Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945

by Tony Judt

Ukrainian Jews at Babi Yar was officially commemorated as the ‘murder of peaceful Soviet citizens’, just as the post-war memorial at Auschwitz confined itself to general references to ‘victims of Fascism’. Racism had no place in the Marxist lexicon; dead Jews were posthumously assimilated into the same local communities that had so disliked them when they were alive. But now the presumptively cosmopolitan qualities of Jews—the international links from which Stalin had hoped to benefit in the dark months following the German attack—began once more to be held against them as the battle lines of the Cold War settled into place and international wartime contacts and communications became in Stalin’s eyes a retroactive liability. The first victims were the Jewish leaders of the wartime Anti-Fascist Committee itself. Solomon Mikhoels, its prime mover and a major figure in Russia’s Yiddish Theatre, was murdered on January 12th 1948. The arrival in Moscow of Israeli Ambassador Golda Meir on September 11th 1948 was the occasion for spontaneous outbursts of Jewish enthusiasm, with street demonstrations on Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur and chants of ‘Next Year in Jerusalem’ outside the Israeli legation. This would have been provocative and unacceptable to Stalin at any time. But he was rapidly losing his enthusiasm for the new State of Israel: whatever its vaguely socialist proclivities it clearly had no intention of becoming a Soviet ally in the region; worse, the Jewish state was dem...