To: hdl who wrote (159445 ) 10/10/2003 4:59:48 AM From: Cyprian Respond to Joe Bananas amconmag.com Afterwards Stalin minded his tongue with greater skill, not least because many leading Bolsheviks were Jews, and even those who were Gentiles (Sergei Kirov, V.M. Molotov, and Kliment Voroshilov, to name three of the most renowned) had Jewish wives. We find him, in his dictatorship’s early years, making anti-Semitic behavior punishable by imprisonment or death and deeming such behavior “the most dangerous vestige of cannibalism.” (Not for him, by this stage, Khrushchev’s folksy candor in complaining to Poland’s Communist leadership, “You have already too many Abramoviches.”) The Order of Lenin’s 1939 recipients included a batch of writers in Yiddish; Trotsky himself stopped short of bemoaning any anti-Jewish malice on Stalin’s part; as late as 1948, Jews accounted for 40 out of 190 Stalin-Prize recipients. Yet restrictions on Jews’ employment within the Soviet bureaucracy had begun during the Second World War. Snarls in Pravda editorials against “rootless cosmopolites” started in 1947. And Golda Meir’s visit to Moscow —where she attracted frenzied crowds that could have been easily enough dispersed by Stalin’s fiat—occurred only months after the assassination (sorry, comrades, “fatal car crash”) of Jewish Antifascist Committee boss Solomon Mikhoels.
