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Abstract
This paper investigates questions surrounding a purported plan (believed to have been interrupted and not resumed after Stalin’s death in March 1953) for the mass deportation of 2 million Soviet Jews from the European part of the country to desolate areas of Siberia, Kazakhstan, and the Arctic North. More specifically, it asks: (1) Was there such a plan, orchestrated by Stalin? (2) Were preparations undertaken to implement the plan, particularly the compilation of lists of potential Jewish deportees, assembly of cattle car echelons for their transportation, and construction of barracks at destinations? The author begins by briefly tracing the history of Stalin’s anti-Semitic campaign after World War II, summarizing the liquidation of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee and the Doctors’ Plot in light of the mounting anti-Semitic campaign in the country, which reached alarming proportions during the “seven-week” period prior to Stalin’s last days. In addition to an in-depth review of Russian-language sources, the paper also is based on contacts with authors and observers with access to state archives and a private archival collection. The latter, still in a state of relative disorganization, could become a link to resolving the question of whether the plan and preparations for the anticipated mass deportation had taken place.
Acknowledgments
I wish to acknowledge with thanks the helpful assistance of Jonathan Brent and Joshua Rubenstein for sharing their observations and insights as well as reviewing the first draft of this paper. I also thank Profs. George Breslauer and Zvi Gitelman for their valuable suggestions received before the paper went to press. Last but not least, Dr Andrew Bond, who worked with me more than 25 years in the past, spent long hours searching the Internet in efforts to verify most citations and inter alia helping to acquire hard-to-find copies of Russian books.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. Nazi term articulating the removal of all Jews.
2. Credible statistics are not available, particularly due to the small number of Jewish survivors of Nazi occupation (Arad Citation2009, 524–525), whose numbers were significantly augmented by a large number of evacuees returning from Central Asia and Siberia after the war. A crude estimate could be based on assumptions that the number residing in the RSFSR in 1953 did not change much from that given in the first post-war census of 1959 (TsSU Citation1962–1963), which reported a total of 875,300 Jews (i.e. Jews who did not conceal their ethnicity). This estimate comparing populations in 1953 with 1959 is even less reliable for the longer occupied Ukrainian (840,000 Jews in 1959), Belorussian (150,084), and the three Baltic republics (66,700 in 1959) (TsSU Citation1962–1963), where there were substantially fewer survivors and returning evacuees.
3. In a grossly inept effort to counter Western protests and airbrush the Soviet image, Pravda proceeded to print a barrage of articles condemning the purported persecution and murder of Jews in the US by citing the case of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg as an example.
4. Personal interviews and contacts focused primarily on the private archive of the late historian and administrator of Soviet state archives, Vladimir Pavlovich Naumov, included those with his widow Valentina Naumova (30 May and 6 June 2015), who resides at the family dacha in Putinki south of Moscow. Multiple interviews and communications with close collaborators and co-authors of Prof Naumov involved Dr Jonathan Brent (currently director of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research) and Joshua Rubenstein of the Harvard Russian Research Center during the period from 28 February to 21 June 2015. Another helpful contact with one of Naumov’s American collaborators, Prof Stephen Cohen of New York University, took place on 8 June 2015. Lastly, in addition to information on a variety of subjects pertaining to preparations for the alleged deportation conveyed by Jonathan Brent and Joshua Rubenstein during the course of our communications, my interview with Prof Julian Rafes (a potential target) on 10 June 2015 yielded further instructive insights.
5. According to Kotkin (Citation2014, 20), Stalin was not the cobbler’s son, but likely his stepson.
6. For exposition of such contrarian views with emphasis on the roles of Malenkov, Beria, Bulganin, and Khrushchev in the alleged sidelining of Stalin, see Zhukov (Citation2003, Citation2005).
7. In a typical overreach, he was arrested and executed as a pro-Zionist Jew, whereas Meyerhold was actually of Christian German descent.
8. See the first Russian-language edition published by Yad Vashem in 1980.
9. For a recent, albeit somewhat incomplete analysis of Kaganovich’s relationship with JAFC and undisguised lack of support for Soviet Jewry, see Rees (Citation2012).
10. At somewhat lower managerial levels, the 46 serving as deputies of ministers in 1946 largely lost their jobs, with the number shrinking to 14 in 1952 (from 8.7 to 1.8% of the total).
11. It should be noted that Gilboa does not distinguish between involuntary separation and routine retirement that may have been voluntary.
12. Later one of the three leaders of the Anti-Zionist Committee installed by Andropov.
13. E.g. see the scholarly Encyclopedia Judaica (Citation1972, 143).
14. Adopted son of Dr Yakov G. Etinger (see below). A survivor of the ghetto in Minsk, he later did time in a gulag.
15. Zhdanov’s former EKG technician (Sophia Karpai, the sole Jew in the group) left the hospital some time before Zhdanov’s second heart attack and death in the last days of August 1948.
16. Accused inter alia by Ryumin of poisoning in 1945 his patient, Politburo member and First Secretary of the Moscow Party, Aleksandr Shcherbakov.
17. I am grateful to Jonathan Brent for pointing out that Ryumin may have been guided in this endeavor by Malenkov.
18. Abakumov was accused by Ryumin of procrastination in securing confessions from the alleged conspirators in JAFC’s case and eventually of murdering Etinger to conceal his manipulation of evidence.
19. According to Brent and Naumov (Citation2003, 379), Stalin anticipated a start of World War III in March 1953.
20. Academician Vinogradov, who served as Stalin’s trusted personal physician, had been unceremoniously fired by the enraged Vozhd’ for urging him to take a long rest from work.
21. I.e. American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, a non-governmental relief and philanthropic organization established around the beginning of World War I.
22. Zhemchuzhina, arrested in February 1949, was freed and rejoined Molotov within days after Stalin’s death.
23. According to Feliks Chuev, who interviewed Molotov on as many as 17 occasions in the 1970s, Molotov nonetheless continued to praise Stalin, attributing his mistakes to stress and fatigue caused by overwhelming responsibilities inducing memory losses and paranoiac fears, still believing that history would rehabilitate him (Chuev Citation1991, 179).
24. His son Sergo (Mikoyan Citation1992, 37, 40, 42) cites such instances as a quarrel with Zhdanov (at the time, Stalin’s leading favorite) over deliveries of supplies to besieged Leningrad starved during the war, efforts to bypass Stalin’s instructions by supplying scarce grain to Belorussia in 1945, or attempts to save leading Armenian communists from an impending purge.
25. Churchill also opined that DPl represented “mischief short of war” (Lorres Citation2002, 185).
26. Unknown to the broader public, it had been whispered about, particularly in Moscow’s Jewish circles, that Mikhoels may have been executed.
27. Simultaneously also providing the finishing touch to the trial of Rudolf Slansky (condemned to death on 3 December 1953) in Czechoslovakia, accelerating the ominous attacks on the purged party head Ana Pauker in Romania, and prompting preparations for an anti-Zionist show trial (later revoked) in East Germany (e.g. see Kostyrchenko Citation2001, 500–504).
28. The brilliant author Ilya Ehrenburg, still stigmatized as “Stalin’s court Jew” and even slandered in the memoir of the widow of executed Perets Markish for betraying JAFC writers to the MGB, is mostly portrayed as an honorable fighter against anti-Semitism. Perhaps the best characterization of Ehrenburg is to be found in the last words of Tangled Loyalties, Joshua Rubenstein’s (Citation1996, 398) scholarly biography of the man, namely: “Always the Jew, the outsider, Ilya Ehrenburg was not confined by his contradictions. He was larger than all of them.”
29. Mostly to the Lyubyanka, Moscow’s main MGB prison.
30. One of Suslov’s (and indirectly Malenkov’s) proteges, Chesnokov had at the time served as the editor-in-chief of Bolshevik (renamed Kommunist) and also functioned as the head of the Central Committee’s department of philosophy.
31. I shall henceforth refer to that first version of the letter as “shameful.” I am grateful to Joshua Rubenstein for pointing out that both Venyamin Kaverin and Margarita Aliger, whom he personally interviewed, were only shown a “softened” version, likely the agitka (see below).
32. None of the versions had ever appeared in print for public consumption before Stalin’s death. The first version is not distinctly acknowledged in the literature except as discussed by Kostyrchenko (Citation2001, 671–685). It is included, however, in the writings of such supporters of the premise that various preparations for the deportation took place, like Rapoport (Citation1990), Sheinis (Citation1992), Vaksberg (Citation1994), Etinger (Citation2001), and Lyass (Citation2007).
33. For information relating to the possible distortion of lists that might have to include people residing in Moscow without propiska, see Light (Citation2010).
34. The large and growing number of half-Jews in the Soviet Union was due to the mushrooming rate of intermarriage. Gitelman (Citation2012, 279) cites Mordechai Altshuler’s estimates of mixed marriages to the effect that “for every 100 marriages in the Soviet Union involving at least one Jewish partner through the mid-1970s, between 40 and 50 were mixed.”
35. An émigré researcher and writer residing in New York since 1993, Prof Rafes is the author of several books, which include a critical evaluation of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (Rafes Citation2004, 93–169), who denies any preparations for deportation likely in light of his general (and not unknown) dislike of Jews.
36. As a spets pereselenets (special resettlement deportee) arrested and shipped from Vilnius to a camp not far from the Altay Mountains in June 1941, I remember the strenuous conditions of traveling for several weeks in a stifling sealed cattle car.
37. Assuming that the shameful letter (see above) did not exist, the agitka (vernacular for text of agitprop origin) comprised the first letter prepared for the signatures of some 58 selected Soviet Jews for subsequent publication in the press. The coarse rhetoric and invective is mainly directed against Jewish billionaires and millionaires conspiring against the working masses together with the leaders of Israel and international Zionists. There is no mention in it, however, of deportation nor of any request for protection from violence against Jews.
38. See the last note in this paper.
39. See note 2.
40. It should be noted that support for Kostyrchenko’s position also came from such less than sympathetic Russian notables as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (as alluded above), who in his book Dvesti let vmeste [Two Hundred Years Together] (Citation2002, 409) states: “The new work of historian G.V. Kostyrchenko, the meticulous investigator of Stalin’s policy toward Jews, firmly refutes that ‘myth about deportation’, proving that [deportation] had neither then nor thereafter been verified by any fact and even that the entire undertaking was beyond Stalin’s ability to execute.”
41. Most if not all authors cited in this paper, except the ones whose books appeared in print before Aleksandr Yakovlev’s initiative to open the hitherto secret archives, as well as those (particularly some Western observers) who did not take advantage of opportunities to spend adequate time in any of the archives, refer to the following: the Rossiyskiy gosudarstvennyy arkhiv sotsial’no-politicheskoy istorii (RGASPI; Russian State Archive of Social and Political History) – formerly the central party archive; the Gosudarstvennyy arkhiv Rossiyskoy Federatsii (GARF; State Archive of the Russian Federation); and the Arkhiv prezidenta Rossiyskoy Federatsii (APRF; Archive of the President of the Russian Federation).