Attack On Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee
Malenkov supported and executed Stalin's orders to destroy the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee which was formed during World War II and became involved in documenting the Holocaust. This ran contrary to the official Soviet policy to present it as an atrocity against all Soviet citizens, not acknowledging the specific genocide of the Jews. Some of the committee members were vocal supporters of the State of Israel, established in 1948, something that Stalin supported very briefly. Their international contacts especially to the USA at the outset of the Cold War, would eventually make them vulnerable to charges that they had become politically incorrect.
Solomon Mikhoels, the popular actor and director of the Moscow State Jewish Theater, was appointed the JAC chairman. The JAC's newspaper in Yiddish language was called Einigkeit (אייניקייט "Unity", Cyrillic: Эйникейт).
In January 1948, Mikhoels was killed in Minsk by the Soviet secret police agents who staged the murder as a car accident. The members of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee were arrested. They were charged with disloyalty, bourgeois nationalism, cosmopolitanism, and planning to set up a Jewish republic in Crimea to serve U.S. interests. In January 1949, the Soviet mass media launched a massive propaganda campaign against "rootless cosmopolitans", unmistakably aimed at Jews.
Malenkov together with Beria, Mikhail Suslov and other top Soviet officials supervised the destruction of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee.
Read more about this topic: Georgy Malenkov
Famous quotes containing the words attack on, attack, jewish and/or committee:
“A great deal of unnecessary worry is indulged in by theatregoers trying to understand what Bernard Shaw means. They are not satisfied to listen to a pleasantly written scene in which three or four clever people say clever things, but they need to purse their lips and scowl a little and debate as to whether Shaw meant the lines to be an attack on monogamy as an institution or a plea for manual training in the public school system.”
—Robert Benchley (1889–1945)
“... possibly there is no needful occupation which is wholly unbeautiful. The beauty of work depends upon the way we meet it—whether we arm ourselves each morning to attack it as an enemy that must be vanquished before night comes, or whether we open our eyes with the sunrise to welcome it as an approaching friend who will keep us delightful company all day, and who will make us feel, at evening, that the day was well worth its fatigues.”
—Lucy Larcom (1824–1893)
“The exile is a singular, whereas refugees tend to be thought of in the mass. Armenian refugees, Jewish refugees, refugees from Franco Spain. But a political leader or artistic figure is an exile. Thomas Mann yesterday, Theodorakis today. Exile is the noble and dignified term, while a refugee is more hapless.... What is implied in these nuances of social standing is the respect we pay to choice. The exile appears to have made a decision, while the refugee is the very image of helplessness.”
—Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)
“A committee is an animal with four back legs.”
—John le Carré (b. 1931)