The Worms Squirm

In the Kremlin's haste to rewrite Soviet history, another seamy little sequence in the Communist past turned up like a bug under a mattress: a belated charge that Stalin practiced and tolerated antiSemitism. Khrushchev, in his virtuoso weep session, had told party leaders about Stalin's fanatical hatred of Jews in his last days, but so far no public mention had been made of the purge of Jewish intellectuals in the '30s, and the later postwar purge, coinciding with the establishment of Israel, and supposedly due to fear of Zionist influence in Russia and the satellite states.

There was less reticence in the satellite states, where the purge of Jewish Communists has been taken up by party newspapers, particularly in Poland. But the "Zionist conspiracy" still found a stout supporter in Czechoslovakia's Communist Premier Viliam Siroky, who admitted last week that "certain manifestations of antiSemitism" had been wrongfully introduced into the trial of Rudolf Slansky and 13 other Czech Communist leaders in 1952. He added that there was a difference between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism, one of the "crimes" Slansky had been charged with and for which, said Siroky, he had been justly executed.

The Warsaw Yiddish-language newspaper Folks-Sztyme made no such equivocations in publishing a long list of Polish Jews, prominent in cultural and political fields, who were liquidated by Stalin.

But the loudest and most pained echo of Stalin's anti-Semitism was heard in New York. The Communist Daily Worker, which time and again had denied, denounced and ridiculed reports that Jews were being persecuted in Russia and the satellites, ate humble crow. Editorialized the Daily Worker: "We feel a deep sense of indignation, anger and grief over the latest disclosures [in Soviet Poland] that a large number of Jewish writers and other Jewish leaders were framed up and executed." Asking "what false theories . . . played a part in the violations," the Worker provided its own answer (like Communists all over the world), in a virtual admission of complicity in Stalin's crimes. Said the Worker: "For our part, we frankly admit we were too prone to accept the explanation of why Jewish culture had disappeared in the Soviet Union in the late 1940s."

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