A sardonic and impassioned analysis of the re-emergence of anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union during the Khrushchev regime, believed to have been written by a Jewish Communist Party member who was a victim of Stalin’s persecution of Jews, has reached the West after being circulated among Soviet Jews clandestinely for about two years.
A report on the document by Emanuel Litvinoff, the British Jewish writer, appeared in The Guardian today. It is an anonymous letter to former Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev after his denunciation of the Soviet poet Yevgeni Yevtushenko for the latter’s famous poem on Babi Yar, the ravine where, in 1941, the Nazis slaughtered hundreds of thousands of Jewish men, women and children. The poem denounced anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union and described the martyrdom of the Jews under the Nazis. The letter to Khrushchev denounced Soviet anti-Semitism outright.
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.
