Stalin and allegations of anti-Semitism
Despite its official opposition to anti-Semitism, critics of the USSR condemn it as anti-Semitic regime due to the Non-Aggression Pact with Nazi Germany, high Jewish causalities in the Great Purges, Soviet anti-Zionism, its hostility toward Jewish religious and cultural institutions, Stalin's documented anti-Jewish bias, the refusal to grant Jewish emigration to Israel, and Soviet tendency to lean pro-Arab. Each of these aspects of Soviet rule taint Soviet history in the West.
The Non-Aggression Pact, for instance, creates suspicion regarding the Soviet Union's position toward Jews. The pact, which arguably allowed Hitler to freely enter Poland, the nation with the world's largest Jewish population, was not an acceptance of Nazism, but a realization that the Soviet Union was unable to win a war against its ideological arch enemy in 1939.
The Great Purges are also popularly portrayed as anti-Semitic in the West, thereby ignoring the actual context of Stalin's consolidation of power. A number of the most prominent victims of the Purges—Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Kamenev, to name a few—were Jewish.
That is, however, an oversimplification, since Stalin was just as brutal when acting against his real or imagined enemies who were not Jewish—e.g., Bukharin, Tukhachevsky, Kirov, and Orkhonikhidze. The number of prominent Jewish Old Bolsheviks killed in the purge reflects the fact that Jews were the largest group in the Central Committee, which had a non-Russian majority, and that Jews had a high participation among the Bolsheviks.
In addition, some Stalinists survived notwithstanding their Jewish heritage. Stalin did not purge Lazar Kaganovich, a loyal supporter who came to Stalin's attention in the 1920s as a successful bureaucrat in Tashkent, who aided Stalin and Molotov against Kirov and who participated in his brutal elimination of rivals in the 1930s. Kaganovich's loyalty endured after Stalin's death, when his opposition to de-Stalinization caused him to be expelled from the party in 1957, along withMolotov.
Statistics and anecdotal evidence, however, do not explain away the special venom that Stalin and his henchmen showed toward the Jewish Bolsheviks they were seding to their death. Stalin reportedly was convulsed with laughter when Paulus, an NKVD operative, reenacted Zinoviev's last moments by rolling on the floor crying "Oh God of Israel hear my cry!" Vishinsky, the chief prosecutor for all of the major show trials, likewise took pains to humiliate Rosengoltz, one of the defendants who was found with a passage of Hebrew sewn into his overcoat by his wife when he was arrested. While this does not mean that Stalin procured these former comrades' deaths because of anti-Semitism—he had far more concrete and "rational," albeit psychopathic, reasons for wanting them dead—mit does show how strong anti-Semitic attitudes remained.
The so-called Doctor's Plot of 1953, on the other hand, was a deliberately anti-Semitic policy: Stalin targeted "corrupt Jewish bourgeois nationalists," eschewing the usual code words like "cosmopolitans." Stalin died, however, before this next wave of arrests and executions could be launched in earnest.
The Doctor's Plot may have reflected Stalin's paranoia, rather than state ideology—a distinction that, of course, made no practical difference as long as Stalin was alive, but which became salient on his death.
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