On July 27, 1918, Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin signed the “decree of antisemitism,” making anti-Jewish hatred and violence in Soviet Russia, and then the Soviet Union, illegal and subject to punishment. It was one of the first countries in the world to do so. The decree was recorded on phonograph records and disseminated through sound systems on propaganda trains, and played in workers’ clubs and at party meetings. (Although Lenin signed the decree, Simon Dimanshtein, the Jewish commissar of the Commissariat of Nationality Affairs, wrote it.) Nearly one hundred years later—as Elissa Bemporad writes in the thoughtful and disturbing Legacies of Blood—a Russian TV miniseries about Leon Trotsky depicted the Jewish revolutionary as an antihero and scoundrel (and as a sexual pervert) who brought communism to Russia. How did this radical change from the Bolshevik fight against antisemitism to the perverse belief in Judeo-Bolshevism in twenty-first-century Russia come to be? Using archival sources and oral histories, Bemporad tells the story of how the Bolsheviks did their best to stamp out antisemitism between the two wars, but then after World War II and the Holocaust, the Soviets allowed antisemitism into their highest offices.

The word “pogrom” came to be the symbol for what Jews should never want—state-sponsored anti-Jewish violence, a phenomenon that supposedly disappeared with the tsars. Bemporad discusses how Soviet schoolchildren learned about anti-Jewish pogroms in 1881 in Elisavetgrad, 1903 in Kishinev, 1905 in Odessa, and other places. But they rarely learned about the pogroms of 1919–1921 during the Russian Civil War because pogroms were defined as “state sponsored,” and once the Bolsheviks took power, there could be no more pogroms. Yet at the local level, Soviet Jews remembered the murders of townsfolk by putting up memorials to the 1919–1921 pogroms.

Bemporad shows that in the interwar period there were flare-ups of antisemitism, generally put down by the Bolshevik authorities. But her book is about the Soviet “legacies of blood,” in which pogroms and charges of ritual murders—the canard that a Jew, usually male, would murder a Christian child and use his blood to make matzah—persisted through the Soviet period. She tells us how suspicious Ukrainian, Lithuanian, Belarussian, and Russian peasants were of Jews. For example, in 1937 in Minsk, a dead body in the city center prompted two Belarusians to accuse their Jewish coworkers of carrying out the murder for “ritual purposes” (88). After much inaction by the Soviet courts, the two Belorussian workers were found guilty of “national hatred” and sentenced. In other words, Russians, Lithuanians, Ukrainians, and others believed the myths of Jewish ritual murder, but the state suppressed such beliefs … until World War II.

Then during World War II, the Germans destroyed the supposed specter of Judeo-Bolshevism by destroying Jews through “pogroms.” Three plus years under German exterminationist ideology against Judeo-Bolshevism would mean that while Soviet penalties against antisemitism would stay on the books, they would not be used in practice.

In 1945 in Lvov, a city that had only 2,500 Jews left after the Holocaust, a rumor spread that Jews were killing Polish and Ukrainian children in a synagogue and then hiding their bodies in the building's basement. In a report, the Lvov prosecutor's office stated, “Not one body was found in the building of the synagogue,” as if one would have expected to find Jewish ritual murder. On August 12, 1952, activists with the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, including some of the Soviet Union's most famous Yiddish writers, were murdered by the KGB. As Bemporad writes, “More Jews than any other national group were arrested and charged with espionage, treason, bourgeois nationalism, and links to American imperialism: they were murdered or sent to the gulag, there they often died, in a well-organized state-sponsored pogrom” (150). If before the war, the Soviet Union fought antisemitism, after the war, Soviet antisemitism was alive and well.

Bemporad has written an engaging, albeit depressing, history of Jews, pogroms, and antisemitic charges of ritual murder. In spite of antisemitism at the social level, the central Soviet state prevailed against antisemitism at least until World War II. Then Soviet antisemitism emerged, and it caught on with a vengeance. Nikita Khrushchev, first secretary of the Communist Party of Ukraine, discussing possible responses to the German myth of Judeo-Bolshevism, said to Polish Jewish communist Maria Chelminskaia: “I also believe that for Ukrainian Jews who survived Hitler's attempt to exterminate them, it would be better not to return here better yet if they moved to Birobidzhan” (the Jewish Autonomous Region in the Soviet Far East) (120–21). Perhaps this was Khrushchev responding to the rampant antisemitism in the Soviet Union, or perhaps it was his own. Nevertheless, in 1953, Khrushchev became general secretary and brought antisemitism into the highest levels of power.

Bemporad shows that “if in the 1920s and 1930s Jews felt empowered by their new standing and confided in the state as their protector, by the 1950s and 1960s they had lost faith in the Soviet justice system and in the authorities’ interest in redressing their grievances.” During the Cold War, scholars argued that the Soviet Union was antisemitic by showing, for example, that it did not allow Soviet Jews to emigrate or that it supported Polish antisemitism in the 1960s, but they lacked the archives to prove their points. Bemporad has found the answers that these scholars only hinted at. She shows that sometimes Soviet people believed in the myth of Jewish ritual murder and supported pogroms against Jews, but the Soviet government policed such activity until World War II. Then she shows how the Soviet government became antisemitic to the point that today, post-Soviet Russia has returned once again to pogroms and charges of ritual murder. But Bemporad argues that Jews are less often the target of such violence than they had been in the past. As she concludes, “Today pogroms are much more likely to target other minority groups, including ethnic groups from Central Asia and the Caucasus, Africans, Roma, or members of the LGBTQ community, who have, in a way, become the Jews of the Soviet lands.”

* The AJS Review editors were saddened to learn of David Shneer's passing in November 2020. May his memory be for a blessing.