In 1943, the Jewish community in Manhattan organized the largest pro-Soviet rally in the history of the United States -- a move that Josh Rubenstein considers very ironic.
"If they knew what [a] son of a bitch [former Soviet leader Joseph] Stalin was to the Jews...," the Amnesty International Northeast Regional director said last Wednesday.
Rubenstein, who is also an associate at the Harvard University Center for Russian Studies, addressed roughly 20 people in Houston Hall last Wednesday night to discuss his third book on Soviet history.
The book, Stalin's Secret Pogrom, is a study of the secret trial held in 1952 in which 15 members of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, which included five prominent Yiddish writers, were convicted of several crimes including "bourgeois nationalism."
The Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee was a political organization composed of Soviet Jewish intellectuals. The committee was created by Stalin during the German occupation of Russia with the intention of spreading the knowledge of Nazi atrocities to the Western World.
Although it was born as an organ of Soviet propaganda, the position of the committee, in the eyes of the Communist government, changed radically in 1943, Rubenstein said in the lecture.
Uncovering Adolf Hitler's crimes had an enormous psychological impact on the members of the Jewish committee.
The members began "to react to the war not as Soviet patriots, as you would expect, but as Jews," Rubenstein said.
The committee's reaction conflicted with the ideology of Stalin's regime, which stated that "there was no such thing as a Jewish people," Rubenstein noted.
After the Allied victory, increased tensions between the United States and the U.S.S.R. and the subsequent creation of the state of Israel caused Soviets to question Jewish loyalty to the nation.
In 1948, Salomon Mikhail, the Jewish committee's leader, was mysteriously murdered. Then, 15 members of the organization were accused of being anti-Communists and were arrested in 1952.
After being kept in prison for two months, where according to Rubenstein the committee members were "tortured and intimidated in the classic Soviet fashion," they were convicted during a secret trial without the presence of a lawyer.
Rubenstein described the process -- which culminated with the execution of 12 of the accused -- as "terror masked as justice."
Despite the injustice of the trial, Rubenstein said that its duration, two months as opposed to the average "15 minutes," was a positive fact.
However, 76-year-old Aaron Jaffe, who fought in World War II and attended the talk, argued that the trial's length was irrelevant, for "the result was the same."
College junior Juliana Bauer said she was particularly interested in this historic trial in light of the current world situation.
"The world is entering a period where nationalism is becoming important, especially in the U.S.," Bauer said.
