The accusation that Joseph Stalin was antisemitic is much discussed by historians. Although part of a movement that included Jews and ostensibly rejected antisemitism, he privately displayed a contemptuous attitude toward Soviet Jews on various occasions that were witnessed by his contemporaries, and are documented by historical sources. Stalin argued that the Jews possessed a national character but were not a nation and were thus unassimilable. He argued that Jewish nationalism, particularly Zionism, was hostile to socialism. At the time of his death, Stalin was allegedly planning an even larger campaign against Jews, which included the deportation of all Jews within the Soviet Union to Northern Kazakhstan. According to his successor Nikita Khrushchev, Stalin was fomenting the doctors' plot as a pretext for further anti-Jewish repressions.

Stalin publicly condemned antisemitism, although he was repeatedly accused of it. People who knew him, such as Khrushchev, suggested he long harboured negative sentiments toward Jews. It has been argued that antisemitic trends in his policies were fuelled by Stalin's struggle against Leon Trotsky. After Stalin's death, Khrushchev claimed that Stalin encouraged him to incite antisemitism in Ukraine, allegedly telling him that "the good workers at the factory should be given clubs so they can beat the hell out of those Jews." In 1946, Stalin allegedly said privately that "every Jew is a potential spy". Robert Conquest stated that although Stalin had Jewish associates, he promoted antisemitism. Robert Service cautioned that there was no irrefutable evidence of antisemitism in Stalin's published work, although his private statements and public actions were "undeniably reminiscent of crude antagonism towards Jews"; Service added that throughout Stalin's life, he "would be the friend, associate or leader of countless individual Jews". According to Beria, Stalin had affairs with Jewish women.

History

Early years No aspect of Stalin's upbringing in Gori, Georgia, his education at an Orthodox seminary in Tiflis, or his political activities up to 1906 stands out as a motive to later antisemitism. Interactions with Jews were infrequent and unlikely to concern him as such. He began meeting Jews more frequently with the Stockholm Congress, including zealous revolutionaries whose competition he might have resented.Pinkus, Benjamin (1990). The Jews of the Soviet Union: The History of a National Minority. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 143–144. .

Stalin's earliest antisemitic rhetoric appears in relation to the rivalry between the Bolshevik and Menshevik political factions. Jews were active in both groups, but more prominent among the Mensheviks. Stalin took note of the ethnic proportions represented on each side, as seen from a 1907 report on the Congress published in the Bakinsky rabochy (Baku Workman), which quoted a coarse joke about "a small pogrom" (погромчик) Stalin attributed to then-Bolshevik Grigory Aleksinsky: Not less interesting is the composition of the congress from the standpoint of nationalities. Statistics showed that the majority of the Menshevik faction consists of Jewsand this of course without counting the Bundistsafter which came Georgians and then Russians. On the other hand, the overwhelming majority of the Bolshevik faction consists of Russians, after which come Jewsnot counting of course the Poles and Lettsand then Georgians, etc. For this reason one of the Bolsheviks observed in jest (it seems Comrade Aleksinsky) that the Mensheviks are a Jewish faction and the Bolsheviks a genuine Russian faction, so it would not be a bad idea for us Bolsheviks to arrange a small pogrom in the party.

1917 to 1930 Although the Bolsheviks regarded all religious activity as counter-scientific superstition and a remnant of the old pre-communist order, the new political order established by Lenin's Soviet after the Russian Revolution ran counter to the centuries of antisemitism under the Romanovs. The Council of People's Commissars adopted a 1918 decree condemning all antisemitism and calling on the workers and peasants to combat it.Pinkus, Benjamin (1990). The Jews of the Soviet Union: The History of a National Minority. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. p. 85. . Lenin continued to speak out against antisemitism.Lenin, V. I. (1919). "Anti-Jewish Pogroms". Lenin's Collected Works, 4th English Edition. Trans. George Hanna. Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1972 Volume 29, pages 252–253 http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1919/mar/x10.htm Marxists Internet Archive. Retrieved 23 February 2011. Information campaigns against antisemitism were conducted in the Red Army and in the workplaces, and a provision forbidding the incitement of propaganda against any ethnicity became part of Soviet law. State-sponsored institutions of secular Yiddish culture, such as the Moscow State Jewish Theater, were established in Soviet Russia and the Soviet Union during this time, as were institutions for other minorities.

As People's Commissar for Nationalities, Stalin was the cabinet member responsible for minority affairs. In 1922, Stalin was elected the first-ever General Secretary of the party—a post not yet regarded as the highest in the Soviet government. Lenin began to criticize Stalin shortly thereafter. In his December 1922 letters, the ailing Lenin (whose health left him incapacitated in 1923–1924) criticized Stalin and Dzerzhinsky for their chauvinistic attitude toward the Georgian nation during the Georgian Affair.Lenin, V. I. "The Question of Nationalities or "Autonomisation". In Lenin Collected Works, Volume 36. Moscow: Progress Publishers. pp. 593–611. Marxists Internet Archive. Retrieved 23 February 2011. Eventually made public as part of Lenin's Testament—which recommended that the party remove Stalin from his post as General Secretary—the 1922 letters and the recommendation were both withheld from public circulation by Stalin and his supporters in the party: these materials were not published in the Soviet Union until de-Stalinization in 1956.Lenin, V. I. "'Last Testament' Letters to the Congress". In Lenin Collected Works, Volume 36. Moscow: Progress Publishers. pp. 593–611. Marxists Internet Archive. Retrieved 23 February 2011.

After the incapacitated Lenin's death on 21 January 1924, the party officially maintained the principle of collective leadership, but Stalin soon outmaneuvered his rivals in the Central Committee's Politburo. At first collaborating with Jewish and half-Jewish Politburo members Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev against Jewish arch-rival Leon Trotsky, Stalin succeeded in marginalizing Trotsky. By 1929, Stalin had also effectively marginalized Zinoviev and Kamenev as well, compelling both to submit to his authority. The intransigent Trotsky was forced into exile. According to Polish historian, Marian Kamil Dziewanowski, Kamenev was denied the position of Chairman of the Soviet Union on Stalin's suggestion due to his Jewish origins. Stalin favoured Alexei Rykov and placed him in the position due to his Russian, peasant background. When Boris Bazhanov, Stalin's personal secretary who had defected to France in 1928, produced a memoir critical of Stalin in 1930, he alleged that Stalin made crude antisemitic outbursts even before Lenin's death.Kun, Miklós, Stalin: An Unknown Portrait, Central European University Press, 2003, , p. 287.

At the 15th Party Congress in December 1927, Stalin publicly condemned growing antisemitism among workers, calling it an "evil" that "must be combated with utmost ruthlessness."

1930s to 1940s Stalin's 1931 condemnation of antisemitism On 12 January 1931, Stalin gave the following answer to an inquiry on the subject of the Soviet attitude toward antisemitism from the Jewish News Agency in the United States:

National and racial chauvinism is a vestige of the misanthropic customs characteristic of the period of cannibalism. Anti-semitism, as an extreme form of racial chauvinism, is the most dangerous vestige of cannibalism.

Anti-semitism is of advantage to the exploiters as a lightning conductor that deflects the blows aimed by the working people at capitalism. Anti-semitism is dangerous for the working people as being a false path that leads them off the right road and lands them in the jungle. Hence Communists, as consistent internationalists, cannot but be irreconcilable, sworn enemies of anti-semitism.

In the U.S.S.R. anti-semitism is punishable with the utmost severity of the law as a phenomenon deeply hostile to the Soviet system. Under U.S.S.R. law active anti-semites are liable to the death penalty.Joseph Stalin. "Reply to an Inquiry of the Jewish News Agency in the United States". Works, Vol. 13, July 1930 – January 1934. Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1954. p. 30.

Establishment of Jewish Autonomous Oblast

To offset the growing Jewish national and religious aspirations of Zionism and to successfully categorize Soviet Jews under Stalin's nationality policy, an alternative to the Land of Israel was established with the help of Komzet and OZET in 1928. The Jewish Autonomous Oblast with the center in Birobidzhan in the Russian Far East was to become a "Soviet Zion". Yiddish, rather than "reactionary" Hebrew, would be the national language, and proletarian socialist literature and arts would replace Judaism as the quintessence of culture. Despite a massive domestic and international state propaganda campaign, the Jewish population there never reached 30% (as of 2003 it was only about 1.2%). The experiment ground to a halt in the mid-1930s, during Stalin's first campaign of purges, as local leaders were not spared during the purges.

Great Purge

Stalin's harshest period of mass repression, the Great Purge (or Great Terror), was launched in 1936–1937 and involved the execution of over a half-million Soviet citizens accused of treason, terrorism, and other anti-Soviet crimes. The campaign of purges prominently targeted Stalin's former opponents and other Old Bolsheviks, and included a large-scale purge of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, repression of the kulak peasants, Red Army leaders, and ordinary citizens accused of conspiring against Stalin's administration.Figes, Orlando (2007). The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin's Russia. New York: Metropolitan. pp. 227–315 . Although many of Great Purge victims were ethnic or religious Jews, they were not specifically targeted as an ethnic group during this campaign according to Mikhail Baitalsky,Baitalsky, Mikhail "Russkii evrei vchera i segodnia", unpublished manuscript. Quoted in Roy Medvedev (1989). Let History Judge: The Origins and Consequences of Stalinism. Trans. George Shriver. New York: Columbia University Press. p. 563. . Gennady Kostyrchenko,Igolkin, Alexander (2002). "Умение ставить вопросы". "Наш современник" N5. Retrieved 4 February 2011. David Priestland,Priestland, David (2009). The Red Flag: A History of Communism. New York: Grove Press. p. 282. . Jeffrey Veidlinger,Veidlinger, Jeffrey (2000). The Moscow State Yiddish Theater: Jewish Culture on the Soviet Stage. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press. pp. 10–11. . Roy Medvedev,Medvedev, Roy. (1989). Let History Judge: The Origins and Consequences of Stalinism. Trans. George Shriver. New York: Columbia University Press. p. 562. . and Edvard Radzinsky.Edvard Radzinsky. Stalin (in Russian). Moscow, Vagrius, 1997. ; available online. Translated version: "Stalin", 1996, (hardcover), 1997, (paperback) Ch. 24 Antony Polonsky argued that Jews suffered significantly during the 1936 phase of the Purge because they were overrepresented among Soviet officials.

German–Soviet rapprochement and the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact