Washington Jewish Week - 12.06.2001

 

Link To NCSJ's 50th Commemoration of "The Night of the Murdered Poets"

Washington Jewish Week

Read It and Weep Book Chronicles Stalin's Post-War Anti-Semitic Campaign

Stalin's Secret Pogrom: The Postwar Inquisition of the Jewish AntiFascist Committee edited by Joshua Rubenstein and Vladimir P. Naumov. Translated by Laura Esther Wolfson. New Haven, Yale University Press, 2001. 527 pp. $35.

By Matt Nesvisky

It's been a long time since I've read a book that so angered and saddened me as did Stalin's Secret Pogrom. How could it be otherwise, being reminded that just a few short years after the defeat of the Nazis -- and before the world could even fully absorb the enormity of the murderous crimes against the Jews -- yet another totalitarian regime was poised to launch a similar genocide, in essence to complete Adolf Hitler's work.

The outline of Josef Stalin's offensive against Jews and Jewish culture in the former Soviet Union has long been known. Likewise his persecution of prominent Jewish figures -- culminating in what has come to be known as "The Night of the Murdered Poets" -- is also a matter of record. But not until now has the actual record been made available to the public.

Stalin's Secret Pogrom is largely based on secret trial transcripts that have only recently been brought to light from archives in Russia.

The story arises out of betrayal and treachery, two characteristics of the Soviet system from its very inception. In 1942, the Soviet dictator sanctioned the establishment of a Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, one of several groups to generate material and moral support for Russia's conflict with Germany.

Members of the Jewish group were sent to the United States, Canada, Mexico and Britain. They met with everyone from Albert Einstein to Charlie Chaplin, spoke at a mass rally at the Polo Grounds before a crowd of 50,000 and succeeded in raising millions of dollars for the Soviet war effort. No sooner was the war was over, however, than the committee was disbanded and its leaders accused of anti-Soviet behavior, espionage, Jewish nationalism and a host of other imaginary crimes.

These accusations led to a trial of 15 Jews. But it was not a classic Soviet show trial; rather, with the Kafkaesque nightmare logic of the paranoid Stalin regime, the trial was held in secret. Not only were there no defense lawyers, there were no prosecutors -- just charges presented before a panel of military judges. Placed in evidence were confessions extracted from the accused under torture during their three-year pretrial imprisonment.

At the trial several of the prisoners recanted their confessions, but to no avail.

On Aug. 12, 1952, 13 of the 15 defendants, including the renowned poets David Markish, Leyb Kvitko and David Hofshteyn, the prize-winning novelist David Bergelson and Itsik Fefer, were shot to death in the cellars of Lubyanka Prison. Defendant Solomon Bregman died in jail and Lina Shtern got off with 10 years at hard labor.

The trial transcript is heart-wrenching, the record of good men and women driven to the brink of madness by the machinery of a mad regime.

Stalin's Secret Pogrom is an important document in this most unhappy moment in Jewish history. Read it and weep.

Matt Nesvisky is a Philadelphia-based writer.