There is a good deal of anecdotal testimony to Stalin's personal anti- Semitism,[270] but in many respects Jewish life continued to prosper in the 1930s. Tens of thousands of Jews lost their lives in the Great Terror and Jewish culture, especially religion, was subject to restrictions similar to those imposed on other nationalities, including a marked reduction in university enrolment. After the suffering of the war years, Jews in the Soviet Union were subjected to a further attack. In 1944, leading members of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (JAC), set up in 1942 to co-ordinate Jewish participation in the war effort and to attract international support, began to discuss the idea of an alternative homeland for the Jews in the Crimea or the Volga region. This was later to provide the pretext for accusations of 'bourgeois Jewish nationalism' and Zionism that culminated in the arrest and execution of former JAC leaders in 1952. In January 1948 the prominent Jewish actor Solomon Mikhoels died in mysterious circumstances, almost certainly murdered by the security services. Later that year a campaign against 'cosmopolitanism' provided the pretext for the harassment and arrest of leading Soviet Jews, the closure of theatres and other cultural institutions, and the disbanding of the JAC and other Jewish organisations. From 1948 to 1953, any Jew who had been active in politics or in Jewish culture lived in permanent fear of arrest, a fate suffered by thousands of them.[271] A series of prominent articles and speeches raised the spectre of an international Jewish conspiracy to overthrow Soviet power. The campaign culminated in the so-called 'Doctors' Plot' early in 1953, when a number of leading Jewish doctors were arrested and charged with having caused the deaths of the former Politburo members Zhdanov and Shcherbakov and of plotting to kill Stalin and other leaders. Goaded on by official propaganda, popular anti-Semitism was turned against Jews from all walks of life. There is now strong evidence that Stalin, Malenkov and others were preparing a plan for the wholesale forced deportation of Jews from the western parts of the Soviet Union to Siberia, with the intention that up to half should die on the way.[272] They were spared this fate only by Stalin's death on 5 March 1953.
The Jews were the only nationality to be persecuted in this way in the postwar years. No clear explanation for the anti-Jewish campaign has yet emerged, but a combination of Stalin's personal anti-Semitism, fear that Jewish organisations would gain undue influence as a result of sympathy for the Holocaust and a foreign policy that supported new-found allies in the Arab world against the new Israeli state all played a role. Although the overt government campaigns died with Stalin, anti-Semitism remained a significant feature of Soviet life and the experience of 1948-53 did much to stimulate the movement for emigration among Soviet Jews in later years.
For other non-Russians, the post-war years were a period of reconstruction, of grief and of the consolidation of a sense of pride in the Soviet system. The overt appeals to Russian nationalism of the war and the subsequent anti- cosmopolitanism campaign encouraged some elements of the leadership to propose a more Russifying line, but by and large these were defeated. Thus proposals to abolish mother-tongue instruction in schools of the autonomous republics of the RSFSR beyond the fourth grade were abandoned in favour of retaining the principle of mother-tongue education for all.[273]
The union republics of the USSR played an important role in the competition for power which followed Stalin's death (i953-57). Of the Politburo contenders to succeed Stalin, Lavrentii Beria, Lazar Kaganovich and Nikita Khrushchev had all spent a significant period of their earlier careers in the republics. Ultimately the balance of power could be decided by votes in the Central Committee of the CPSU, many of whose members came from the republics, especially Ukraine where both Khrushchev and Kaganovich had served. During the few months of his ascendancy prior to his arrest, Beria had time to launch an attack on Stalin's later nationality policies, accusing him of abandoning Leninist principles, and was able to initiate significant changes in republican leaderships which favoured local nationals over Russians, such as the replacement of Mel'nikov by Kirichenko as party leader in Ukraine. The general principle that the first party secretary in each republic should be a local national was established at this time. Beria also moved quickly to release the accused in the 'Doctors' Plot' from prison and to condemn the anti-Semitism of the late Stalin years.
Although 'activating remnants of bourgeois-nationalist elements in the union republics' was one of the charges laid against Beria at the time of his arrest in June 1953, the republics continued to enjoy advantages relative to their position in the late Stalin years. Khrushchev in particular used his position as General Secretary to promote former colleagues from Ukraine, increasing Ukrainian representation in the Central Committee from sixteen in 1952 to fifty-nine in 1961. Ukraine also benefited from the decision to transfer the Crimean peninsula from the RSFSRto Ukrainian jurisdiction in 1954, while the rehabilitation of most of the deported peoples in 1956-7 also signalled that non-Russians would no longer be subject to the kind of arbitrary treatment they had reason to fear under Stalin. In seeking to impose his authority over economic policy against his rival Malenkov, Khrushchev decentralised a number of economic ministries and the Ministry of Justice, considerably increasing the decision-makingpowers of the republics. While there was sound economic reasoning behind these moves, Khrushchev also reckoned that such measures might stand him in a more powerful position in any future inner-party conflicts.[274]
The strategy paid off. When his main rivals in the Politburo sought to remove him in June 1957, Khrushchev successfully appealed to the Central Committee, which was by now packed with supporters from Ukraine and other republics. But it would be a mistake to view Khrushchev as a keen supporter ofthe rights of non-Russians. After all, he owed much ofhis rise to the top of the Soviet system to the reputation he had earned in crushing all displays of Ukrainian nationalism after 1937. Having consolidated his power in 1957,
Khrushchev soon moved to reverse most of the decentralising measures introduced in the preceding years. More significantly, he signalled a far-reaching ideological shift by abandoning talk of the 'Brotherhood of Peoples' in favour of the 'merging of peoples'.
It was inevitable that such a merged identity should be centred on the Slavic languages and cultures. Khrushchev took care to include other Slavs, especially Ukrainians, alongside Russians when it came to defining the leading nations of the state, as evidenced in both his promotions and his cultural policies. No doubt he was mindful of the need to retain his personal base of support among Ukrainians, but some commentators have noted another possible factor: the relatively high birth rate among the Soviet Union's Muslims compared to that of the Russians, which threatened their overall majority in the population.[275]Modernising economic strategies also led to a renewed period of internal migration as Russians and Ukrainians moved into less-developed regions.[276]
271
Nora Levin,
272
IakovEtinger, 'The Doctors' Plot: Stalin's Solution to the Jewish Question', in Ro'i,
273
Peter A. Blitstein, 'Nation-Building or Russification? Obligatory Russian Instruction in the Soviet Non-Russian School, 1938-1953', in Suny and Martin,
274
Gerhard Simon,
275
John A. Armstrong, 'The Ethnic Scene in the Soviet Union: The View of the Dictatorship', in Rachel Denber (ed.),