Stalin's Last Purge written and directed by Alan Rosenthal, USA/ Russia, 2005, 55 min., Beta SP, English/Russian/Yiddish with subtitles.

By Donald H. Harrison

What an incredible trip Yiddish literary  luminaries Solomon Mikhoels and Yitzhak Fefer made from the Soviet Union to the United States as representatives of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee! Their message that Jews throughout the world must unite to stop the Nazi terror was greeted enthusiastically in New York, where 50,000 people attended their rally, and where they had photo sessions with such celebrities as Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, singer Paul Robeson and physicist Albert Einstein.

Secretly, the two men didn't trust each other. Mikhoels, the leading figure in the Yiddish Theatre, a winner of the Stalin Prize and a member of the Moscow City Council, never joined the Communist party, whereas the Yiddish poet Fefer was a loyal party member. In the end, their differences didn't matter. Both would be murdered by Stalin, who decided that their New York trip could be used as a pretext to do away with his political enemies, real and imagined.


Solomon Mihoels (l)  and Yitzhak Fefer clown for the cameras;
in reality deep distrust marked the two men's relationship

Einstein is credited in the documentary, Stalin's Last Purge, with keen intuition.  He asked the Soviet Jews if there were anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union, to which they replied that, of course, such things did not exist.  Einstein shook his head in disbelief over Fefer's and Mihoels' self-delusion, commenting that Judaism always lives in the shadow of anti-Semitism. 

Stalin kept his own anti-Semitism under wraps until after the end of World War II, in which his nation  suffered 30 million deaths, including 1.5 million Jewish civilians massacred by the Nazis and another 100,000 Jews who fell in battle.  In his "us and them" view of the world, according to the documentary , he came to see the Jews as agents of international capitalism, even as Jews in some capitalist circles were being denounced as agents of international communism.

As a popular figure of the Yiddish Theatre, and as a political figure with a worldwide following, Mikhoels in particular was in danger; but, just as he had deluded himself about anti-Semitism in that discussion with Einstein, so too did he miscalculate the effect on Stalin of the mass enthusiasm for the creation of Israel that Golda Meir's visit to Moscow helped to create among Soviet Jews.  

After a play in Moscow's Yiddish Theatre, Mikhoels got up on stage and quoted approvingly from a speech the Soviet Ambassador Andrei Gromyko had made at the United Nations in favor of Israel's independence. Mikhoels comments  prompted an enthusiastic celebration and prodded Stalin to act against him.  In January of 1948, Mikhoels was invited to travel from Moscow to Minsk to participate in judging for a Stalin Prize. According to the documentary, he was murdered by KGB agents, who then ran over his body with a truck and left the corpse in the snow to be discovered by a passerby.  

The mysterious murder was used as the opening for this interesting and well-researched documentary.  Call me chutzpadik, but I'd have preferred the footage of Mikhoels and Fefer in New York City as a dramatic way to get into the story.  

Stalin pretended to be shocked by Mikhoels' murder, permitting a state funeral that drew 10,000 mourners. But the Soviet dictator simply was biding his time. He soon ordered the arrest of high-profile members of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, Jewish literary figures, scientists and even one-time deputy foreign minister, Solomon Lozovsky. Except for Fefer, who agreed to inform on the others, and  physiologist Lena Shtern, all were severely beaten as part of their interrogations.

When Robeson visited the Soviet Union, he asked to meet with Fefer, and according to the documentary, Fefer was brought from prison and ordered not to tell a word of his true situation to Robeson, with whom he met in a bugged hotel room.

Nevertheless, Fefer was able to communicate to Robeson that Mikhoels had been murdered, that he and other Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee  figures were in prison, and that many other Jews had died.  At his concert in Moscow, which was broadcast around the world, Robeson said that he regretted Mikhoels' death, but that he had seen Fefer, whom he described as looking pale.

In 1952, Fefer and 14 other defendants were secretly tried, convicted, and with the exception of Shtern were executed.  Among the trumped-up charges was that all had conspired to set up a Zionist state in the Crimea that would be another outpost of capitalism.  Relatives of the murdered prisoners were exiled to Khazakistan or to Siberia without being told of their loved ones' fate.

This was a prelude to perhaps the most famous trial in Stalin's campaign against the Jews—the Doctors Trial, in which Jews were six of nine defendants accused of plotting to poison high Soviet officials, perhaps even Stalin himself—in a plot which Mikhoels supposedly had concocted during his famous visit to the United States.

According to the documentary, Stalin's intention was not only to foment hatred against the Jews—and to later send as many as a half million Jews to exile—but also to "prove" that the KGB and their allies in the Politburo had known all along of the plot and had done nothing.  That would have been the perfect grounds for purging his many political enemies.

However, before the trial could come to a conclusion, Stalin's death was announced on March 5, 1953, and not long afterwards the charges against the doctors were dismissed. Further, the reputations of Mikhoels and other members of the Anti-Fascist Committee officially were . rehabilitated.

Because many of the names of the various defendants are either unknown or forgotten by the bulk of movie-going audiences, it would have helped if the movie makers had flashed the spelling of those names over their respective photographs.  Notwithstanding this minor criticism, if you want to familiarize yourself with the paranoiac history of the Soviet Union during the time of Stalin, this documentary is a good one to see.  

Stalin's Last Purge will be presented by the 16th Annual San Diego Jewish Festival at 5 p.m.,  Thursday, February 16, at the AMC La Jolla Theatres.  Writer-Director Alan Rosenthal is expected to attend.