Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945

by Tony Judt

The security forces colonel who conducted the investigation, Vladimir Komarov, sought to broaden the charges out to encompass a large-scale Jewish conspiracy against the USSR directed from Washington and Tel Aviv. As he put it to Solomon Lozovsky, one of the prisoners: ‘Jews are low, dirty people, all Jews are lousy bastards, all opposition to the Party consists of Jews, Jews all over the Soviet Union are conducting an anti-Soviet whispering campaign. Jews want to annihilate all Russians.’12 Such overt anti-Semitism might have been embarrassing even to Stalin, however; in the end the fifteen defendants (all Jewish) were secretly tried in the summer of 1952 by a Military Tribunal. All but one were executed; the sole survivor, Lina Shtern, received ten years in prison.