Late Stalinism and the Rise of Antisemitism in the USSR

In January 1953, the Soviet press announced the exposure of a “terrorist group of doctor-saboteurs” allegedly working for foreign intelligence services. This event, which became known as the “Doctors’ Plot,” was one of the final political cases of the Stalin era and led to a sharp rise in antisemitic sentiment in Soviet society.

After the official announcement that the group had been “exposed,” a large-scale propaganda campaign began. Archival documents show that, alongside “positive statements,” society also displayed numerous “negative manifestations” — overt antisemitic statements and actions.

Young people proved especially receptive to antisemitic attitudes. According to the Kyiv Regional Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine, in February 1953 the MGB department on the South-Western Railway uncovered an organised youth group distributing anti-Soviet leaflets with antisemitic appeals in Kyiv. The handmade leaflets called on people to “abandon work on collective farms and in factories, take up arms, organise secret political groups, and destroy the Jews.”

The MGB established that the authors of these leaflets were students of Railway Vocational School No. 1 in Kyiv, as well as young people from the village of Havrylivka in Dymer District, Kyiv Oblast. During a search of the group organiser’s home, the authorities confiscated the group’s programme, poems, and anti-Soviet leaflets.

The group consisted of 27 people. Those arrested called their informal association the “Ukrainian Social-Communist Party of Narodniks.” The confiscated programme called for the unification of “anti-Soviet-minded individuals,” the creation of secret groups, the organisation of strikes, and, in particular, the “forced expulsion of Jews from the USSR.”

Similar incidents were recorded elsewhere. In the town of Smila, leaflets were found calling to “remove all Jews from the south-eastern and south-western territory of the Soviet Union, i.e. from Ukraine, as people who had sold themselves to American imperialism.”

In Kremenchuk, according to a report from the Poltava Regional Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine dated 6 February 1953, two handwritten anti-Soviet leaflets were discovered. One read: “Appeal! Comrade workers and members of the intelligentsia... There is nothing in the shops. Everywhere the Yids are in charge... Demand higher wages and food in the shops.” On the reverse side of one of the leaflets was written: “Death to Yid-Communists.”

The state security organs reported that they were responding promptly to cases involving the spread of antisemitic materials. Yet the campaign against antisemitism could only have limited effect, since the propaganda surrounding the “Doctors’ Plot” itself helped fuel antisemitic sentiment. Although after Stalin’s death in March 1953 the charges against the doctors were acknowledged to have been fabricated and those arrested were released, the campaign had already inflicted serious damage on interethnic relations in the USSR.

Documents on this topic can be read in the J-Doc digital archive.

Freddy Rotman