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Painting: Stalin as a Jew, 1986–1987 - Alexander Kosolapov

Was Stalin antisemitic? The answer may seem obvious, given the Soviet leader’s role in directing the campaign against the so-called “Doctors’ Plot.” Between 1952 and 1953, Stalin unleashed a flurry of repression in which a group of prominent Moscow doctors—most of them Jewish—were falsely accused of conspiring to assassinate senior Soviet officials through intentional medical malpractice.1 This case was part of a larger repressive campaign that targeted intellectuals and professionals accused of harbouring foreign loyalties, particularly linked to Zionism and the newly established state of Israel in Palestine. Many citizens were dismissed from their jobs, imprisoned, and tortured into false confessions after being accused of “cosmopolitanism.”2 After Stalin’s death in March 1953, the charges were declared baseless, and the surviving doctors were released.

Stalin’s orchestration of this campaign is usually assumed to have been motivated by antisemitic tendencies. While at first glance this appears to be a clear case of bigotry against Jews, this view has been challenged by a number of historians who emphasize instead Stalin’s primarily political motivations. For instance, Geoffrey Roberts, a leading specialist on Stalin, writes that Stalin was not so much “anti-Semitic as he was politically hostile to Zionism and Jewish nationalism.”3 This view is echoed by one of Stalin’s biographers, Christopher Read, who notes that newly available evidence “should make observers hesitate to argue, as is widely done, that a general anti-Semitic campaign was under way [under Stalin].”4 The scholars Yu Xiao and Ji Zeng write that Stalin’s decision-making during this period can be better explained by his “paranoiac political worldview than by antisemitic tendencies.”5 Additionally, the British historian Robert Service describes these events as emerging from “realpolitik rather than visceral prejudice.”6

The fundamentally political nature of Stalin’s anti-Zionist campaign is why, Christopher Read observes, non-Jews also came to be targeted while, at the same time, many Jews remained untouched. Indeed, there were prominent Soviet Jews who enthusiastically participated in the campaign against Zionism, such as “the philosopher and member of the Academy of Sciences, Mark Mitin; the journalist, David Zaslavsky, and the orientalist, V. Lutsky.”7 Benjamin Pinkus, a historian of Soviet Jewry, writes that “the chief victims” of the anti-cosmopolitan campaign were “two non-jews” and that there no “explicit or implicit anti-Jewish tone in the campaign,” [emphasis mine] a notion that is consistent with Stalin’s own worldview, as historian and anti-Soviet dissident Zhores Medvedev writes:8

Stalin was neither an anti-Semite nor a Judeophobe. Judeophobia can be understood as an intense hatred toward any member of the Jewish people — something Stalin did not exhibit. Nowhere in his official speeches or archival documents is there a statement that can be fairly described as anti-Semitic.9

If, in the words of Geoffrey Roberts, Stalin “was not anti-Semitic in any meaningful sense,” what explains the cause of these events?10 This episode of repression can be better explained by taking a closer look at Stalin’s almost obsessive suspicion of “bourgeois nationalism.”

Prior to this, Stalin carried out a number of repressions against perceived anti-Soviet nationalisms, and while the anti-cosmopolitan campaign had distinctive elements given its Cold War context, it generally adhered to the same Stalinist logic, violent repression against any perceived support of bourgeois nationalism. Kazakh, Armenian, Latvian, Ukrainian, Estonian, and other groups, at various times faced accusations of anti-Soviet bourgeois nationalism. The term specifically denoted those nationalist tendencies that were perceived as attempting to restore bourgeois class dominance and capitalist exploitation. According to Stalin:

the bourgeoisie of the oppressed nation, repressed on every hand, is naturally stirred into movement. It appeals to its "native folk" and begins to shout about the "fatherland,'; claiming that its own cause is the cause of the nation as a whole. It recruits itself an army from among its "countrymen" in the interests of ... the "fatherland." Nor do the "folk" always remain unresponsive to its appeals; they rally around its banner: the repression from above affects them too and provokes their discontent.”11

Any ties to a pre-Soviet or non-Soviet national identity were seen as a liability exploitable by foreign intervention; thus, national expression was to be expressed within the acceptable parameters of Soviet identity. Notably, this did not mean Russification, but that minority national expression had to be compatible with the overarching ideals and values of a universal socialist identity as understood by the Soviet state.12 One was to be a Soviet Kazakh or Soviet Armenian, for instance.

Terry Martin writes that the USSR took deliberate efforts to promote “distinctive national identities,” efforts which “actually intensified after December 1932,” during the Stalin era.13 For Stalin, the supranational multiethnic community of the “Friendship of Peoples” was a fundamental component of a universal Soviet identity. Martin observes that while the Soviets eventually accorded Russia a symbolic leading role in this multinational system, state support for non-Russian culture, historical education, and language instruction within each socialist republic remained strong, writing that “with respect to policy toward most non-Russians, then, the affirmative action empire continued with limited corrections throughout Stalin's rule.” 14

There was no Stalinist attempt to replace minority identity with a Russian one, contrary to popular belief. Elissa Bemporad’s excellent case study on Jewish community in Minsk describes how early Soviet equity policies fostered the formation of a distinct Soviet-Jewish identity in which Jewish and Yiddish culture were actively promoted and celebrated within the framework of socialist nationality policy.15 These policies stood in stark contrast to the popular attitudes towards Jews in European nations. Bemporad describes how “local Jews, acutely aware of the governmental and popular anti-Semitism faced by friends and relatives in Poland, still felt pride in their Soviet identity” despite living in a climate of repression during the height of Soviet terror in the 1930s.16 What has been perceived as state-endorsed antisemitism should be situated within the historical context of Stalin’s mounting hostility and paranoia toward Zionism, which took shape in the aftermath of the war.

While the USSR had a long-standing ideological opposition to Zionism, it initially supported the creation of the State of Israel in 1947–1948. This cynical maneuver marked a departure from the prior policy and was justified on strategic grounds: by backing the end of the British Mandate in Palestine and arming Jewish paramilitary groups through Czechoslovakia, the Soviet leadership aimed to weaken British influence in the Middle East and potentially bring a new socialist-leaning ally into the Soviet sphere. However, this hope quickly dissipated. The new Israeli state aligned itself with the United States, signalling to Soviet leaders that Zionism was more likely to serve as a vehicle for Western influence than socialist solidarity. Those who suffered the most from the Soviet reversal were the indigenous population of Palestine, who faced brutal atrocities and displacement, often at the barrels of Soviet-funded weapons.

Because of Israel’s favourable positioning towards the USSR’s enemies, domestic opposition to Jewish nationalism became a matter of paramount importance for Soviet leadership. Concerned about foreign influence and political loyalty within their borders, Stalin’s government took increasingly repressive measures to counter what it viewed as possible conduits of anti-Soviet bourgeois nationalism. Stalin’s anti-cosmopolitan campaign was aimed at rooting out individuals deemed insufficiently loyal to Soviet values and overly influenced by foreign ideas.17

The campaign promoted Soviet patriotism and cultural conformity while condemning so-called rootless intellectuals who were accused of undermining national unity and socialist patriotism. This insular worldview was a Cold War backlash against the perceived encroachment and intrigue of the capitalist world, signalling a new socialist defense of the motherland and its national character. Although “rootless cosmopolitanism” is often read retroactively as a coded antisemitic slur, in its original Soviet usage it functioned as a broader ideological critique rather than targeting Jews or Zionists specifically. The ideological basis of the term, argues Van Ree, fundamentally “rested on patriotic etatism and militant anti-capitalism” rather than traditional Russian antisemitism.18 It was primarily deployed to denounce individuals perceived as lacking loyalty to the Soviet state and espousing cultural servility to the capitalist West, and was used against many non-Jewish intellectuals and artists who engaged with Western ideas.19 Tellingly, Van Ree writes that Stalin conceptualized the Russian tsarist tradition as the main source of cosmopolitanism, a tradition which was virulently antisemitic itself and was often criticized on this basis by Stalin and the Soviets (in a speech Stalin had once remarked that “the Hitlerites suppress … the rights of nations as readily as the tsarist regime suppressed them, and that they organize mediæval Jewish pogroms as readily as the tsarist regime organized them.)20 21

The exceptional ferocity of Stalin’s anti-nationalist campaign against Zionism is tied to the heated Cold War tensions of the period. Stalin was alarmed by the enthusiastic response Soviet Jews gave to the establishment of Israel, particularly the outpouring of support following the visit of a Golda Meir envoy in 1948, which saw thousands of Soviet Jews publicly celebrate her arrival and express deep emotional attachment to the new Jewish state.22 Letters poured in from across the USSR proclaiming Israel as “our” country, a sentiment that deeply unsettled Stalin, who viewed such displays of transnational loyalty as absolutely antithetical to the kind of Soviet patriotism that was expected of all Soviet citizens.23

These factors primed Stalin’s cataclysmic response to all and any perceived Jewish nationalism, however tenuous.

Bourgeois Nationalism

There is a tendency to characterize the anti-Zionist campaign as a manifestation of classic Russian antisemitism, in continuity with tsarist pogroms and state-sanctioned violence against Jews. Van Ree points out that this seems intuitive, but there is no archival evidence that directly substantiates any connection.24 Rather, Stalinist anti-Zionism was part of a broader pattern of distinctly Soviet political repression, in which numerous groups had been targeted at different times under the charge of bourgeois nationalism.25 In one example, repression during the 1930s targeted a wide range of Ukrainian intellectuals and political figures accused of promoting Ukrainian nationalism.26 In one example, repression during the 1930s targeted a wide range of Ukrainian intellectuals and political figures accused of promoting Ukrainian nationalism.26 Among them were members of the so-called Executed Renaissance, a generation of writers, artists, and cultural leaders who were arrested, imprisoned, or executed. One major factor fueling these repressions was official suspicion of ideological links between Soviet Ukrainian writers and émigré nationalist figures abroad.

Notably, in the 1920s, the prominent Soviet Ukrainian writer Mykola Khvylovy engaged with the ideas of Dmytro Dontsov, a proponent of integral nationalism—a radical, fascist ideology. Although Khvylovy remained a committed communist, incorporating these ideas within his ideologically communist framework, he was drawn to Dontsov’s vision of cultural revival and national assertiveness, ideas that would influence the fascist Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN).27 For Soviet authorities, any flirtation with émigré ideologues like Dontsov was seen as a dangerous, potential threat.

We do not have the space to review every Stalinist repression of bourgeois nationalism, but there were many. Robert Service writes: “Stalin moved aggressively against every people in the USSR sharing nationhood with peoples of foreign states.”28 Similarly, Lindemann, a scholar of antisemitism, writes that Stalin’s “hatreds and suspicions knew no limits; even party members from his native Georgia were not exempt.”29 Indeed, Stalin grew concerned over Mingrelians—a Georgian ethnic subgroup—“dominating others in the political hierarchy” and forming ethnic patronage cliques.30 Stalin grew particularly wary of Lavrentiy Beria, a Mingrelian whose growing influence he perceived as the major beneficiary of these developments in Georgian politics, and hence a potential threat. What began as accusations of bribery and corruption soon morphed into paranoid allegations of involvement in a so-called “Mingrelian nationalist ring” and collaboration with Western imperialists.31

While there is little evidence that Stalin harbored explicit ethnic or racial hatreds, there is ample documentation of his deep suspicion toward political nationalism, which he viewed as a potential threat to Soviet unity and a possible conduit for foreign infiltration and collaboration. As a result, Stalin was acutely concerned with the “loyalty” of various nationalities and their susceptibility to international intrigue. A useful framework for understanding this mindset is what Terry Martin terms “Soviet xenophobia”—defined as “the exaggerated Soviet fear of foreign influence and foreign contamination.”32 Importantly, Martin clarifies: “I absolutely do not mean traditional Russian xenophobia. Soviet xenophobia was ideological, not ethnic. It was spurred by an ideological hatred and suspicion of foreign capitalist governments, not the national hatred of non-Russians.”33 This distinction becomes especially evident in cases such as NKVD Order No. 00593, which targeted an ethnic Russian diaspora group for their perceived transnational affiliations and threatening territorial proximities:

National Operation, initiated by NKVD Order n° 00593 on September 20, 1937 … targeted the so-called "Kharbintsy". These were former personnel (engineers, employees, railway workers) of the Chinese-Manchurian railway whose headquarters were based in Kharbin, in Manchuria. After the sale, by the Soviet government, of this railway to Japan in 1935, many returned to the Soviet Union. For Stalin and his team, although most of the Kharbintsy were ethnic Russians, their cross-border ties to the Kharbintsy remaining in China turned them into the functional equivalent of a diaspora nationality. And so, despite their "Russianness", they too became an "enemy group" targeted as part of the National Operations during the Great Terror34

This episode of repression exemplifies the distinctly ideological and political nature of these kinds of repressions, which were primarily concerned with security issues tied to primarily politico-territorial conceptions of identity rather than ethnic ones. Here, a Soviet state led by an ethnic Georgian was carrying acts of repression against a group of ethnic Russians. What made individual(s) vulnerable to Stalin’s ire was not a deep-seated prejudice based on racial doctrines or cultural stereotypes, but perceived ideological contamination of nationalities through territorial proximity, suspect geopolitical connections or international contact with hostile capitalist entities, which, nonetheless, invariably entailed forms of collective punishment. Stalin’s anti-Zionist campaign should be situated within this context.

To exceptionalize the Soviet repression of Jewish nationalism as an entirely unique and separate form of violence in comparison to other anti-nationalist campaigns is to risk retrofitting post-Holocaust frameworks onto a Stalinist logic of repression predicated on political and ideological motivations, rather than ethnic ones. Just as various other “nationalist deviations” were subjected to suspicion and repression due to their perceived geopolitical associations, so too was Jewish nationalism targeted in the context of growing Soviet hostility toward Zionism and the Western bloc. What also distinguishes Stalin’s anti-Zionism from traditional European antisemitism was Stalin self-professed strident opposition to antisemitism. Not only did Stalin not have any documented antisemitic remarks or directives, he condemned antisemitism in the harshest of terms:

in 1927 [Stalin] explicitly mentions that any traces of anti-Semitism, even among workers and in the party is an “evil” that “must be combated, comrades, with all ruthlessness.” And in 1931, in response to a question from the Jewish News Agency in the United States, he describes anti-Semitism as an “an extreme form of racial chauvinism” that is a convenient tool used by exploiters to divert workers from the struggle with capitalism. Communists, therefore, “cannot but be irreconcilable, sworn enemies of anti-semitism.” Indeed, in the U.S.S.R. “anti-semitism is punishable with the utmost severity of the law as a phenomenon deeply hostile to the Soviet system.” Active “anti-semites are liable to the death penalty”35

Some have interpreted Stalin’s public condemnation of antisemitism as a progressive facade, suggesting it served to obscure the more insidious motivations of an authoritarian regime.36 According to this view, Stalin’s egalitarian ideology functioned largely as window-dressing, designed to deflect attention from what they see as the regime’s “real” animating impulses. This interpretation rests on the assumption that Stalin was consistently operating in a cynical and calculated manner—an assumption that, like any historical claim, requires supporting evidence. In this case, that would mean demonstrating a clear discrepancy between Stalin’s private writings or internal government correspondence and his public pronouncements. As historian Zhores Medvedev has noted, no such evidence has been uncovered. Indeed, the WWII specialist, Mark Edele, also cautions against this assumption, writing that the Soviet critique of antisemitism “should be taken more seriously” and that it complicates this history more than scholars have traditionally been willing to admit.37

However this lack of direct evidence does not rule out the possibility of antisemitic motives. One could argue that Stalin still harboured deeply seated antisemitic views, shaped by pre-revolutionary cultural norms, which he never acknowledged, perhaps in order to preserve the coherence of his professed egalitarian and internationalist worldview. From this perspective, Stalin’s alleged hatred of Jews can be inferred not from professed attitudes or ideology evidenced in archival documents but from patterns of behaviour and the concrete effects of his policies on Soviet Jews.

Anti-Antisemitism

This interpretation is complicated by two key factors: first, as previously mentioned, the chief targets of the so-called antisemitic campaigns were not Jewish, and many prominent Jews remained untouched. As historian Albert Lindemann observes, Stalin’s personal relationships and political appointments challenge the notion that he harboured a hatred of Jews:

Not only did [Stalin] repeatedly speak out against anti-Semitism but both his son and daughter married Jews, and several of his closest and most devoted lieutenants from the late 1920s through the 1930s were of Jewish origin—for example, Lazar Moiseyevich Kaganovich, Maxim Litvinov, and the notorious head of the secret police, Genrikh Yagoda … The importance of men like Kaganovich, Litvinov, and Yagoda makes it hard to believe that Stalin harbored a categorical hatred of all Jews, as a race.38

While Stalin may not have been personally antisemitic, antisemitism nonetheless existed within Soviet society, which undoubtedly included officials and party functionaries. These views often persisted despite the formal anti-antisemitic laws and ideology of the regime. As Van Ree notes, Stalin was at times directly confronted with such behaviour and pushed back against it:

In 1947, [Stalin] told Romanian party leader Gheorghiu-Dej that it was unacceptable to remove his colleague Pauker from high positions in the party merely because she was Jewish…Stalin also rejected Suslov’s proposal according to which “nationality” might be used as the official reason for dismissal from one’s work place.39

Stalin reprimanded his Romanian counterpart with a striking comment: “[One] must remember that, if their party will be class-based, social, then it will grow; if it will be racial, then it will perish, for racism leads to fascism.”40 This brings us to the second major factor complicating any straightforward narrative of Soviet antisemitism. Stalin’s line of reasoning in this interaction echoed the USSR’s project of promoting social equity among minority groups, including Jews. One key example of this was the korenizatsiya (indigenization) policy of the 1920s, which actively supported minority languages and cultures as part of the larger socialist nation-building effort. For Soviet Jews, this included the establishment of Yiddish-language schools, theatres, publications, and the creation of the Yevsektsiya, the Jewish sections of the Communist Party. 41

Elements of the indigenization policies wound down by the mid-1930s, and some have interpreted this as evidence that Stalin’s regime took a full conservative turn, abandoning its commitment to minority equity and moving toward a form of traditional Russian chauvinism, with antisemitism never far beneath the surface. There is no denying the stark shift that occurred by the late 1940s and early 1950s amidst the anti-Zionist campaign, when the Soviet state shuttered many Jewish cultural institutions due to growing fears around their extensive ties to religious and cultural organizations abroad, especially those based in the United States, which were increasingly seen as potential sources of ideological contamination.

This view of a chauvinistic, Russifying USSR is complicated by the fact that pro-minority policies continued for Jews at the height of an allegedly antisemitic campaign. Following the USSR’s territorial expansion during and after the Second World War, the Soviet state reintroduced aggressive affirmative action–style measures in what scholars have termed a period of “neo-indigenization,” once again working to aggressively remove social barriers through employment equity and popular education.42 This revival sheds light on how the Soviet leadership understood its minority equity policies—not as a continuous process, but as a distinct initial stage in the development of nations. Importantly, this renewed indigenization extended to Jewish communities in the newly annexed territories. These initiatives reflected a genuine effort to integrate and empower minorities within the Soviet system, complicating claims that antisemitism was a defining or consistent feature of Stalinist policy.

As historian Diana Dumitru has shown in her study of Soviet Moldavia, Jewish representation in civil and cultural institutions remained significant after 1948 in this region, and in some cases, even grew, precisely during the period often cited as the onset of official Soviet antisemitism:

The Jewish presence in Soviet Moldavia’s leading cultural institutions was also significant throughout the entire period, even if it showed some fluctuation. In 1945, 33 percent of the membership of the MSSR’s Union of Writers were of Jewish origin, and by 1949 this proportion increased to 43 percent; although it decreased back to 33 percent by 1953. Jews were a significant group in the Union of Composers of the MSSR: in 1948 the Union’s 18 members included eight Jews. Even more surprising, if one takes into account the climax of anti-Jewish sentiments in Moscow in the early 1950s, the proportion of Jewish members in the Union of Composers in the MSSR had increased further by 1953.18 members included eight Jews. Even more surprising, if one takes into account the climax of anti-Jewish sentiments in Moscow in the early 1950s, the proportion of Jewish members in the Union of Composers in the MSSR had increased further by 1953.18 Among the members of the MSSR’s Union of Artists, Jews comprised 16.6 percent for three consecutive years (1944–1946); their share dropped to 10.6 percent in 1948, yet grew again to 14–15 percent in the following years, and jumped to 20 percent by 1953. [43]

Dumitru describes how the new Soviet culture in Moldavia was a stark contrast to the previous antisemitic government, encouraging “the professional advancement of ethnic Jews to positions of power and prestige previously unmatched in this region.”44 The rapid facilitation of Jews into positions of power and their overrepresentation in professional areas “relative to their share of the population” in the region was enabled by the USSR’s broad decrees against antisemitism and the inclusive nature of its social policy.45 Likewise, Smilovitsky’s text on Jewish life in Belarus describes how “Jews rose to form a significant and disproportionately-sized group in leading managerial positions in Belorussia’s economic, educational, scientific, and cultural institutions between 1945 and 1950.”46 These anti-antisemitism policies had significant implications during WWII, saving countless lives.

In Dumitru’s comparative study of civilians' attitudes and behaviour toward the Jewish population in Romania and the occupied Soviet Union, she demonstrates that even brief periods of Soviet control significantly transformed local attitudes by actively combating antisemitism through state-led campaigns, education, and the promotion of internationalist socialist ideology.47 In one informative example, Dumitru describes how the state used social satire and theatre as forms of popular education against antisemitism:

Satire and public shaming were then highly regarded in the Soviet Union as educational tools. In their spirit, mock trials of antisemites were staged for the public, boldly taking on the particular preconceptions of the era. An American journalist who visited Kiev in 1932 attended such a play, which featured a clerk named Raznochintseva, who was accused of saying, “the Jews have already forgotten what a pogrom is like, but soon there will be another war and we shall remind them what it means to capture Russia’s government, land, factories, and everything else.” Influenced by her ideas, a peasant begins to complain that the Soviet government is giving land, seed, and credit to Jews, while only taking from the Russian peasants. The trial associated antisemitism with counterrevolution and the bourgeoisie, as well as with ignorance:

Raznochintseva: Don’t you know that [the Jews] have always been after easy money?

Attorney for the Defense: How well do you know any Jews?

Raznochintseva: Personally I know very few of them. I always avoid them.

Prosecutor: Did you ever read any literature about Jews?

Raznochintseva: I was not interested enough.

The play suggested that such individuals could easily corrupt those who do not read the Soviet press; Raznochintseva and several other witnesses all confirmed that their own antisemitic ideas were not backed up by any empirical knowledge. Even Raznochintseva’s boss, a Jew named Kantorovich, ends up on trial, for hearing antisemitic statements by his workers but doing nothing to stop them. In the end Raznochintseva is fired from her job and sentenced to two years for the “counterrevolutionary activity of inciting antisemitism.48

These policies were historically unprecedented both within the region and in the broader context of wartime Europe, fostering greater awareness among local populations of the dangers posed by Nazi racial doctrines. As a result, Transnistrian Moldova, under Soviet rule, witnessed far less collaboration than did Bessarabian Moldova, under Romanian rule.49 Dumitru’s findings highlight how the Soviet state’s ideological commitment to combating ethnic hatred and fascism shaped a material difference on the ground and undermine any straightforward characterization of the Stalinist state as inherently antisemitic. The apparent paradox between what some scholars have described as Stalinist antisemitism and the simultaneous promotion of Soviet-Jewish identity and anti-antisemitism was not truly a paradox at all. For the Soviets, it reflected two distinct but non-contradictory processes: the promotion of multicultural equity inclusive of Jews, alongside the repression of Zionism that, like all forms of bourgeois nationalism, was viewed as a threat to the Soviet state.

Indeed, Christopher Read, drawing on Medvedev’s research, writes that Stalin died just before the publication of a letter he had approved, written by Soviet Jews, which outlined the difference between Soviet Jews and cosmopolitans—likely as a means of correcting those on the ground who, contrary to Stalin’s intentions, interpreted the campaign as an antisemitic assault on all Soviet Jews.50 Read notes that Stalin sought to terminate the campaign at the end of his life but died before giving final approval, contradicting the common assumption that Stalin would have expanded his suppression of Jewish institutions had he not died when he did.