June 11: Jews and the Great Terror Trials
Yeronim Uborevich, Yona Yakir, Yakov Garmanik, and Boris Feldman were Bolsheviks of Jewish backgrounds who were among the eight top military generals executed in the USSR on this date in 1938 following a secret trial. Their persecution marked the third wave of Stalin’s “Great Terror” trials, mostly held in public and featuring elaborate confessions extracted through torture and threats to victims’ families. The “purge” eliminated most veterans of the Bolshevik revolution (including Grigory Zinoviev, Lev Kamenev, and numerous other Jews) and liquidated 35,000 officers of the Red Army in less than three years, which left the USSR particularly vulnerable to the Nazi invasion in 1941. In the larger Soviet society, the purges would take 681,692 lives, according to Soviet archives (many historians think the number to be considerably higher), while hundreds of thousands of other victims were shipped to prison. Among the murdered were numerous Jewish writers and artists, including Osip Mandelstam and Isaac Babel; others would be killed in subsequent mini-purges such as on August 12, 1952, when the cream of Jewish artists and cultural activists were shot.
“The death of one man is a tragedy. The death of millions is a statistic.” —Joseph Stalin
George Jochnowitz -
Stalin had to suppress free thought, so that the final stage of communism could arrive, when according to Marx and Engels, the state would wither away, and we could hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening and criticize after dinner (“The German Ideology”).
Nevertheless, Stalin did a good deed. He allowed Jews fleeing the Nazis to cross into the USSR and let them live through the war in Uzbekistan and other remote parts of the Soviet Union. He also allowed Soviet Jews to flee eastward and survive.
Just as nobody knows that the cruelty of Marxist leaders comes from the words of Marx, nobody knows that Stalin did a good deed.
Abbie Lipschutz -
Stalin’s “Good Deed,” was an incidental element of his paranoid purges of the late 30′s. Anti-Semitism was a common aspect of those purges. Ani-Semitism, always a latent undertone in Russia, under the Czars as well as under Stalin. Mandelshtam had written a poem satirising Stalin’s anti-Jewish obsession. Reading it to a circle of close friends, one of whom was a Stalin informer, meant a death decision for Mandelshtam. Isaac Babel’s major work, Konarmia, translated as Red Cavalry, contained many Jewish stories, was denounced by many well-known Soviet personalities, such as Budyenni, the Cossack commander. The famous Yiddish actor whose portrait of Hamlet was admired world-wide, was killed in an engineered truck accident, concocted on Stalin’s orders in 1947. The leadership of the Jewish wartime anti-fascist Committee, organized by Stalin during WW-2, mainly to bring about American support for the Soviet war effort, was arrested in 1950, found guilty of Zionist-Jewish anti-Soviet agitation and, except for one member, executed.
Abbie Lipschutz
Houston, Texas
Abbie Lipschutz -
Sorry for errors: name of Yiddish actor was Solomon Mikhoels. His murder took place in 1949. The judicial murder of the leadership in the Anti-Fascist Jewish Committee: the trial took place in 1950, the execution was later. Isaac Babel was arrested in 1937, the date of his death is in dispute, assumed to be in the Gulag in 1940.
Abbie Lipschutz