World War II, Jews, and Post-War Soviet Society

Nina Konstantinovna Petrova, Antifashistskie komitety v SSSR: 1941-1945 gg. Moscow: Izdatel'skii tsentr Instituta rossiiskoi istorii RAN, 1999. 339 pp. ISBN 5-80550-0024-8.

Ster Iakovlevich Elisavetskii, Polveka zabveniia: Evrei v dvizhenii soprotivleniia i partizanskoi bor_be v Ukraine 1941-1944. Kiev: Vypol, 1998. 399 pp. ISBN 9-66020-701-8.

Stalin's Secret Pogrom: The Postwar Inquisition of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee. Joshua Rubenstein and Vladimir Pavlovich Naumov, eds. Trans. from the Russian by Laura Esther Wolfson. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001. xxvii + 527 pp. ISBN 0-30008-4862. $35.00.

World War II is a truly pivotal event in Soviet history, an event comparable in significance to the October Revolution. Stalin understood that war would be coming (when and how he did not know and in the end he got it wrong) and that it would test the might of the first socialist country and determine its fate. It would also test Stalin as a leader. Just as war (World War I) helped the Bolsheviks to take power, so, Stalin feared, a new war might help his foes to topple his government or at least might encourage them to entertain the idea of doing so. The eventual victory in the war prompted Stalin in February 1946 to declare that "our victory means above all that our social system has won and that the Soviet social system has successfully withstood the test of the fire of war and demonstrated its full viability." ¹

Not all turned out well for Stalin, however. For one thing, the scars of war, both literal and symbolic, were so deep and ubiquitous that Stalin's justification of the Soviet system sounded self-serving to many. ² More generally, even though the war experience may not have given birth to political dissidence, it did make the Soviet people and institutions more assertive. One historian has called this phenomenon "Stalin embattled." ³ Both internally and internationally, Stalin had to cope with new situations created by the war.

Two factors contributed to a more assertive Soviet population. The wartime relaxation of Moscow's tight control, symbolized by its atheist government's concordat with the Russian Orthodox Church, was one. Another was the fact that society deemed itself justified in making demands on Moscow because of its many sacrifices that had contributed to the victory. ⁴

The Soviet Jews typified the postwar assertiveness. They also bore the brunt of the political terror incurred as a consequence. The history of the Jewish Antifascist Committee (EAK) exemplifies the complex history of postwar Soviet politics. The EAK was one of several similar committees organized during the war, with the sanction and encouragement of the Soviet government, to promote the war efforts of the Soviet people. In some respects, these organizations, based on non-class categories (women, youth, scholars, Jews) marked an important departure from the prewar organizing principle of the Soviet body politic (although, already in the mid-1930s, the class principle had begun to fade internally and Stalin had sanctioned the united, or "people's," front internationally). (In addition to these antifascist committees, another, the All-Slavic Committee [Vseslavianskii komitet] was organized along the same lines.) The main purpose of the antifascist committees was the dissemination of pro-Soviet and antifascist propaganda outside the country and the mobilization of foreign peoples for the Soviet war efforts. The Soviet government placed particular emphasis on the Slavic and the Jewish Committees in view of the fact that large numbers of Slavs and Jews lived abroad, most notably in the United States. In her informative book on the antifascist committees, Petrova argues that the government estimated that approximately 15 million ethnic Slavs lived in the United States and that, of the nearly three million "Russians" in the United States, 65 percent were Russian Jews (70, 127, 170). The Soviet antifascist committees made deliberate efforts to mobilize these groups...