Russia's "Stowaways"

Ever on the alert, Stalin's Communist sentries spotted a new enemy outside the walls of Russia--the baby state of Israel.

Israel and the Zionists, says the current Red line, are serving Anglo-U.S. "imperialist warmongers." To Manhattan's Communist Yiddish-language daily, Freiheit, once a strident champion of Israel, fell the painful task of announcing the party-line shift in the U.S.

A Dutiful Echo. After recanting its "Jewish bourgeois nationalist" stand on Zionism, Freiheit declared last week that the recent Israel-Transjordan armistice was merely a U.S.-British plot. "The British power has returned to Palestine," wrote Freiheit, "and [through Transjordan] encircles the Jewish land on all sides." This was a dutiful echo of Pundit Ilya Ehrenburg's pronouncement in Pravda: "Israel's bourgeoisie is no better than the bourgeoisie in other countries . . ."

Zionism has long been proscribed inside Soviet Russia--and ridiculed by the Communists outside. When the Soviet delegates backed Israel's claims before U.N.--purely to embarrass the U.S. and Britain --only the gullible believed that Russia was Zionism's real friend. After the Israeli state was actually established, Russia discovered that hundreds of thousands of Jews were trying to get into Israel from the satellite "New Democracies." In the Soviet Union itself, where anti-Semitism is "outlawed," thousands of Jews applied for visas at the Israeli mission.

Two of Two Dozen. Promptly, the Russians clamped down. In Hungary, Poland and Rumania, thousands of Jews were refused permission to emigrate to Israel. The drive against Zionism had sharply anti-Semitic overtones. The Soviet press began to rumble about "cosmopolitanism." To be a cosmopolitan, according to the Moscow Literary Gazette, meant to be a "rootless intellectual," a "passportless wanderer," a "ticketless stowaway." It also meant, in most cases, to be a Jew. This was made slyly plain when the Soviet press, listing the Jews' original names after the Russianized ones, would speak of "the wrecking work done by cosmopolitan-critics L. Sanov (Smulson), E. Martich (Finkelstein), L. Zhadanov (Lifshits)." Two Jewish publications were suspended.

It may or may not be coincidence that only two Jews are now left among the two dozen top men who rule Russia--Lev Mekhlis, Minister of State Control, and the Politburo's Lazar Kaganovich, who is Stalin's brother-in-law. Last week Ilya Ehrenburg, a Jew and hitherto a major Communist prophet, was himself under attack. October, organ of the Soviet Writers' Union, discovered that the characters in two of Ehrenburg's early novels lacked a "Communist conscience."

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