Stalin's Secret Pogrom: The Postwar Inquisition of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee

In the spring and summer of 1952, fifteen Soviet Jews, including five prominent Yiddish writers and poets, were secretly tried and convicted; multiple executions soon followed in the basement of Moscow's Lubyanka prison. The defendants were falsely charged with treason and espionage because of their involvement in the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, and because of their heartfelt response as Jews to Nazi atrocities on occupied Soviet territory. Stalin had created the committee to rally support for the Soviet Union during World War II, but he then disbanded it after the war as his paranoia mounted about Soviet Jews.

For many years, a host of myths surrounded the case against the committee. Now this book, which presents an abridged version of the long-suppressed transcript of the trial, reveals the Kremlin's machinery of destruction. Joshua Rubenstein provides annotations about the players and events surrounding the case. In a long introduction, drawing on newly released documents in Moscow archives and on interviews with relatives of the defendants in Israel, Russia, and the United States, Rubenstein also sets the trial in historical and political context and offers a vivid account of Stalin's anti-Semitic campaign.



Summary: Powerful, definitive account of Soviet anti-semitism
Rating: 5

Mr. Rubenstein has done an outstanding job as a researcher and writer in giving us this gripping record of Stalin's purge in 1950-52 of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee. The JAC had been active during WWII in organizing international aid to the besieged Soviets. Despite their vigorous efforts in the struggle against the Nazis, some of the most respected Russian Jewish poets, writers, and cultural figures associated with the JAC were eventually imprisoned on blatantly fabricated charges of espionage, then executed in 1952. Using recently-opened soviet files, he and Mr. Vladimir Naumov have carefully and authoritatively documented this sordid chapter in recent Soviet history.


Summary: Important documentation of Soviet horror under Stalin
Rating: 5

This book documents just one of the horrors of the Soviet regime. While Stalin murdered millions of innocent people who were unlucky enough to have been citizens under his rule, this book tells of the way this evil regime turned on fifteen people whose crime was being Jewish and wanting to examine the Nazi atrocities in the portions of the USSR they occupied.

It is a particularly poignant telling because the authors provide us with excerpts from the transcripts of the trial so you hear the victims and their accusers in their own words. These people were destroyed by the system they tried to serve and help largely because Stalin decided to use the Jews and the fear of paranoid Zionist conspiracies as the Nazis had done.

This is a very valuable book and I am glad it is in print. As part of the Annals of Communism series it provides important and permanent testimony of the criminality of the USSR that had been lied about and hidden for too long.

Thanks to the authors.