Soviet Jews who survived the war knew that their loved ones had been murdered because of their Jewish ethnicity. They knew that some of their neighbors were Nazi collaborators. The Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (JAC), partly composed of Soviet Jews who had traveled abroad to raise huge sums of money for the Soviet war effort, went to great lengths to document Nazi atrocities in the Soviet Union in the
Black Book.
As the war ended and Joseph Stalin’s government shifted its domestic and foreign policy, a campaign against “Jewish nationalism” and “cosmopolitanism” and “Zionism” began to be waged against Soviet Jews, reaching its climax with the
Doctor’s Plot, a conspiracy theory promoted by Stalin’s government claiming that “Zionists” and people with Jewish surnames were attempting to assassinate Soviet officials. The Black Book was suppressed in the Soviet Union in 1947, and many members of the JAC were executed by Stalin’s regime during the height of his anti-Jewish panic. The facts that the committee had methodically documented, including widespread Nazi collaboration by ethnic Ukrainians, Latvians, and others, undermined Soviet propaganda, which claimed uniform support for the Stalinist regime from all Soviet citizens. Jews attempting to put up memorials for their loved ones were punished, their actions characterized as “Jewish particularism”; their recollection of the war didn’t serve the Soviet regime’s interests. The interests of the
vlast were not the same as those of the
narod, at least the Jewish one.
