you are wrong,
Stalin began a new purge with repressing his wartime allies, the
Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee. In January 1948,
Solomon Mikhoels was assassinated on Stalin's personal orders in
Minsk. His murder was disguised as a hit-and-run car accident. Mikhoels was taken to MGB
dacha and killed, along with his non-Jewish colleague Golubov-Potapov, under supervision of Stalin's Deputy Minister of State Security
Sergei Ogoltsov.
Their bodies were then dumped on a road-side in Minsk.
[30][31]
The
Night of the Murdered Poets (
Russian:
romanized:
Delo Yevreyskogo antifashistskogo komiteta,
lit. 'Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee affair';
Yiddish: ,
romanized:
Harugey malkus funem Ratnfarband,
lit. 'Soviet Union Martyrs') was the execution of thirteen
Soviet Jews in the
Lubyanka Prison in
Moscow,
Russian SFSR,
Soviet Union on 12 August 1952.
[1] The arrests were first made in September 1948 and June 1949. All defendants were accused of
espionage and
treason as well as many other crimes. After their arrests, they were tortured, beaten, and isolated for three years before being formally charged. There were five
Yiddish writers among these defendants, all of whom were part of the
Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee.
Doctors' plot
On 13 January 1953, the Soviet Union's
TASS information agency announced the unmasking of a conspiracy of so-called "doctors-poisoners" who had covertly attempted to decapitate the Soviet leadership. The accused doctors were all senior physicians—most of them Jewish—who had allegedly confessed to planning and successfully carrying out heinous assassinations, including the covert murders of such high-profile Soviet citizens as writer
Alexander Shcherbakov (died 1945) and politician
Andrey Zhdanov (died 1948). The alleged conspirators were accused of acting on behalf of both the American and British intelligence services and an anti-Soviet international Jewish bourgeois-nationalist organization.
[42]
As Western press accused the Soviet Union of antisemitism, the Central Committee of Communist Party decided to organise a propagandistic trick, a collective letter by Jewish public figures, condemning with fervour "the murderers in white overalls" and the agents of
imperialism and Zionism, and to assure there was no antisemitism in the USSR. The letter was signed by well-known scientists and culture figures, who had been forced to do so by the
NKVD.
[15] However, the letter, initially planned to be published in February 1953, remained unpublished. Instead of the letter, a vehement feuilleton "The Simple-minded and the Swindlers" was published in
Pravda, featuring numerous characters with Jewish names, all of them swindlers, villains, saboteurs, whom the naïve Russian people trust, having lost vigilance. What followed was a new wave of antisemitic hysteria, and a plan by Stalin to send all of the Jews to Siberia,
[43][44] similar to other ethnic groups. Only Stalin's death the same year relieved the fear.
[15]
Similar purges against Jews were organised in Eastern Bloc countries (see
Prague Trials).
During this time Soviet Jews were dubbed as
persons of Jewish ethnicity. A dean of
Marxism-Leninism department at one of Soviet Universities explained the policy to his students:
[45]
One of you asked if our current political campaign can be regarded as
antisemitic. Comrade
Stalin said: "We hate Nazi not because they are Germans, but because they brought enormous suffering to our land". Same can be said about the Jews.
It has been claimed that: "At the time of [Stalin's] death, no Jew in Russia could feel safe."
[46] However, throughout this time, the Soviet media avoided overt antisemitism and continued to report the punishment of officials for antisemitic behavior.
[47]