During Central Committee voting on a proposal to expel P. S. Zhemchuzhina from the party I abstained, which I admit to be politically mistaken. I hereby state that having thought over this question, I vote in favor of the Central Committee decision, which corresponds to the interests of the party and the state and teaches a correct understanding of the meaning of Communist Party membership. Furthermore, I admit my grievous guilt in that I did not duly restrain Zhemchuzhina, someone close to me, from false steps and ties with anti-Soviet Jewish nationalists, such as Mikhoels.
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In March 1949, Molotov was dismissed from the post of foreign minister, and Mikoyan was relieved of his duties as minister for foreign trade. These dismissals did not mean that the two men were cast out of the government. Both remained members of the Politburo and deputy chairmen of the government, and in these capacities they fulfilled important administrative functions. But their political authority was damaged, an outcome that undoubtedly was Stalin’s true objective.
The use of Zhemchuzhina’s origins in formulating the charges against her reflected a policy of state anti-Semitism that Stalin launched as confrontation with the West intensified. In early 1948 he ordered state security to destroy the prominent Jewish intellectual and theatrical director Solomon Mikhoels. Later that year he ordered the dissolution of the Soviet Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, which had been founded during the war to mobilize international support for the USSR. The authorities had begun to view the committee as a nest of spies with ties to foreign intelligence agencies. Over the next few years, the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee Affair gradually engulfed more victims, until it ended with a closed trial held from May through July 1952. All the defendants but one were shot.
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In 1949, the arrests of Jewish public figures were supplemented with a wide-ranging campaign against “cosmopolitanism.” Many Soviet Jews were arrested, fired from their jobs, and made targets of discrimination and contempt.
Newly available documents confirm what most historians have long believed: such campaigns could not have been conducted without Stalin’s support and involvement. This fact raises legitimate questions about the motives behind Stalin’s anti-Semitism. It is tempting to assume that in the final years of Stalin’s life he merely became more open about a Judophobia he had always held as a predictable aspect of his general misanthropy. The evidence, however, suggests that his postwar anti-Semitism was primarily a product of domestic and foreign policy calculations. A complex set of historical factors lay behind his turn toward anti-Semitism as a political tool.
Foremost among these factors was the evident growth in anti-Semitism in the USSR. In no small part because of Nazi propaganda, anti-Semitic feelings and beliefs had spread among certain segments of Soviet society. During the war, even highly placed Soviet functionaries did not hesitate to lace their reports with anti-Semitic comments. In January 1944 the deputy commander of Soviet air forces, General Grigory Vorozheikin, wrote to Stalin and other Soviet leaders about the problem of having too many members of the military working in comfortable jobs at headquarters or in commissaries. Regarding those manning the commissaries that sold items to the troops—
voentorgs
—he wrote, “At the fronts they’re called not ‘voentorgs’ but ‘abramtorgs.’ … All of these ‘abramtorgs’ should be sent to fight.”
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Among the letters Stalin placed in his personal archive during the postwar years we find some expressing anti-Semitic feelings and others complaining about the spread of anti-Semitism. One writer, who accused Jews of shirking physical labor, offered a proposal on how to “reeducate” them: “Separating Jews, as a worthy nation, into a separate republic … and making them work on a justly organized basis would be widely approved by all the other peoples of the Soviet Union.”
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Stalin undoubtedly was aware of the prevalence of such feelings and took them into consideration.
Like any totalitarian regime, the Stalinist dictatorship needed to keep society mobilized. This goal was achieved both by provoking anxiety about external threats and by using domestic groups as scapegoats, thereby channeling dissatisfaction away from the country’s leaders. The spread of anti-Semitism shows that Jews were the most convenient target for social stigmatization. In the immediate aftermath of the war, however, Stalin was not able to exploit popular anti-Semitism. The complicated games being played in the international arena and the fact that there were advantages still to be derived from his alliance with the West forced him to be circumspect. The ideological campaigns of the first postwar years, designed to combat the rather amorphous idea of “kowtowing to the West,” were intended as “ideological education” for the intelligentsia and probably had little resonance among the general population.
The situation changed as tensions spiked with the West, as embodied by the United States with its strong Jewish community. As relations with the new Jewish state of Israel broke down and Israel became allied with the United States, Soviet Jews became more suitable targets. As Yuri Slezkine put it, “The Jews as a Soviet nationality were now an ethnic diaspora potentially loyal to a hostile foreign state.”
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The new ideological paradigm that took shape in 1948–1949 brought Stalin’s campaign against kowtowing into line with his exploitation of anti-Semitism. The two coalesced in the campaign against “cosmopolitans,” appropriately understood by the Soviet masses as targeting Soviet Jews and their foreign patrons. A 1949 letter selected to be shown to Stalin captures the essence of this campaign: “Just as the entire German people bear responsibility for Hitler’s aggression, so too the Jewish people must bear responsibility for the actions of the bourgeois cosmopolitans.”
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State anti-Semitism was transformed into a tool of social manipulation.
Stalin’s personal prejudice undoubtedly played an important role in this new twist in the political line. There are many signs that during the final years of his life, he viewed Jews as a “counterrevolutionary” nation, much as he had viewed Poles, Germans, and the peoples of the North Caucasus before and during the war. The repression of the 1930s, the Stalinist regime’s failure to protect its citizens from the Holocaust, and postwar anti-Semitism had all dampened the revolutionary fervor many Soviet Jews felt during and after the revolution. Now, Stalin assumed, Jews had turned their gaze westward, toward the United States, and were prepared to serve the West with the enthusiasm they had once shown for the revolution. “Any Jew-nationalist is an agent of American intelligence,” Stalin told a meeting of the party’s top leadership in late 1952. “Jew-nationalists believe that their nation was saved by the U.S.A. (there you can become rich, a bourgeois, etc.). They feel they have an obligation to the Americans.”
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These suspicions were only intensified by the Jewish wives of some of his closest associates and by his own daughter’s Jewish husband. Stalin’s political anti-Semitism, taking deep root during his final years, became a key factor in both domestic and foreign policy.
MEETING WITH MAO
The setbacks Stalin faced in Europe were partly compensated by the advance of communism in Asia. On 1 October 1949, a Communist victory in the protracted Chinese civil war resulted in the proclamation of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) under the leadership of Mao Zedong. The Soviet leadership immediately established diplomatic relations with the new government and severed all ties with the defeated Kuomintang.
The Communist victory in China no doubt strengthened the Soviet Union’s position in the Cold War, but it brought with it a new set of problems associated with the building of Sino-Soviet relations. Despite its dependence on the USSR, Communist China was too imposing a force to remain just another satellite. Stalin had reason to suspect that Mao might confront him with the same assertive intractability he had encountered in Yugoslavia. Considering China’s size and its importance within the Third World, such recalcitrance could have much more serious consequences. A major source of friction was economic problems. The need to provide aid to a war-torn friendly power was a heavy burden for the financially strained Soviet Union.
Even before the Chinese Communists had come to power, Stalin had retained personal control over contacts with them. Through Soviet military intelligence he had set up radio communication with Mao, whose army was based in northeastern China. This line of communication was maintained through special Soviet emissaries, who also served as Mao’s physicians. Although Mao and Stalin kept up a continuous written correspondence, this was not enough for the Chinese revolutionary leader, who repeatedly expressed a desire to visit the Soviet Union. Probably he saw such a visit in symbolic as well as practical terms: he needed to confirm his status as the leader of the Chinese people and a partner (albeit junior) of Stalin. But Stalin kept finding ways to forestall a visit. At first he felt it inadvisable to demonstrate close ties with the Chinese Communists when they were not the country’s official government. The situation in China was extremely fluid, and a Communist victory seemed far from certain.
After several postponements by Moscow, Mao began to lose patience. On 4 July 1948 he informed Stalin that he intended to set out for Harbin and fly from there to Moscow. Ten days later he received the following response: “In view of the commenced grain harvest work, the leading comrades will leave for the provinces in August, where they will remain until November. Therefore the party’s Central Committee is asking Com. Mao Zedong to time his visit to Moscow for the end of November so as to have an opportunity to see all the leading comrades.”
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Mao had no choice but to comply, but he made his annoyance plain. Stalin’s excuse sounded ridiculous, and the Chinese leader did not try to pretend otherwise. The Soviet communications officer attached to Mao even felt compelled to inform Stalin of Mao’s reaction:
I have known Mao Zedong for more than 6 years and could tell that his smile and the words “hao, hao—good, good,” spoken as he was listening to the translation, did not mean that he was happy with the telegram. … He was sure that he would be going immediately. Probably the trip became necessary for him. He waited for a reply with great eagerness.… Mao Zedong’s suitcases were being packed, and even leather shoes were bought (like everybody here, he wears cloth slippers), and a thick wool coat was tailored.… So now he is outwardly calm, polite and attentive, courteous in a purely Chinese manner. But it is hard to see his true soul.
This visit was becoming a serious headache. From August through December 1948, as the Communists achieved a string of decisive victories, Mao continued to insist on coming. In a telegram dated 28 September 1948 he wrote, “On a series of questions it is necessary to report personally to the Central Committee and to the
glavny khoziain
[the boss or chief].” In early January 1949 he again expressed his desire to come to Moscow to report to the “
glavny khoziain
.” Stalin stood firm. In January 1949 the Soviet side again canceled a scheduled visit. Anastas Mikoyan was sent to the Chinese instead. As Mikoyan later recalled, in discussing this matter Stalin had justified the refusal to receive Mao by saying that it would “be interpreted in the West as a visit to Moscow to receive instructions.… This would lead to a loss of prestige for the Chinese Communist Party and would be used by the imperialists and the Chiang Kai-shek clique against the Chinese Communists.”
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This explanation fit nicely with Stalin’s policy of caution and demonstrative neutrality.
During Mikoyan’s visit in February 1949, the Communist march to victory entered a decisive phase. Negotiations were begun on the terms of military and economic assistance from the USSR and what to do about treaties between the Soviets and the Kuomintang. A friendship and cooperation treaty, along with associated accords, had been signed with the Chiang Kai-shek government in August 1945. These documents stemmed from agreements reached with the Allies in Yalta: in exchange for Stalin’s promise to enter the war against Japan, the United States and Britain had agreed to give to the USSR lands that the Russian Empire had lost in the 1905 Russo-Japanese War. The Kuomintang government had recognized the independence of the Outer Mongolian Soviet satellite, the People’s Republic of Mongolia; the Soviet Union’s rights to build a military base in Port Arthur; and its long-term lease of the port of Dalny. The Chinese-Changchun Railway, which connected Port Arthur and Dalny with the USSR proper, had been brought under Soviet administration. There was lingering dissatisfaction over these forced concessions in China. With time, the Soviet presence inside the country began to look increasingly like a politically dangerous anachronism. Both Moscow and the Chinese Communist leadership understood this. Mutual concessions were expected; it was only a question of degree.
After the Chinese Communists finally achieved victory, Stalin no longer had grounds to avoid Mao’s visit. Furthermore, given the new situation, a face-to-face meeting would be extremely helpful in resolving key questions regarding the Sino-Soviet relationship. Mao left Beijing on 6 December 1949. After a ten-day trip he arrived at Moscow’s Yaroslavl Station on 16 December, exactly at noon. Mao’s interpreter recalled that the station clock struck twelve just as they pulled up, making the arrival all the more dramatic.
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A famous photograph capturing the meeting on the station platform shows the head of the honor guard in the front row with his saber drawn, Bulganin in his marshal’s uniform, Molotov, and Mao. The Chinese Communist leader, tall and stout next to the slight Molotov and Bulganin, looked imposing in his large fur collar and high fur hat. Later that evening Stalin received Mao in his Kremlin office.
Did the Soviet and Chinese leaders like each other? They certainly had much in common. Both were born in remote provinces to families that were poor but not destitute. Both despised their fathers and loved their mothers. Despite material deprivations, each had obtained an education, joined the revolutionary underground in his youth, and overcome his modest social origins. Each had received much of his education through independent, unguided reading and showed a penchant for abstract, philosophical topics and radical ideas. Both wrote verse and enjoyed literature idealizing rebels and brigands with forceful personalities, physical strength, and indomitable will. Neither had a talent for languages, knew a single foreign language, or even spoke his dominant language very well. Stalin’s accent was strongly Georgian, Mao’s Xiang (Hunanese).
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Both were ruthless and decisive. Mao fully shared Stalin’s views on attaining sole dictatorial powers and governing and largely borrowed the Soviet leader’s methods, carrying out purges, liquidating former comrades, embracing forced rapid industrialization, and presiding over a great famine. The characterization of Mao prepared for the Soviet leadership in 1949 by the doctor and radio communications specialist A. Ya. Orlov describes the Chinese leader as “Unhurried, even slow.… He moves steadily toward any goal he sets, but not always following a straight path, often with detours.… Is a natural performer. Is able to hide his feelings and can play whatever role is needed.”
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This description greatly resembled Stalin. In December 1949, when Stalin was celebrating his seventieth birthday, Mao was about to turn fifty-six. Understandably, Mao looked up to Stalin. Among the Chinese leadership, the Soviet leader was referred to as “the old man.”
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