FROM THE ARCHIVES: March 5, 2003
Stalin's Last Laugh
By VLADIMIR TISMANEANU
On the surface, the ideology of the political left looks incompatible with anti-Semitism. In reality, on more than one occasion, beginning with young Karl Marx's simultaneously anti-bourgeois and anti-Semitic pamphlet on the "Jewish Question," many on the left identified Jews with money, murky financial transactions and plutocracy. Especially in France, 19th-century socialist activists nourished deep anti-Semitic sentiments. In recent decades, as the United States has become the symbol and main carrier of global capitalism, anti-Semitism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Americanism have coalesced in an eclectic yet immensely powerful political myth.
Joseph Stalin , who passed away 50 years ago today in Moscow, gave the most powerful formulation to this myth. It is one of his lasting legacies for our times.
A few months before his death, at the 19th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in October 1952, Stalin delivered his last major address proclaiming the need for the "progressive forces of mankind" to close ranks and support the Soviet bloc's "struggle for peace." He stigmatized the U.S. and its alleged lackeys, the West European democracies, as war mongers. One month later, in Prague on November 27, in what history recorded as the Slansky Trial, 14 defendants -- all of them communists and all but three Jews -- were found guilty of Trotskyism, Titoism, Zionism, and espionage for the West. Several days later, 11 were hanged, including Rudolf Slansky, ex-secretary-general of the Czechoslovak Communist Party and top Stalinist propagandist Andre Simone (Otto Katz). The trial and executions were directly linked to the intensification of Stalin's anti-Semitic fixations in the aftermath of the creation of the state of Israel and the growing role of the United States as the most important opponent of Soviet expansionism.
A few other instances should be recalled in order to highlight the deep racist, anti-Semitic component of Stalinism: in January 1948, secret-police thugs in Minsk murdered famous actor Solomon Mikhoels. The same year, Stalin unleashed the campaign against "rootless cosmopolitans," and the Jewish identity of prominent intellectuals became an argument to demonstrate their lack of "patriotism." After 1948, Soviet authorities engaged in a systematic effort to suppress Jewish culture. The Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee was dissolved and hundreds of Jewish writers, actors, and journalists were arrested. Purges resulted in the almost complete elimination of Jews from any leading positions, especially in such sensitive fields as the military, secret police, radio broadcasting, and the legal system (the token Jew Lazar Kaganovich, Stalin's loyal underling, was one of the most rabid proponents of anti-Semitic actions).
In August 1952, 25 of the leading figures associated with the disbanded Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee were secretly executed in the Lubljanka prison. In a report to Stalin , one of their tormentors boasted of his ruthless behavior toward the "Jewish vermin." To his credit, the veteran Bolshevik Solomon Lozovski, who had been appointed by Stalin himself to chair the committee, as well as most of the other defendants, refused to confess to the surreal charges concocted by the secret police in accordance with Stalin's demented script. Among those murdered there was the celebrated Yiddish poet Peretz Markish, who had hoped to find in the USSR a homeland free of racist prejudice.
On January 13, 1953, the politics of anti-Semitic paranoia reached a climax when Pravda announced the arrest of a group of "Saboteurs-Doctors" (the murderers in white blouses): these were physicians, mostly Jewish, long entrusted with the personal health of the top Soviet leadership, now accused with conspiracy of poisoning the generalissimo and his acolytes. Busy as he was musing on "Marxism and the Questions of Linguistics," the coryphaeus of science (as the propaganda depicted Stalin ) found the time and the resources of hatred to set the ground for a monstrous trial meant to lead to the execution of the defendants and the mass deportations of Jews to Siberia. It was only Stalin's death that prevented the trial from taking place.
Amazingly, during all those months, there was no voice (major or minor) of the Western pro-communist and anti-American left to protest the official espousal by the USSR and its satellites of Nazi-style anti-Semitic clichés and fantasies. The Western left, including the existentialist luminaries of Jean-Paul Sartre's celebrated journal Les Temps Modernes, were too busy denouncing American alleged use of bacteriological weapons in Korea, not to speak of the world campaign in favor of the Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, accused of espionage on behalf of the USSR (it now turns out the charge, at least in the case of Julius, was entirely accurate).
Fifty years have passed from those times of infamy, and we are witnessing a resurgence of the same resentful myths. Israel is seen as the mastermind behind U.S. policies, Islamic fundamentalists are lionized as "freedom fighters," Zionism (of whatever nuance) is equated with racism and fascism, globalization is depicted as a plot meant to enslave the poor countries, and America is demonized as the main cause of all the world's problems (from environmental degradation to the attempt to gain control over the oil fields of Iraq). For some, even September 11 was justified by America's subordination to the presumed Zionist strategy of world domination.
As in the past, the radical left and its gullible supporters prefer to close their eyes regarding the atrocities committed by the anti-Semitic and anti-Western dictators. They indulge in selective outrage and enduring denial. It is thus high time to revisit the traditions of a large segment of the left and acknowledge the fact that anti-capitalism has often gone hand in hand with deep hostility to democracy, individual rights, and genuine internationalism. How else can one interpret the statement by Portuguese novelist (and Nobel prize winner) Jose Saramago who, returning from the Palestinian Authority, went so far as to declare: "Ramallah is Auschwitz." In the early 1950s, the Western left was silent about Stalin's venomous anti-Semitism. Today, 50 years later, all the late Soviet tyrant's obsessions have resurfaced in the discourse of the new anti-Americanism and the maniacal identification of Zionism with war, colonialism, oppression, and racism. From his grave in the Kremlin wall, Stalin must be grinning with enormous joy and a not unjustified sense of historical revenge.
Mr. Tismaneanu, professor of politics at the University of Maryland (College Park), is the author of "Stalinism for All Seasons: A Political History of Romanian Communism" (University of California Press, 2003).
Updated March 5, 2003 |
