Stalin’s Anti-Semitism was ‘Selective, Controlled and Pragmatically Cynical,’ Emil Pain Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, May 6 – Xenophobia typically is under stood as an “irrational and uncontrolled fear or hatred of members of another group, but Stalin’s anti-Semitism does not correspond to that definition, Emil Pain says. Instead, it was “selective, controlled and pragmatically cynical,” promoted or reined in depending on the Soviet dictator’s judgment about its utility.

            The Moscow specialist on ethnicity offers that conclusion at the end of his third article on Stalin’s approach to anti-Semitism ( https://mbk-news.appspot.com/sences/demonstrativnyj-antisemitizm/; on the first two, see windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2020/04/stalins-anti-semitism-was-both-fanatic.html and windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2020/05/stalin-hid-his-anti-semitism-in-public.html).

            In the current article, Pain says that what are known as the Black Years of Soviet Jewry (1945-1953) were not uniform and shows that Stalin used anti-Semitism as part of his anti-cosmopolitan campaign before dropping it in order to seek good ties with Israel and then used it again to balance his attacks on Russian nationalism in the Leningrad Affair.

            Pain’s references to the ways in which Stalin reined in anti-Semitism when he hoped to attract the new state of Israel to his side are common ground for most historians of the late Soviet period. His discussion of the use of anti-Semitism as a balance to Russian nationalism is more controversial. Pain himself says that this is his view.

            But Pain’s most useful remarks concern his general assessment of Stalin’s approach. He writes that “Stalin’s policy of repression and intentional promotion of mass intolerance wqs not directed at any one ethnic community. It presupposed the possibility of repression against any ethno-political group, including ‘the Russian nationalists.’” 

            “In the 1940s and 1950s, the Balkars, Kalmyks, Chechens, Ingush, Crimean Tatars, Volga Germans and many other peoples were subject to mass repressions,” he writes.  They were “intentionally demonized in the consciousness of residents of the USSR. In this, there is no evidence that Stalin personally felt toward these peoples feelings of dislike or hatred or in general anything in particular.”

            “As the heroes of gangster films say, ‘Nothing personal; just business.’”

            “For the dictator, this was political business,” and in conducting it, he could sacrifice any ideological or ethnic principle. It is something else entirely that “the political pragmatism of the Soviet leadership inevitably was enlivened by the built up stereotypes of xenophobia in mass consciousness,” Pain continues.

            In this regard, “phobias about Jews which had been exacerbated from the times of the Russian Empire spread more quickly and broadly than others in the USSR,” he says. “As soon as state anti-Semitism stopped, mass xenophobia toward Jews began to weaken.” And today, Jews are among the ethnic groups Russians feel the least socially distant.

            “However,” Pain stresses, “the lengthy period of state anti-Semitism has not passed leaving no trace: it has cost Russia a significant fraction of its educated and urbanized population, which made a major contribution to the cultural capital of the entire society.”  That is because Jews felt that the best protection against it was emigration.

            Under both tsars and Soviet leaders, “the majority of the Jewish population chose as the means of its national salvation not revolution as mythology holds but departure.”  As a result, the number of Jews fell from 5.2 million in 1897 to 1.48 million in 1989 to only 158,000 in the most recent Russian census in 2010.