Stalin and Antisemitism

Rethinking Late Stalinist Repression

Was Stalin antisemitic? The answer may seem obvious, given the Soviet leader’s role in directing the campaign against the so-called “Doctors’ Plot.” Between 1952 and 1953, Stalin unleashed a flurry of repression in which a group of prominent Moscow doctors—most of them Jewish—were falsely accused of conspiring to assassinate senior Soviet officials through intentional medical malpractice.¹ This case was part of a larger repressive campaign that targeted intellectuals and professionals accused of harbouring foreign loyalties, particularly linked to Zionism and the newly established state of Israel in Palestine. Many citizens were dismissed from their jobs, imprisoned, and tortured into false confessions after being accused of “cosmopolitanism.”² After Stalin’s death in March 1953, the charges were declared baseless, and the surviving doctors were released.

Stalin’s orchestration of this campaign is usually assumed to have been motivated by antisemitic tendencies. While at first glance this appears to be a clear case of bigotry against Jews, this view has been challenged by a number of historians who emphasize instead Stalin’s primarily political motivations. For instance, Geoffrey Roberts, a leading specialist on Stalin, writes that Stalin was not so much “anti-Semitic as he was politically hostile to Zionism and Jewish nationalism.”³ This view is echoed by one of Stalin’s biographers, Christopher Read, who notes that newly available evidence “should make observers hesitate to argue, as is widely done, that a general anti-Semitic campaign was under way [under Stalin].”⁴ The scholars Yu Xiao and Ji Zeng write that Stalin’s decision-making during this period can be better explained by his “paranoiac political worldview than by antisemitic tendencies.”⁵ Additionally, the British historian Robert Service describes these events as emerging from “realpolitik rather than visceral prejudice.”⁶

The fundamentally political nature of Stalin’s anti-Zionist campaign is why, Christopher Read observes, non-Jews also came to be targeted while, at the same time, many Jews remained untouched. Indeed, there were prominent Soviet Jews who enthusiastically participated in the campaign against Zionism, such as “the philosopher and member of the Academy of Sciences, Mark Mitin; the journalist, David Zaslavsky, and the orientalist, V. Lutsky.”⁷ Benjamin Pinkus, a historian of Soviet Jewry, writes that “the chief victims” of the anti-cosmopolitan campaign were “two non-jews” and that there no “explicit or implicit anti-Jewish tone in the campaign,” [emphasis mine] a notion that is consistent with Stalin’s own worldview, as historian and anti-Soviet dissident Zhores Medvedev writes:⁸

Stalin was neither an anti-Semite nor a Judeophobe. Judeophobia can be understood as an intense hatred toward any member of the Jewish people — something Stalin did not exhibit. Nowhere in his official speeches or archival documents is there a statement that can be fairly described as anti-Semitic.⁹

If, in the words of Geoffrey Roberts, Stalin “was not anti-Semitic in any meaningful sense,” what explains the cause of these events?¹⁰ This episode of repression can be better explained by taking a closer look at Stalin’s almost obsessive suspicion of “bourgeois nationalism.”

Prior to this, Stalin carried out a number of repressions against perceived anti-Soviet nationalisms, and while the anti-cosmopolitan campaign had distinctive elements given its Cold War context, it generally adhered to the same Stalinist logic, violent repression against any perceived support of bourgeois nationalism. Kazakh, Armenian, Latvian, Ukrainian, Estonian, and other groups, at various times faced accusations of anti-Soviet bourgeois nationalism. The term specifically denoted those nationalist tendencies that were perceived as attempting to restore bourgeois class dominance and capitalist exploitation. According to Stalin:

the bourgeoisie of the oppressed nation, repressed on every hand, is naturally stirred into movement. It appeals to its "native folk" and begins to shout about the "fatherland,'; claiming that its own cause is the cause of the nation as a whole. It recruits itself an army from among its "countrymen" in the interests of ... the "fatherland." Nor do the "folk" always remain unresponsive to its appeals; they rally around its banner: the repression from above affects them too and provokes their discontent.”¹¹

Any ties to a pre-Soviet or non-Soviet national identity were seen as a liability exploitable by foreign intervention; thus, national expression was to be expressed within the acceptable parameters of Soviet identity. Notably, this did not mean Russification, but that minority national expression had to be compatible with the overarching ideals and values of a universal socialist identity as understood by the Soviet state.¹² One was to be a Soviet Kazakh or Soviet Armenian, for instance.

Terry Martin writes that the USSR took deliberate efforts to promote “distinctive national identities,” efforts which “actually intensified after December 1932,” during the Stalin era.¹³ For Stalin, the supranational multiethnic community of the “Friendship of Peoples” was a fundamental component of a universal Soviet identity. Martin observes that while the Soviets eventually accorded Russia a symbolic leading role in this multinational system, state support for non-Russian culture, historical education, and language instruction within each socialist republic remained strong, writing that “with respect to policy toward most non-Russians, then, the affirmative action empire continued with limited corrections throughout Stalin's rule.” ¹⁴

There was no Stalinist attempt to replace minority identity with a Russian one, contrary to popular belief. Elissa Bemporad’s excellent case study on Jewish community in Minsk describes how early Soviet equity policies fostered the formation of a distinct Soviet-Jewish identity in which Jewish and Yiddish culture were actively promoted and celebrated within the framework of socialist nationality policy.¹⁵ These policies stood in stark contrast to the popular attitudes towards Jews in European nations. Bemporad describes how “local Jews, acutely aware of the governmental and popular anti-Semitism faced by friends and relatives in Poland, still felt pride in their Soviet identity” despite living in a climate of repression during the height of Soviet terror in the 1930s.¹⁶ What has been perceived as state-endorsed antisemitism should be situated within the historical context of Stalin’s mounting hostility and paranoia toward Zionism, which took shape in the aftermath of the war.

While the USSR had a long-standing ideological opposition to Zionism, it initially supported the creation of the State of Israel in 1947–1948. This cynical maneuver marked a departure from the prior policy and was justified on strategic grounds: by backing the end of the British Mandate in Palestine and arming Jewish paramilitary groups through Czechoslovakia, the Soviet leadership aimed to weaken British influence in the Middle East and potentially bring a new socialist-leaning ally into the Soviet sphere. However, this hope quickly dissipated. The new Israeli state aligned itself with the United States, signalling to Soviet leaders that Zionism was more likely to serve as a vehicle for Western influence than socialist solidarity. Those who suffered the most from the Soviet reversal were the indigenous population of Palestine, who faced brutal atrocities and displacement, often at the barrels of Soviet-funded weapons.

Because of Israel’s favourable positioning towards the USSR’s enemies, domestic opposition to Jewish nationalism became a matter of paramount importance for Soviet leadership. Concerned about foreign influence and political loyalty within their borders, Stalin’s government took increasingly repressive measures to counter what it viewed as possible conduits of anti-Soviet bourgeois nationalism. Stalin’s anti-cosmopolitan campaign was aimed at rooting out individuals deemed insufficiently loyal to Soviet values and overly influenced by foreign ideas.¹⁷

The campaign promoted Soviet patriotism and cultural conformity while condemning so-called rootless intellectuals who were accused of undermining national unity and socialist patriotism. This insular worldview was a Cold War backlash against the perceived encroachment and intrigue of the capitalist world, signalling a new socialist defense of the motherland and its national character. Although “rootless cosmopolitanism” is often read retroactively as a coded antisemitic slur, in its original Soviet usage it functioned as a broader ideological critique rather than targeting Jews or Zionists specifically. The ideological basis of the term, argues Van Ree, fundamentally “rested on patriotic etatism and militant anti-capitalism” rather than traditional Russian antisemitism.¹⁸ It was primarily deployed to denounce individuals perceived as lacking loyalty to the Soviet state and espousing cultural servility to the capitalist West, and was used against many non-Jewish intellectuals and artists who engaged with Western ideas.¹⁹ Tellingly, Van Ree writes that Stalin conceptualized the Russian tsarist tradition as the main source of cosmopolitanism, a tradition which was virulently antisemitic itself and was often criticized on this basis by Stalin and the Soviets (in a speech Stalin had once remarked that “the Hitlerites suppress … the rights of nations as readily as the tsarist regime suppressed them, and that they organize mediæval Jewish pogroms as readily as the tsarist regime organized them.)²⁰ ²¹

The exceptional ferocity of Stalin’s anti-nationalist campaign against Zionism is tied to the heated Cold War tensions of the period. Stalin was alarmed by the enthusiastic response Soviet Jews gave to the establishment of Israel, particularly the outpouring of support following the visit of a Golda Meir envoy in 1948, which saw thousands of Soviet Jews publicly celebrate her arrival and express deep emotional attachment to the new Jewish state.²² Letters poured in from across the USSR proclaiming Israel as “our” country, a sentiment that deeply unsettled Stalin, who viewed such displays of transnational loyalty as absolutely antithetical to the kind of Soviet patriotism that was expected of all Soviet citizens.²³

These factors primed Stalin’s cataclysmic response to all and any perceived Jewish nationalism, however tenuous.

Bourgeois Nationalism

There is a tendency to characterize the anti-Zionist campaign as a manifestation of classic Russian antisemitism, in continuity with tsarist pogroms and state-sanctioned violence against Jews. Van Ree points out that this seems intuitive, but there is no archival evidence that directly substantiates any connection.²⁴ Rather, Stalinist anti-Zionism was part of a broader pattern of distinctly Soviet political repression, in which numerous groups had been targeted at different times under the charge of bourgeois nationalism.²⁵ In one example, repression during the 1930s targeted a wide range of Ukrainian intellectuals and political figures accused of promoting Ukrainian nationalism.²⁶ Among them were members of the so-called Executed Renaissance, a generation of writers, artists, and cultural leaders who were arrested, imprisoned, or executed. One major factor fueling these repressions was official suspicion of ideological links between Soviet Ukrainian writers and émigré nationalist figures abroad.

Notably, in the 1920s, the prominent Soviet Ukrainian writer Mykola Khvylovy engaged with the ideas of Dmytro Dontsov, a proponent of integral nationalism—a radical, fascist ideology. Although Khvylovy remained a committed communist, incorporating these ideas within his ideologically communist framework, he was drawn to Dontsov’s vision of cultural revival and national assertiveness, ideas that would influence the fascist Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN).²⁷ For Soviet authorities, any flirtation with émigré ideologues like Dontsov was seen as a dangerous, potential threat.

We do not have the space to review every Stalinist repression of bourgeois nationalism, but there were many. Robert Service writes: “Stalin moved aggressively against every people in the USSR sharing nationhood with peoples of foreign states.”²⁸ Similarly, Lindemann, a scholar of antisemitism, writes that Stalin’s “hatreds and suspicions knew no limits; even party members from his native Georgia were not exempt.”²⁹ Indeed, Stalin grew concerned over Mingrelians—a Georgian ethnic subgroup—“dominating others in the political hierarchy” and forming ethnic patronage cliques.³⁰ Stalin grew particularly wary of Lavrentiy Beria, a Mingrelian whose growing influence he perceived as the major beneficiary of these developments in Georgian politics, and hence a potential threat. What began as accusations of bribery and corruption soon morphed into paranoid allegations of involvement in a so-called “Mingrelian nationalist ring” and collaboration with Western imperialists.³¹

While there is little evidence that Stalin harbored explicit ethnic or racial hatreds, there is ample documentation of his deep suspicion toward political nationalism, which he viewed as a potential threat to Soviet unity and a possible conduit for foreign infiltration and collaboration. As a result, Stalin was acutely concerned with the “loyalty” of various nationalities and their susceptibility to international intrigue. A useful framework for understanding this mindset is what Terry Martin terms “Soviet xenophobia”—defined as “the exaggerated Soviet fear of foreign influence and foreign contamination.”³² Importantly, Martin clarifies: “I absolutely do not mean traditional Russian xenophobia. Soviet xenophobia was ideological, not ethnic. It was spurred by an ideological hatred and suspicion of foreign capitalist governments, not the national hatred of non-Russians.”³³ This distinction becomes especially evident in cases such as NKVD Order No. 00593, which targeted an ethnic Russian diaspora group for their perceived transnational affiliations and threatening territorial proximities:

National Operation, initiated by NKVD Order n° 00593 on September 20, 1937 … targeted the so-called "Kharbintsy". These were former personnel (engineers, employees, railway workers) of the Chinese-Manchurian railway whose headquarters were based in Kharbin, in Manchuria. After the sale, by the Soviet government, of this railway to Japan in 1935, many returned to the Soviet Union. For Stalin and his team, although most of the Kharbintsy were ethnic Russians, their cross-border ties to the Kharbintsy remaining in China turned them into the functional equivalent of a diaspora nationality. And so, despite their "Russianness", they too became an "enemy group" targeted as part of the National Operations during the Great Terror³⁴

This episode of repression exemplifies the distinctly ideological and political nature of these kinds of repressions, which were primarily concerned with security issues tied to primarily politico-territorial conceptions of identity rather than ethnic ones. Here, a Soviet state led by an ethnic Georgian was carrying acts of repression against a group of ethnic Russians. What made individual(s) vulnerable to Stalin’s ire was not a deep-seated prejudice based on racial doctrines or cultural stereotypes, but perceived ideological contamination of nationalities through territorial proximity, suspect geopolitical connections or international contact with hostile capitalist entities, which, nonetheless, invariably entailed forms of collective punishment. Stalin’s anti-Zionist campaign should be situated within this context.

To exceptionalize the Soviet repression of Jewish nationalism as an entirely unique and separate form of violence in comparison to other anti-nationalist campaigns is to risk retrofitting post-Holocaust frameworks onto a Stalinist logic of repression predicated on political and ideological motivations, rather than ethnic ones. Just as various other “nationalist deviations” were subjected to suspicion and repression due to their perceived geopolitical associations, so too was Jewish nationalism targeted in the context of growing Soviet hostility toward Zionism and the Western bloc. What also distinguishes Stalin’s anti-Zionism from traditional European antisemitism was Stalin self-professed strident opposition to antisemitism. Not only did Stalin not have any documented antisemitic remarks or directives, he condemned antisemitism in the harshest of terms:

in 1927 [Stalin] explicitly mentions that any traces of anti-Semitism, even among workers and in the party is an “evil” that “must be combated, comrades, with all ruthlessness.” And in 1931, in response to a question from the Jewish News Agency in the United States, he describes anti-Semitism as an “an extreme form of racial chauvinism” that is a convenient tool used by exploiters to divert workers from the struggle with capitalism. Communists, therefore, “cannot but be irreconcilable, sworn enemies of anti-semitism.” Indeed, in the U.S.S.R. “anti-semitism is punishable with the utmost severity of the law as a phenomenon deeply hostile to the Soviet system.” Active “anti-semites are liable to the death penalty”³⁵

Some have interpreted Stalin’s public condemnation of antisemitism as a progressive facade, suggesting it served to obscure the more insidious motivations of an authoritarian regime.³⁶ According to this view, Stalin’s egalitarian ideology functioned largely as window-dressing, designed to deflect attention from what they see as the regime’s “real” animating impulses. This interpretation rests on the assumption that Stalin was consistently operating in a cynical and calculated manner—an assumption that, like any historical claim, requires supporting evidence. In this case, that would mean demonstrating a clear discrepancy between Stalin’s private writings or internal government correspondence and his public pronouncements. As historian Zhores Medvedev has noted, no such evidence has been uncovered. Indeed, the WWII specialist, Mark Edele, also cautions against this assumption, writing that the Soviet critique of antisemitism “should be taken more seriously” and that it complicates this history more than scholars have traditionally been willing to admit.³⁷

However this lack of direct evidence does not rule out the possibility of antisemitic motives. One could argue that Stalin still harboured deeply seated antisemitic views, shaped by pre-revolutionary cultural norms, which he never acknowledged, perhaps in order to preserve the coherence of his professed egalitarian and internationalist worldview. From this perspective, Stalin’s alleged hatred of Jews can be inferred not from professed attitudes or ideology evidenced in archival documents but from patterns of behaviour and the concrete effects of his policies on Soviet Jews.

Anti-Antisemitism

This interpretation is complicated by two key factors: first, as previously mentioned, the chief targets of the so-called antisemitic campaigns were not Jewish, and many prominent Jews remained untouched. As historian Albert Lindemann observes, Stalin’s personal relationships and political appointments challenge the notion that he harboured a hatred of Jews:

Not only did [Stalin] repeatedly speak out against anti-Semitism but both his son and daughter married Jews, and several of his closest and most devoted lieutenants from the late 1920s through the 1930s were of Jewish origin—for example, Lazar Moiseyevich Kaganovich, Maxim Litvinov, and the notorious head of the secret police, Genrikh Yagoda … The importance of men like Kaganovich, Litvinov, and Yagoda makes it hard to believe that Stalin harbored a categorical hatred of all Jews, as a race.³⁸

While Stalin may not have been personally antisemitic, antisemitism nonetheless existed within Soviet society, which undoubtedly included officials and party functionaries. These views often persisted despite the formal anti-antisemitic laws and ideology of the regime. As Van Ree notes, Stalin was at times directly confronted with such behaviour and pushed back against it:

In 1947, [Stalin] told Romanian party leader Gheorghiu-Dej that it was unacceptable to remove his colleague Pauker from high positions in the party merely because she was Jewish…Stalin also rejected Suslov’s proposal according to which “nationality” might be used as the official reason for dismissal from one’s work place.³⁹

Stalin reprimanded his Romanian counterpart with a striking comment: “[One] must remember that, if their party will be class-based, social, then it will grow; if it will be racial, then it will perish, for racism leads to fascism.”⁴⁰ This brings us to the second major factor complicating any straightforward narrative of Soviet antisemitism. Stalin’s line of reasoning in this interaction echoed the USSR’s project of promoting social equity among minority groups, including Jews. One key example of this was the korenizatsiya (indigenization) policy of the 1920s, which actively supported minority languages and cultures as part of the larger socialist nation-building effort. For Soviet Jews, this included the establishment of Yiddish-language schools, theatres, publications, and the creation of the Yevsektsiya, the Jewish sections of the Communist Party. ⁴¹

Elements of the indigenization policies wound down by the mid-1930s, and some have interpreted this as evidence that Stalin’s regime took a full conservative turn, abandoning its commitment to minority equity and moving toward a form of traditional Russian chauvinism, with antisemitism never far beneath the surface. There is no denying the stark shift that occurred by the late 1940s and early 1950s amidst the anti-Zionist campaign, when the Soviet state shuttered many Jewish cultural institutions due to growing fears around their extensive ties to religious and cultural organizations abroad, especially those based in the United States, which were increasingly seen as potential sources of ideological contamination.

This view of a chauvinistic, Russifying USSR is complicated by the fact that pro-minority policies continued for Jews at the height of an allegedly antisemitic campaign. Following the USSR’s territorial expansion during and after the Second World War, the Soviet state reintroduced aggressive affirmative action–style measures in what scholars have termed a period of “neo-indigenization,” once again working to aggressively remove social barriers through employment equity and popular education.⁴² This revival sheds light on how the Soviet leadership understood its minority equity policies—not as a continuous process, but as a distinct initial stage in the development of nations. Importantly, this renewed indigenization extended to Jewish communities in the newly annexed territories. These initiatives reflected a genuine effort to integrate and empower minorities within the Soviet system, complicating claims that antisemitism was a defining or consistent feature of Stalinist policy.

As historian Diana Dumitru has shown in her study of Soviet Moldavia, Jewish representation in civil and cultural institutions remained significant after 1948 in this region, and in some cases, even grew, precisely during the period often cited as the onset of official Soviet antisemitism:

The Jewish presence in Soviet Moldavia’s leading cultural institutions was also significant throughout the entire period, even if it showed some fluctuation. In 1945, 33 percent of the membership of the MSSR’s Union of Writers were of Jewish origin, and by 1949 this proportion increased to 43 percent; although it decreased back to 33 percent by 1953. Jews were a significant group in the Union of Composers of the MSSR: in 1948 the Union’s 18 members included eight Jews. Even more surprising, if one takes into account the climax of anti-Jewish sentiments in Moscow in the early 1950s, the proportion of Jewish members in the Union of Composers in the MSSR had increased further by 1953.18 Among the members of the MSSR’s Union of Artists, Jews comprised 16.6 percent for three consecutive years (1944–1946); their share dropped to 10.6 percent in 1948, yet grew again to 14–15 percent in the following years, and jumped to 20 percent by 1953⁴³

Dumitru describes how the new Soviet culture in Moldavia was a stark contrast to the previous antisemitic government, encouraging “the professional advancement of ethnic Jews to positions of power and prestige previously unmatched in this region.”⁴⁴ The rapid facilitation of Jews into positions of power and their overrepresentation in professional areas “relative to their share of the population” in the region was enabled by the USSR’s broad decrees against antisemitism and the inclusive nature of its social policy.⁴⁵ Likewise, Smilovitsky’s text on Jewish life in Belarus describes how “Jews rose to form a significant and disproportionately-sized group in leading managerial positions in Belorussia’s economic, educational, scientific, and cultural institutions between 1945 and 1950.”⁴⁶ These anti-antisemitism policies had significant implications during WWII, saving countless lives.

In Dumitru’s comparative study of civilians' attitudes and behaviour toward the Jewish population in Romania and the occupied Soviet Union, she demonstrates that even brief periods of Soviet control significantly transformed local attitudes by actively combating antisemitism through state-led campaigns, education, and the promotion of internationalist socialist ideology.⁴⁷ In one informative example, Dumitru describes how the state used social satire and theatre as forms of popular education against antisemitism:

Satire and public shaming were then highly regarded in the Soviet Union as educational tools. In their spirit, mock trials of antisemites were staged for the public, boldly taking on the particular preconceptions of the era. An American journalist who visited Kiev in 1932 attended such a play, which featured a clerk named Raznochintseva, who was accused of saying, “the Jews have already forgotten what a pogrom is like, but soon there will be another war and we shall remind them what it means to capture Russia’s government, land, factories, and everything else.” Influenced by her ideas, a peasant begins to complain that the Soviet government is giving land, seed, and credit to Jews, while only taking from the Russian peasants. The trial associated antisemitism with counterrevolution and the bourgeoisie, as well as with ignorance:

Raznochintseva: Don’t you know that [the Jews] have always been after easy money?

Attorney for the Defense: How well do you know any Jews?

Raznochintseva: Personally I know very few of them. I always avoid them.

Prosecutor: Did you ever read any literature about Jews?

Raznochintseva: I was not interested enough.

The play suggested that such individuals could easily corrupt those who do not read the Soviet press; Raznochintseva and several other witnesses all confirmed that their own antisemitic ideas were not backed up by any empirical knowledge. Even Raznochintseva’s boss, a Jew named Kantorovich, ends up on trial, for hearing antisemitic statements by his workers but doing nothing to stop them. In the end Raznochintseva is fired from her job and sentenced to two years for the “counterrevolutionary activity of inciting antisemitism.⁴⁸

These policies were historically unprecedented both within the region and in the broader context of wartime Europe, fostering greater awareness among local populations of the dangers posed by Nazi racial doctrines. As a result, Transnistrian Moldova, under Soviet rule, witnessed far less collaboration than did Bessarabian Moldova, under Romanian rule.⁴⁹ Dumitru’s findings highlight how the Soviet state’s ideological commitment to combating ethnic hatred and fascism shaped a material difference on the ground and undermine any straightforward characterization of the Stalinist state as inherently antisemitic. The apparent paradox between what some scholars have described as Stalinist antisemitism and the simultaneous promotion of Soviet-Jewish identity and anti-antisemitism was not truly a paradox at all. For the Soviets, it reflected two distinct but non-contradictory processes: the promotion of multicultural equity inclusive of Jews, alongside the repression of Zionism that, like all forms of bourgeois nationalism, was viewed as a threat to the Soviet state.

Indeed, Christopher Read, drawing on Medvedev’s research, writes that Stalin died just before the publication of a letter he had approved, written by Soviet Jews, which outlined the difference between Soviet Jews and cosmopolitans—likely as a means of correcting those on the ground who, contrary to Stalin’s intentions, interpreted the campaign as an antisemitic assault on all Soviet Jews.⁵⁰ Read notes that Stalin sought to terminate the campaign at the end of his life but died before giving final approval, contradicting the common assumption that Stalin would have expanded his suppression of Jewish institutions had he not died when he did.

Perceptions of Soviet Antisemitism

The perception of Soviet antisemitism has also been shaped, in part, by two widely believed misconceptions about the USSR. The first is the claim that the Nazi genocide of the Jews became a forbidden topic in the Soviet Union, and that Soviet commemoration of those killed by the Nazis deliberately refused to acknowledge the extermination of Jewry. While Soviet historians of the first postwar decades did not define the Nazi extermination as “a separate, uniquely Jewish phenomenon,” as it is currently understood in the West, they nonetheless acknowledged the exceptional brutality of Nazi treatment towards Jews while situating this violence within a broader narrative of a distinctly Soviet tragedy. Baranova writes:⁵¹

When Soviet historians did discuss the Nazi atrocities against the Jews, they usually viewed that catastrophe as an integral part of a larger phenomenon – the Nazi genocide and the tragedy of all Soviet people (whether Jews, Russians, Belarusians, Ukrainians) occasioned by Nazi racism directed not only at Jews, but also at Slavs who all were targets of the Nazi policy of enslavement and extermination. In other words, Soviet historians acknowledged that many Jews were killed by the fascist and that Jews were often treated in a most brutal way, but they asserted that similar things happened also to other national groups in the occupied areas of the Soviet Union. ⁵²

While some critics have expressed concern over highlighting non-Jewish victims of the Nazi genocide, we should not overlook the historical reality that millions of Slavic people were systematically killed by a regime that explicitly regarded Slavs as racially inferior beings fit only for slavery and death. The Nazi vision of settler-colonial genocide and expansion (Lebensraum) in Soviet lands cannot be separated from the Holocaust.⁵³ For the Soviets, Nazi extermination was undoubtedly a Soviet-wide tragedy, and the downplaying of this historical reality is part of a larger attempt in the Western world to minimize both the sacrifice and the achievements of the Soviet people during the war effort. This denialism reflects a deeply rooted form of anti-Slavic racism and Russophobia that, regrettably, continues to permeate much of Western media and scholarship.

While the Soviets did not elevate Jewish suffering above other ethnic groups in their commemorative activity, they still acknowledged the horrific treatment of Jews at the hands of the Nazis and permitted space for their commemoration—often made possible through the activism of Soviet Jews who mobilized within their communities to ensure their loved ones were honoured. Indeed, Arkadi Zeltser, a research historian at Yad Vashem, “shows that, on the contrary, Soviet Jews memorialized the Holocaust in the Soviet Union similarly to Jews elsewhere in the world.”⁵⁴ Zeltser describes how Jewish communities in over 700 locations mobilized to set up memorials to Holocaust victims, each of which required state approval.⁵⁵ It was an onerous and bureaucratic process, and some requests were denied, but the claim that the Soviets strictly forbade recognition of Jewish victims is demonstrably false. In fact, the USSR’s own ambassador to the United Nations explicitly cited the Holocaust as part of the justification for the colonial imposition of a Jewish state on Palestinian territory, stating:

The Jewish people suffered exceptional calamities and sufferings in the last war. On the territory dominated by the Hitlerites, the Jews were subjected to almost complete physical extermination - about six million people died. The fact that not a single Western European state was able to ensure the protection of the elementary rights of the Jewish people and protect it from violence by the fascist executioners explains the Jews' desire to create their own state. It would be unfair not to reckon with this and deny the right of the Jewish people to carry out such a desire.⁵⁶

This reflects a darker dimension of Soviet Holocaust recognition, its instrumentalization in service of geopolitical ambitions that ultimately enabled horrific atrocities against Palestinians, who experienced displacement and settler-colonial violence during the creation of a Jewish state, which we will return to later in this piece. Nonetheless, it is false that the Soviet state embraced a form of Holocaust denial in its commemorative activities.

The second major myth of Stalinist antisemitism is that Stalin was planning to ethnically cleanse the entire Soviet Jewish population by deporting them en masse to Siberia or the Far East, a campaign believed by some to have been imminent on the eve of his death in 1953. Ken Kalfus correctly notes that historians “have not yet found evidence that further actions against the nation’s roughly 2.2 million Jews were contemplated.”⁵⁷ A campaign of that scale would have required extensive logistical preparation and the full mobilization of the Soviet state apparatus. The absence of any such documentation makes clear that no such plan ever existed, as it is difficult to imagine an operation of that magnitude leaving no bureaucratic trace.⁵⁸

The notion of a coming deportation of Jews was largely the product of fear, rumour, and speculation in the wake of the fabricated Doctors’ Plot and the earlier dissolution of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee. Nonetheless, the idea that Stalin was preparing a mass expulsion of Jews has been endlessly recycled as a self-evident truth despite the complete lack of concrete evidence.

Palestine and Israel

While the alleged plan to deport Jews within Soviet borders was never real, the USSR was indeed implicated in a mass expulsion that did take place around the same time: the Nakba of 1948. As part of its initial support for the creation of the State of Israel, the Soviet Union played a significant role in the displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians. Through diplomatic backing, demographic support, and arms transfers, the USSR facilitated the emergence of the new Israeli state, directly contributing to the forcible expulsion of Palestinian Arabs. Réal writes::

Before 1948, the USSR directly or indirectly supported secret immigration operations organised by the Jewish Agency for Israel, sending Jews from eastern Europe, especially Romania and Bulgaria (66% of the Jews who arrived in Palestine between 1946 and 1948 came from there)⁵⁹

This was made possible through the USSR’s influence in its aligned nations in Eastern Europe: “Support for Jewish emigration from the People's Democracies was the USSR's most effective lever for affecting developments in and concerning Palestine.”⁶⁰ The demographic contribution proved vital in ensuring the success of Israel’s settler-colonial project, which relied on an influx of settlers that the USSR was eager to facilitate. Demographic support “meant in essence contributing to the Israeli war effort against the neighboring Arab states,”⁶¹ as the growing settler population directly translated into military advantage. The Soviet alliance with Zionism stood in stark contrast to the USSR’s historical condemnations of colonialism and its rhetorical support for anti-colonial struggles across the Global South. The historian of Central Asia, Adeeb Khalid, has noted how the anticolonial “Third Worldist” dimension of Bolshevik thought especially struck a chord in the Soviet “East” of Central Asia, where revolutionary practice was seen as the antidote to imperialist and colonial domination by the capitalist world.⁶² For these reasons, Stalin’s support of a colonial movement in the Middle East was especially shocking.

The Soviet reversal in support of Zionism was largely determined by geopolitical calculations in the region, as they saw it as an invaluable strategic opportunity to assert themselves in a region in which the Soviets had no footing. It would also, in their view, divide the “capitalist powers” and primarily serve as a major blow to the imperialist enemy Great Britain, which had only recently lost India and was now open to another blow. Palestine was a strategic hub for British imperial interests, serving as a key junction for Middle Eastern oil pipelines and global trade routes.⁶³ The allure of a new geopolitical equation favourable to the Soviets seemed to greatly outweigh any moral considerations, leading to the USSR’s shameful disregard of the Palestinians.

In addition to crucial demographic support, the USSR also facilitated covert arms shipments, primarily through Czechoslovakia, to the Haganah, the main Zionist military force. These arms played a key role in the 1948 war, during which Zionist forces carried out a campaign of violence and displacement against the Palestinian population.⁶⁴ Ilan Pappé, who wrote the seminal text on the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, affirms the Soviet role in this process, though qualifies it, writing:

[The USSR] supplied arms to the Israelis, and this is something which of course helped the ethnic cleansing. On the other hand they supported the Partition resolution which did not call for an ethnic cleansing. In fact it called for the creation of a bi-national Arab-Jewish state. According to the Partition resolution, almost 50% of the citizens of the future Jewish State were supposed to be Palestinians.⁶⁵

While the Soviets were formally opposed to the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, their support for a plan of peaceful Arab-Jewish coexistence was undermined by the extensive material support they provided to the Zionist movement. Armed with Soviet-supplied weaponry, these militias carried out brutal operations that included massacres, forced expulsions, and the destruction of entire villages. It must be noted that the violence unleashed by the Zionist movement was not incidental or accidental but part of a systematic effort to establish a Jewish state with territorial dominance at the direct expense of the indigenous population. Indeed, the Soviet indifference to crimes against Palestinians is especially disturbing. Ruckert writes:

Another aspect of the Soviet Union's demographic contribution to the Israeli war effort was its noticeable support of the Jewish state’s position on the fate of the 700,000 Arab Palestinians expelled or exiled from the territories gained by the Jewish forces. The mass forced departure of the Palestinians allowed Israel to expand and homogenize its territory. The Soviet press ignored the massacre of the Arab village of Deir Yassin committed by Irgun and Lehi groups on 9 April 1948. During the UN debate, the Soviet delegates denied that Israel had any responsibility for the fate of the Palestinian peoples and deflected it instead to Great Britain and the Arab countries. They also supported the Israeli position rejecting the plan of Count Bernadotte, the appointed mediator in the Arab/Jewish conflict, which proposed a Palestinian right to financial compensation.⁶⁶

Moshe Shertok, head of the political department of the Jewish Agency for Palestine, describes how in all his interactions with the Soviets, there was an “absence of any interest in, or concern about, the fate of the Arab refugees, utter contempt for the progressive forces in the Arab states, and so forth.”⁶⁷ The Soviets had even voted against a UN resolution that would allow Arab refugees wishing to return to their homes to do so or be compensated for loss or damage to property.⁶⁸ The Soviet position on Palestine decimated the reputation and standing of communism in the Arab world, where Communist Parties in the region saw a mass exodus in their membership.

While the (false) claim that the Soviets prohibited any acknowledgment of the Nazi genocide of Jews is often cited as further evidence of Stalinist antisemitism, scholars of Soviet history analyzing Soviet policy in the Middle East typically have not conceived of Soviet complicity in the displacement of Palestinians as an atrocity or a crime for which moral culpability is due, let alone make accusations of anti-Arab or anti-Palestinian racism. Instead, it is treated as a minor footnote in the broader story of Soviet diplomacy in the region. While there are only a handful of book-length texts on Stalin-era Middle Eastern policy by historians of the USSR or Soviet international relations in English, I have yet to read one that even mentions the word Nakba or uses the term “ethnic cleansing” in relation to Palestinians.⁶⁹

This reflects an enduring hierarchy of victimhood in which the suffering of certain groups is granted greater moral legitimacy than others. Nakba denial has enjoyed mainstream acceptance within Soviet scholarship and beyond, while disproportionate emphasis is placed on Soviet antisemitism—so much so that antisemitic motives and incidents have, at times, been exaggerated or asserted without any substantiating evidence in certain historical accounts. The ease with which a non-existent plan to deport Jews has come to be accepted as fact reflects the distorting influence of the “totalitarian” thesis, a popular anti-communist theoretical framework that casts Hitler and Stalin as mirror images of each other, collapsing the essential differences between these figures and the distinct historical contexts that shaped their motives and ideology.⁷⁰ Within this reductive comparative framework, it becomes easy to project Nazi atrocities onto the Soviet Union (and vice versa). Soviet programs of social equity for minorities or campaigns against antisemitism do not fit neatly within this schema and are overlooked, smoothing out the contradictions that complicate dominant narratives of Stalin’s state-endorsed antisemitism. While historians have searched in vain for evidence of an antisemitic expulsion of Soviet Jews, an actual ethnic expulsion took place during the same late Stalinist era as a result of Soviet decision-making. This expulsion was then actually suppressed by the Soviet press, unlike the demonstrably false claims of Soviet Holocaust denial.

Part of this privileging of Jewish suffering over other victims stems from the Holocaust’s status as the paradigmatic genocide in modern historical consciousness; it endures in our collective memory as the purest form of distilled racial hatred. As a result, antisemitism has come to occupy a singular position as the archetype of evil, which, in turn, shapes how we read and interpret history. During the Cold War, Western scholars and institutions often emphasized Soviet repression to highlight contrasts with liberal democratic values. Within this context, focusing on alleged antisemitism in the USSR became a compelling narrative, as it resonated with broader Western concerns about human rights and totalitarian threats. It is easy to see how Stalin’s paranoid anti-Zionist campaign was taken up as antisemitic in the literature.

Conclusion

Backshadowing is a form of historical distortion that occurs when a presumed outcome is treated as inevitable, and the past is selectively reconstructed to fit that conclusion. Rather than analyzing events on their own terms, this approach imposes a predetermined endpoint, and forces the facts to fit the narrative, leading to the omission of contradictory evidence. The notion of Stalinist antisemitism has become something of a historiographic trope, largely based on the legitimate fears and perceptions of Soviet Jews, but it does not accurately reflect the motivations of the Soviet state as documented in the archival record.

This writing should not be perceived as a defence of Stalinist repression; if anything, I’m arguing that the focus on antisemitism actually reduces the scope of Stalin’s violence by downgrading the other anti-nationalist repressions into a less visible category. While it may be tempting to add antisemitism to the litany of charges levelled at Stalin, we do not need to embellish or invent charges to prove that Stalin wielded repression brutally—the existing evidence is clear. Stalin’s repression of perceived nationalist movements were usually unnecessary and ruthless, causing immense suffering to its victims. It may seem that only a deep, primordial racial hatred can explain the scale of these repressions. After all, an antisemitic Stalin is intuitively satisfying, a figure who fits neatly into a familiar one-dimensional narratives of psychopathic dictators and totalitarian terror in the mold of Hitlerism. But the insistence on casting him as a Soviet Hitler tells us less about Stalin himself than about the preconceived notions and ideological reflexes that shape our understanding of history, and which separates worthy victims from unworthy ones.

Afterword for Paid Subscribers at the end of Footnotes⁷¹

1. Benjamin Pinkus, The Jews of the Soviet Union: The History of a National Minority (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 181.

2. Ibid., 181-185.

3. Geoffrey Roberts, Stalin's Wars: From World War to Cold War, 1939–1953 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 341.

4. Christopher Read, Stalin: A Biography (London: Routledge, 2005), 304-305.

5. Yu Xiao and Ji Zeng, "Antisemitism or Political Purge? Stalin's Jewish Policies Revisited," Journal of Cold War Studies4, no. 1 (2002): 66–80

6. Robert Service, Stalin: A Biography (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2004), p. 568.

7. Benjamin Pinkus, The Jews of the Soviet Union: The History of a National Minority (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 157; Pinkus is a historian who does defend the concept of Soviet antisemitism, though this conclusion is undermined by much of his own evidence.

8. Ibid., 151-155

9. Mironov, Boris N. "Социальная история России периода империи (XVIII—начало XX века)." Accessed June 21, 2025. https://www.hrono.ru/libris/lib_m/mironin37.html; Zhores Medvedev, Stalin i evreiskii vopros [Stalin and the Jewish Question] (Moscow: Prava cheloveka, 2003).

10. Jiwan Lee, "An Interview with Geoffrey Roberts about 'Stalin’s Library'," Yale Books Blog, March 22, 2024, https://yalebooksblog.co.uk/2024/03/22/an-interview-with-geoffrey-roberts-about-stalins-library/.

11. Joseph Stalin, Marxism and the National Question, March 1913, Marxists Internet Archive, accessed June 21, 2025, https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1913/03a.htm.

12. Terry Martin, “An Affirmative Action Empire,” in A State of Nations: Empire and Nation-Making in the Age of Lenin and Stalin, ed. Ronald Grigor Suny and Terry Martin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).

13. Ibid,. 81.

14. Ibid., 84.

15. Becoming Soviet Jews: The Bolshevik Experiment in Minsk (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013).

16. Inna Shtakser, review of Becoming Soviet Jews: The Bolshevik Experiment in Minsk, by Elissa Bemporad, accessed June 22, 2025, https://conservancy.umn.edu/server/api/core/bitstreams/368096ee-472f-401a-9b02-ac38db3eb15a/content.; Elissa Bemporad, Becoming Soviet Jews: The Bolshevik Experiment in Minsk (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013).

17. Stephen J. Rees, The Political Thought of Joseph Stalin: A Study in Twentieth-Century Revolutionary Patriotism (London: Routledge, 2012), 202-207.

18. Ibid., 205.

19. Ibid.,

20. Ibid. Unlike Roberts, Read, Medvedev, and Xiao, Van Ree does attribute personal antisemitism to Stalin, but as a secondary component to this campaign. He describes etatism and patriotism as the basis of Stalin’s antisemitism—however, without any racial, religious, or cultural dimension to Stalin’s supposed antisemitism, I question if this strictly political form antisemitism can be classified as antisemitism as all, given that non-Jews were targeted and that Jews participated in the repression.

21. Joseph Stalin, Speech at Celebration Meeting of the Moscow Soviet of Working People's Deputies and Moscow Party and Public Organizations, November 6, 1941, in Works, vol. 14 (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1955), 18–31. https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1941/11/06.htm.

22. Yu Xiao and Ji Zeng, "Antisemitism or Political Purge? Stalin's Jewish Policies Revisited," Journal of Cold War Studies4, no. 1 (2002): 66–80

23. Ibid.

24. Stephen J. Rees, The Political Thought of Joseph Stalin: A Study in Twentieth-Century Revolutionary Patriotism (London: Routledge, 2012), 206-207.

25. Christopher Read, Stalin: A Biography (London: Routledge, 2005), 305.

26. Trevor Erlacher, “Mykola Khvyl’ovyy, Dmytro Dontsov, and the Transgressive Symbiosis of Communist and Nationalist Visions for a Revolutionary Ukrainian Literature,” Connexe: Les Espaces Postcommunistes en Question(s) 5 (October 2020): 53–75, https://doi.org/10.5077/journals/connexe.2019.e250.

27. Ibid., 62.

28. Robert Service, Stalin: A Biography (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005),

29. Albert Lindemann, Esau’s Tears: Modern Anti-Semitism and the Rise of the Jews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 454.

30. Christopher Read, Stalin: A Biography (London: Routledge, 2005), 305.

31. Michael Parrish, The Lesser Terror: Soviet State Security, 1939–1953.

32. Terry Martin, The Origins of Soviet Ethnic Cleansing (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017),

33. Ibid.

34. Nicolas Werth, “The NKVD Mass Secret National Operations (August 1937 - November 1938),” Mass Violence & Résistance, May 20, 2010, accessed June 22, 2025, https://www.sciencespo.fr/mass-violence-war-massacre-resistance/en/document/nkvd-mass-secret-national-operations-august-1937-november-1938.

35. Espresso Stalinist, “Stalin’s ‘Anti-Semitism,’” The Espresso Stalinist, July 27, 2016, https://espressostalinist.com/2016/07/27/stalins-anti-semitism/.

36. This was the view of Khrushchev professed in his problematic memoir that has been criticized by a number of historians for its historical distortions, fabrications, and omissions. See: https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1974/08/08/khrushchev-forgets/?utm_source=chatgpt.com

37. Edele, Mark, “More Than Just Stalinists: The Political Sentiments of Victors, 1945–1953,” in Fürst, Juliane, ed., Late Stalinist Russia: Society between Reconstruction and Reinvention (London, 2006), 173

38. Albert Lindemann, Esau’s Tears: Modern Anti-Semitism and the Rise of the Jews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 454.

39. Stephen J. Rees, The Political Thought of Joseph Stalin: A Study in Twentieth-Century Revolutionary Patriotism (London: Routledge, 2012), 205.

40. Ibid.

41. Elissa Bemporad, Becoming Soviet Jews: The Bolshevik Experiment in Minsk (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013).

42. Diana Dumitru, “Jewish Social Mobility under Late Stalinism: A View from the Newly Sovietizing Periphery,” Slavic Review 78, no. 4 (Winter 2019)

43. Ibid.

44. Ibid.

45. Diana Dumitru, The State, Antisemitism, and Collaboration in the Holocaust: The Borderlands of Romania and the Soviet Union (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016)

46. Diana Dumitru, “Jewish Social Mobility under Late Stalinism: A View from the Newly Sovietizing Periphery,” Slavic Review 78, no. 4 (Winter 2019), 987; Leonid Smilovitsky, Jewish Life in Belarus: The Final Decade of the Stalin Regime, 1944–1953 (Budapest : Central European University Press, July 20, 2014);

47. Ibid.,

48. Ibid., 127.

49. Ibid., 235.

50. Christopher Read, Stalin: A Biography (London: Routledge, 2005), 305.

51. Olga Baranova, "Politics of Memory of the Holocaust in the Soviet Union," Junior Visiting Fellows' Conferences, vol. XXXIV (Vienna: Institute for Human Sciences, 2010),

52. Ibid.

53. Dan Stone, The Holocaust: An History. (London: Oxford University Press, 2016),

54. David Shneer, review of Unwelcome Memory: Holocaust Monuments in the Soviet Union, by Arkadi Zeltser, Slavic Review 79, no. 1 (Spring 2020): 231–232,

55. Arkadi Zeltser, Unwelcome Memory: Holocaust Monuments in the Soviet Union, trans. A. S. Brown (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem Press, 2018).

56. Laurent Rucker, Moscow’s Surprise: The Soviet–Israeli Alliance of 1947–1949, Working Paper no. 46 (Washington, D.C.: Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, July 15, 2005), 17.

57. Ken Kalfus, “Imagining Stalin’s Plot to Exile the Jews,” The New Yorker, February 1, 2016.

58. Ibid.

59. Michel Réal, “The Forgotten Alliance,” Le Monde diplomatique (English edition), September 2014, https://mondediplo.com/2014/09/07israel-russia.

60. Yaacov Ro'i, Soviet Decision-Making in Practice: The USSR and Israel, 1947–1954 (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1980), 33.

61. Laurent Rucker, Moscow’s Surprise: The Soviet–Israeli Alliance of 1947–1949, Working Paper no. 46 (Washington, D.C.: Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, July 15, 2005), 30.

62. Adeeb Khalid, “Locating the (Post-)Colonial in Soviet History,” Central Asian Survey 26, no. 4 (2007): 465–73, https://doi.org/10.1080/02634930802017895.

63. Yaacov Ro'i, Soviet Decision-Making in Practice: The USSR and Israel, 1947–1954 (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1980), 40.

64. Laurent Rucker, Moscow’s Surprise: The Soviet–Israeli Alliance of 1947–1949, Working Paper no. 46 (Washington, D.C.: Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, July 15, 2005), 26.

65. Greg Dropkin, interview with Ilan Pappé, LabourNet, September 13, 2002, https://www.labournet.net/world/0209/pappe1.html.

66. Laurent Rucker, Moscow’s Surprise: The Soviet–Israeli Alliance of 1947–1949, Working Paper no. 46 (Washington, D.C.: Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, July 15, 2005), 33.

67. Ibid., 34.

68. Ibid.

69. See the work of Golia Golan, Yaacov Ro’i, Roman, Brackman, Joseph Heller. Laurent Rucker is cited in this article as well, but his book length texts are in French.

70. Michael Geyer and Sheila Fitzpatrick, eds., Beyond Totalitarianism: Stalinism and Nazism Compared (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Domenico Losurdo, “Stalin and Hitler: Twin Brothers or Mortal Enemies?,” Crisis and Critique 3, no. 1 (March 29, 2016).

71. Afterword

As I wrote this article, I could not help but reflect on the connections between this history and the ongoing genocide in Gaza. The Nakba cannot be understood as a singular event in which the Soviets briefly and regrettably played a role before shifting course.