Nikita Khrushchev, head of the Communist Party in the Soviet Union, was criticized today in the Daily Worker, a Communist newspaper published in New York, for omitting to mention in his anti-Stalin speech in Moscow the anti-Jewish acts committed under the Stalin regime.
“We express our concern,” the Communist organ said in an editorial,” that in the long list of crimes mentioned in the speech, there was silence on those committed against Jewish culture and Jewish cultural leaders. To date, this series of outrages has not been publicized in the socialist countries except in the columns of a Jewish-Language paper in Warsaw. We do not consider the Khrushchev speech to be the last word on just how Stalin’s terror control came into existence and maintained itself for 20 years and of the role of the other Communist leaders.”
The New York Times reported today from Paris that Andre Philip, member of a French Socialist delegation that visited Moscow last month, said in an interview yesterday that Mr. Khruschev, during two conferences with the 12 members of the French delegation, also had discussed the status of the Jews in the Soviet Union.
At their first meeting, the French delegate went on, Mr. Khrushchev treated the Jewish question as a topic of small general interest. However, at the second conference, the Soviet leader seemed to be impressed by the visitors’ insistence on the world importance of it and went to great lengths to assure his listeners that he was not anti-Semitic, M. Philip said. He told the French that the Jews were considered to be like any other minority nationality, such as the Ukrainians or Georgians. The Jews, Mr. Khrushchev declared, have the same rights as other Soviet citizens, but no more.
The Yiddish language is fading away and the majority of the Jews in the Soviet Union are learning Russian as the best way to obtain a livelihood in the modern Soviet state. M. Philip quoted Mr. Khrushchev as having said. With regard to Soviet-Israel relations, the Soviet leader told the French delegation that there “still is a cold war between us and Israel, but we expect to get over it quickly” M. Philip reported that Mr. Khrushchev had charged that Israel was being used “as an instrument of Anglo-Saxon imperialism,” and that this had brought about the poor relations between Israel and the Soviet Union.
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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.
