The Last Days of Stalin Joshua Rubenstein Yale University Press, £25 When Stalin died on Purim, in 1953, beggars in Jerusalem rattled their tin cans and cried “Haman is dead!” In the USSR, there were public tears and private joy. Huge, inconsolable crowds appeared in the streets and many participants were crushed underfoot in the…
Review of Let My People Go by Pauline Peretz (Trans: Ethan Rundell) Transaction, £54.50 Joseph Stalin’s last years were the “Black Years of Soviet Jewry”. The trial and execution of the Yiddish writers, the Slansky trial of mainly Jewish Communists in Prague, and the infamous Doctors’ Plot in January 1953, all characterised this period. Stalin’s…
Last week saw the passing of two former Soviet Jewish refuseniks, Vladimir Slepak and Vladimir Prestin, who were not permitted to leave the USSR for almost 20 years. It was only when Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in 1985 that the gates were finally opened for a small group of long-term Moscow activists. Slepak and…
Memo to Mr Putin: Stalin was a tyrant By Colin Shindler, January 3, 2014 Follow The JC on Twitter Vladimir Putin’s jocular comment, floating the possibility of erecting a statue of Stalin in Russia — since one of “the cruel dictator”, Cromwell, stood outside the House of Commons — clearly went down well among Russian…
From the play, ‘The Snail and the Whale’ with our under-fives grandchildren to a 95th birthday party. Michael Sherbourne was a pivotal figure in the Soviet Jewry campaign in this country. He maintained telephone contact with many activists throughout the long years of Soviet denial of exit visas. In a collective email, a role-call of…
During the 1970s, there were always internal debates about how to help Soviet Jewry through demonstrations and protests. Indeed, the student organisers of the very first march to the Soviet Embassy in London in May 1966 did not inform the Board of Deputies, in case they tried to veto it, since they feared it would…
Why improving Israel’s image is a tough job Following Gorbachev’s accession to power in 1985, I was able to visit Jewish refuseniks in Moscow, after many years of being refused a visa due to my work for Jews in the USSR. I met many remarkable people on that visit, including Yuli Edelstein, shortly after his…
Isaiah Berlin and Vladimir Jabotinsky In his ‘personal impression’ of Chaim Weizmann in 1958, Isaiah Berlin made a passing reference to Vladimir Jabotinsky as ‘the leader of the extreme right wing Zionists’.1 In one sense, such a comment presupposes that a leader must hold the same opinions as his followers. In the case of Jabotinsky,…
The files just released by the Public Records Office under the 30 year rule indicate that the Government of Edward Heath was unnerved by the possibility of disruptive Jewish demonstrations of cultural events and political visits by Soviet glitterati. Downing Street was quite taken aback in particular at the conveyor belt demonstrations staged by the…
Man Is Wolf to Man: Surviving Stalin’s Gulag (Simon and Schuster) by Janusz Bardach and Kathleen Gleeson The Israeli critic, Dov Sadan, symbolised the 20th-century experience as the nations of the world crowded together in a room. The Jews were squeezed in at a coiner of a table, but in the centre of the room….