Part 5 (2/2)

Now that Jewishness and Jewish connections with the United States were suspect, Viktor Abak.u.mov, head of the MGB, tried to find a way to make the former activists of the dissolved Anti-Fascist Committee into agents of American espionage. In some sense, the job was easy. The Committee had been created to allow Soviet Jews to speak to world Jewry, so its members could easily be called both Jewish nationalists and cosmopolitans. Yet this logic did not immediately seem to justify a ma.s.s terror action, or the model of the national operations of 1937-1938. Abak.u.mov found himself frustrated from above. Without Stalin's express approval, he could not drag any truly important Jews into the plot, let alone begin anything like a ma.s.s operation.

During the national operations of 1937-1938, no member of the politburo had belonged to any of the targeted nationalities. Matters would be different for any prospective Jewish operation. In 1949, Lazar Kaganovich was no longer Stalin's closest a.s.sociate and no longer his presumed successor, but he was still a member of the Soviet politburo. Any claim of Jewish nationalist penetration of top Soviet organs (on the a.n.a.logy of Polish nationalist penetration of 1937-1938) would have to begin with Kaganovich. Stalin refused to allow Kaganovich, the only Jewish politburo member, to be investigated. At this time, five of the 210 full and candidate members of the central committee of the Soviet communist party were men of Jewish origin; none of them was investigated.

Abak.u.mov's search for Jewish spies did reach the families of politburo members. Polina Zhemchuzhina, Molotov's wife, was arrested in January 1949. She denied the charges of treason. In his one act of rebellion, Molotov abstained from the vote to condemn his wife. Later, though, he apologized: ”I acknowledge my heavy sense of remorse for not having prevented Zhemchuzhina, a person very dear to me, from making her mistakes and from forming ties with anti-Soviet Jewish nationalists such as Mikhoels.” The next day she was arrested. Zhemchuzhina was sentenced to forced labor, and Molotov divorced her. She spent five years in exile in Kazakhstan, among kulaks, the kind of people her husband had helped to deport in the 1930s. It seems that they helped her to survive. Molotov, for his part, lost his position as commissar for foreign affairs. He had been appointed to the job in 1939, in part because he (unlike his predecessor Litvinov) was not Jewish, and Stalin had then needed someone with whom Hitler would negotiate. He lost the same job in 1949, at least in part because his wife was was Jewish. Jewish.14 Those people who were investigated were not very cooperative. When fourteen more or less unknown Soviet Jews were finally chosen to be tried in May 1952, the result was an unusual sort of judiciary chaos. Only two of the accused confessed to all of the charges during the investigations; the rest admitted only some of the charges or denied them all. Then, during the trial itself, every single one of them claimed to be innocent. Even Itzik Fefer, a police informant all along, and during the trial a witness for the prosecution, refused in the end to cooperate. Thirteen of the fourteen defenders were sentenced to death in August 1952 and executed. Although the trial created a precedent for executing Jews for spying for the Americans, it was of little political value. The people in question were too little known to arouse much interest, and their comportment was inappropriate for a show trial.15 If Stalin indeed wanted a spectacular Jewish affair, he would have to look elsewhere.

Communist Poland looked like a promising place for an anti-Semitic show trial, though in the end one never took place. The Jewish question was even more sensitive in Warsaw than in Moscow. Poland had been the home to more than three million Jews before the war; by 1948 it had been remade as a nationally h.o.m.ogeneous ethnic Polish state ruled by communists-some of whom were of Jewish origin. Poles were co-opted by formerly German property in the west and formerly Jewish property in the cities-the Polish language developed words meaning ”formerly German” and ”formerly Jewish,” applied to property. Yet while Ukrainians and Germans were deported from from communist Poland, Jews were actually deported communist Poland, Jews were actually deported to to Poland: about one hundred thousand from the Soviet Union. Poles could hardly fail to notice that the highest ranks of the communist party and its security apparatus remained multinational even as the country was ethnically cleansed: party and secret police leaders were disproportionately of Jewish origin. Jews who chose to stay in Poland after the war were often communists with a sense of mission, who believed in the transformation of the country for the good of all. Poland: about one hundred thousand from the Soviet Union. Poles could hardly fail to notice that the highest ranks of the communist party and its security apparatus remained multinational even as the country was ethnically cleansed: party and secret police leaders were disproportionately of Jewish origin. Jews who chose to stay in Poland after the war were often communists with a sense of mission, who believed in the transformation of the country for the good of all.16 Poland had been the center of Jewish life in Europe for five hundred years; now that history seemed to be over. Some ninety percent of Poland's prewar Jewish population had been killed during the war. Most of the Polish-Jewish survivors of the war left their homeland in the years following the war. Many of them could not return to their homes in any event, since these now lay in the Soviet Union, which had annexed eastern Poland. In Soviet ethnic cleansing policies, Ukrainians and Belarusians and Lithuanians were to remain in the Soviet republics that bore their names, whereas Jews, like Poles, were to go to Poland. Jews who tried to return home were often greeted with distrust and violence. Some Poles were perhaps also afraid that Jews would claim property that they had lost during the war, because Poles had, in one way or another, stolen it from them (often after their own homes had been destroyed). Yet Jews were often resettled in formerly German Silesia, a ”recovered territory” taken from Germany, where this issue could not have arisen. Even so, here as elsewhere in postwar Poland, Jews were beaten and killed and threatened to such an extent that most survivors decided to leave. It mattered, of course, that they had places to go: the United States or Israel. To get to these places, Polish Jews first went to Germany to displaced persons camps.

The voluntary movement of Holocaust survivors to Germany was not only a melancholy irony. It was also the latest stage in a journey that revealed many of the dreadful policies to which Jews and others had been subjected. Jews in displaced persons camps in Germany were very often Jews from western and central Poland who had fled from the Germans in 1939, or been deported by the Soviets to the Gulag in 1940, only to return to a postwar Poland where people wanted to keep their property and blamed them personally for Soviet rule. It was very dangerous to be a Jew in postwar Poland-though no more so than to be a Ukrainian or a German or a Pole in the anti-communist underground. These other groups generally wished to stay in their homeland. Jews, however, had a special reason to be unsure of themselves in their own country: three million of their fellows had just been killed in occupied Poland.

The departure of Polish Jews to Israel and the United States made the role of Jewish communists in Polish politics even more visible than it would otherwise have been. The Polish communist regime faced a double political handicap: it was not national in a geopolitical sense, since it was dependent upon the support of Moscow; and it was not national in an ethnic sense, since some of its prominent representatives were Jewish (and these people had spent the war in the Soviet Union).17

Polish communists of Jewish origin could be in power in 1949 because of the international politics of the early Cold War in 1948. For reasons that had nothing to do with Poland, and everything to do with a larger rupture within the communist bloc, Stalin paid more attention to the risk of majority nationalism than to the risk of Jewish ”cosmopolitanism” or ”Zionism” in summer 1948.

Since Stalin was trying to coordinate and control his new group of communist allies, Moscow's ideological line reacted to perceived disloyalty in eastern Europe. As Stalin must have observed, it was much harder for the leaders of communist regimes to follow the Soviet line than it had been for leaders of communist parties before the war: these comrades actually had to govern. Stalin also had to adjust his ideological line to the realities of American power. These anxieties came to the fore in summer 1948; the concern with Jews dropped momentarily into the background. This was crucial for Poland, since it allowed communists of Jewish origin to secure power, and then to make sure that no anti-Semitic show trial took place.

In summer 1948, Stalin's major worry in eastern Europe was communist Yugoslavia. In this important Balkan country, communism involved admiration for the Soviet Union but not dependence upon Soviet power. t.i.to (Josip Broz), the leader of the Yugoslav communists and Yugoslav partisans, had succeeded in taking power without Soviet help. After the war, t.i.to showed signs of independence from Stalin in foreign policy. He spoke of a Balkan federation after Stalin had abandoned the idea. He was supporting communist revolutionaries in neighboring Greece, a country that Stalin regarded as falling within the American and British sphere of influence. President Harry Truman had made clear, in his ”doctrine” announced in March 1947, that the Americans would take action to prevent the spread of communism to Greece. Stalin cared more about stabilizing his gains in Europe than about further revolutionary adventures. He clearly believed that he could bring down t.i.to and have him replaced with more solicitous Yugoslav leaders.h.i.+p.18 The t.i.to-Stalin split shaped international communism. t.i.to's independent stand, and the expulsion of Yugoslavia from the Cominform that followed, made him a negative model of ”national communism.” Between April and September 1948, Moscow's satellite regimes were encouraged to concern themselves with the supposed nationalist danger (the ”right-wing deviation” from the party line) rather than the (Jewish) cosmopolitan one (the ”left-wing deviation”). When Polish general secretary Wadysaw Gomuka objected to the new line, he opened himself to charges that he too exemplified a national ”deviation.” In June 1948, Andrei Zhdanov instructed rival Polish communists to bring down Gomuka. The Polish politburo member Jakub Berman agreed that the Polish party suffered from a national deviation. That August, Gomuka was removed from his position as general secretary. At the end of the month he had to issue a self-criticism to the a.s.sembled central committee of the Polish party.19 Gomuka was in fact a national communist, and Polish comrades of Jewish origins were perhaps right to fear him. He was not Jewish (though he did have a Jewish wife), and was seen as more attentive to the interests of non-Jewish Poles than his comrades. Unlike Jakub Berman and several other leading communists, he had remained in Poland during the war, and so was less well known to the Soviet leaders.h.i.+p in Moscow than were comrades who had fled to the Soviet Union. He had certainly profited from national questions: he had presided over the dual ethnic cleansings of Germans and Ukrainians, and had taken personal responsibility for the settlement of Poles in the western ”recovered territories.” He had gone so far as to make a speech to the central committee in which he criticized certain traditions of the Polish Left for their disproportionate attention to Jews.

After his fall, Gomuka was replaced by a triumvirate of Bolesaw Bierut, Jakub Berman, and Hilary Minc (the latter two of whom were of Jewish origin). The new Polish troika came to power just in time to avoid an anti-Semitic action in Poland. Disconcertingly for them, the line from Moscow altered during the very weeks when they were trying to consolidate their position. While the right-wing national deviation was still possible, Stalin's most explicit signals in autumn 1948 concerned the role of Jews in east European communist parties. He made clear that Zionists and cosmopolitans were no longer welcome. Perhaps sensing the new mood, Gomuka appealed to Stalin that December: there were too many ”Jewish comrades” in the Polish party leaders.h.i.+p who ”do not feel connected to the Polish nation.” This, according to Gomuka, led to the alienation of the party from Polish society and risked ”national nihilism.”20 The year 1949 thus brought a particular sort of Stalinism to Poland. Jewish Stalinists exercised a great deal of power, but were caught between Stalinist anti-Semitism in Moscow and popular anti-Semitism in their own country. Neither of these was important enough to make their rule impossible, but they had to make sure that the two did not meet. Jewish communists had to stress that their political identification with the Polish nation was so strong that it erased their Jewish origins and removed any possibility of distinct Jewish policies.

One striking example of this tendency was the reimagining of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943, the major instance of Jewish resistance to the Holocaust, as a Polish national revolt led by communists. Hersh Smolar, the Polish-Jewish communist who had been the hero of the Minsk ghetto, now drained the Jewishness from Jewish resistance to n.a.z.is. He described the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in the obligatory ideological terms of Zhdanov: there had been ”two camps” within the ghetto, one progressive and one reactionary. Those who spoke of Israel were in the reactionary camp now, as they had been then. The progressives were the communists, and the communists had fought. This was an extraordinary distortion: while the communists had indeed urged armed resistance in the ghetto, the left-wing Zionists and the Bund had more popular support, and the right-wing Zionists more guns. Smolar promised purges to Jewish political activists who failed to accept Polish national communism: ”And if there turn out to be people among us who are going to buzz on like flies about some sort of supposedly higher and more essential Jewish national goals, then we will eliminate those people from our society, just like the fighters of the ghetto pushed aside the cowards and those of weak will.”21 All resistance to fascism was by definition led by communists; if it was not led by communists, then it was not resistance. The history of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943 had to be rewritten such that communists could be seen as leading Polish Jews-just as they were supposedly leading the Polish anti-n.a.z.i resistance generally. In the politically acceptable history of the Second World War, the resistance in the ghetto had little to do with the ma.s.s murder of Jews, and much to do with the courage of communists. This fundamental s.h.i.+ft of emphasis obscured the Jewish experience of the war, as the Holocaust became nothing more than an instance of fascism. It was precisely Jewish communists who had to develop and communicate these misrepresentations, so that they could not be charged with attending to Jewish rather than Polish goals. In order to seem like plausible Polish communist leaders, Jewish communists had to delete from history the single most important example of Jews resisting n.a.z.is from Jewish motivations. The bait in Stalin's political trap was left by Hitler.22 This was Polish-Jewish Stalinist self-defense from Stalin's own anti-Semitism. If Jewish resistance heroes were willing, in effect, to deny the significance of Hitler's anti-Semitism to Jewish life and politics, and in some cases to their own desire to resist the German occupation, then surely they had proven their devotion. Stalinism involved denying the most obvious historical facts, and their most pressing personal significance: in the case of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943, Polish-Jewish communists managed both. By comparison, the a.s.sociated slander of the Home Army and the Warsaw Uprising of 1944 was an easy labor. Since it had not been led by communists, it could not have been an uprising. Since the Home Army soldiers were not communists, they were reactionaries, acting against the interests of the toiling ma.s.ses. The Polish patriots who died seeking to liberate their capital were fascists, little better than Hitler. The Home Army, which had fought the Germans with much greater determination than the Polish communists, was a ”bespittled dwarf of reaction.”23 Jakub Berman was the politburo member responsible for both ideology and security in 1949. He repeated a key Stalinist argument for terror: as the revolution nears completion, its enemies fight ever more desperately, and so committed revolutionaries must resort to ever more extreme measures. With feigned deafness to the Soviet line, he framed the struggle as one against the right-wing, or national, deviation. No one could fault Berman for lack of attention to nationalism after the t.i.to-Stalin split. Meanwhile, no one could have done more than Berman to discolor the Jewish memory of German ma.s.s killing in occupied Poland. Berman, who had lost much of his immediate family to Treblinka in 1942, presided over a Polish national communism in which, only a few years later, the gas chambers fell deep into the historical background.24 The Holocaust had drawn many Jews toward communism, the ideology of the Soviet liberator; and yet now, in order to rule Poland and to appease Stalin, leading Jewish communists had to deny the Holocaust's importance. Berman had already made a first important move in this direction in December 1946, when he directed that the official estimate of non-Jewish Polish dead be significantly increased and that of Jewish dead somewhat decreased so that the two numbers were equal: three million each. The Holocaust was already politics, and of a dangerous and difficult sort. It, like every other historical event, had to be understood ”dialectically,” in terms that corresponded to Stalin's ideological line and the political desiderata of the present moment. Perhaps more Jews than non-Jewish Poles had died. But perhaps that was politically inconvenient. Perhaps it would be better if the number were even. To allow one's personal sense of factuality or fairness to interfere with such dialectical adjustments was to fail as a communist. To recall one's own family's deaths in the gas chamber was pure bourgeois sentimentality. A successful communist had to look ahead, as Berman did, to see just what the moment demanded from the truth, and act accordingly and decisively. The Second World War, like the Cold War, was a struggle of progressive against reactionary forces, and that was that.25 Berman, a very intelligent man, understood all of this as well as anyone could, and he brought these premises to their logical conclusions. He presided over a security apparatus that arrested members of the Home Army who had accepted the special a.s.signment of saving Jews. They and their actions had no historical resonance within a Stalinist worldview: the Jews had suffered no more than anyone else, and the soldiers of the Home Army were no better than fascists.

Berman's most glaring fault, from the perspective of Stalin himself, was that he was himself of Jewish origin (though his doc.u.ments showed Polish nationality). This was not exactly a secret: he had married under a khuppah. In July 1949, the Soviet amba.s.sador complained in a note to Moscow that the Polish leaders.h.i.+p was dominated by Jews such as Berman, and that the security apparatus was run by Jews-an exaggerated a.s.sessment, although not without some basis. In the period 1944-1954, 167 of 450 high-ranking Ministry of Public Security officers were Jewish by self-declaration or origin, so about thirty-seven percent in a country where Jews were fewer than one percent of the population. Most though far from all people of Jewish origin in the upper reaches of the security service defined themselves as Poles in their ident.i.ty doc.u.ments. This may or may not have reflected how they regarded themselves; these matters were rarely simple. But pa.s.sport ident.i.ty, even when it did (as it often did) reflect a sincere identification with the Polish state or nation, did not prevent people of Jewish background from being seen as Jews by much of the Polish population or by the Soviet leaders.h.i.+p.26 Berman, the most important communist of Jewish origin in Poland, was the obvious target of any potential anti-Semitic show trial. He understood this perfectly well. To make matters worse, he could be connected with the leading actors of the main drama of the early Cold War, the Field brothers. The Americans Noel and Hermann Field were by then under arrest in Czechoslovakia and Poland as American spies. Noel Field had been an American diplomat, but also an agent of Soviet intelligence; he was friendly with Allen Dulles, the American intelligence chief who had directed the OSS office in Bern, Switzerland; he also ran a relief organization that aided communists after the war. Field came to Prague in 1949, probably believing that the Soviets again wished for his services; he was arrested. His brother Hermann came to look for him, and was himself arrested in Warsaw. The two of them, under torture, confessed to having organized a vast espionage organization in eastern Europe.27 Though they were never tried themselves, the Field brothers' alleged activities provided the plot line for a number of the show trials that were then being held throughout communist eastern Europe. In Hungary in September 1949, for example, Laszlo Rajk was show-tried and executed as an agent of Noel Field. The Hungarian investigation had supposedly discovered cells of the Fields' organization in fraternal communist countries as well. As it happened, Hermann Field knew Berman's secretary and had once given her a letter for him. The Fields were dangerous precisely because they did in fact know many communists, could in fact be a.s.sociated with American intelligence, and now under torture could be expected to say anything. At a certain point, Stalin himself asked Berman about Field.28 Jakub Berman could also be linked to Jewish politics of a kind that were no longer permitted. He knew the members of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, since he had met with Mikhoels and Fefer before their 1943 visit to the United States. He came from a family that represented some of the range of Jewish politics in Poland. A brother (killed at Treblinka) had been a member of Poalei-Zion Right, one branch of socialist Zionism. Another brother, Adolf, who had survived the Warsaw ghetto, was a member of Poalei-Zion Left, another branch of left-wing Zionism. Adolf Berman had organized social services for children in the Warsaw ghetto, and after the war directed the Central Committee of Polish Jews. As Poland became communist, he remained a left-wing Zionist, in the conviction that these political positions could somehow be reconciled.29 In 1949, it was becoming clear that people such as Adolf Berman had no place in postwar Poland. Indeed, it was to him personally that Smolar had directed the harsh words about the reactionary character of Zionism and the need to eliminate cowardly Jews from Polish society. In so doing Smolar was creating a kind of Stalinist defense against Stalin himself: if Jewish communists in Poland were ostentatiously anti-Zionist and pro-Polish, they could elude accusations of Zionism and cosmopolitanism. But it was less than clear that even this categorical approach could defend Jakub Berman from the a.s.sociation with his brother. Stalinist anti-Semitism could not be so easily resisted by individual loyalty and commitment.

Jakub Berman survived because he was defended by his friend and ally Bolesaw Bierut, the general secretary of the Polish party and the gentile face of its ruling triumvirate. Stalin once asked Bierut whom he needed more, Berman or Minc: Bierut was too wise to fall into that trap. Bierut placed himself between Stalin and Berman, which was to take a risk. In general, Polish communists never permitted themselves the brutality to one another that was evident in Czechoslovakia, Romania, or Hungary. Even the disgraced Gomuka was never forced to sign a humiliating confession or face trial. Polish communists who were in power in the late 1940s usually knew, from personal experience, just what had happened to their comrades in the 1930s. Back then, Stalin had sent a signal; Polish communists had duly denounced each other, which led to ma.s.s murder, and the end of the party itself. Although all foreign communists suffered in the Great Terror, this Polish experience was unique, and perhaps created a certain sense of concern for the lives of one's own closest comrades.30 As the pressure from the Soviet Union built, Berman finally allowed the security services to follow the anti-Jewish line in 1950. Polish Jews fell under special suspicion as American or Israeli spies. This was not without a certain awkwardness, as those building the cases against Polish Jews were sometimes themselves Polish Jews. The Polish security apparatus itself was purged of some of its Jewish officers. Because this often involved Jews purging other Jews, the relevant department of the security apparatus was informally called the bureau of ”self-extermination.” It was directed by Jozef wiato, whose own sister had left for Israel in 1947. 31 31 Yet Berman, Minc, and Bierut held on, maintaining that they were the proper Poles, the proper communists, the proper patriots, both to an incredulous society and to a doubting Stalin. Although Jews, communists and otherwise, were forced to stifle the memory of the Holocaust, there was no public campaign in Poland in those years against Zionists and cosmopolitans. Making concessions and relying on the loyalty of his friend Bierut, Berman was able to maintain that in Poland the main danger came from the Polish, not the Jewish, national deviation. When in July 1951 Gomuka was finally arrested, the two security officers who came for him, as he likely remembered, were men of Jewish origin.

In the years 1950-1952, as the Poles dragged their feet, the Cold War became a military confrontation. The Korean War sharpened Stalin's concerns about American power.

In the early 1950s, the Soviet Union seemed to be in a much stronger position than it had been before the war. The three powers then presented as encircling the Soviet Union-Germany, Poland, and j.a.pan-had all been substantially weakened. Poland was now a Soviet satellite whose minister of defense was a Soviet officer. Soviet troops had reached Berlin, and remained. In October 1949 the Soviet occupation zone of Germany had been transformed into the German Democratic Republic, a Soviet satellite ruled by German communists. East Prussia, the formerly German district on the Baltic Sea, had been divided between communist Poland and the USSR itself. j.a.pan, the great threat of the 1930s, had been defeated and disarmed. Yet here the Soviet Union had not contributed to the victory, and so took little part in the occupation. The Americans were building military bases in j.a.pan and teaching the j.a.panese to play baseball.32 Even in defeat, j.a.pan had changed the politics of east Asia. The j.a.panese incursion in China in 1937 had, in the end, only aided the Chinese communists. In 1944 the j.a.panese had mounted a successful ground offensive against the Chinese nationalist government. This made no difference to the outcome of the war, but it did fatally weaken the nationalist regime. Once the j.a.panese surrendered, their forces were withdrawn from the Chinese mainland. Then the Chinese communists had their moment, much as Russia's communists had thirty years before. j.a.pan in the Second World War played the role that Germany had played in the First World War: having failed to win a great empire for itself, it served as the handmaiden to a communist revolution in a neighbor. The People's Republic of China was declared in October 1949.33 Although in Was.h.i.+ngton Chinese communism looked like the continuation of a world communist revolution, it was ambivalent news for Stalin. Mao Zedong, the leader of the Chinese communists, was not a personal client of Stalin, as were many of the east European communists. Although Chinese communists accepted the Stalinist version of Marxism, Stalin had never exercised personal control of their party. Stalin knew that Mao would be an ambitious and unpredictable rival. ”The battle of China,” he said, ”isn't over yet.” In making policy in east Asia, Stalin had now to ensure that the Soviet Union maintained its position of leader of the communist world. This concern arose first with respect to Korea, where a communist state had also just been established. j.a.pan, which had ruled Korea since 1905, withdrew after the war. The Korean peninsula was then occupied by the Soviet Union in the north and the United States in the south. North Korean communists established a people's republic in North Korea in 1948.34 In spring 1950 Stalin had to decide what to say to Kim Il-Sung, the North Korean communist leader, who wished to invade the southern part of the peninsula. Stalin knew that the Americans considered Korea beyond the ”defensive perimeter” they were constructing in j.a.pan and the Pacific, because the secretary of state had said as much in January. The US Army had withdrawn from the peninsula in 1949. Kim Il-Sung told Stalin that his forces would quickly overcome the South Korean army. Stalin gave Kim Il-Sung his blessing for war, and sent Soviet arms to the North Koreans, who invaded the South on 25 June 1950. Stalin even dispatched several hundred Soviet Koreans from Soviet central Asia to fight on the North Korean side-the same people who had been deported by order of Stalin only thirteen years earlier.35 The Korean War looked very much like an armed confrontation between the communist and capitalist worlds. The Americans responded quickly and firmly, sending troops from j.a.pan and elsewhere in the Pacific, and were able to push the North Koreans across the original border. In September, Truman approved NSC-68, a secret and formal confirmation of the American grand strategy of containment of communism throughout the world-an idea formulated by George Kennan. In October, the Chinese intervened on the side of the North Koreans. Until 1952 the United States and its allies were making war against communist North Korea and communist China, with American tanks battling Soviet-made tanks, and American aircraft engaging Soviet-made fighters.

Stalin seemed to fear a broader war, perhaps a war on two fronts. In January 1951, Stalin called together the leaders of his east European satellites, and ordered them to build up their armies in preparation for a war in Europe. In 1951 and 1952, the troop strength of the Red Army doubled.36

During precisely these years, in 1951 and 1952, the idea that Soviet Jews were undercover agents of the United States seems to have gained resonance in Stalin's mind. Defied in Berlin, frustrated in Poland, and embattled in Korea, Stalin faced again, at least in his own increasingly troubled imagination, encirclement by enemies. As in the 1930s, so in the 1950s, it was possible to see the Soviet Union as the object of an international plot, masterminded no longer from Berlin, Warsaw, and Tokyo (with London in the background) but from Was.h.i.+ngton (with London in the background). Stalin apparently believed that a Third World War was inevitable, and reacted to what he saw as the coming threat much as he had in the late 1930s.

In some respects, the international situation could seem more threatening now than then. The Great Depression had at least brought poverty to the capitalist world. But by the early 1950s it seemed that the countries liberated by the Western powers would undergo a quick economic recovery. In the 1930s, the capitalist powers were divided against one another. As of April 1949, the most important of them were united in a new military alliance, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, or NATO.37 Stalin found a way in July 1951 to turn his own security services against an imagined Jewish plot inside the Soviet Union. The narrative of the plot, as it emerged in the second half of that year, had two parts: Russians who might have been seen as anti-Jewish had been murdered, and their murders had been covered up by the Soviet security apparatus.

One of the supposed victims was Aleksandr Shcherbakov, the wartime propagandist who had claimed that Russian people were ”bearing the main burden” of the war. He had overseen the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, and had purged newspapers of Jewish journalists at Stalin's orders. The other was Andrei Zhdanov, Stalin's purifier of Soviet culture, who had blocked the publication of the Black Book of Soviet Jewry Black Book of Soviet Jewry. Their deaths were supposedly the beginning of a wave of Jewish medical terrorism, sponsored by American paymasters, which was to end only with the slaughter of the Soviet leaders.h.i.+p.

One of the ostensible murderers was the Jewish doctor Yakov Etinger, who had died in police custody in March 1951. Viktor Abak.u.mov, director of the MGB, had supposedly failed to report on this plot, because he was himself involved in it. In order to prevent his own role from being known, he had deliberately killed Etinger. Because Abak.u.mov had killed Etinger, Etinger had been unable to confess to the full range of his crimes.38 A first outline of these extraordinary claims was presented in a denunciation of Abak.u.mov sent to Stalin by Abak.u.mov's MGB subordinate Mikhail Riumin. The choice of Etinger played to Stalin's worries. Etinger had been arrested not as part of any medical pl

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