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Soviet Jews under Khrushchev:
Still the Total State
- Abstract
EVEN Nikita Khrushchev does not claim that, forty-one years after the Bolshevik revolution, the Soviet Union has “solved the Jewish problem.” In an interview with a French journalist, Serge Groussard, published in Figaro last April, he deplored Jewish reluctance to accept the “remarkable gift” of Birobidzhan, and complained that Soviet Jews preferred intellectual pursuits to such “mass occupations” as the building trades and metal industry. Although Moscow Radio denounced Groussard’s account of the interview as a “provocative forgery,” there seems little doubt that the statements attributed to Khrushchev reflect the climate of hostility and discrimination in which three million Soviet Jews are compelled to live. Certainly the terror which Soviet Jews endured in Stalin’s last years stood in sharp contrast to the egalitarian hopes of 1917, promising the emancipation of the Jews. And it is still difficult to form a precise picture of the extent to which the situation of the ordinary Jew has changed in the six years since Stalin’s death.
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