Stalin's Secret Pogrom

The Postwar Inquisition of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee

Browse Return to Previous Page       Related Subjects All Subjects History Jewish studies Religious studies Russian History

Edited by Joshua Rubenstein and Vladimir P. Naumov,

Translated by Laura Esther Wolfson

Yale University Press

Due/Published October 2005, 496 pages, paper

ISBN 0300104529

New in paper (F05)

In the spring and summer of 1952, fifteen Soviet Jews, including five prominent Yiddish writers and poets, were secretly tried and convicted; multiple executions soon followed in the basement of Moscow's Lubyanka prison. The defendants were falsely charged with treason and espionage because of their involvement in the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee and because of their heartfelt response as Jews to Nazi atrocities in occupied Soviet territory. Stalin had created the committee to rally support for the Soviet Union during World War II, but he disbanded it after the war as his paranoia mounted about Soviet Jews.

For many years, a host of myths surrounded the case against the committee. Now this book, which presents an abridged version of the long-suppressed transcript of the trial, reveals the Kremlin's machinery of destruction.