By this time Mikhoels and the JAFC were in the cross hairs of the Minister of State Security Viktor Abakumov, who tarred the unfortunate man with an assortment of accusations, the worst of which was involvement in an American-Zionist plot. The minister alleged that Mikhoels, on his trip to the United States during the war, spoke to “intelligence sources.” For that reason, and perhaps also because Mikhoels tried to obtain access to his daughter, Stalin decided to have him killed and ordered security officials to stage an accident, as happened in Minsk on January 12, 1948.6
Mikhoels was given a burial, with full honors as a smokescreen. When the dust finally settled, the Politburo decided on November 20 to dissolve the JAFC, alleging that “the facts show that this Committee is the center of anti-Soviet propaganda and regularly provides information to the anti-Soviet foreign intelligence agencies.” Its newspaper was closed, and all its files were seized.7
Also “repressed” was Solomon Lozovsky, a Jewish member of the Communist Party Central Committee. His long and distinguished career went back to the 1905 Bolshevik conference in Tammerfors, Finland, where he had met Lenin and Stalin. Lozovsky was involved with the JAFC and arrested in January 1949 on Stalin’s orders. He was expelled from the party on the charge of conspiring with the JAFC, which “recently turned into a spy organization of Jewish nationalists.” Its aim was to create “a Jewish state in Crimea,” allegedly as part of a plan of “American capitalist interests.” The innocent seventy-year-old Lozovsky was pressured to confess, but he stood firm.
Another side of the Soviet anticosmopolitanism campaign was the adoption of anti-Zionism. Soviet Jews embraced the idea of the new Israel and joyously showed their feelings on September 3, 1948, when Golda Myerson (later Meir, eventually prime minister of Israel) came to Moscow as an envoy. She was celebrated by crowds and when she appeared at a synagogue, the streets overflowed outside. Such a blatant demonstration of “bourgeois nationalism” would, in Stalin’s view of the world, ignite among the Soviet Jews the very centrifugal forces he was trying to control in the Soviet empire.8
Anyone who openly favored Israel or applauded the accomplishments of Jewish intellectuals came under suspicion. Even Konstantin Simonov, a man well placed in Stalin’s regime, was accused of keeping the wrong company. He responded with a scathing speech to a meeting in Moscow of playwrights and critics, part of which was printed in Pravda on February 28, 1949:
The harmful activity of cosmopolitanism cannot be reduced only to the sphere of art and science, but it also has political implications. The propaganda of bourgeois cosmopolitanism now aids the world reactionaries and those who want a new war. Cosmopolitanism is the imperialists’ policy and at the same time it seeks to weaken patriotism and afterwards to deliver the people to the American monopolies. Cosmopolitanism in art aims to deprive people of pride in their national roots and to run down their national pride, at which point they can be sold as slaves to American imperialism.9
The campaign against cosmopolitanism focused on the intellectual elite in general, and because the Jews were heavily represented members, the purges had strong anti-Semitic overtones. Although Simonov said he was not anti-Semitic, as editor of the influential journal Novi Mir (New World), he soon fired all the Jewish writers, some of them close friends. Initially, even the famed writer Ilya Ehrenburg was silenced. He was Jewish, and in February 1949 his works suddenly stopped being printed. Instead of waiting for the ax to fall, he wrote Stalin to ask what fate awaited him. The dictator had been pleased with Ehrenburg’s wartime articles that had whipped up hatred against the Germans, and he was impressed when, at the dawning of the Cold War, Ehrenburg turned his guns against the United States. By April he was allowed to travel to the World Peace Conference in Paris, so he was back in good graces again.10
The anticosmopolitanism campaign featured a flood of notes to the authorities from all kinds of people with suggestions to make the system more watchful, like one hand-delivered to the Kremlin that provided a motto: “Vigilance must be everywhere!” These letters frequently exaggerated the shortcomings of this writer or that professor. Taken as a whole, the atmosphere that was created closed off the Soviet Union more than ever to new ideas, criticism, and the outside world. Although the files of all those attacked for “Jewish bourgeois nationalism” are still closed, estimates are that fifty people were executed out of the five hundred or so arrests, more than enough to send a chill through the country.11
POLAND, ALBANIA, HUNGARY, ROMANIA
At the time Stalin was cracking down on “Jewish nationalism,” he began to rethink his relatively flexible theory that each of the Eastern European countries could take their own road to socialism. The breakaway of Yugoslavia and the creation of Israel in 1948 he saw as forceful examples of the need to centralize power and to assert more control from Moscow. The responses of Communist leaders on the periphery varied; while some dragged their feet before dutifully following orders, others capitalized on Soviet demands and channeled their terror against homegrown enemies.
During Stalin’s conversations with Polish head of government Bolesław Bierut in August 1948, they agreed that General Secretary Władysław Gomułka, the champion of a Polish “road to socialism,” had to be removed from the party’s leadership. In Stalin’s eyes, Gomułka was or could become a Polish Tito. Although he and more than a hundred party officials were subsequently arrested, no large-scale purge or great show trial followed. Other areas of potential opposition, especially the Catholic Church, were scrutinized, and arrests were numerous, though by the early 1950s the authorities had backed off.12
At the end of 1948, a Polish United Workers’ Party (PZPR) resulted from the forced unification of the Communist (PPR) and Socialist (PPS) parties, which by and large ruled the country until 1989. Everyday surveillance, a secret police with files on millions of people, and thinly veiled terror became the norm. Just why Stalin did not insist on a show trial remains unexplained. As it was, the years between 1944 and 1956 were filled with another round of terror; no fewer than 243,066 people were arrested, though the estimates run up to between 350,000 and 400,000.13
At the same time the head of state security, Stanisław Radkiewicz, “recruited” 200,000 or more informers. He admitted that the object was not merely to collect information but to degrade people, to break their morale. In addition, the Polish army had its own network of informers in every district of the country. The army became one of the mainstays of the government, and annually it recruited, trained, and propagandized tens of thousands for two-year periods of indoctrination.14
When Stalin died in 1953, the Communist regime in Poland had the country well under control. Although the dictator’s successors made it possible for the resilient Gomułka, who survived prison, to get back into power in 1956, he brought little relief for the Polish people, who had to endure decades more of Communist rule.
In Albania, Enver Hoxha had consolidated his position even before the big blowup with Tito. In 1946, and under the country’s new constitution, the thirty-five-year-old Hoxha combined the offices of prime minister, foreign and defense minister, commander of the armed forces, along with the post of general secretary of the Communist Party. He had visited Stalin in July 1947 and, veritably overwhelmed to be in the presence of the Great Man, allowed his adulation to flow freely. He wanted nothing more than to be instructed on how to create a Stalinist system in Albania. Back home the party had consolidated its hold on power through a series of attacks on organized religion, the tiny intellectual opposition, and what remained of the pillars of the old society. He soon adopted a cult to Stalin that transformed the Soviet dictator into the guarantor of the country’s independence.15