Marshal Joseph Stalin once denounced the anti-Semitism which his regime is now practicing as “the most dangerous remnant of cannibalism,” the Manchester Guardian recalls in an article. The paper quotes an interview given by Stalin to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency in January, 1931, in which the Communist dictator said:
“Anti-Semitism, being an extreme form of racial chauvinism, is the most dangerous remnant of cannibalism. Anti-Semitism is useful to the exploiters as a lightning conductor to protect capitalism from being struck down by the working people. Anti-Semitism is a danger to the working people; it is a wrong path which diverts them from the right road and leads them into the jungle. Therefore, as logical internationalists, Communists cannot fail to be irreconciliable and sworn enemies of anti-Semitism.”
(The New York Times, in a cable from its Moscow correspondent, reports that an article on Jews in a new volume of the Soviet Encyclopedia declares that the Jews do not constitute a nation; that the Zionists are “agents of American and British imperialists”; and that Israel is a reactionary state being turned into a United States war base. The article says that the word “Jew” was simply the name for different nationalities generally originating from the ancient Jews. It does not give any figures on the Jewish population of the Soviet Union today, but says that in 1939 there were 3,020,000 Jews in the USSR.)
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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.
