Stalin's Holocaust?

I recently heard that in his final years, Stalin was planning a full scale holocaust against the Jewish people. Has anyone else heard anything about this?

Komrade Ной

That's one of the most insane things I've heard in quite awhile. Anti-semitic claims have been made against Stalin but never to this extent that I've seen.

Oh thank God this wasn't a thread about the Holodomor like I thought it would be. There were these fragging nationalist Ukrainian emigre types who hung up a bunch of posters on campus about Stalin's/Soviet "genocide" and I suspect that they might have picked April 12 specifically to put up a bunch of anti-Soviet because it was the World Cosmonautics Day to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Gagarin's flight, which obviously is celebrating a Soviet achievement. I can't imagine what these nationalists would have been like had Gagarin been Ukrainian... But that being neither here nor there, I'll refrain from ranting about it.

Anyway, there was this whole Doctors' Plot (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctors%27_plot) deal, where the Soviet state was allegedly getting ready to blame a conspiratorial clique of doctors—many of whom Jewish—for carrying out assassinations against Soviet officials. Some people say that this was was going to be used as an excuse to launch a purge and persecute Jews in what will essentially be a revival of the pogroms.

I wouldn't be surprised if Stalin, in his later years, was becoming increasingly mentally unfit to lead the country (same thing happened to Mao, just look at the GLF and GPCR), and if he had planned an attack against Jewish intellectuals, it might be related out of his suspicions of their loyalties after the creation of Israel.

Whether or not he had really planned a genocide or a purge of that kind is another story, though it doesn't make it any more justifiable, assuming that these allegations are true, which scholarly research usually says are not. I believe the most commonly accepted interpretation of the Doctors' Plot is that Stalin was planning a massive party purge again, and not directed specifically at Jews. Actually, I think the Wiki article says the same thing near the end.

There have been some allegations of Stalin having been antisemitic. I don't know how true they are. Perhaps with the revival of some more conservative traditions of Russia under him, antisemitism might have seeped back into culture to some degree, but it was not as endemic as anti-communists would suggest, and these sentiments are usually combated by official Soviet ideology and propaganda.

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I recently heard that in his final years, Stalin was planning a full scale holocaust against the Jewish people. Has anyone else heard anything about this?

This comes from the myth that Stalin was going to deport all Soviet Jews to Siberia (Birobidzhan or near there), but even anti-Soviet historians admit that there is no real evidence for this.
Of course some anti-communists, taking this myth as the absolute truth, let their imagination take off and suggest that Stalin was planning a final solution for the Jews just like Hitler...

I have heard accounts of Stalin being anti-Jew in the years after World War II and leading up to his death. And this was even sited in a book I read called "Neighbors" by Jan T. Gross, it was an interesting book and talked about the Jedwabne Massacre and the trial afterwords where Polish citizens were accused for their part. Anyways Gross said that a lot of them were found innocent since Poland was under Stalinist influence and were being anti-Jew. I'm not sure to the extent of Stalin's anti-Semiteism, but I think him planing a holocaust is an outrageous claim.

Considering that the Jew's were radicalized by the Nazi Holocaust, it does not make much sense why the Soviet's would eliminate potential allies.

Stalin gave them a parcel of land somewhere, but since there was little true religious freedom there it could be argue that this was an act of genocide, though a subtle one.

Err when was this, and what land did he give them?

Jewish autonomous oblast?

Here is the official site of the Jewish Autonomous Oblast and their perspective of history:

http://www.eao.ru/eng/?p=343

Also it's important to mention that the Jews are not only a religious group, they are a nation.

Also it's important to note that Jews aren't a nation, but a religious group.

(Which is why the Holocaust was no genocide.)

Israelis are a nation.

Being Jewish was considered less of an ethnic identity and more of a religious one, but the rise of European nationalism led to them being considered an ethnic group, not just for religious reasons, but also for reasons related to culture (which for the Jews has been for centuries influenced by their religion), language, and ancestry.

Mabool wrote:

(Which is why the Holocaust was no genocide.)

It was mass murder deliberately targeting specific groups of people based on the notion of "blood" and ancestry, wherein being "Jewish" was considered being of a different race, even if they were assimilated Germans. If it doesn't fit a certain definition of genocide, the Nazis certainly made it so, and so was it in the context of modern nationalism.

The definition of genocide and the way the word gets thrown around are certainly problematic, but let's not get overzealous with rejecting the definition of genocide, which does include religious as part of one's ethno-cultural identity, or saying that something that actually was one isn't.

That said, I'm also not sure if I like the way this thread/question has been framed, particularly the comparison of something that is mostly speculation with an actual crime against humanity.

That's more democide, I think.

Well actually the entire distinction is bogus. Why care if it was a nation or a political movement or a race that's being killed?

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Also it's important to note that Jews aren't a nation, but a religious group.

Nations don't exist anyway, they should rightfully be called clines. In fact pretty much every concept concerning a group of people within a specific geographical area and sufficient genetic drift from other populations can be called a cline.

Don't really see the distinction you're trying to make anyway.

Mabool writes

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Also it's important to note that Jews aren't a nation, but a religious group.

Marx Writes

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The chimerical nationality of the Jew is the nationality of the merchant, of the man of money in general.

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/wo ... /index.htm

Stalin Writes

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The Russian Marxists have long had their theory of the nation. According to this theory, a nation is a historically constituted, stable community of people, formed on the basis of the common possession of four principal characteristics, namely: a common language, a common territory, a common economic life, and a common psychological make-up manifested in common specific features of national culture. This theory, as we know, has received general recognition in our Party.

http://www.marx2mao.com/Stalin/NQL29.html



A religion alone is a people, Judaism is completely a nation, one cant believe in Judaism and be Jewish, they must either be born Jewish or migrate to Judaism and join the Jewish people accordance to Jewish law.

And yet african, arab, indian, and otherwise non-european jews face discrimination in israel. Some nation.

Shigalov writes:

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I have to say that the whole Doctor's Plot issue doesn't look very good - there are several books which I have read which are convinced that the Plot was the precursor to wide scale purge which would have started with Jews then probably broadened out into a more wide-scale party-wide purge.

You are correct; most serious historians and/or biographers of Stalin would agree with you. Certainly the author of the best of the Stalin biographies, Eduard Radzinsky, was convinced this was going to be the case, citing numerous early examples of precursors in the past which foreshadowed Stalin's various purges (Red Army purges, Leningrad Party apparatus purges (twice), etc.) and the similarities surrounding these earlier purges. Radzinsky was convinced Stalin was anti-Semitic, and also took note of Stalin's use and subsequent treatment post WW-II of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, which in 1948-49 saw its nominal leader, Solomon Mikhoels, murdered by Soviet agents in Minsk (made to look like a car wreck, but fooling no one) and 12 other prominent JAFC merbers being jailed. These 12 prominent JAFC leaders were susequently placed in show trials and executed in 1952 during the "Night of the Murdered Poets," just when Stalin was getting set to really "pop the lid" so to speak on the Doctor's Plot, which most likely would have resulted in yet another round of purges (amd most likely would have seen the end of Stalin's most long-lived henchmen, to include Molotov, Kaganovich, and yours truly!) before ol' Uncle Joe hung up his bloody boots for good.