Antisemitism in the Soviet Union

In 1922, the Bolsheviks won the Russian Civil War and set up the Soviet Union (USSR). The USSR succeeded the Russian Empire, which had a centuries-old history of antisemitism,^[1] including repeated pogroms.^[2][3] Antisemitism persisted in the USSR, fluctuating throughout the Cold War.^[4] The persecution of Jews in the USSR lasted until the union ceased to exist on December 26, 1991.^[4]

Between 1922 and 1953, Joseph Stalin (1878–1953) was the leader^[5] of the USSR.^[6] Stalin launched state campaigns to persecute Soviet Jews.^[7][8] Soviet Jews of professional backgrounds, especially writers, were accused of having "bourgeois Western influences" from 1946 onwards.^[9][10]

Soviet state propaganda emphasized the imagined harm posed by the so-called rootless cosmopolitans (Russian: безродный космополит, romanized: bezrodnyi kosmopolit) with whom Soviet Jews were accused of being associated.^[7][8] The propaganda backed up the "anti-cosmopolitan campaign" between 1948 and 1953,^[7][8] which involved antisemitic purges and executions across the USSR and her satellite states.^[7][8]

The persecution peaked in the Doctors' Plot when Stalin falsely accused Jewish doctors of planning to poison the Soviet leaders based on a medieval antisemitic trope.^[7][8] These came at a time of tension between the newly founded State of Israel and the USSR,^[7][8] when Israel began allying with the United States (US).^[11]

Historian Cathy S. Gelbin wrote:^[12]

From 1946 onwards [...] Soviet rhetoric increasingly highlighted the goal of a pure Soviet culture freed from Western degeneration [. ...] in the Soviet weekly Literaturnaya Gazeta in 1947, which denounced the claimed expressions of rootless cosmopolitanism as inimical^[13] to Soviet culture. From 1949 onwards, then, a new series of openly antisemitic purges and executions began across the Soviet Union and its satellite countries, when Jews were charged explicitly with harbouring^[14] an international Zionist cosmopolitanist conspiracy.

Literature professor Margarita Levantovskaya wrote:^[15]

The campaign against cosmopolitanism of the 1940s and 1950s [. ...] defined rootless cosmopolitans as citizens who lacked patriotism and disseminated foreign influence [...] including theater critics, Yiddish-speaking poets and doctors. They were accused of disseminating Western European philosophies of aesthetics, pro-American attitudes, Zionism [. ...] emphasizing their [Jewish] status as strangers and outsiders.

Such antisemitic policies extended to the Soviet occupation zone in Germany, which later formed the German Democratic Republic (GDR) (German: Deutsche Demokratische Republik (DDR)), commonly known as the East Germany. American historian Norman Naimark noted that Soviet governors showed a "growing obsession" with the presence of Jews in the military government.^[16]

East German Jews who opposed Soviet communism were classed as having "non-Aryan background lined up with the bourgeois parties".^[16] The policies continued under Nikita Khrushchev (1894–1971), who ruled the USSR between 1953 and 1964.^[16][17]

The persecution of Jews in the USSR intensified under Leonid Brezhnev's rule when Israel defeated the Soviet-armed Arab League in the 1967 Six-Day War. Antisemitic propaganda in the form of "anti-Zionist" broadcasting appeared, such as the film Secret and Explicit, which demonized Jews as a malign Zionist cabal based on stereotypes from The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.^[18] Many of Brezhnev's close advisors, especially Mikhail Suslov, were radical antisemites.^[19]

Jewish emigration to Israel or the United States (US) was heavily restricted,^[20] often impossible without a special invitation from a relative overseas. Written permission from all close family members was also required, with a low application approval rate.^[21] Systemic racism against Jews was widespread.^[22]

Boris Kochubievsky, a Ukrainian-Jewish radio engineer, wrote Brezhnev a letter:^[4]

I am a Jew. I want to live in the Jewish state. That is my right, just as it is the rights of a Ukrainian to live in the Ukraine, the right of a Russian to live in Russia, the right of a Georgian to live in Georgia. I want to live in Israel. That is my dream, that is the goal not only of my life but also of the lives of hundreds of generation that preceded me, of my ancestors who were expelled from their land. I want my children to study in the Hebrew language. I want to read Jewish papers, I want to attend a Jewish theatre. What is wrong with that? What is my crime [...] ?

Shortly after, Kochubievsky was kidnapped by the KGB into a mental asylum.^[4] Almost all Soviet Jews were reportedly affected by the post-1967 wave of antisemitism.^[4] In 1969, Soviet propagandist Yuri Ivanov condemned Zionism as a "capitalist imperialist" construct:^[23]

Modern Zionism is the ideology [...] of the wealthy Jewish bourgeoisie which has closely allied itself with monopoly circles in the USA and other imperialist countries [. ...] Zionism is bellicose^[24] chauvinism and anti-communism.

In the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, the World Zionist Organization (WZO) was accused of "controlling Western media" and "participating in colonialism" worldwide.^[25]

In his book A History of the Jews in the Modern World, American historian Howard Sachar stated that Soviet "anti-Zionism" was not much different from Nazism:^[26]

In late July 1967, Moscow launched an unprecedented propaganda campaign against Zionism as a 'world threat.' [...] an 'all-powerful international force.' [...] the new propaganda assault soon achieved Nazi-era characteristics. The Soviet public was saturated with racist canards [. ...] Yuri Ivanov's Beware: Zionism, a book essentially replicated^[27] The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, was given nationwide coverage.

The persecution did not fade until the 1980s,^[4] when Brezhnev reportedly changed course in 1981 by indirectly disapproving of antisemitism at a Communist Party meeting.^[28] Despite Brezhnev's reported disapproval of antisemitism, antisemitic propaganda remained widespread in the USSR.^[28]

Sometimes, those antisemitic propaganda promoted the false claim of "active WWII Nazi‒Zionist collaboration".^[29][30] The false claim is still commonly exploited by antisemites on the far right and far left^[29][30] to trivialize the Holocaust and demonize the vast majority of diaspora Jews who support Israel's right to exist.^[31][32]

Pravda (CPSU's official newspaper) ran an "anti-Zionist" front-page article on April 1, 1983:^[33]

By its nature, Zionism concentrates ultra-nationalism, chauvinism and racial intolerance, excuse for territorial occupation [...] dirty tactics and perfidy^[34] [...] Absurd^[35] are attempts of Zionist ideologists to present criticizing them [...] as antisemitic [. ...] We call on all Soviet citizens: workers, peasants, representatives of intelligentsia: take active part in exposing Zionism [...] social scientists: activate scientific research to criticize reactionary core of that ideology [...] writers, artists, journalists: fuller expose anti-populace and anti-humane diversionary character of propaganda and politics of Zionism.

It is estimated that about 2,750,000 Soviet Jews left the USSR between May 9, 1945 and December 26, 1991, with most departing after 1989 when exit control was relaxed.^[36]

Walter Laqueur (1921–2018), a German-American historian,^[37] summarized his research:^[38]

In the light of history, the argument that anti-Zionism is different from antisemitism is not very convincing. No one disputes that in the late Stalinist period anti-Zionism was merely a synonym for antisemitism. [...] in the Muslim [...] Arab world, the fine distinctions between Jews and Zionists hardly ever existed.

• Khazar myth
• Antisemitism in Europe
• Double genocide theory
• Soviet persecution of Poles during World War II