Stalin’s postwar terror targeted Soviet Jews – in the name of ‘anti-cosmopolitanism’

A plaque in Russia commemorates the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, whose leaders were executed in August 1952. Adam Baker/Flickr via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY

Many Americans know of Josef Stalin’s Terror of the late 1930s, during which more than 1 million people were arrested for political crimes, and over 680,000 executed.

Fewer know about the repressions that began after World War II and ended with Stalin’s death in 1953. Much like the repressions of the 1930s, they involved fabricated plots, arrests, coerced confessions and purges. Unlike the Terror of the 1930s, they were accompanied by a wave of state-sponsored antisemitism – including the purge of Jews from multiple occupations and unwritten quotas that limited their professional and educational opportunities.