Georgy Malenkov - Attack On Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee

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.