Stalin’s Secret Pogrom: The Postwar Inquisition of the Jewish Anti-Fascist CommitteeIn the spring and summer of 1952, fifteen Soviet Jews, including five prominent Yiddish writers and poets, were secretly tried and convicted; multiple executions soon followed in the basement of Moscow’s Lubyanka prison. The defendants were falsely charged with treason and espionage because of their involvement in the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee and because of their heartfelt response as Jews to Nazi atrocities in occupied Soviet territory. Stalin had created the committee to rally support for the Soviet Union during World War II, but he disbanded it after the war as his paranoia mounted about Soviet Jews. For many years, a host of myths surrounded the case against the committee. Now Stalin’s Secret Pogrom: The Postwar Inquisition of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, which presents an abridged version of the long-suppressed transcript of the trial, reveals the Kremlin’s machinery of destruction. Joshua Rubenstein provides annotations about the defendants and events surrounding the case. In a long introduction, drawing on newly released documents in Moscow archives and on interviews with relatives of the defendants in Israel, Russia, and the United States, Rubenstein also sets the trial in historical and political context and offers a vivid account of Stalin’s antisemitic campaign. (Published by Yale University Press in 2001 as part of its Annals of Communism Series in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. An abridged paperback edition is available.) Stalin’s Secret Pogrom has also been published in Italian (Società Editrice Internazionale.)Stalin’s Secret Pogrom received a National Jewish Book Award in the Eastern European Studies category in 2001-2002.

“No more important book on Communism has been or will be published for years.”

– Geoffrey Wheatcroft, Times Literary Supplement

“Fascinating. . . . This book brilliantly portrays Soviet attitudes to the Jews [and] . . . also reveals a great deal about Soviet attitudes to justice in general.”

– Anne Applebaum, Wall Street Journal

“A vivid, tragic panorama.”

– Richard Bernstein, New York Times