The Anti-Zionist Committee of the Soviet Public

The Anti-Zionist Committee of the Soviet Public (AZCSP; Russian abbreviation: AKSO) was created in the spring of 1983 as part of a large-scale anti-Zionist campaign initiated by the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the KGB.

The committee’s leadership was made up of prominent Soviet figures of Jewish origin. Its chairman was Colonel General of Tank Troops David Dragunsky, twice Hero of the Soviet Union. Its first deputy chairman was Samuil Lazarevich Zivs, Doctor of Law, professor, and Honoured Scientist of the RSFSR. The deputy chairman was Mark Borisovich Krupkin, who served as deputy director of RIA Novosti and head of a department at Literaturnaya Gazeta.

The inclusion of well-known Soviet Jews — cultural figures, scholars, and military officers — was part of a propaganda strategy intended to demonstrate the “unanimous condemnation” of Zionism by Soviet Jews and to give the organisation particular weight in the eyes of the international public.

The AZCSP was created at a time of worsening Soviet–American relations and an intensified campaign against Jewish emigration from the USSR. In its programmatic appeal, the committee declared that “the global strategy of US imperialism uses international Zionism as one of its shock detachments in the offensive against socialism.”

The committee’s main areas of activity included organising anti-Zionist propaganda in Soviet and foreign media through publications, press conferences, and public appearances by its members; publishing books and brochures; criticising Israeli policy while supporting the Palestinian movement; and opposing Jewish emigration from the USSR.

The committee regularly held international press conferences and arranged media appearances by its members to promote anti-Zionist views. Its activity, however, provoked serious rejection both inside the country and abroad.

A telling incident occurred in 1985, when the US State Department denied entry visas to a delegation headed by Dragunsky, which had planned to attend a ceremonial meeting marking the 40th anniversary of the victory over fascism. The refusal was explained directly by the inciting activity of the chairman and the committee he led.

Resistance to the AZCSP’s activities was also growing within the USSR. On 15 April 1989, a mass rally of the Jewish public took place at Luzhniki in Moscow under the slogan “Down with the Anti-Zionist Committee and its ‘godfathers.’” It was one of the first public protests against official anti-Zionist policy.

By the late 1980s, against the background of perestroika and the democratisation of society, the AZCSP’s activities were provoking increasing rejection. In early 1991, the committee’s leadership attempted to transform the organisation into a public committee called Mir-Segodnya (“Peace Today”), a name borrowed from the Israeli movement Shalom Achshav (“Peace Now”). This, however, prompted a firm protest from the Jewish public.

On 15 December 1990, an expanded plenum of the All-Union Association of Soviet Jewish War Veterans, attended by 158 people, unanimously adopted a statement demanding that the AZCSP be dissolved. The document stated that the committee had “poured streams of lies and slander onto the whole world, supposedly in the name of Soviet public opinion, damaging the interests of Jews and the processes of democratisation in the country.”

The veterans demanded not only the dissolution of the committee, but also the transfer of its premises and funds to organisations engaged in the revival of Jewish culture.

Under mounting public pressure and amid changes in the country’s political course, the AZCSP gradually curtailed its activities. The committee officially ceased to exist in 1994, against the background of normalising Russian–Israeli relations. It went down in history as one of the last major manifestations of state antisemitism in the USSR, vividly demonstrating the methods of ideological struggle and propaganda in the Soviet period.

You can read more about the activities of the Anti-Zionist Committee of the Soviet Public on our website.

Freddy Rotman