Event

Alleged plan to deport Soviet Jews, 1953

Alleged plan to deport Soviet Jews to Siberia, Kazakhstan and the Arctic North in 1953; historians disagree about whether it existed.

2 links, 0 backed by primary records

Connections 2

Joseph Stalin Disputed Scholarship & press 1
Disputed: Soviet-era Western scholars, memoirists and some officials’ recollections say yes; Gennady Kostyrchenko finds no credible evidence; others hold that the question stays unresolved.

Doctors’ Plot Disputed Scholarship & press 2
Disputed: Historians disagree about whether any such plan existed. No archival document confirming it has been found.

Timeline 1 date

Proof 2 sources

From Silence to Spiel: Representing Stalin’s Alleged Jewish Deportation Plan (doctoral dissertation, UCLA), University of California, Los Angeles (eScholarship); by Oleg Ivanov, 2021. Scholarship & press
most Soviet-era Western scholars of Stalinist antisemitism viewed his alleged Jewish deportation plan as a historical fact.
Bulganin claimed that Stalin ordered him to “assemble thousands of cattle cars outside major Soviet cities in February 1953 to facilitate this massive bout of ethnic cleansing”
fails to explain why members of the Soviet elite—Riumin, Mikoian, Mikhailov’s wife, and others—also seem to have discussed the deportations in early 1953.
Kostyrchenko writes that stories about preparations of any kind for Stalin’s alleged deportation of Jews are a “Cold War legend”
insisting that “the issue of the deportations must remain unresolved”
The dearth of archival material confirming Stalin’s alleged Jewish deportation plan has prevented a consensus regarding its existence from forming.
Reflections on the anticipated mass deportation of Soviet Jews (abstract), Post-Soviet Affairs 31(6), Post-Soviet Affairs (Taylor & Francis), 2015. Scholarship & press
This paper investigates questions surrounding a purported plan (believed to have been interrupted and not resumed after Stalin’s death in March 1953) for the mass deportation of 2 million Soviet Jews from the European part of the country to desolate areas of Siberia, Kazakhstan

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