Post-war and Arab world (1945–1970)
Campaign against 'rootless cosmopolitans'
1948-1953·URSS
The toll is reproduced exactly as the source states it — never rounded, never added to another. Tolls overlap from one event to the next.
dissolution of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, closure of the Yiddish theater and *Eynikayt* newspaper, arrest of writers
From the late 1940s onward, the Soviet leadership launched a campaign against "rootless cosmopolitans," a phrase designating Jewish intellectuals. It began with the murder of Salomon Mikhoels, actor and president of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, staged to look like an accident.
The Committee was dissolved, Moscow's Jewish State Theatre closed, the newspaper *Eynikayt* banned, Yiddish publishing houses suppressed. Writers and poets of the Yiddish language were arrested; many would be executed during the "Night of the Murdered Poets." The campaign culminated in the "Doctors' Plot," brought to a halt by Stalin's death.
Within a few years, it destroyed the Yiddish cultural infrastructure that had survived the war in the USSR, reducing Soviet Judaism to an identity without institutions.
- Period :
- Post-war and Arab world (1945–1970)
- Type :
- Massacre
- Region :
- Central and Eastern Europe
- Country :
- URSS
Joshua Rubenstein et Vladimir Naumov, *Stalin's Secret Pogrom* ; Encyclopaedia Judaica.