Soviet Prime Minister Nikita S. Khrushchev, obviously reacting to the chorus of Western criticisms against his regime’s policies of anti-Semitism, denied publicly at a meeting in the Kremlin yesterday that there is any anti-Semitism in Russia, and cautioned Russian intellectuals against “echoing” such Western-invented calumnies, ” according to Moscow dispatches received here today. The dispatches were based on reports printed widely in the Soviet press.
“Everybody in Russia, ” said Mr. Khrushchev, “is regarded –not on the basis of race, religion or nationality, but on the basis of class. Since the October Revolution (of 1917, when the Communist regime came into power), the Jews here have enjoyed all rights equally with the rest of the population. The West invented the anti-Semitic issue as part of its cold war incitement against the USSR. Those intellectuals who pursue this line of the existence of a Jewish question in Russia are only echoing the calumnies invented in the West.”
The Prime Minister singled out poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko, and the latter’s poem, “Babi Yar, ” for specific attack. He called Yevtushenko “politically immature. ” He said the poem, which referred to the mass murder of many thousands of Jews buried in a mass grave in the Kiev suburb of Babi Yar, had failed to mention that Russians, Ukrainians and other non-Jews had also been victims of Nazi slaughter during World War Two.
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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.
