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Ehrenburg Reveals He Appealed to Stalin on Soviet Anti-semitism

March 23, 1965
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Ilya Ehrenburg, famous Soviet novelist-journalist, has revealed that he had personally appealed to Stalin, during the latter’s regime, to investigate the persecutions being carried on, from 1948 to 1952, against Soviet Jewish intellectuals, according to a Moscow dispatch received here today. He did not reveal what, if anything, Stalin had replied.

Continuing his memoirs in the Russian literary magazine, Novy Mir, Mr. Ehrenburg devoted several pages of his latest installment to the Jewish question. He detailed again the purge of the Jewish intellectuals, beginning with the murder of actor-director Solomon Michoels, in 1948, and continuing with the execution of other leading Jewish intellectuals. He himself expected “the ringing of the bell,” meaning arrest and possible execution, he reported. Finally, he wrote, he appealed to Stalin against the anti-Jewish actions by the Soviet authorities.

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