History contains multiple paradoxes, and none greater than the fact that it was Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin – a mass murderer and a lifelong antisemite – who helped the Jews reestablish sovereignty in their ancient homeland.
May 1st is just behind us, and until the Soviet Union was dissolved in December 1991, Moscow annually celebrated May Day – International Workers’ Day. From the Kremlin balcony, Communist Party leaders would review the thousands parading with red flags and portraits of revolutionary luminaries Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin.
There were decades when pictures of Stalin were also held aloft, but that ceased in February 1956 when then-Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev denounced his former boss.
A political earthquake for the Communist movement
In a closed session of the Party’s 20th Congress, Khrushchev condemned Stalin’s crimes: the abuse of power, mass terror, ubiquitous torture, omnipresent personality cult, and persecution of fellow Communists.
At the time, Khrushchev’s revelations were a bombshell, a political earthquake for the Communist movement worldwide (Israel’s Mossad was the first Western intelligence agency to acquire a transcript of the secret speech and passed it on to the CIA).
But Khrushchev’s denunciation understated Stalin’s horrific legacy, ignoring the millions who died in government manufactured famines, forced collectivization, population transfers, Gulag labor camps, and outright massacres.
Khrushchev’s speech also overlooked Stalin’s antisemitism. From his early years as a Marxist revolutionary in Georgia to his old age as the all-powerful Kremlin dictator, Stalin harbored a dark enmity towards Jews.
As a young radical, Stalin claimed he sided with the supposedly “Russian” Bolsheviks over what he saw as the “Jewish” Mensheviks. And following the 1917 October Revolution, in his power struggles with Leon Trotsky and other Jewish Communists, Stalin would skillfully exploit his opponents’ ethnic heritage to discredit them, while saving his openly prejudiced outbursts for private conversations.
During his final years, Stalin’s antisemitism erupted in full force: he closed Jewish cultural institutions, jailed and executed prominent Jewish figures, and purged all Jews from positions of authority in the security apparatus.
In December 1952, Stalin addressed the Party’s Politburo: “Every Jewish nationalist is the agent of the American intelligence service. Jewish nationalists think that their nation was saved by the USA… They think they are indebted to the Americans. Among doctors, there are many Jewish nationalists.”
Stalin’s final remark was a reference to the infamous “Doctors Plot” in which Jewish physicians were accused of involvement in a conspiracy to murder senior Soviet leaders – their arrests accompanied by an intensive antisemitic media campaign.
Concurrently, reports abounded that Stalin was planning the imminent forced deportation of Soviet Jews en masse to the Siberian wilderness. Only his death in March 1953 ended the anti-Jewish frenzy.
Yet, while Stalin’s antisemitism was all-too-real, during the perilous 1940s, in two pivotal conflicts, Stalin found himself the Jewish people’s benefactor.
The first was in the crucial role the Soviet Union played in the defeat of Nazi Germany and ending the Holocaust, emblematic of which was the January 1945 liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau by the Red Army.
STALIN INITIALLY sought to avoid war with Hitler, opting for the August 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop non-aggression pact between Berlin and Moscow. But with the launch of the June 1941 German invasion of the Soviet Union, Stalin commanded the effort to repel the Nazi attack and, later, the counter-offensive that eventually led to the Red Army entering Berlin and raising the hammer and sickle over the Reichstag building in April 1945.
The victory over Germany came at an enormous cost. Some 20 million Soviet citizens lost their lives in World War II, of which eight to nine million died of famine and disease.
Israel has officially recognized that immense sacrifice. In June 2012, with Russian President Vladimir Putin and the then-Israeli president Shimon Peres in attendance, the “Victory Monument” was unveiled on the Netanya beachfront. In his remarks at the ceremony Peres said: “This is an opportunity to thank the Red Army. Had it not defeated the Nazi beast then, it is doubtful we would be standing here today.”
While Stalin’s leadership of the Soviet effort to defeat Nazi Germany is widely recognized, less understood is his role in the creation of the State of Israel – perhaps because both Jerusalem and Moscow subsequently had a political interest in downplaying it.
Despite the decades of staunch Soviet opposition to Zionism that saw Zionist activists sent to the Gulag, including Israel’s future prime minister Menachem Begin, in the November 1947 UN partition vote Moscow backed Jewish statehood.
Stalin’s UN delegate Andrei Gromyko stated: “The fact that no Western European state has been able to ensure the defense of the elementary rights of the Jewish people and to safeguard it against the violence of the fascist executioners explains the aspirations of the Jews to establish their own state.”
As expected, Belarus, Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Ukraine followed Moscow in supporting Jewish independence, their votes essential in achieving the required two-thirds majority.
Over the following months, while Washington wavered and abandoned partition for trusteeship, Moscow remained resolute in advocating a Jewish state. And in May 1948, if the US became the first country to grant Israel de facto recognition, it was the Soviet Union that led the international community in establishing full diplomatic relations.
But Stalin’s assistance was not just diplomatic. When seven Arab countries invaded to destroy the newborn Jewish state, their military forces were armed with Western weapons, and in some cases even trained and commanded by British officers.
Washington chose to remain aloof from the fighting, imposing an arms embargo on all the parties to the conflict – a decision that reinforced the Arabs’ preexisting quantitative advantage (though some American equipment was purchased surreptitiously).
Outmanned and outgunned, the Jews desperately needed weapons for their defense. Communist Czechoslovakia stepped in and supplied Israel with dozens of military aircraft, 50,000 rifles, 6,000 machine guns and 90 million bullets – their provision authorized by the Kremlin.
Moscow’s impetus was not altruism – it stemmed from the Soviet desire to roll back the British empire and weaken Western influence in the Middle East. But Stalin’s motivation notwithstanding, the armaments he approved were indispensable.
The Kremlin would soon dramatically reverse course. By the 1950s Moscow became the champion of Arab nationalism, embracing an anti-Israel and anti-Jewish agenda – and would continue thus over consecutive decades.
But at a historic inflection point, when it was life or death for the nascent Jewish state, Stalin was Israel’s indispensable patron.
The writer, formerly an adviser to the prime minister, is chair of the Abba Eban Institute for Diplomacy at Reichman University. Connect with him on LinkedIn, @Ambassador Mark Regev.