Khrushchev’s Failure to Mention Stalin’s Anti-semitism Noted in U.S.

Jewish leaders here today emphasized that while Nikita Khrushchev, head of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, exposed Stalin’s fabrication of the notorious “doctors’ plot” in his speech at the Communist Party congress in Moscow, he failed to make any reference to the anti-Jewish nature of this plot. Nor did he refer to any other anti-Jewish developments which took place during the Stalin regime, such as the elimination of Jews from diplomatic positions and the liquidation of all Jewish cultural institutions.

Khrushchev’s failure to indicate that seven of the nine physicians arrested in the so called “doctors’ plot” were Jews and that Stalin charged them with “taking orders from the American intelligence service through Jewish organization,” was taken as an indication by American Jewish leaders that the Soviet Government today is bent on evading restoration of the Jews in the Soviet Union to the same cultural rights which all other national minorities in the USSR enjoy.

When the “doctor’s plot” was announced by the Stalin administration in 1953, it provoked alarm among Jews throughout the world because of its outspoken anti-Jewish character. It was considered an indication of the beginning of a virulent anti-Jewish course in the USSR and in the Soviet satellite countries. It stimulated the “Slansky trial” in Czechoslovakia and other similar trials conducted against a strong anti-Jewish background and helped to spread anti-Jewish sentiment among the population.

Although the Joint Distribution Committee had ceased its relief activities in the Soviet Union in 1938, the Soviet press and radio charged the Moscow doctors arrested in 1953 with being “connected with the international Jewish bourgeois-nationalist organization “Joint” set up by American intelligence service.” This charge was called “fantastic” in a statement issued in New York by Edward M. M. Warburg, JDC chairman. The Soviet press also claimed at that time that instructions concerning “the destruction of the leading personnel of the Soviet Union” were sent from the American headquarters of the “Joint” through a Dr. Shmilevich and the “well-known Jewish bourgeois nationalist Mikhoels.”

No further identification of Dr. Shmilevich was given. Solomon Mikhoels was a prominent Jewish actor in Moscow and president of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee there until his death under mysterious circumstances in January 1948. He visited the United States in 1943 as head of a Soviet-Jewish mission and was awarded the Lenin Order in 1931. Itzik Feffer, another member of that mission, is among the many Soviet Jewish writers who “disappeared” when Stalin ordered the liquidation of Jewish cultural institutions in the USSR.