Moscow Says Khrushchev’s Anti-jewish Remarks Are “forgery”; Hits Israel

Moscow Radio, broadcasting in the Hungarian language on its European service, accused the French newspaper Le Figaro of “manufacturing a provocative forgery” in quoting anti-Jewish remarks by Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev in the course of an interview with that newspaper, it was reported here today by Radio Liberation, the anti-Soviet radio station which monitors broadcasts from the Soviet Union and also beams news to the Soviet Union.

In reporting this surprise development, Radio Liberation said that this was still another Moscow effort “to take Khrushchev off the hook for his intemperate remarks.” Moscow Radio accused Le Figaro of having launched an “anti-Soviet hullabaloo” which, in turn, was “snapped up in Israel, where with plenty of additional spice and further slander it was published by the entire Israeli press and has served as an excuse for a further campaign of slander against the Soviet Union.”

The Moscow broadcast assailed a “mass meeting of former Soviet Union subjects held recently in Tel Aviv organized by the Mapai administration, claiming the speeches consisted of “confused nonsense.” “The aim of every single speech was to slander the Soviet Socialist state and to present in a distorted light the Leninist policy on nationalities followed by the Soviet Union, “the Moscow broadcast contended.

The Moscow station claimed “it is well known” that Israel’s leaders, “claiming to be the protectors of Jewry, have been waging for a long time a campaign for the concentration in Israel of the Jewish population of various countries, among them the Soviet Union. “It observed that “there were such people who were taken in by the Israeli-American propaganda and have emigrated to Israel. But their disappointment was a bitter one.” Apparently, this was a reference to Polish Jews who emigrated to Israel.

The Moscow radio broadcast quoted from letters purportedly received from “misled people who became victims of Israeli-American propaganda” and had emigrated to Israel. “These people became capitalist forced-laborers concealed by the fig leaf of the Jewish national state, “the broadcast declared. “These people were confronted by hunger, misery and unemployment.”

“These letters of misled people are documents which expose the dirty slanderous character of the allegations of the inspirers of the new anti-Soviet propaganda campaign on the so-called Jewish question,” the Moscow station continued “This invented problem does not exist in the Soviet Union, where the Jewish population enjoys the fruits of the Leninist policy of nationalities in the same manner as all other peoples of the Soviet Union.”