Communism, Zionism, and the Jews: A Brief Romance

One of the many virtues of Martin Kramer’s essay, “Who Saved Israel in 1947?” is its reminder of the decades of Communist hostility to Zionism both before and after the moment when, to the surprise of virtually everyone, the Soviet Union came out in favor of a Jewish state in Palestine and in November 1947 voted “yes” for the UN partition plan.

As Kramer notes, Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko’s qualified support of Zionist aspirations in his May 14, 1947 speech at the UN was a startling repudiation of longstanding Soviet condemnations of Zionism as an especially pernicious form of bourgeois nationalism. Indeed, the USSR had outlawed Zionist activity ever since the early 1920s, applauded the Arab massacres of Jews in Palestine in 1929, and in the 1930s sponsored its own “Jewish homeland” in Birobidzhan.

Yet was the surprise warranted? When it came to Zionism, as Kramer shows, Stalin’s policies were driven less by visceral anti-Semitism than by calculations of Soviet interests. Despite his antipathy toward Jews, the Soviet dictator was quite capable of temporarily aligning himself with their interests in order to advance his own—and equally capable of reversing course on the same basis, as he would rapidly enough proceed to do.