In a dramatic and apparently unprecedented gesture, a non-Jewish Russian scholar, Dr. Ivan Martinov of Leningrad, has renounced his academic degree to protest mounting official anti-Semitism in the USSR, most vehemently espoused by the notorious anti-Jewish writer, Dr. Lev Korneyev, according to the Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry.
Martinov stated in an open letter to the presidium of the Soviet Academy of Sciences that he was giving up his title of Candidate of Pedagogical Sciences (equal to a PhD) particularly because there had been no move to expel Korneyev from the scientific community, “a professional bankrupt ignoramus and falsifier who disseminates the most vicious Black Hundreds (notorious Czarist pogromists) type of anti-Semitism in the pages of the Soviet press.”
In his recent book, “On the Course of Aggression and Fascism,” printed in over 100,000 copies, Korneyev details Zionism’s alleged “criminal alliance with the Fascists” and concludes that the figure of six million Jewish Holocaust victims “has been exaggerated by the Zionists by at least 2-3 times. It is the Zionists who bear the responsibility for the extermination of non-Zionist Jews in Europe between 1941 and 1945.”
Martinov charged this was “a blasphemous revision of the number of Jewish victims”. In another recent book, “The Class Essence of Zionism, ” Korneyev flatly declares Jews to be “a fifth column in any country.”
According to the SSSJ, Martinov said: “I am a Russian bibliographer and historian of Russian Orthodox background. I was brought up in a Russian home. Russian culture is both my life work and gives meaning to my existence. To paraphrase Maxim Gorky’s famed words, I boldly state: ‘Everything good in me I owe to the Jews’.” Martinov recalled that he received much help from Jewish teachers and scholars in his career.
The Leningrad academic went on to protest official retaliations taken against his Jewish scientific colleagues seeking to emigrate, including the elimination of their names from their published works. Martinov demanded the publication of his letter in the Soviet scientific press, as well as an open discussion of the anti-Semitic climate.
He called upon his professional peers to “mercilessly condemn and expel” Korneyev “from the scientific community” and to refrain from publishing their articles in journals which discriminate against Jewish emigration applicants. Martinov said he personally regretted contributing to Neva, a Leningrade literary monthly, which published Korneyev’s hate, including material sympathizing with Adolf Eichmann, “the victim of Zionist terrorists.”
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
