regime. In short, Stalin was devising a code of behaviour for Soviet citizens
that bound them to party and state.
The National Question
Stalin’s emotional regime began to take shape after 1917 and then quickly
developed after he succeeded Lenin as leader of the Communist Party;
however his code of behaviour for the nations of the USSR had earlier
origins. In the pre-revolutionary years Stalin published many articles
concerning the national question and he occasionally wrote on this topic
after the October Revolution. His major works in this field were ‘Marxism
and the National Question’, written in 1913, and in 1929 he wrote ‘The
National Question and Leninism’, which was, more or less, an update of the
30
Ibid., pp 137-138.
31
Ibid., p. 138.

19
1913 article. Both of these articles contain his definition of a ‘nation’. A
nation, as devised by Stalin, was ‘a historically constituted, stable
community of people formed on the basis of a common language, territory,
economic life, and psychological make-up manifested in a common
culture.’32
Stalin had been an admirer of the great multinational state before the
October Revolution and he held onto this admiration in the post-
revolutionary years. This is clear as he always put the Soviet state above any
of its nationalities. As the nations were political realities, which could not be
ignored, Stalin was prepared to give them some freedom to develop, mostly
in cultural and linguistic terms.33
This was only the beginning and he spends
a significant amount of time outlining the future of the national minorities of
the Soviet Union. Before national differences could be eradicated and the
progress of socialism furthered each national minority would have to be
nurtured. The victory of socialism worldwide would lead to a gradual
merging of nations and languages but at this stage, the stage of socialism in
one country, this merging was not feasible. The nations were saved from the
oppression of tsarist imperialism by the Soviet revolution and now they
were to be given a period of development.
In the 1929 article he even quoted Lenin to justify his writings: ‘The
October Revolution, however, by breaking the old chains and bringing a
number of forgotten peoples and nationalities on to the scene, gave them
32
Joseph Stalin, ‘Marxism and the National Question (1913), available at Marxist Internet
Archive (http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1913/03a.htm#s1) (20
May 2014).
33
Erik Van Ree, ‘Stalin and the National Question’ in Revolutionary Russia, vii (1994), p.
229.

20
new life and a new development.’34
With the help of the Soviet Union,
according to Stalin, national minorities had been freed from oppression,
allowed to develop their national cultures and they began to strengthen
‘friendly, international’ ties among the peoples of the Soviet Union which
led to stronger mutual cooperation ‘in the work of building socialism’.
Towards the end of ‘The National Question and Leninism’ Stalin declares
that the Communist Party will continue to support such a policy because of
its importance in strengthening socialist nations.
He finished the article by promoting national languages. Schools and
teachers, the administration, the press, theatre, cinema, music, and so on, all
needed to utilise the national language. Stalin saw this as the only scenario
for the successful cultural, political and economic development of the Soviet
nations. 35
The language factor is important, not just for cultural
development, but for the development of communism. The nations would
need to learn their native languages if they were to engage and defeat the
bourgeois elements of their own nations.36
Stalin reiterated many times that
the nations needed to develop; members of the various national groups must
have taken note of this and that it was how Stalin expected them to behave.
These two articles also tell us something about Stalin's opinion of the Jews.
According to Stalin a nation could only exist if all five defining
characteristics were present simultaneously. A people had to share a
language, a territory, an economy and a culture if they were to be designated
34
Joseph Stalin, The National Question and Leninism (1929), available at Marxist Internet
Archive (http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1929/03/18.htm) (20 May
2014).
35
Ibid.
36
Yuri Slezkine, ‘The USSR as a Communal Apartment, or How a Socialist State
Promoted Ethnic Particularism’ in Slavic Review, liii (1994), p. 418.

21
a nation. In Stalin’s mind the Jewish people of the world did not constitute a
nation as they were spread out across the globe inhabiting many territories,
speaking many languages and engaging in various economies. Stalin
concedes that they may have still possessed a ‘common destiny’ based on
their religion and psychological make-up:
But how can it be seriously maintained that petrified religious rituals
and fading psychological relics affect the destiny of these Jews more
powerfully than the living social, economic and cultural environment
that surrounds them?37
Stalin’s point here was not only that a community must have all of the
defining characteristics present to become a nation but that a nation could
not be distinguished by one single factor, re-emphasising that all
characteristics were required. He vehemently denies that such a group of
people could form a nation:
What sort of nation, for instance, is a Jewish nation which consists of
Georgian, Daghestanian, Russian, American and other Jews, the
members of which do not understand each other (since they speak
different languages), inhabit different parts of the globe, will never
see each other, and will never act together, whether in time of peace
or in time of war?!38
Stalin tried to alleviate this problem in 1934 by designating Birobidzhan as
a Jewish autonomous region. Soviet Jews were encouraged to resettle there
but poor conditions and the distance from Moscow (Birobidzhan is located
in the Far East near the border with China) meant that this project was met
with little success.39
37
Stalin, ‘Marxism and the National Question’ (1913).
38
Ibid.
39
Joshua Rubenstein & Vladimir P. Naumov (eds) & translated by Laura Esther Wolfson,
Stalin’s Secret Pogrom: The Postwar Inquisition of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee
(London, 2001), p. 11.

22
Stalin’s dealings with the Jewish Labour Bund (a popular Jewish socialist
movement) also teach us how he viewed people of the Jewish faith. He
explains that because of assimilation the Jewish people in Russia have no
right to call for national-cultural autonomy. Stalin claims that ninety-six
percent of Russian Jews, of which there were between five and six million,
worked in trade, industry and urban institutions, and, as a group, tended to
live in towns. The other four percent of Russian Jews were the only ones
with a connection to the land, by means of agricultural work. ‘In brief, the
Jewish nation is coming to an end’;40
as a result there would be nobody to
claim national-cultural autonomy for. A community could not become a
nation without Stalin’s defining features but if there was no ‘stable
community of people’41
a nation could never emerge.
After a quick recap of the Bund’s history Stalin explained that people had
come to believe that it was the only body representing the Jewish proletariat.
It then developed a framework for achieving national cultural autonomy.42
This set off alarm bells for Stalin because he had determined that ‘national
autonomy leads to nationalism.’ 43
Stalin also criticised the Bund for
believing that an institution for cultural affairs would protect a Jewish nation
from national persecution because history had shown Stalin that the
opposite was true. If old, well-established institutions could not achieve
such an outcome Stalin doubted the ability of a young and ‘feeble’
institution for cultural affairs to do so. Another Bund project that caught
Stalin’s negative attention was its attempts to ascertain special status for
particular Jewish features. It wanted the Sabbath enshrined in law so that
40
Stalin, ‘Marxism and the National Question’ (1913).
41
Ibid.
42
Ibid.
43
Ibid.

23
Jewish workers were guaranteed their right to observe it. It also sought
special status for the Jewish language of Yiddish which should be
‘championed with “exceptional persistence,”’ another form of Jewish
particularism.
Preservation of everything Jewish, conservation of all [original
emphasis] the national peculiarities of the Jews, even those that are
patently harmful to the proletariat, isolation of the Jews from
everything non-Jewish, even the establishment of special hospitals –
that is the level to which the Bund has sunk!44
Stalin’s views on the Bund in some ways foreshadow his future dealings
with the JAC as it attempted something similar to the Bund three decades
later. Stalin reacted furiously to the Bund’s demands when he was writing
essays in the pre-revolutionary years. His response to the JAC when he was
leader of the Soviet Union would be much more severe.
Becoming familiar with Stalin’s writings on the national question serves
many purposes. Firstly, we see in these writings early examples of Stalin’s
anti-Semitism. Secondly, the construction of his emotional regime aimed to
educate citizens on the proper use of emotions and, in the same way,
Stalin’s nationalities policy aimed to teach the Soviet nations how to
progress from culturally-backward nations into modern socialist nations.
Soviet Patriotism
Stalin’s answer to the national question was to promote the development of
the Soviet nations but his postwar push for Soviet patriotism created
problems. In practice Soviet patriotism looked a lot like Russian nationalism
which meant that nationalistic activity by other Soviet nations was not
44
Ibid.

24
permitted. This would prove to be a hindrance to the development of nations.
Stalin pursued Russocentrism and Soviet patriotism after the war because
‘the nation form... appeared to possess an enviable power to forge affective
ties and shared identities among its people’ which would increase the state’s
ability to mobilise its population. 45
Stalin hoped that Soviet patriotism
would pervade all aspects of society, imbuing his citizens with a sense of
pride in their socialist homeland; thereby creating a population of
completely loyal citizens.
In April 1947 the regime prepared a document about the promotion of
Soviet patriotism and why such a venture was important. The document
began with the overthrow of capitalism in 1917 when construction of a
socialist society began and the Soviet Union reached full political and
economic independence from the capitalist West. Work could now begin on
removing the last ‘remnants of capitalism’ from the minds of Soviet citizens.
These remaining ‘bourgeois habits’ were not compatible with the new
socialist society and were considered very dangerous. People harbouring
such habits were said to show adulation towards the West and towards
modern bourgeois culture. Removing these remnants from people’s minds
was of paramount importance as it would lead to the successful education of
communist awareness and teach citizens to love their homeland
unconditionally.46
45
Ronald Grigor Suny, ‘Thinking About Feelings: Affective Dispositions and Emotional
Ties in Imperial Russia and the Ottoman Empire’ in Steinberg & Sobol (eds) Interpreting
Emotions in Russia and Eastern Europe (DeKalb, 2011), p. 111.
46
No author, ‘Action Plan to Promote Ideas of Soviet Patriotism Among the Population’ (18
April 1947), RGASPI. F. 17. Op. 125. AD 503. L. 40-48. Available at
http://www.alexanderyakovlev.org/fond/issues-doc/69334 (4 December 2014).

25
The document is divided up into multiple sections, each of which explains
how a certain aspect of society (e.g. the press) should promote Soviet
patriotism. The first section is dedicated to defining Soviet patriotism, why
citizens should be proud of their socialist state and why patriotism is
important. Workers involved in party organisation, in the press, in
propaganda, in the sciences and in culture were expected to constantly
remind the population of the meaning of Soviet patriotism. A Soviet patriot
was to understand that the construction of a socialist society was superior to
that of a bourgeois society, to feel pride in the USSR as a socialist homeland,
and to be completely dedicated to the party. Press organs and other
institutions were expected to show why citizens should be proud of their
country. Under the leadership of the Bolshevik party the Soviet people built
the first socialist society – the ‘most perfect society system.’ They achieved
the ‘genuine flowering of democracy’; they eradicated the problem of
national oppression and helped forge a multi-national state based on
equality and the friendship of peoples; they liberated women from the
oppression of the previous regime; they defeated the imperial armies of
Germany and Japan. Their greatest pride was to be reserved for the
Bolshevik party itself but the Soviet people were to be especially proud of
Lenin and Stalin as great geniuses in the areas of advanced revolutionary
theory.47
The document states that all political work must demonstrate, on a continual
basis, how the Soviet people have contributed more to humanity than
anyone else. The outstanding people of the Soviet Union are responsible for
opening up the new socialist epoch in human history which saved the world
47
Ibid. Covers all quotes and information in paragraph.

26
from Hitler’s fascists; the document makes it clear that the Nazis would
have defeated their enemies if not for the socialist USSR. The socialist
homeland is described as a ‘guiding beacon for all humanity’ and stands at
the head of all other peoples in the ‘struggle for progress.’ It was also
necessary to show that worship of bourgeois culture was incompatible with
love for the socialist homeland. Love for the Soviet Union implied a
recognition that national oppression was a serious bane on the progress of
world civilisation. As the capitalist and bourgeois West thrived on national
oppression there could be no compromise between the two sides.48
The document then goes on the offensive. All propaganda, political and
cultural work was to show that the capitalist West was parasitic and
exploitative, that it was oppressive towards society and national minorities,
that the freedoms it professed to offer were nothing but lies, and that it
covered up its domination of minorities. The document calls for the
‘ideological poverty of bourgeois culture’ to be aggressively exposed, as
should its ‘rottenness’ and reactionary behaviour. Such work was to
demonstrate the advantages that socialism had over capitalism. It was
necessary to show the Soviet population that the bourgeois world was
spiritually impoverished and that it was deforming and crippling people by
putting ‘moneybags’ and profit ahead of the interests of the people.
Propaganda work was expected to show that the mores of capitalist societies
had been defiled and that the people of the bourgeois world had been
morally degraded. Once again it was not enough to simply deride capitalism,
the Soviet Union had to be showered with praise, as did its inhabitants; it
was necessary to ‘emphasise the moral superiority and spiritual beauty of
48

27
the Soviet people.’ Inhabitants of the USSR are described as ‘outstanding’
and as the ‘most advanced peoples of modernity.’ This was based on what
they have actually contributed to humanity and not on any ‘racist or
nationalistic fictions, which are alien to the Soviet peoples.’ The love and
pride that people had for the Soviet Union was based on achievements and
was ‘void of national limits.’ Furthermore, the Soviet peoples recognised
the achievements of other peoples as they knew that they were valuable
contributions to world culture.49
Whether in film, novels, plays, poetry,
education or propaganda Soviet society was to be placed on a pedestal while
capitalism was to be viciously attacked.50
It is clear from this document that the regime wanted to create loyal Soviet
citizens who would have no sympathy or love for the capitalist West and
who would love their socialist homeland unconditionally. In an effort to
bind people to the state the regime praised the people for their part in the
construction of socialism and celebrated the achievements of the Soviet
Union. It then created a dark image of the West as a rotten and depraved
society. By contrasting these two images the regime hoped that people could
only be repulsed by the West; therefore, they had to believe in Stalin’s
USSR and all that it represented.
To make the plans detailed in the document on Soviet patriotism a reality,
the Communist Party’s central newspaper, Pravda, published numerous
articles which successfully utilise Stalin’s teachings on both Soviet
patriotism and on the national question. An article from January 1948
described Soviet patriotism as the ‘deep love and dedication of the people to
49
50
Ibid.

28
the party of Lenin-Stalin.’ The Soviet Union is described as a utopia where
there was no discrimination along national lines: in fact, national minorities
were given the freedom to develop their cultures. The socialist society that
Stalin envisaged was to be built in the communist spirit of trust, friendship
and mutual respect. Such ideas led to the ‘moral-political unity of peoples’
in the USSR, something that they were encouraged to be proud of.51
An article from later in January provided an overview of how such Soviet
principles could be practiced effectively, using the Ukrainian soviet as an
example. A central aspect of the Soviet experience was the fraternity of
ethnically diverse workers which was built on ‘cooperation, mutual aid,
sincere trust and friendship.’ The October Revolution had liberated all the
peoples of Russia from the chains of capitalism which gave nationalities the
freedom to develop their cultures. The Great Russian people were the first to
travel the path towards communism, but their Ukrainian brothers were right
behind them. ‘Under the star of Soviet power’ the Ukrainian SSR made
some great achievements: the Ukrainian people could now govern
themselves and they were free to maintain and develop their own economy
and culture.52
In May 1948 Pravda published an article that perfectly encapsulated the
Stalinist principles of Soviet patriotism and national politics. It praised the
Soviet ideology, the ‘ideology of equality and the friendship of peoples.’
Stalin preached that every nation was unique and that these unique
characteristics were added to the ‘treasury of world culture.’ The October
Revolution of 1917 reinvigorated the spirit of the nations of Russia and they
51
Pravda, 12 January 1948. Covers all quotes and information in paragraph.
52
Pravda, 26 January 1948. Covers all quotes and information in paragraph.

29
‘achieved unprecedented flowering’ by following the ‘national in form,
socialist in content’ creed. It was imperative that the regime turn its citizens
away from the ‘degrading and corrupt bourgeois culture’ and to educate
them to be cultured Soviet and socialist people whose chief characteristic
was their ‘deep respect for culture and the historic past of other peoples.’53
The article describes Soviet patriotism as having ‘harmoniously combined’
national traditions with the interests of workers. The main aim of the party’s
nationalities policy was to assist those nations who were economically and
culturally behind so that they could reach the same advanced level as the
regions of central Russia. The article claims that this goal was achieved
rather quickly. Unsurprisingly the article finishes by criticising capitalism
and praising socialism. Capitalism was responsible for cultural degradation,
whereas socialism revitalised cultures and gave them the means to develop.
The Soviet Union was the ‘mighty stronghold of happiness, friendship and
progressive peoples’ and was the ‘beacon of world civilisation and
culture.’54
This article is important as it includes many elements of Stalin’s
postwar plan: the praising of Soviet ideology; the criticism of capitalist
culture; promoting Soviet patriotism; and explaining Stalinist national
policies.
Postwar Anti-Semitism
The final piece in Stalin’s postwar plan was anti-Semitism. This began with
an anti-cosmopolitan campaign, launched just after the war, which
amounted to a thinly-veiled attack on Soviet Jewry; in the last years of
tsarism ‘cosmopolitan’ had become largely synonymous with ‘Jew’ so
53
‘Other peoples’ refers to all Soviet cultures.
54
Pravda, 15 May 1948. Covers all quotes and information in paragraph. Covers all quotes
and information in paragraph.

30
people could easily make the connection. The ‘cosmopolitan’ was
conceptualised as all characteristics foreign to the ‘Russian nature’ and the
Jew in the form of the cosmopolitan was the prime enemy. 55
Cosmopolitanism became a ‘cultural betrayal of the interests of the
society.’56
In tandem with this, Andrei Zhdanov began a new cultural policy in 1946, a
policy of extreme anti-Westernism that was to be strictly adhered to. This
was known as Zhdanovshchina. It was aimed at the intelligentsia and their
harmful Western influences to prevent any subversion.57
Anti-Semitism
would play a large part in this period of Great Russian chauvinism and
starting in 1948 the victims of these campaigns were disproportionately
Jewish.58
There were three main aims of these campaigns. Firstly, they were used to
suppress any calls for Jewish political and cultural autonomy and to set up
Jews as scapegoats for the poor state of the country in the postwar years.
Secondly, the regime was striving for complete domination of society and
the intelligentsia was a major obstacle to this so the leadership needed to
remove influential circles of the Soviet intelligentsia. And, finally, it was a
way for the regime to achieve its goal of political and ideological isolation
from the West.59
As well as this, cosmopolitans, and Zionists, were now
enemies of the regime. The leadership could now construct conspiracies
from within and from outside the Soviet Union, allowing them to maintain
55
Frank Grüner, ‘“Russia’s battle against the foreign”: the anti-cosmopolitan paradigm in
Russian and Soviet Ideology’ in European Review of History, xvii (2010), pp 444-447.
56
Elena Zubkova, Russia After the War: Hopes, Illusions, and Disappointments, 1945-
1957, translated by Hugh Ragsdale (New York, 1998), p. 136.
57
Grüner, ‘“Russia’s battle against the foreign”’ p. 450
58
Ibid., p. 452.
59
Ibid., pp 453-455.

31
the image that the country was ‘politically besieged.’60
So, by positioning
Soviet Jews as a link between internal and external enemies Stalin was able
to justify his postwar anti-Semitic policies.61
An article from April 1949 described cosmopolitanism as an ‘ideological
weapon’ that the USA was using to achieve world domination and that that
the exploiting classes were using to justify and conceal their aggressive
policies. The bourgeoisie used it to disguise their efforts to seize foreign
territories, new colonies and markets. The only way to achieve these
imperialist aims was to ‘unleash a new world war.’ All of this was aimed at
the Americans, who embodied imperialism and cosmopolitanism. They did
not care for the interests of their own people; the American government
could ‘recognise only the interests of its own purses.’ The development of
this ‘shield of cosmopolitanism’ was to aid the imperialists in their struggle
against the growing strength of socialism.
In modern conditions cosmopolitanism is the ideology of American
domination of the world, the ideology of the suppression of freedom
and independence of peoples, big and small, the ideology of the
colonisation of Europe – and not just the European continent.62
This article was not written by Stalin but it perfectly reflects his world view
of the time. Having defeated Nazi Germany in the Second World War and
gained new satellite states in Eastern Europe, the USA viewed the Soviet
Union as its primary enemy, in both military and ideological terms. Instead
of risking all-out war with the USSR the Americans opted to employ a
longer, slower, and more covert method; that of cosmopolitanism. Stalin
represented the Soviet Union and its utopian ideal of the ‘friendship of
60
Robert Service, Stalin: A Biography (London, 2004), p. 343.
61
Roy Medvedev, Let History Judge: The Origins and Consequences of Stalinism (Oxford,
1989), p. 804.
62
Pravda, 7 April 1949. Quotes earlier in this paragraph are also from this source.

32
peoples’ and so could only be opposed to such an ideology as
cosmopolitanism. It was the Communist Party and its leaders who were
leading the struggle against the imperialists.63
To survive, the Soviet Union
would need to develop its own ideological weapons (In February 1953 alone
Pravda declared that vigilance, 64
propaganda and agitation, 65
and
Leninism66
were all ideological weapons of the Communist Party).
The aim of anti-Semitism may seem obvious but, for Stalin, it could be used
for more than just attacking his Jewish population. By implementing the
anti-cosmopolitan campaign Stalin was able to rekindle popular anti-
Semitism and could link Soviet Jews to the USA. This would allow him to
create an international conspiracy in which Soviet Jews, backed by America,
were planning to dismantle the USSR and would give him enough popular
support to take action.
Conclusion
The aim of this chapter has been to establish the Stalinist emotional regime,
but also to determine the atmosphere of high Stalinism and Stalin’s
nationalities policy, and the important role that emotions played in each.
Broadly, we can say that Stalin’s emotional regime created a scenario of
perpetual distrust and fear which left the regime as the only viable outlet for
people to trust in. Recent work on the history of emotions in the Soviet
Union has shown that the regime had an interest in emotions, which it either
encouraged (public displays of happiness, laughing at enemies); tolerated in
certain circumstances (it was acceptable to express grief if the regime was
63
Ibid.
64
Pravda, 8 February 1953.
65
66

33
not the cause); or deplored (personal happiness). The Soviet state wanted to
create in its citizens a love for the USSR, or at least a trust in the central
leadership. Stalin’s nationalities policy focused on the development of the
cultures of national minorities in an attempt to endear the various national
groups to the Soviet state. Soviet patriotism was used to emphasise the
achievements of the USSR and its peoples in order to imbue Soviet citizens
with a love for their homeland. The post-war policies of anti-Semitism and
anti-cosmopolitanism represent the darker side of the Stalinist emotional
regime. Stalin needed the spectre of an enemy, real or perceived, to mobilise
his population to a certain end. In this case the perceived enemy was the Jew.
These policies were Stalin’s way of controlling fear and anger.

34
CHAPTER 2
THE JEWISH ANTI-
FASCIST COMMITTEE
(1941-45)

35
Global Yiddish culture was in a poor state in the 1920s, and this was only
getting worse. This narrative was tragically personified by Peretz Markish,
Leyb Kvitko, David Bergelson and David Hofshteyn; each had left the
USSR in the 1920s, and moved to locations that contained a sizeable
population of Yiddish-speakers. Sooner or later, they all returned as they
were unable to find suitable employment as Yiddish writers abroad. The
USA had millions of Yiddish-speaking immigrants but offered few
prospects; as did Poland because many anti-Semitic restrictions were in
place. In the developing Jewish community in Palestine, Hebrew was
prioritised while Yiddish was (sometimes violently) discouraged. These four
Yiddish writers ‘came to regard the Soviet Union as the only country where
they could still find a large enough readership to make a living.’1
However, they soon realised that Stalin’s USSR was no Yiddish utopia.
They now had to fall in line with the ideological demands of the regime and
engage in Stalinist propaganda and denunciation. According to Joshua
Rubenstein, Stalin’s plan was to encourage Yiddish writers and to make
them follow his ‘national in form, socialist in content’ creed in an effort to
create a secular Yiddish culture that would ‘wean Jews from their religious
and cultural ties.’2
Even though Yiddish was still the official language of the
Jewish minority, native speakers were being turned away from the new
‘Soviet Yiddish’ culture because of the Stalinist nature of new cultural
products.3
1
Rubenstein, Stalin’s Secret Pogrom, pp 4-5.
2
Ibid., p. 5
3
Ibid., p. 6.

36
Considering that Stalin had somewhat soured the culture that these Yiddish
writers were trying to contribute to and to make a living from, it is possible
that, if given the chance, they would work to restore their Yiddish culture.
Prior to the establishment of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee and the
involvement of figures like Solomon Mikhoels, a Jewish committee to
combat fascism was proposed by Viktor Alter and Henryk Erlich. They had
been leaders of the Bund in Poland and were arrested in late 1939 after
denunciation. They were released in 1941 so that the regime could utilise
their Western contacts and their support for the Soviet war effort. However,
their proposals for a Jewish anti-fascist organisation were turned down
because Stalin was not prepared to permit an independent and international
Jewish body come into existence. Consequently, Erlich and Alter were
imprisoned once again, this time in solitary confinement. Sadly, in May
1942 Erlich committed suicide while Alter was executed in early 1943.4
The idea that a Jewish organisation could contribute to the Soviet war effort
still seemed promising to Stalin. Subsequently, the JAC was unveiled on 7
April 1942 but this was a different animal to the internationally-focused
organisation proposed by Erlich and Alter. It was to be supervised by the
regime and it was ‘meant to function as an obedient tool in the hands of the
Soviet government.’5
The aim of the committee’s foreign activities was to
promote a more positive image of the USSR among American Jews and in
US public opinion. Their appeals to non-Soviet Jews were centred on the
themes of Jewish national unity and the struggle against Hitler.6
4
Ibid., pp 9-10.
5
Shimon Redlich, ‘The Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee in the Soviet Union’ in Jewish
Social Studies, xxxi (1969), p. 29.
6
Ibid., p. 30.

37
Within the newly-formed committee there were two factions. The first
comprised of typical Stalinist functionaries who viewed their work at the
JAC as a temporary assignment; they mostly engaged in Soviet propaganda
and literature but not in anything specifically Jewish. Members of this
faction included Solomon Lozovsky, Ilya Ehrenburg, Lina Shtern and Boris
Shimeliovich. Lozovsky, as Deputy Chief of the Soviet Information Bureau
(Sovinformburo)7
was the JAC ‘watchdog’ who served as a link between
higher authorities and the committee. Itsik Fefer (who was also an NKVD
informant) and Shakno Epshteyn (the JAC’s executive secretary) regularly
informed Lozovsky about the committee’s work. The second faction was
made up of Yiddish writers and intellectuals who viewed the committee in
an entirely different light. ‘They considered the preservation of Jewish
literature and culture in Soviet Russia as the basis for their own spiritual
existence.’8
This group included Solomon Mikhoels, a leading actor and
director of the Moscow State Jewish Theatre; Yiddish poets Markish,
Hofshteyn and Kvitko; and David Bergelson, a Yiddish novelist. These lines
of division were not set in stone but were porous, meaning that a single
member of the committee could often empathise with both sides. For
example, Mikhoels, as we will see, exuded Jewish and Yiddish qualities
while also promoting Stalinist ideals. Nevertheless, the power of the
Yiddish intellectual faction was quite significant.
While the committee was officially set up to influence foreign public
opinion it quickly became the USSR’s leading Jewish cultural site and an
important centre for Yiddish publishing. It seems that the JAC added the
7
The Sovinformburo was set up as a news agency soon after the German invasion in 1941
to control the flow of information. All five anti-fascist committees answered to the
Sovinformburo.
8
Redlich, ‘The Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee in the Soviet Union’, p. 32.

38
revival of Jewish culture in the Soviet Union to its list of priorities.
Mikhoels, the committee’s chairman, even became the ‘unofficial
representative of Soviet Yiddish culture during the war years.’9
The rest of
this chapter will document the ideological struggle between both factions.
Emotional Refuge or Stalinist Apparatus?
In February 1942 Lozovsky sent a list of goals prepared by Epshteyn and
Mikhoels that would guide the JAC in its work to Alexander Shcherbakov,
director of the Sovinformburo and Lozovsky’s boss. All of these aims were
geared towards the battle with fascism, but nearly all fifteen of the listed
goals would require the promotion of Jewish culture, and in some cases
Yiddish culture. These aims can roughly be divided into four categories.
The first category concerned the collection of information. The JAC wanted
‘concrete information about the situation of Jews’ in occupied Europe and
occupied lands in the western parts of the Soviet Union. The committee also
planned to compile information about Soviet Jews who were contributing to
the war effort. They also believed that it was necessary to periodically report
on the committee’s progress.10
The second category was the Jewish involvement in anti-fascist movements.
The committee wanted to ‘promote, in every way possible, the creation of
Jewish anti-fascist committees abroad’ and to ‘develop a broad anti-fascist
campaign among the Jewish population abroad.’11
Such work was important
given the current situation.
9
Ibid., p. 32.
10
Shimon Redlich, Document 10 in War, Holocaust and Stalinism: A Documented History
of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (Luxembourg, 1995), pp 196-197.
11
Ibid.

39
The third category aimed to raise awareness of the Jewish involvement in
the war. Publications, such as pamphlets and brochures, were utilised to
illustrate Hitler's atrocities against the Jews and to demonstrate how Jews
were participating in the war. The committee also wanted to write and
publish small pieces on ‘Jewish heroes’ of the war and they were interested
in publishing illustrated collections on the themes of ‘Jews in the Great
Patriotic War’ and ‘The fascists are annihilating the Jewish people.’12
The fourth, and contextually most important, category also contained the
theme of anti-fascism but the main method of employing it was through
various Jewish mediums. The committee planned to design posters and
cartoons about Hitler’s atrocities and about Jewish participation in the war;
these were to contain texts written by Jewish poets. They also wanted
Jewish writers and other public figures to prepare radio addresses aimed at
foreign audiences. They planned to produce films based on the Jewish
struggle against fascism and on the atrocities committed against Jews by the
Nazi regime. As well as those plans, they wanted to work with Jewish
publishers to draw up collections of anti-fascist songs and to translate some
of the best anti-fascist works into Yiddish. While all of the points in this
category contribute to the JAC’s anti-fascist movement, they all
simultaneously aimed to salvage the ailing Soviet Jewish culture.13
From the regime’s point of view the fifteenth, and final, point on the JAC's
list of goals was the most important, and sits outside the other four
categories. The JAC planned to ‘organise a campaign for financial
contributions, especially in the United States, to buy medicine and warm
12
Ibid.
13
Ibid.

40
clothing for the Red Army and people evacuated from regions occupied by
the Germans.’ Using such a committee to aid the Red Army was an enticing
prospect for the regime.
It seems that the JAC would have a dual purpose: it would serve the
regime’s propaganda machine while serving its own Jewish members by
allowing them to work on Jewish topics and use the Yiddish language, for
those who spoke it.
Early on the JAC recognised the importance of a Yiddish newspaper for its
aim of rejuvenating the Jewish culture in Russia, but also for the regime; the
committee was prepared to allow their newspaper to publish Soviet
propaganda in order to achieve its own goals. Many prominent Jews began
appealing to the authorities to publish a Yiddish newspaper before the
formal establishment of the JAC and some of those who petitioned to the
Sovinformburo would later sit on the JAC’s executive committee. There
were several aspects to their appeals. In July 1941 a group of Jewish writers
(including Markish, Bergelson and Kvitko) wrote that ‘a Yiddish newspaper
in Moscow will play a major role in organising the Jewish masses for the
support of our homeland.’14
Many Jews had moved to more central areas of
the country, in and around Moscow, after the German invasion, the majority
of which only spoke Yiddish so ‘their interest in the Yiddish printed word is
very great indeed.’15
The JAC felt that it should provide the ideological
education that these masses required:
It is vitally necessary to publish a Yiddish newspaper in Moscow in
order to influence ideologically these masses which have undergone
14
Ibid., Document 13, p. 186.
15

41
such a terrible ordeal, and systematically to draw them into the
active struggle to defend the homeland.16
The committee wanted to properly educate citizens on ideological matters,
demonstrating that the JAC could be both Jewish and Soviet.
They also envisaged a great propaganda role for themselves:
In addition to serving the cultural-political needs of the great masses
of Jews inside the country, a Yiddish newspaper in Moscow would
also play an important propaganda role abroad: its voice would be
especially heeded by the Jewish community in England and the
Dominion, in the USA and other countries. The very fact of the
publication of a Yiddish newspaper in the capital of the USSR would
have great political significance. It would strengthen the sympathy of
all classes and sections of the Jewish population abroad, primarily in
the USA, towards the USSR and its pressing needs in the Great
Patriotic War against fascism.17
This last point may have decided the point as it would later become one of
the JAC’s main functions: to win support for the Soviet Union from abroad.
Also, a handwritten note left at the end of the document appealing for a
Yiddish newspaper stated that the paper should go ahead in limited form to
see if it had potential.18
By the end of September 1941 the publication of a
Yiddish newspaper received the backing of the Propaganda Department. It
was proposed that the newspaper should be published every week in
Moscow from 15 October 1941 with 10,000 copies of each issue.19
Despite
some initial setbacks, Eynikayt soon began publication.20
Just like the JAC itself, Eynikayt would serve the regime by publishing
propaganda abroad and serve the committee by allowing them to publish
articles and essays on specific Jewish topics.
16
Ibid.
17
Ibid.
18
19
20

42
Just like they had been involved in the efforts for a Yiddish newspaper,
many important Jewish figures were also involved in Jewish rallies prior to
the forming of the JAC. On 16 August 1941 members of the Jewish
intelligentsia (including future JAC members Mikhoels, Bergelson, Kvitko,
Markish, Zuskin and Epshteyn) wrote to Solomon Lozovsky proposing that
a Jewish rally be held in Moscow. The stated aim of such an event was to
‘mobilise world Jewish public opinion in the struggle against fascism and
for its active support of the Soviet Union in its Great Patriotic War of
liberation.’21
Speeches delivered at this rally (and later rallies) were a mix of
Jewish particularism and Stalinist rhetoric, maintaining the committee’s
raison d’être. Speakers frequently referred to the Jews as the main target of
Hitler’s Germany: ‘Hitler’s bloody regime has brutally planned the
complete and unconditional annihilation of the Jewish people by all means
available to the fascist executioners’ and ‘there has never been a period
comparable to the horror and calamity which fascism has brought to all
humanity, and with particular frenzy, to the Jewish people.’22
Alongside
these comments were others that were embedded with typical Stalinist
language: the Soviet Union was a ‘country where peoples have found a true
Motherland which has given them a wonderful life, freedom, happiness, and
a flowering of cultures’ and the ‘Jewish people found its place among the
great family of nations of the USSR.’23
Similar sentiments can be found in a speech made by Mikhoels at this rally.
At the beginning of his speech Mikhoels spoke of Hitler’s murder of
hundreds of thousands of Jews and that anti-Semitism was the foundation of
21
22
23
Ibid., pp 175-176.

43
Hitler’s regime: that ‘among his other evil deeds he has called for the total
annihilation of the Jewish people.’ 24
But the latter part of his speech
demonstrated that Mikhoels was also a proper Stalinist citizen:
In the new, free Soviet country a totally different generation of
people has grown up: a generation which has learned mankind’s
great progressive ideas; a generation which has learned the great
cultural riches of its people’s past and the past of all humanity; a
generation which thoroughly understands what a homeland is, for the
Soviet Union is the dear, beloved homeland of all Soviet peoples.25
He followed this with more statements about the ‘freedom of our Soviet
homeland’ and the importance of vigilance. In this one speech Mikhoels
demonstrated how to successfully employ the language of Stalinism.
Markish, Bergelson and Ehrenburg also made speeches at this rally but their
speeches differed from that of Mikhoels. Markish declared that it was time
for Jews to react aggressively to their dire situation and that they could not
allow their culture to be violently eroded by Hitler: ‘None of you can permit
our great history to be stained with the passive acceptance of death.’
Bergelson stated that ‘Hitler’s plan to annihilate peoples, first and foremost
the Jewish people [emphasis added], is as simple and cruel as the plan of a
cannibal.’26
Meanwhile, Ehrenburg maintained that ‘Hitler hates us more
than anything, and this makes us special.’27
All three of these speakers
echoed Mikhoels that Jews were the main target of Hitler’s regime but all
three failed to utilise the requisite Stalinist language. They were exploiting
the situation created by the war but these three did not understand Stalinism
as Mikhoels did. Mikhoels presented himself as a champion of the Jewish
24
25
Ibid., p. 178.
26
Ibid., p. 180.
27
Ibid., p. 182.

44
people and as reliable Soviet citizen: he was serving both the state and his
nation.
The JAC had been formed prior to the second Jewish rally, which was held
in May 1942, and it continued the efforts of the first rally: to make citizens
of the USSR aware of the atrocities being committed by the Germans,
paying special attention to the atrocities aimed at the Jewish people. As a
Jewish group combating fascism such statements were in line with their
prescribed functions. The following were all statements heard at this rally:
‘Great is the misfortune of the Jewish people’; ‘the most atrocious of all is
the cruelty they practice on our Jewish brothers and sisters’; ‘the sword of
fascism, broken but not yet defeated, is still drawn against all peoples and
primarily against the Jews.’28
The sacrifices being made by the Jewish
people of the Soviet Union became a more prominent theme in May 1942
than it had been nine months previously:
Time and again we have given the world evidence of our self-
sacrifice in the cause of preserving the existence of our people.
Many were the Jews who donned shrouds in order to survive as Jews.
Today Jews must draw upon their tradition of self-sacrifice in order
to survive as Jews. Only in this way can the existence of our people
be preserved in these cruel times.29
Continuing with this sentiment Bergelson added that ‘we ourselves must
avenge this blood. None of us is exempt from this sacred duty; none of us
can evade the duty to engage in a self-sacrificing struggle against fascism.’30
The previous rally saw Mikhoels attempt to compensate for his Jewish
remarks by employing Stalinist language, for example, discussing the
Stalinist friendship of peoples. However, the second rally lacked the same
28
Ibid., Documents 24-25, pp 202-204.
29
30
Ibid.

45
emphasis on conforming to the regime’s standards, even by Mikhoels. The
speakers did, however, mention the Soviet army frequently; the progression
of the war had changed the focus from conforming to the regime’s national
policy to praising the Red Army but, most of the comments made about the
Red Army refer only, or particularly, to its Jewish soldiers.
The second rally vividly demonstrated that Hitler led a violent and bloody
regime. Many speakers at the first rally noted that the German invasion had
spilled a lot of Soviet blood but discussion of Jewish blood became more
prominent at the second rally. One comment stated that ‘there is Jewish
blood mixed in with the sacred Soviet blood which has been shed for the
liberation of the homeland’ while another urged Jews to ‘fight to the last
drop of blood.’31
At the first rally Mikhoels deemed it unnecessary to delve
too deep into the specifics of Nazi violence yet here he painted a vivid
picture:
Fellow Jews of the entire world! Even though we are separated by
the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, the oceans of blood for which the
Nazis are responsible – the blood of our mothers and children, of our
brothers and sisters – these oceans of innocent blood have confirmed
the blood ties between us.
He continued:
Do you not feel the terrible reproach in the fixed stare of the stiff
bodies of our brothers who were tortured to death by the cruel
enemy, that heartless marauder and instigator of pogroms? Do you
not hear the groans of our aged mothers, the weeping of our children,
their final, faint sounds before their lacerated bodies give up the
ghost?32
Mikhoels used such language and imagery in order to demonstrate what
type of enemy they were dealing with and by using such methods, reach a
31
Ibid., Document 24, pp 202-203.
32

46
larger audience; it is hard to deny that his appeals were much more poignant
and passionate than those of his colleagues.
The speeches presented at the third Jewish rally were closer to those given
at the original rally in 1941. At least two of the speakers noted the special
attention that Hitler paid to the Jews as he spread his violence throughout
Europe. Mikhoels stated that ‘among all the heinous crimes and violence
committed against nations the most flagrant are the crimes committed
against the Jewish people’; while a rabbi announced: ‘Hitler, the venomous
leech, is sucking Jewish blood... Hitler, let his name be cursed and erased
from memory forever, mercilessly set about to annihilate the entire Jewish
people – children and old people, men and women.’ 33
However, the
speakers at this rally spoke with a better understanding of Stalinism than at
the previous two rallies. At the beginning of his speech Mikhoels declared
that ‘we have gathered together at a time of glory and greatness of our
Homeland – the Country of Soviets; at a time of dazzling victories of the
heroic Red Army; at a time of triumph of Stalin's genial policy.’ Other
comments included ‘we are proud of our Soviet people’; ‘we Jews, loyal
sons of our Soviet country’; and ‘the Soviet nation will burn out fascism.’34
From an analysis of these three rallies it should be noted that the Jewish
intelligentsia made good use of the relaxation of the campaign against
nationalist deviation during the war but many still remained faithful to their
Soviet identities.
This same ambivalence is also present in the minutes of the committee’s
second plenary session. The session looked at the committee’s past work
33
34
Ibid.

47
and members argued over what their future work should focus on: ‘There is
so much to be done, so many people to help. How can we do this? It is clear
that the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee has done a lot, has done what it
could. But, what could it do?’35
In this session of February 1943 speakers made suggestions for the
committee’s future work which exceeded the power given to them by the
Sovinformburo. The issue of resettling Jews who had been displaced by the
war was raised by some members. Peretz Markish said that ‘the Jewish
Anti-Fascist Committee should continue to expand its activity’ and believed
that ‘the Committee has a direct responsibility to assist in the resettlement of
these masses.’36
Another member echoed this statement but added that ‘the
Committee will have to concern itself with this, because Jews don’t have
any other body to represent them.’37
This is a significant statement as it
suggests the committee has a larger responsibility to the Jews of the Soviet
Union and that it represented them. Markish suggests that the committee
should do everything in its power to help Soviet Jewry, going above and
beyond its prescribed functions. Fefer was very diplomatic in his response
to such suggestions:
In our discussions we haven’t dealt sufficiently with our work
abroad. This remains our task in the future. Not all of our comrades
have realised what the functions of the committee are. It is
impossible to demand that it overlap other Soviet organisations.
Nevertheless, there are questions to which we cannot remain
indifferent. The Committee should take the necessary initiative. For
example, letters from numerous evacuees reach the Committee.
However, the Committee could and should relay them to the
appropriate authorities.38
35
36
Ibid., p. 210.
37
Ibid., pp 209-210.
38
Ibid., p. 212.

48
Fefer wanted to help his fellow Jews but was aware that acting on such
suggestions could create trouble for the committee so he suggested that they
should opt for a middle ground.
Shakno Epshteyn took a more conservative approach:
The basic objective of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee has been
and remains to mobilise and activate the Jewish masses world-wide
for the struggle against fascism. Our work in the past has
concentrated upon this objective and this should be the essence of
our work in the future as well.
It seems Epshteyn did not want to rock the boat and felt that the committee
should stick to the tasks it had set itself from the beginning. Finally,
Mikhoels gave his opinion on the comments made at the session:
The functions and scope of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee’s
activity were not, apparently, understood by everyone as they should
have been. Some wanted to add even more functions. Thus it was
lost sight of that the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee is a fighting unit,
which has a single purpose, to consolidate all its forces for the
struggle against fascism. That is its only task. It is the basis which
defines all its activity.39
From this statement we get the impression that Mikhoels comprehensively
understood the committee’s functions and that they should not be exceeded.
Yet, later, at the same session, he spoke of a letter he received from a
woman whose father had just died and he recalled the grief and loneliness
she described to him. Somewhat opposed to his original statement Mikhoels
noted that:
What’s characteristic is the fact that it occurred to this woman that
she has someone to turn to. There are many people suffering because
of the war, and we cannot turn away from them, and say that they are
no concern of ours. We must take part in their fate, raise a question
39
Ibid., p. 213.

49
about them, but all this is still a side issue. Our basic task – is the
destruction of Hitler’s regime.40
It is unusual that at first he states that the only task of the committee was to
aid in the fight against fascism and then shortly after that they should begin
to deal with issues on the side, such as the problem of relocating evacuees.
His desire to help his fellow Jews may have been in conflict with his
identity as a loyal Soviet citizen. Through this plenary session we see that
Mikhoels personified the ambivalence of the JAC. He felt it was his duty to
help his fellow Jews but he knew that this was beyond the scope of the
committee’s original, Stalinist functions. In any case the regime was not
satisfied with such dialogue within the committee. A secret document
written in the months after the second plenary session points to the ‘flagrant
political blunders’ made at the session.41
Conflict between the JAC and
Stalin’s regime was emerging as early as the first half of 1943.
One of the JAC’s self-styled goals was to campaign abroad, mostly in
America, for financial aid that was to provide the Red Army and evacuees
with much needed provisions. The Soviet Union needed to improve its
image in America after revelations of the deaths of Erlich and Alter. In
March 1943 the Soviet regime began preparations to send Mikhoels and
Fefer to the USA on a mission that would satisfy both goals. In the seven
months they would spend abroad most of it was spent giving speeches in
American cities but they also spent time in Canada and Mexico and then
visited England on their return journey to the USSR. While controversy
surrounded some of their meetings with representatives of American Jewish
groups, Mikhoels and Fefer were also met with genuine enthusiasm and
40
Ibid., p. 214.
41

50
interest: as Soviets they had just defeated the Wehrmacht at Stalingrad and
as Jews they were victims of Hitler’s genocidal policies. The highlight of
this visit was a rally at the Polo Grounds in New York which was attended
by fifty-thousand people. Mikhoels and Fefer gave their speeches on the
Red Army in Yiddish while many of the American speakers spoke
favourably about the Soviet Union.42
Pravda commented that ‘this was the
first such rally in the USA wholly devoted to the Soviet Union and was
imbued with deep emotion and sympathy toward the Soviet people and the
Soviet government.’43
The positive reaction at home seems to suggest that
the mission was a success. It is noteworthy that just before they left for
America, Mikhoels revealed in a letter to his wife that he did not trust
Fefer.44
Fefer was among the most loyal and conformist Yiddish poets who
kept other Yiddish writers in check, ideologically. Mikhoels did not want
him to accompany him abroad but Fefer was selected to go by the regime
because it could rely on him.45
Conclusion
Prior to the Second World War members of the Soviet Jewish intelligentsia
feared that assimilation and Stalin’s efforts were eroding their culture; for
those who worked with the Yiddish language this fear was even more
pronounced. After Hitler broke his pact with Stalin and invaded the Soviet
Union in June 1941, reports from the occupied areas soon made it clear that
Hitler reserved a special violence for Jewish people. Within the USSR the
42
43
Redlich, Document 88 in War, Holocaust and Stalinism, p. 307.
44
Ibid., Document 86, p. 306. (Fefer had been working as an informant for Soviet
intelligence and he went on to cooperate with the authorities when the JAC was under
investigation).
45

51
Jewish intelligentsia came together, offering their services to fight fascism.
While Soviet patriotism and a simple fear of an invading army may explain
this jump to action, it is difficult to exclude the existential threat that the
Germans posed to the Jews. Therefore, the war simultaneously threatened
the destruction of Soviet Jewish culture and offered an opportunity to save
that culture. In an effort to ensure unity of cause, Stalin relaxed his
campaign against overt nationalism which many prominent Jews recognised
and their subsequent appeals led to the formation of the Jewish Anti-Fascist
Committee. As a Soviet organ it was designed strictly to aid the war effort;
led by Soviet Jews and Yiddish speakers the JAC became a Jewish
institution with the power to give life to a dying culture.
The committee members enjoyed the JAC as an emotional refuge, at least
for a few short years, but it applied more so to its members who worked in
the Yiddish language. We already know that an emotional refuge is a
‘relationship, ritual, or organisation (whether informal or formal) that
provides safe release from prevailing emotional norms and allows relaxation
of emotional effort, with or without an ideological justification, which may
shore up or threaten the existing emotional regime.’46
Stalin’s emotional
regime was geared towards creating loyal Soviet citizens and, in theory, it
offered cultural development to national minorities which, in practice, was
not always the case. The JAC did allow for cultural development during the
war and, therefore, allowed a ‘safe release from prevailing emotional
norms.’47
46
Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling, p. 129.
47
Ibid.

52
While an emotional refuge certainly can threaten an emotional regime, it
can also ‘shore up’48
a regime. During the Great Patriotic War the JAC
carried out much propaganda work for the regime along with its own work.
By promoting Soviet patriotism and other Stalinist propaganda (promoting
the friendship of peoples, for example) they were strengthening the Stalinist
emotional regime. Their work shored up the emotional regime because
Soviet patriotism ultimately aimed to make people feel certain emotions:
pride and love for the USSR. Therefore, the JAC was both an emotional
refuge and a part of the Stalinist apparatus.
Essentially, the JAC was an ambivalent organisation. On the one hand, it
was an integral part of the Stalinist regime during the war because it played
a massively important propaganda role both at home and abroad and was
successful in procuring substantial aid for the Soviet war effort. Many of its
members, especially Mikhoels, displayed proper Soviet qualities in their
work. On the other hand, many committee members had their Jewish
identities re-awakened by Hitler’s murderous anti-Semitism. This may have
led them to include nationalistic sentiments in their works (or at least that is
how the regime would come to see it, despite such comments being an
intrinsic part of their work) and also made them feel duty-bound to help
their Jewish compatriots who had suffered greatly in the war. It was difficult,
if not impossible, to be both a loyal Stalinist and a champion of the Jews.
One would have to win out over the other.
48
Ibid.

53
CHAPTER 3
STALIN & THE JAC
(1945-1953)

54
The end of the war signalled a change for the JAC. The relaxed atmosphere
of the war years was now tightened and the Soviet Union began to isolate
itself once again. The chauvinisation of power had begun back at the end of
the 1930s and periods of intense patriotic propaganda often brought with
them periods of hardship for the smaller Soviet nations.1
Fefer recognised
this change and in 1946 he left the Jewish propaganda poem, ‘I am a Jew’,
out of an anthology.2
The regime considered closing the JAC down as early
as 1946 and in that August the committee’s supervision changed hands. The
Sovinformburo and Lozovsky were replaced by the Foreign Relations
Department of the Central Committee and Mikhail Suslov. Suslov was a
typical Stalinist and the Central Committee would prove to be less open
than the Sovinformburo. Suslov began to collect reports of the JAC’s work
to comb them for reasons to disband the committee. Suslov’s own report
was quite damning. Sent to Stalin and the Politburo, it declared that the JAC
had served its wartime purpose but had now become ‘politically
damaging’. 3
He accused the JAC members of Jewish nationalism and
Zionism and recommended that the committee be liquidated. However,
Stalin did not give the go-ahead just yet as he might need the committee in
the coming crisis over Palestine. The JAC could be used as a ‘face’ for
Soviet Jewry.4
The Soviet war experience increased Stalin’s fear of enemies, home and
abroad. The Second World War inflicted invasion and occupation upon the
socialist homeland but internally the Soviet population became more
1
Gennadii Kostyrchenko, Tainaia politika Stalina: Vlast i antisemitizm (Stalin’s Secret
Policy: Power and Anti-Semitism) (Moscow, 2003), p. 249.
2
Rubenstein, Stalin’s Secret Pogrom, p. 25.
3
Ibid., pp 31-32.
4
Ibid.

55
nationalistic.5
After the war Stalin attempted to meld Soviet patriotism with
Russian nationalism (Russian figures, such as Peter the Great, were much
more prominent in discourse than non-Russian figures).6
Stalin had already
taken action against national groups during the war which would continue in
the postwar years. When interpreting the Soviet Union in the 1930s,
Norman Naimark remarked that the need for homogeneity was the reason
for embarking on campaigns of national violence.7
The postwar years were
very similar. Stalin would not permit confusion over the Soviet war
experience; Stalin needed Russians to be the ‘greatest victors and the
greatest victims, now and forever.’8
He needed a version of the war that
elevated Russians but marginalised Jews and all other Soviet ethnic
minorities. The war had to begin with the German invasion of the USSR in
June 1941 and not with the joint Nazi-Soviet invasion of Poland in 1939.
The new territories gained by the Soviet Union as a result had to be
presented as always having been Soviet and the regime could in no way be
portrayed as the aggressor. Jews as the main victims of Nazi aggression
could also not be tolerated. The Soviet invasion of Poland had to be
forgotten, as did the fact that the Soviet Union was totally unprepared for
the German invasion. As Timothy Snyder has pointed out: ‘The murder of
Jews was not only an undesirable memory in and of itself; it called forth
other undesirable memories. It had to be forgotten.’ 9
The need for
homogeneity had returned and the official version of events aimed to
5
Norman M. Naimark, Fires of Hatred: Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth-Century Europe
(Cambridge, 2001), p. 89. For the Jewish population see Jeffrey Veidlinger, ‘Soviet Jewry
as a Diaspora Nationality: the “Black Years” Reconsidered’ in East European Jewish
Affairs, xxxiii (2003), p. 21.
6
David L. Hoffman, Stalinist Values: The Cultural Norms of Soviet Modernity, 1917-1941
(London, 2003), p. 165.
7
Norman M. Naimark, Stalin’s Genocides (Princeton, 2010), p. 94.
8
Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (London, 2010), p. 341.
9
Ibid., p. 345.

56
‘celebrate the Communist Party’s wartime successes and provide an
inspirational image of exemplary unity and popular heroism.’10
Supporting the Soviet war effort was the official aim of the JAC and the
reason it was established, so it stood to reason that it would disband at the
war’s end. This did not happen and, in fact, the JAC took on more
responsibilities, responsibilities unsanctioned by the regime. The committee
came into conflict with the regime when their work began to run counter to
the official narrative.
Representing Soviet Jews
In the last two years of the war, and in the years after, the JAC received
many letters from Jews expressing concerns for the future. The Soviet
Jewish population now viewed the committee as a national Jewish
organisation which they could turn to in order to seek help for problems
caused by the war. The JAC responded to these letters with enthusiasm and
began forming new roles for itself, pushing it further and further away from
the regime.
In many letters to the JAC we are able to see how ordinary Jewish people
viewed the committee and what they believed its purpose to be. In 1944 a
theatre critic, fighting at the front, wrote to Mikhoels about his experience in
Mogilev-Podolsk. Many people in the area recorded their experience of
Nazi atrocities in journals and collected other documentation and material
relating to the atrocities. Due to language barriers the stories of people from
Mogilev-Podolsk would not be heard by a wider audience. The critic writing
10
Nina Tumarkin, The Living and the Dead: The Rise and Fall of the Cult of World War II
in Russia (New York, 1994), p. 50.

57
the letter demanded ‘an urgent visit by representatives of the Jewish Anti-
Fascist Committee’ so that ‘an entire “Klondike” of incriminating materials’
and other urgent matters could be attended to. The critic obviously viewed
the JAC as the first outlet to air Jewish problems.11
A Jewish kolkhoz member after returning to his local area found that 135 of
his fellow Jews had been killed by the Germans through local collaboration
and was welcomed with a general hostility towards Jews. This kolkhoz
member called on the JAC to investigate the situation. A group of factory
workers in Rubtsovsk sent a letter to Mikhoels in July 1945 after an increase
in anti-Semitic attacks. ‘An incredible moral depression, oppressing us to
the utmost, forces us to turn to you with a request to dispel our doubts, calm
us all down, and to take appropriate measures.’ The factory workers wanted
the JAC to send a commission to Rubtsovsk to investigate their claims of
anti-Semitism.12
An engineer wrote to Mikhoels in January 1946 lamenting
that many Jews had left their native language and culture behind and that the
war had left many Jews without living quarters. This person hoped, as did
all examples cited, that the JAC would have the answers.13
As the JAC received so many letters asking for its help, the committee was
inadvertently becoming a Jewish representative body. One person wrote to
the JAC commending their work informing the world about the condition of
the Soviet Jewish population, the crimes the Nazis committed against them,
and also how Jews contributed to the Soviet war effort. The author of this
letter was not satisfied with the committee’s work at home; they complained
about the many misconceptions about Jews but especially that the people of
11
Redlich, Document 34 in War, Holocaust and Stalinism, pp 225-226.
12
13

58
the Soviet Union were unaware of the role that Jews played in the Great
Patriotic War:
To our great shame and regret it must be stated that very many in our
country have a false idea of the part played by Jews in the Great
Patriotic War. Indeed, there are general misconceptions about a lot
of things relating to Jews, for example, about the actual proportion of
Jews in government institutions as compared with the general urban
population; about the social structure of the Jewish population; about
the contribution of Jews in new inventions, production processes,
and armaments in general.14
The writer wanted the JAC to do more to combat this because it was feeding
popular anti-Semitism:
I think that an organisation which was formed to struggle against
fascism, and especially a Jewish anti-fascist organisation, cannot
overlook such phenomena. It should take measures to disseminate
information about the true situation of things no less than it does in
connection with Jewish public opinion abroad.15
This one letter is very emblematic of the time. The Second World War had
left the Jews of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe in a terrible situation
but it had also rekindled their sense of loyalty to each other and of Jewish
nationalist sentiments. As a national Jewish organisation, aggrieved Jews
saw the committee as the first port-of-call for their problems. Another wrote
of the JAC that:
We see in you the representatives of a great nation – a nation of
genius and martyrdom. We express, through you, our hope for
national distinctiveness and national cultural autonomy... You are the
sole representatives in the USSR of this wonderful people and only
you can further the preservation of this great nation of Prophets,
innovators, and martyrs.16
This last letter perfectly sums up how Soviet Jews viewed the JAC as their
representative.
14
15
Ibid.
16

'Stalin and the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee - A History of the Emotions Interpretation' by Ian Doyle

'Stalin and the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee - A History of the Emotions Interpretation' by Ian Doyle

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