#WORLD #WORLDWIDE #FRANCE #ANARCHISM #News #Journal #Update - (en) France, UCL AL #329 - Story, 1952: The Night of the Murdered Jewish Poets (ca, de, it, fr, pt, tr)[machine translation]

 Between 1946 and 1953, state anti-Semitism developed in the USSR on fertile

popular ground and on the paranoia of a Stalin who saw the Jews in turn as
counter-revolutionary threats, spies, Zionists, etc. The great Jewish
intellectuals are hunted down, tortured and executed. From this little-known
story there are still imaginaries today. ---- The scene is easy to imagine. A man
prostrate on a chair, broken by torture. Facing him are three officers from the
Red Army or the NKVD [1], finally, from some emanation of the police state. At
the back of the room, guards, in front of the door, guards, behind the accused,
another guard. In this room of the Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR
[2], the military caps are placed on a huge desk, empty of any file. Or do they
remain closed... There is indeed nothing to discuss, nothing to investigate, the
cause is heard, and the sentence anticipated.

The men and women who follow one another before these judges are called Itzik
Fefer, Ilya Ehrenburg, Peretz Markish and Vassili Grossman, Solomon Losovski,
David Bergelson, Lina Stern... even Polina Jemtchouzhina, the wife of Molotov,
pillar of Stalinism, s will sit before these sinister figures. They and they are
members of the Party, often early Bolsheviks, intellectuals, artists, poets, all
of them are Jews.

Chagall and Solomon Mikhoels
We are in 1948. Trials follow accusations and specific purges extend the "  great
purges  " of 1930. Stalin, at the head of the USSR, continues a regime of massive
terror. And in this month of November 1948, the Jews irritated the First
Secretary of the Party: the nascent State of Israel had moved closer to the
United States, reducing to nothing the efforts it had been making for a year to
seduce the Zionists. Yet a month earlier, Golda Meir's visit was acclaimed in
Moscow. Only, these cries of "  the Jewish people will live  ", irritate the
little father of the peoples. And from annoyance to irritation, Joseph Stalin
accumulates anger against the "  stiff-necked people  " [3]whose revolutionary
enthusiasm, initiatives and commitment sharpen paranoid distrust more than the
desire to put them on his side.

Here, let's take the example of the International Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee.
Its creators, Victor Alter (from the Bund) and Henryk Erlich (from the Socialist
International) were taken prisoner in Poland, sent to the Gulag and sentenced to
death. As Poles and despite their longstanding responsibilities in the
revolutionary movement, the NKVD suspected them of collusion with the Nazis.
Their socialist sincerity is not cooled by it. They write a note to Stalin: let's
create a Committee to convince Jews and Communists in the occupied zones to join
the ranks of the Polish or Russian armies, to undermine the actions of the
occupier and to support the USSR. Stalin's gratitude sends them straight back to
prison, with Victor Alter being executed immediately after his arrest.

Yidn fun der glover velt! Jews of all countries !
The anti-fascist committee nevertheless saw the light of day in August 1941, but
under strictly Soviet aegis. A first speech on Radio Moscow invites, in Yiddish,
the Jews of the whole world to join the anti-fascist fight. Made public almost a
year later, this organization will consist of 70 members and will be chaired by
Solomon Mikhoels, famous actor and director of the Jewish theater in Moscow. This
work is also taking place in Yiddish and will be based on a newspaper called
Eynikeyt - Unity.

SOLOMON MIKHOELS (1890 - 1948) was the chairman of the Jewish Antifascist
Committee. Famous actor and director of the Moscow Jewish Theater. Stalin had him
assassinated in 1948 for fear of his many contacts with the Jewish diaspora,
especially in the United States.
The aim of the Jewish Antifascist Committee was to disseminate pro-Russian
propaganda to the whole world, but more particularly to Jewish sympathizers and
the intellectual world of the time. The central message is placed in counterpoint
to German policy: the USSR is not anti-Semitic. Thus from 1942 to 1948, the
Committee will multiply the trips to Europe and the United States. On one of
these occasions, their reception at the prestigious Polo Grounds in New York was
provided by Albert Einstein at the head of a delegation including the mayor of
New York Fiorello La Guardia, or even Stephen Wise, president of the World Jewish
Congress, the all in front of an audience of 50,000 people. This rally will go
down as the largest pro-Soviet event in US history. Chagall, Chaplin, the great
African-American singer and communist activist Paul Robeson will support the idea
that Russia must be helped to fight against Hitler's ogre. Nearly 45 million
dollars will be collected in this way, without counting the sending of medical
and technical equipment, ambulances... And then we insist to North American
opinion that theGI join the war.

No reference to the final solution
As early as 1943, the discussions between Einstein, Fefer and Mikhoels gave rise
to the idea of compiling in a Black Book: the facts proving the villainous
extermination of the Jews by the German fascist invaders in the temporarily
occupied regions of the USSR and in the camps of extermination in Poland  [4].
The insistence of certain European intellectuals of the time to carry out such
work already proves that the camps, massacres and genocidal system are known to
contemporaries.

It's a rich idea. But an idea that will come up against the usual paranoia of the
fastidious tenant of the Kremlin. It comes up against two fundamentals of the
regime: first , it is never wrong, second , the enemy is everywhere. But
especially inside. The Black Book indeed highlights that the Nazis in Russian,
Polish and Ukrainian territory necessarily benefited from the support of the
local populations to carry out both the Holocaust by bullets and the guarding of
the camps, logistics, etc. Unacceptable ! As it is inadmissible to consider that
Soviets would have been killed by the Germans.

Within the progressive movements, a critical return to the themes propagated by
Stalinist anti-Semitism remains to be done in order to free themselves completely
from this gangrene.
They were killed as Soviet citizens , not as   Jews . Any consideration to the
contrary would be nationalism - impossible when one is an internationalist. Worse
! that would be "  rootless cosmopolitanism  "! The formal contradictions of
course are negligible for the Stalinist doxa which, in order to kill its dog,
does not hesitate to use Nazi terminology, and accuse it of the rage of Zionism,
or of being sold to the Americans.

The very mention of a final solution perpetrated against Jews as such is
prohibited. It is the old Russian anti-Semitism, that of the Cossacks and the
pogroms, which dresses itself in dogmatic justifications, speaks of
counter-revolution, influences from abroad, decadence... Because the same person
who said in 1931: "  Communists, as coherent internationalists, can only be sworn
and implacable enemies of anti-Semitism  ", begins to declare in 1952: "  every
Jewish nationalist is a potential agent of American intelligence.»

It is on the level of religion that the propaganda against Judaism is positioned,
in that it is capable of conveying a "  retrograde archaism  ". But a form of
essentialism is inseparable from it: cosmopolitans, the Jews, can only encourage
foreign infiltration, espionage... The recycling of the theses of the
Judeo-Bolshevik Nazi conspiracy is complete.

Russian public opinion indulges in openly expressing its hatred and cases follow
one another proving that the fatherland of socialism harbors a poison. Because,
if the first purges of Stalin (1937-38) made Jewish victims without aiming them
in a systemic way, it becomes obvious that an anti-Semitism of State is from now
on well in place. This will even take on a pseudo-scientific air with " Zionology
  ", which takes up anti-Semitic themes and justifies them by demonizing the
State of Israel.

For Jewish intellectuals, things are rushing. Andreï Zhdanov, eminent member of
the Politburo, hero of Leningrad and executioner of Russian culture, will
relentlessly attack the Yiddish language and Jewish artistic and intellectual
production in the name of "  socialist realism  ", this Soviet formalism for
which only representation is worth of big-muscled proletarians and peasant women
in headscarves, harvesting ripe wheat.

In early 1946, a partial edition of the Black Book appeared. In October 1947, it
was banned in the USSR. In January 1948, having left Moscow for Minsk, Mikhoels
was found murdered in a city street. In March 1948, the Committee was denounced
as "  Zionist  ". Stalin, in a final standoff, wants to force him to promote a
movement of Jews to Birobidjan, a Siberian city and region where he intends to
relegate them. It's the writer Peretz Markish - leading author, at the forefront
of the Yiddish revival, and winner of the 1946 Stalin Prize ! - which signifies a
refusal: "  You cannot displace a people, tear it from its roots historically
formed with its native land, its homeland  ".Stalinist fury. On November 21,
1948, the Jewish Antifascist Committee was dissolved. There followed a campaign
to liquidate the Yiddish language and culture, targeting the approximately 3
million speakers of the country.

Meeting of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee in 1941
December 1948, Viktor Abakoumov, the sadistic head of the MGB/KGB, is in charge
of anti-Jewish policy. He arrests Fefer, who has played a murky game against his
colleagues from the Antifascist Committee. During the winter of 1948-49, all the
other militants of the Committee were arrested, at night, clandestinely, locked
up in the Lubianka, the headquarters of the KGB, interrogated and tortured. The
accusation: bourgeois nationalism, treason, cosmopolitanism without roots... It
is also under this name that a vast campaign of state anti-Semitism was launched
in January 1949, to which P. Markish would remark: "  Hitler wanted to destroy us
physically, Stalin wants to destroy us spiritually  ".

The aftermath of the purge
Abducted in 1949, the members of the Committee were tortured and detained until
1952. But their ordeal was to experience two stages: that of the confessions
extracted by pain in the low pits of the Lubianka, then the recantation .
Because, when the trial officially opened in May 1952, they and they confessed to
everything, a series of crimes contained in this count: "  planning an armed
insurrection aimed at establishing a Zionist and bourgeois republic which would
have served as an American base, espionage activities, anti-Soviet propaganda  ".

Informed of these reasons, rebound ! Those who were communists of unwavering
loyalty, early activists, decorated, all find the strength to deny the
accusations en bloc, forcing the court to sit behind closed doors. We are again
in the darkness of a room in the Military College of the Supreme Court, from
which fall accusations, each more absurd than the other, Kafkaesque, Orwellian,
to which we can again imagine that the accused do not deign to answer. So much do
they understand that this is a farce to the great glory of Soviet state
terrorism. They and they are shot on August 12, 1952.

Cuervo (UCL Aix en Provence)

TRAJECTORIES OF MEMBERS OF THE JEWISH ANTI-FASCIST COMMITTEE

Solomon Mikhoels , actor, director of the Moscow State Jewish Theater, murdered
in January 1948 (see photo).

Solomon Losovski , former Soviet Deputy Foreign Minister, executed August 12, 1952.

Itzik Fefer , poet, executed August 12, 1952.

Solomon Bregman , Deputy Minister for State Control, died in custody January 23,
1953.

Aaron Katz , General of the Military Academy, released after Stalin's death, died
in 1971.

Boris Shimeliovich , Chief Medical Officer of the Red Army. Executed August 12, 1952.

Joseph Yuzefovich , historian, executed August 12, 1952.

Leib Kvitko , poet, executed August 12, 1952.

Peretz Markish , poet, executed August 12, 1952.

David Bergelson , writer, executed August 12, 1952.

David Hofstein , poet, executed August 12, 1952.

Benjamin Zuskin , actor, executed August 12, 1952.

Ilya Vatenberg , publisher, executed August 12, 1952.

Emilia Teumim , publisher, executed August 12, 1952.

Leon Talmy , journalist and translator, executed August 12, 1952.

Khayke Vatenberg-Ostrowskaya , translator, executed August 12, 1952.

Lina Stern , female doctor and biochemist, sentenced to life imprisonment,
released after Stalin's death. Died in 1968.

Der Nister , writer, exiled to Birobidjan in 1947, imprisoned in 1949, died in
custody in 1950.

To validate

[1]Soviet secret services, ancestors of the KGB

[2]Created in 1924, and initially intended to deal with military affairs, in 1934
it became the body that would judge "  counter-revolutionary  " crimes
specifically linked to Party cadres. Of the 1,548,366 victims of the Stalinist
purges, the College will try 44,465, 85% of whom are sentenced to death.

[3]Biblical phrase

[4]Subtitle of the work

[5]On this anti-Semitic memorial battle, see Lisa Vapné, "  Babi Yar, a memorial,
memorials  " , K-larevue.com, September 29, 2021.

https://www.unioncommunistelibertaire.org/?1952-La-nuit-des-poetes-juifs-assassines
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