University Daily Kansan
Page 3
Nikita Denies Anti-Semitism
Friday, Feb. 21, 1964
By Phil Newsom
CPI Foreign News Analyst No less a personage than Premier Nikita Khrushchev has seen fit to deny that there is such a thing as anti-semitism in the Soviet Union.
And that, no doubt, will be his reply this time to the appeal for better treatment of Jews in the Soviet Union forwarded to him by Bertrand Russell, 91-year-old British philosopher, and co-signed by four other Nobel Prize winners and such world figures as Dr. Albert Schweitzer and dowager Queen Elizabeth of Belgium.
Persecution of Jews is an old story in what is now the Soviet Union, dating back to the ghettos of the middle ages and reaching its peak under the czars with a slaughter which began on Easter Eve, 1881, and eventually spread to more than 160 towns and villages.
"WE ARE TROUBLED," the letter said, "by the prison sentences imposed for the preparation of uncleavened bread."
Their letter found "gravely disturbing" the fact that 60 per cent of those executed for economic crimes since the beginning of the current drive in 1961 have been Jews.
Counting the current drive as one, there have been four serious anti-semitic drives in the Soviet Union, each of them instigated by the government.
Under the Communists, antisemitism ostensibly disappeared and some Jews even were permitted to attain high places in the Soviet government.
AFTER THE START of World War II, there were government-inspired rumors that "the Jews are deserting Moscow."
In 1948-49 came the drive against "cosmopolitanism" in which the Jews were not mentioned but were the principal targets among those under suspicion because of foreign contacts.
Two theories have been advanced for the reasons behind the current drive
were released and the charges exposed as a fabrication.
The third reached a peak in 1953 just before Stalin's death, with the arrest of six Jewish and three other Kremlin doctors on charges of plotting to murder Soviet leaders. After Stalin's death they
ONE IS THAT it is a deliberate attempt to isolate and terrorize the three million Jews still living within the Soviet Union because of their ties to Israel and to the West.
Another is that it is a propaganda device to halt a practice widespread among the Soviet masses — currency speculation, black marketing, selling on a
private basis and trading in gold and jewelry.
In this, the government tries to exploit underlying antisemitism as a weapon against a practice common throughout the Soviet Union, with the Jews bearing the brunt of the attack for dramatic effect.
Stalin had his "union of militant godless."
Khrushchev has his institute for scientific atheism", aimed especially at the young.
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THE CURRENT EVENTS FORUM
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Dr. Jose Vera Lamterein Director University of Chile
in
"A Latin Economists View of the Alliance For Progress"
Friday, Feb. 21, 1964 4:30
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