East European Jewish Affairs

ISSN: 1350-1674 (Print) 1743-971X (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/feej20

“We were in a very difficult situation”:

antisemitism in Soviet school education during the
1950s

Alexander Karp

To cite this article: Alexander Karp (2010) “We were in a very difficult situation”: antisemitism
in Soviet school education during the 1950s, East European Jewish Affairs, 40:1, 1-18, DOI:
10.1080/13501671003593600

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 East European Jewish Affairs
Vol. 40, No. 1, April 2010, 1–18

“We were in a very difficult situation”: antisemitism in Soviet

school education during the 1950s
Alexander Karp*

Teachers College, Columbia University, New York, USA

East
10.1080/13501671003593600
FEEJ_A_459869.sgm
1350-1674
Original
Taylor
102010
40
apk16@columbia.edu
AlexanderKarp
00000April
European
and
&Article
Francis
(print)/1743-971X
Francis
2010
Jewish Affairs (online)
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The antisemitic campaign of the late 1940s and early 1950s in the Soviet Union
has been widely studied both in Russia and abroad. However, its manifestations in
school-level education remain largely unresearched. This article, based on
materials from the St Petersburg Archive of Historical–Political Documents, aims
to contribute to such research. At its core is a description and analysis of materials
from school Communist Party meetings, which allow us to see the everyday life
of the school, including its usually unpublicised sides. The evidence shows that
antisemitism in schools was both censured, as any infringement of discipline in
Stalin-era schools had to be, as well as encouraged in one way or another. The
study of these materials is also useful for a broader analysis of the mechanisms and
distinctive characteristics of the interaction between Soviet government and
society during these years.
Keywords: anti-cosmopolitan campaign; Soviet antisemitism; Doctors’ Plot;
Soviet education; school Communist Party meetings; schools under Stalin

In recent decades, antisemitism in the Soviet Union during the 1940s and 1950s has
received considerable scholarly attention. The vicissitudes of the so-called “anti-
cosmopolitan campaign” or the “Doctors’ Plot,” which took place in those years, have
been described both by their victims and participants1 and by historians and other writ-
ers.2 In recent years, several collections of archival documents have also been
published.3 Stalin’s antisemitic campaign exerted (and probably continues to exert) an
enormous influence on all aspects of life in the former Soviet Union, and consequently
attempts have been made to study its effects in various specific spheres, such as art,
industry, medicine, science and the press. There have also been studies about the
campaign’s effects on higher education.4 However, its effects on pedagogy in elemen-
tary, middle and high schools have practically never been studied. The investigation
of daily life in the Soviet Union during the 1940s and 1950s – an object of intensive
scholarly scrutiny in recent years – has also touched on what happened in schools in
no more than a cursory manner.5
The fact that schools were affected by the antisemitic campaign that unfolded
during these years goes against the still quite widespread myth that, in spite of every-
thing, children had happy childhoods under Stalin. The very nature of Soviet
antisemitism – which was far more clandestine than antisemitism in Nazi Germany –
helps to sustain such a belief, since open incitement to antisemitic actions was indeed
practically nonexistent in Soviet schools, although such actions themselves did take

*Email: apk16@columbia.edu

ISSN 1350-1674 print/ISSN 1743-971X online

© 2010 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/13501671003593600
http://www.informaworld.com
 2 A. Karp

place, as will be shown below. The collection and analysis of data that illustrate what
actually happened and how it happened – including how the authorities attempted to
avoid publicising what was happening – is therefore an important task and constitutes
the aim of this paper.
In addition, such research is vital both for an understanding of the life of the Soviet
people during that period in general, and for an understanding of how the Soviet
educational system functioned in particular. Sheila Fitzpatrick has pointed out that
“the overarching theme that Western historians have commonly used for interpreting
the Stalin period is state against society.”6 Society, in accordance with this view, was
seen as a passive object of the state’s influence and therefore not of particular interest
in and of itself. However, the evidence that has survived and that has come to light in
recent years (albeit to a limited degree) indicates that the history of this period is by
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no means reducible to the analysis of party decisions and resolutions; the interaction
between society and government was far more complex. In school-level education,
certain processes inevitably took place in a more explicit fashion than elsewhere.
Consequently, the school setting presents us with additional opportunities to examine
the interaction between the authorities and ordinary people.
Antisemitism in schools, just like the other educational practices of the 1940s and
1950s, inevitably influenced future generations and deserves to be studied. This article
will lay the groundwork for such research, focusing mainly on the analysis of certain
materials from the St Petersburg archives.

Background: schools under Stalin

By the end of the 1940s, Soviet schools had gone through a long and complex course
of development. The initial post-Revolutionary attempts to destroy the traditions of
the Tsarist school system and to replace them with the principles of progressive
education were subsequently criticised as “leftist.”7 Post-Revolutionary schools gave
way to schools with stable textbooks and curricula, approved by the Ministry of
Education and mandatory throughout the entire vast territory of the country, in which
discipline and order were notions of paramount importance.8 The “cultural revolu-
tion” of the late 1920s and early 1930s and the subsequent transformations in Soviet
education considerably increased the number of people who received high-school and
college-level education.9 However, the school – at least as the government envisioned
it – was seen as a place of unflinching respect for the authority of the teacher, the prin-
cipal and the government in general, as a place in which unsanctioned and indepen-
dent actions were usually inappropriate. Significantly, even in the teaching of subjects
that were far removed from social life, an enormous amount of time was spent on
dispensing precise instructions about how to talk, write, position materials on the page
and so on.10
Oskar Anweiler has persuasively shown that Soviet education had its own kind of
pluralism.11 The coveted goal of general uniformity was not achieved; in particular, in
many schools it proved impossible to achieve perfect discipline and respect for
authority.12 Nonetheless, the existence of such a goal is significant in and of itself.
Catriona Kelly notes that children were portrayed in Soviet art as practically the only
stable point in the country’s life (apart from Comrade Stalin himself).13 The school
had to be thought of as a place in which children, thanks to Comrade Stalin, could
enjoy their happy childhoods, preparing to carry out their goals and dreaming about
them, but precisely for this purpose fully committed to maintaining order and disci-
 East European Jewish Affairs 3

pline. Individual initiative – even when it was expressed within the framework of the
government-backed antisemitic campaign – went against this ideal of perfect order.
As the surviving evidence shows, however, when such initiative was expressed during
the period of the anti-cosmopolitan campaign and the Doctors’ Plot in the 1940s and
1950s, it met with a complex and multifaceted reaction.

The anti-cosmopolitan campaign and the Doctors’ Plot

Officially, the so-called “anti-cosmopolitan campaign” proposed to fight against any
inadequate expressions of patriotism and all idolisation of things foreign. In practice,
this meant specifically highlighting the achievements of Russians in any field of
endeavour and downplaying the achievements of foreigners and the extent of their
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influence on Russia. Moreover, foreigners were usually given the role of saboteurs
who were in various ways trying to ruin the lives of the Russian people; this was
important for cultivating hatred against the West, the USSR’s enemy in the Cold
War.14 The basic features of the anti-cosmopolitan campaign took shape gradually.
The collection of documents Stalin and Cosmopolitism15 begins in 1945, but the
origins and manifestation of what unfolded in subsequent years can be traced back to
an even earlier period.16 On the other hand, one can say that the campaign ended with
Stalin’s death, although its impact (and to a certain extent its continuation) continued
to be felt long after 1953.
The anti-cosmopolitan campaign was not exclusively antisemitic in nature, but its
antisemitic component was very important. During this campaign, Jews were often
viewed as a kind of fifth column, working for the enemy, and serving as conduits for
harmful foreign influences. In January 1948, the outstanding actor Solomon Mikhoels
was killed (according to the official report, he died in an accident). In November 1948,
a decision was made to liquidate the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, which had been
created during the war and headed by Mikhoels. Subsequently, a number of the
committee’s members were arrested and executed, while Mikhoels himself was retro-
actively declared a bourgeois nationalist and an enemy of the USSR.17
An important step in the development of the campaign was marked by an edito-
rial in Pravda, the country’s main newspaper, “Concerning One Unpatriotic Group
of Theatre Critics,” published on 28 January 1949.18 This article spoke in extremely
critical terms about theatre critics (the majority of whom were Jewish), who, “hiss-
ing and vilifying, trying to create a kind of literary underground … besmirch the
best things that have come out of Soviet dramaturgy.”19 Following this assault on
theatrical criticism, cosmopolitan Jews were attacked in practically all spheres of
activity.20 A massive antisemitic campaign unfolded in the press (one might
mention, as a minor but telling example, the sadly famous humorous piece “Pinya
from Zhmerinka,” published after Stalin’s death).21 Great numbers of Jews also lost
their jobs.
The peak of the antisemitic campaign was the so-called “Doctors’ Plot,” which
officially began with an announcement in the press on 13 January 1953 about the
arrest of a group of doctors (almost all of them Jews). The announcement began with
the following words: “Some time ago state security agencies discovered a terrorist
group of doctors who had made it their aim to cut short the lives of active public
figures in the Soviet Union by sabotaging their medical treatment.”22 The “murderers
in white lab coats” had been exposed and discovered, according to the article, thanks
in large part to a simple worker at the Kremlin’s hospital, Lidiia Timaschuk; she had
 4 A. Karp

written the corresponding denunciation and for this she was declared to be “near and
dear to millions of Soviet people.”23
One must bear in mind that antisemitic policies in the Soviet Union never had the
explicit character that they had in Nazi Germany. Lists of cosmopolitan Jews always
included one or two people with Russian surnames. In 1953, the death of Lev Mekhlis
– one of Stalin’s loyal servants, who had by that time already been edged out of his
high position – was used to demonstrate the absence of antisemitism; Mekhlis was
given a magnificent funeral.24 A similar thing happened when Ilia Erenburg, a prom-
inent writer and a Jew by nationality, was awarded the Stalin Prize.
Despite all these sham displays, the Doctors’ Plot continued to unfold unimpeded.
It was stopped only by Stalin’s death on 5 March 1953. Lavrentii Beria, the former
head of state security who had lost much of his influence by this time, returned to his
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former position of power and, naturally, saw fit to distance himself from what was
being done by his enemies. On 3 April 1953 the Presidium of the Central Committee
of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) passed a resolution rehabilitating
the individuals arrested in the Doctors’ Plot and the following day the USSR’s
Ministry of Internal Affairs published an announcement stating that the arrested
doctors had been released, and that they had been arrested by the “former Ministry of
State Security of the USSR without cause and without any legal basis.”25
Subsequently, the responsibility for the Doctors’ Plot was laid on the employees
of the Ministry of State Security. Thus, Pravda’s lead article on 7 April 1953 reported,
“As has been reported in the press, contemptible opportunists such as Ryiumin, busy
at work in the organs of state security, tried to use fabricated evidence to foment feel-
ings of ethnic hatred, which are profoundly foreign to socialist ideology.”26 In the
summer of 1953, in another twist of the struggle for power, Beria was arrested,
convicted at a specially convened plenary meeting of the CPSU’s Central Committee
and executed shortly afterward. But the official interpretation of the Doctors’ Plot
remained unchanged.

The antisemitic campaign in education: evidence from published materials

The educational sphere was, of course, impacted upon by the antisemitic campaign.
Analysing historical data about higher education, Konstantinov has shown that the
percentage of Jews among the total number of college studies decreased noticeably
during Stalin’s last years.27 As has already been said, the effect of the antisemitic
campaign on school education has usually not been treated as a separate focus of
study. Nonetheless, Gennady Kostyrchenko, who does devote a short section in his
book to pedagogy, touches on the subject of education in pedagogical institutes, which
is connected with school-level education (writing about pedagogical institutes,
Konstantinov shows that in these institutes, as well as in the far less prestigious teach-
ers’ institutes, the percentage of Jews accepted as first-year students was substantially
lower in 1952 than in 1948).28 Kostyrchenko notes that the “personnel upheavals that
afflicted people with Jewish last names reached their greatest scale in the pedagogical
institutes – the colleges that had the greatest numbers of humanities students in the
country.”29 As evidence for this claim, he cites statistics about mass lay-offs of teach-
ers at the Lenin State Pedagogical Institute in Moscow at the beginning of the 1950s.
Among the student body, too, individuals were identified and censured for being
“infected with nationalist sentiments” (i.e. those who were unable to conceal their
displeasure at the unfolding antisemitic campaign). At the Academy of Pedagogical
 East European Jewish Affairs 5

Sciences and in other scientific establishments, meetings were held at which adulation
of the West and “cosmopolitism” were condemned.30
There is evidence, however, that indicates that things went much further than this.
A collection of letters from Soviet citizens to the leadership of the USSR contains one
from a schoolgirl to Joseph Stalin, dated 30 January 1953, in which she writes, “After
the announcement about the traitor-doctors was published, beatings of Jewish children
began in many of the schools of our city. What kind of life is that? Where is the real
truth and justice? What are our Communist leaders doing about it?”31 That such beat-
ings were not isolated incidents is confirmed, for example, by the fact that they were
also known to and mentioned by Lev Kopelev, a philologist who went on to become
a well-known dissident, but who, at that time, was serving a prison sentence. Kopelev
wrote that, “in some schools, Jewish boys were beaten up.”32
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Evidence of the opposite reaction in the schools also exists. Yakov Rappoport, one
of the “killer doctors,” wrote:

The reaction of the Natasha’s [Rappoport’s daughter] class to my arrest was typical of
the sentiments of a part of the population … Many of Natasha’s peers and classmates
who lived in our building knew about my arrest. But no one said a single word about it.
This was a spontaneous conspiracy of silence. It was broken only after my release. Then,
Natasha’s friends openly congratulated her.33

But it should be stressed that such a reaction to what was happening was by no means
universal. Two years later, in 1955, the historian Natan Eidelman, who was working
at a school at the time, noted in his diary that “ethnic things continue – I’ll know about
it.”34 Eidelman was likely referring to “things” directed against him as a Jewish
teacher, but the fact that they took place in a school is also quite telling. The American
Mary Leder, who lived in the USSR for many years, recalled the period of the
Doctors’ Plot: “Antisemitic remarks became commonplace in the long lines to buy
food. Jewish children were taunted in the schoolyards.” And, she concluded, “no
attempt was made to curb such outbursts, which was signal enough.”35
There were other signals as well. They were given by the press, including the speci-
alised pedagogical press, if only one knew how to read it. Alexander Solzhenitsyn
wrote the following about the hero of one of his novels:

He understood the newspaper as an openly distributed but in reality coded piece of

instructions, in which not everything could be said directly, but from which a knowledge-
able person – based on various minor signs, on the positioning of the articles, on what
was left unsaid and omitted – could form an accurate notion of the latest developments.36

Naturally, Solzhenitsyn’s protagonist was not alone in this way of thinking.

Professional educators could read many instructions between the lines of professional
publications. As an example, let us look at one issue of the leading pedagogical peri-
odical, Uchitelskaia Gazeta (Teachers’ Newspaper), from 24 January 1953.
The lead article was entitled “Be Vigilant and Alert!” It called on readers to “wage
an uncompromising struggle against credulity and complacency, and to educate Soviet
teachers and the school-going youth in the spirit of high revolutionary vigilance.” The
specific direction that this education was supposed to take, and consequently the
specific manner in which this vigilance was supposed to be expressed, could be
inferred from the next sentence of the article: “educating our youth in the spirit of life-
giving Soviet patriotism and Soviet national pride is a powerful weapon in the struggle
 6 A. Karp

against the savage morality of contemporary imperialism.” What is noteworthy is that

a large part of the article was devoted not to the problems of education, but to person-
nel policy – to the fact that the district and regional boards of public education should
unyieldingly abide by the “Stalinist principle of hiring personnel based on their polit-
ical and professional attributes.” The very fact that vigilance, national pride and
personnel policy are part of the same discussion turns out to be informative. In addi-
tion, printed directly below the lead article was the decree by the Presidium of the
Supreme Council of the USSR “decorating Doctor L. F. Timaschuk with the Order of
Lenin for exposing the saboteur-doctors.”
In this context, another article published in the same issue – “The Results of One
Exam”37 – also took on considerable significance. This article dealt with an exam in
geometry at a two-year teachers’ institute that was part of the Tula Pedagogical
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Institute. The course was taught and the exam was given by Professor M.Ia. Vygodskii,
a well-known author of many manuals, who prior to 1948 had worked at Moscow State
University.38 The author of the article, however, found that the students were insuffi-
ciently prepared, and that the fault for this was not so much theirs as their professor’s,
who gave them inadequate explanations, did not pay attention to what they said, made
practically no use of the textbooks and wilfully revised the curriculum, throwing out
references to the “works of the famous Russian crystallographer and mathematician,
the academician Yevgraf Stepanovich Fedorov.” The article also reported that the Tula
Pedagogical Institute had three professors who had doctorates in mathematics –
Meyman, Levin and Vygodsky (all three of these last names were obviously Jewish)
– but that from the methodological point of view the courses in mathematics left much
to be desired.
Although none of these articles contained any explicit expressions of antisemitism
– and, moreover, in other issues of this newspaper readers could find the names of
Jews mentioned in the most positive light (for example, the very next issue reported
that the International Stalin Prize had been awarded to the writer Ilia Erenburg) – the
overall message pushed by the newspaper was clear. And, yet, materials from archives
that have become available (unfortunately, only in part) during recent decades have
greatly enriched our historical picture of the situation.

The inspection of the Leningrad Pedagogical Institute

In 1952, the Leningrad Regional Committee of the CPSU conducted an inspection of
the city’s pedagogical institute, which prepared teachers for Leningrad and for the
entire northwestern district of the country.39 This inspection was multifaceted and
included, for example, an analysis of how the institute maintained contact with its grad-
uates, and how frequently its instructors attended one another’s lectures. Nonetheless,
it was clear that one of the most pressing issues for the commission was the issue of
personnel, understood as an analysis of the ethnic backgrounds of the instructors and
the students. This ethnic background was indicated and examined whenever and wher-
ever it was possible to do so. Table 1 gives certain statistics about the ethnic makeup
of various groups of students and instructors which were indicated in the commission’s
report.40
It is noteworthy that not even this classified report explicitly mentions the purpose
of such a thorough examination of the ethnic background of the students and faculty.
There is not a word of praise or blame for the institute’s personnel-hiring staff,
although the differences in the numbers cited are fraught with meaning. As can be
 East European Jewish Affairs 7

Table 1. Ethnic makeup of various groups of students and instructors.

Russians Jews Others Total
Accepted first- 515 50 35 (12 Ukrainians, 12 Belarusians, 4 Tatars, 600
year students 3 Estonians, 2 Finns, 1 Korean and 1 Pole)
Graduate students 40 0 4 (1 Ukrainian, 1 Belarusian, 1 Lezgin and 1 44
first year Tatar)
Second year 51 1 4 (1 Uzbek and 3 Georgians) 56
Third year 37 3 4 (2 Ukrainians, 1 Belarusian and 1 44
Kabardinian)
Research faculty 197 32 12 (3 Ukrainians, 4 Belarusian, 2 Estonians, 241
2 Poles and 1 Armenian)
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seen, Jews make up 8.3% of first-year students, less than 2% of second-year graduate
students, and are unrepresented among first-year graduate students.41 This is particu-
larly conspicuous in light of the fact that they make up almost 7% among third-year
graduate students and 13% among the research faculty. At the same time, Russians
and representatives of other ethnic groups constitute, respectively, 85.8% and 5.8%
among first-year students, 90.9% and 9.1% among first-year graduate students, 91%
and 7.1% among second-year graduate students, while making up 84.1% and 9.1% of
third-year graduate students and 81.7% and 5% of the research faculty (it would be
difficult to compare the numbers for the other non-Russian ethnic groups individually,
since their total numbers are very small and a difference in one or two people might
be accidental; nevertheless, one might note that Ukrainians and Belorussians make up
2% each among accepted first-year students and equal or greater numbers among first-
and third-year graduate students, while constituting under 2% of the research faculty).
The number of Jews who were admitted to research jobs and college-level teach-
ing positions – for it is precisely such positions that graduate studies led to – was
apparently reduced through such policies. At the same time, a comparatively large
number of Jews continued to be admitted to the pedagogical institute; in other words;
they were allowed to teach in schools, where teachers were often in short supply.
The very fact that the report contains information about ethnic backgrounds
confirms the aforementioned existence of ethnicity-based restrictions. It is notable,
however, that the report makes no overt references to such policies.

Sources of information about events in schools

What happened in secondary schools during those years can be learned from the
recollections and memoirs of people who were students and teachers at the time.
Examples of such memoirs have been cited above, and other examples can be added
to the list; those who were students in Soviet schools in 1953 are now not much older
than 70.42 At the same time, much that went on in the schools then was hidden from
view. Therefore, sources that make it possible to judge about things that neither
students nor teachers could see are important as well. Despite the closed nature of
Soviet society and its desire not to leave written traces behind, certain written records
of what took place did get preserved, among them the minutes of the meetings of
school party organisations.
The task of school party organisations was not merely to provide general ideological
guidance, but also to direct the teaching faculty in all of its activities. Consequently,
 8 A. Karp

discussions at party meetings focused not only on ideological issues and on the ways
in which teachers might improve their political literacy, but also on such topics as
student success rates, classroom teaching practices and the organisation of clean-up
and maintenance services. The minutes of such party meetings were normally submitted
to higher-ranking party organisations; for this reason, a considerable number of them
have survived in Communist Party archives. For unknown reasons, however, many
minutes were not preserved (or are at least not listed in archival catalogues). The overall
picture is thus inevitably incomplete. Nonetheless, a far greater quantity of minutes
from party meetings has been preserved and remains accessible than minutes from
school faculty meetings, and they can be used by researchers of Soviet education to
study the everyday life of the school.
Naturally, there is little reason to suppose that the minutes fully and adequately
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reflected everything that took place at the meetings. The minutes were written and
rewritten by the party organisation secretaries or under their supervision, and far from
everything that took place was recorded. This can be seen from the minutes them-
selves, and from the complaints that were sometimes included in them. Thus, at one
party meeting, in one of the schools, a participant made the following remark:

In the minutes of the meeting devoted to a review of the school year at the party educa-
tion organisation, my presentation was misrepresented. My strong criticism of the party
bureau was expunged from the minutes. My criticism of the bureau concerning the
tendency to formalism in ideological–political education, which I illustrated with exam-
ples from my own work, was also expunged from the minutes.43

Moreover, those who took part in the meetings understood perfectly well that the
minutes would be (or at any rate, might be) read in higher-ranking departments, and
therefore they spoke in such a way as to make everything look sufficiently smooth and
toned down. For example, at a meeting devoted to the plenary meeting of the CPSU
Central Committee at which Beria was denounced, the secretary of the party organi-
sation at one of the schools, displeased at the participants’ passive attitude, openly said
that, “judging by the presentations, one can get the wrong idea about our collective.
The duty of every communist is to express his view, to add his voice to the voice of
the Soviet people, and to draw political conclusions.”44
As the rest of the minutes reveal, the communists did not hesitate to follow these
instructions and added their voices to the voice of the Soviet people. However, as even
this example demonstrates, reality could also find its way into the minutes. Therefore,
even with all of the qualifications that have been mentioned, the minutes of party
meetings constitute a source of exceptional importance.

A few case studies

The accepted newspaper style of leaving things unsaid and speaking through hints
rather than directly could not be as rigorously maintained at the school meetings,
where teachers were both less experienced than reporters and often considered it
important precisely to elucidate the information reported by the press. Thus, at a party
meeting at one of Leningrad’s schools on 13 February 1953, the school principal as
usual noted that political education was now more important than ever. His explana-
tion that “this will facilitate vigilance” was also par for the course. But the principal
went further, indicating the specific direction in which the vigilance was to be aimed:
“A series of events reported in the press (such as recent events in the state of Israel,
 East European Jewish Affairs 9

the saboteur-doctors, and so on) tell us that any manifestation of the enemy, no matter
how minor, must not pass unnoticed.”45 In this case, we do not know how exactly “the
most minor manifestations of the enemy” were identified and what exactly was done
in response to them. But occasionally what went on at the schools came out on the
surface.
The minutes of party meetings at Leningrad’s school no. 206 for 1952–3 indicate
that several Jewish teachers at the school had their names and patronymics changed.
The minutes contain heated debates about this fact. One female participant objected
to allowing such changes, and in addition – as if by the way – mentioned the school’s
bursar (a Jew), who had committed a certain violation; while another participant (a
Jewish woman) rebuked her for making distortions and defaming communists (in
response to which the first woman adroitly remarked that it was she who was being
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defamed by the second woman).46 It is obvious from the minutes that they included
only a part of what was said by the arguing women, who themselves probably did not
strive to say everything they had to say.
The discussion at this school was much more candid at a meeting devoted to the
debunking of Beria on 29 August 1953 (such special party meetings were held at prac-
tically all schools and were clearly often taken to indicate the rejection of previous
practices). After routine discussions about Beria’s perfidious actions and about the
need to improve student performance in response to the Central Committee’s deci-
sions, teacher V. (to judge by his last name, a Jew) spoke up:

We should also connect the Central Committee’s resolution to the education of the
students. Last year, we had cases of antisemitism at the school (student D., fourth grade).
Moreover, teacher K. not only did not do anything with this student, but herself encour-
aged this behaviour.47

This topic was taken up by teacher P. (a Jewish woman):

Comrade V. has described student D.’s behaviour. I encountered a case like that. There
was a Jewish student, Sarah, registered in class 4B, and so on. The principal of the
school found out about this case, had a talk with the students, and these incidents
stopped. The second question is about our own education. We still have vestiges of old
habits. There was a revolting discussion when the party bureau secretary was being
elected in 1951 – that no Jew should be elected party bureau secretary. Second: at a
memorial meeting on the occasion of I. V. Stalin’s death, comrade V. was not permitted
to speak. Third fact: during class period, teachers discussed the news about the killer
doctors with the students. But we know that [usually] we do not discuss the news in
class.48

Significantly, the minutes did not preserve any traces of a discussion of who could be
elected secretary of the party bureau. “Officially” such a discussion could never have
taken place. This meeting was concluded by the secretary of the party organisation,
who made the following remarks:

Comrade V. was right to note incidents of antisemitism among the students. In the future,
the party organisation should pay attention to such things. I consider comrade P.’s
remarks wrong, libellous. I considered it completely unfounded to say that communist
Jews were persecuted based on the cases that she cites. I have never heard about any
persecution of communist Jews before this meeting. The fact that teacher K. showed
support for antisemitic sentiments in the classroom, as comrade V. has indicated, will be
examined by the party bureau.49
 10 A. Karp

If the case of teacher K. was ever examined at all, then nothing in the minutes indi-
cates this fact. These discussions did not subside, however, and three years later they
again spilled out on the surface. The immediate reason for this was the examination
of the case of the same Jewish bursar, B., who was being accused (and, apparently,
with sufficient reason) of another violation. The same comrade V. made the following
remarks:

I would like to recall the past … I have been accused of antisemitism [an obvious
misprint: the word should have been Zionism or Jewish nationalism]. For three years, we
were in a very difficult situation. I was told that “my class did not have a single Soviet
person.” I use all my strength and knowledge to educate real people, and yet this is what
they say in our party organisation. Comrade B. lost his respect among our clerical staff
not because he is not doing a good job, but because we are not doing a good job at educat-
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ing our clerical staff. They were infected with antisemitism and they caused him harm.
How many times did B. tell us that they used such expressions as “yid” and so on.50

The principal of the school did not allow the participants to get dragged into a useless
discussion, noting that the meeting was devoted only to the case of B., who had
committed a crime, which he himself did not deny. According to the principal,
comrade V.’s remarks would be appropriate at a meeting held to hear reports.51
However, at a meeting held to hear reports and to elect new officials, which took
place several months later, only the secretary of the party organisation raised the topic
anew. She noted that “critical remarks with respect to communist B. were perceived
by certain communists for a number of years as insults.”52 No objections followed.
The minutes of party meetings from another Leningrad school – school no. 24 –
preserve some interesting testimony about events at the school both during the
Doctors’ Plot and afterward. At a meeting on 17 November 1953, teacher G. (a Jewish
woman) said:

Education is at a low level. Children write on the blackboard: “Beat the yids!” The inci-
dent with teacher P. was shameful and the school’s reaction to it inappropriate. The
mother of the student whom she insulted is not keeping quiet, and the children are asking
why nothing is being done to her. The party organisation ignored this incident, while it
should have been put to the general public so that people could decide whether such a
teacher should be permitted to work at a school.53

As the discussion makes clear, teacher P. told the Jewish student that he and other
Jews did not belong in Soviet schools.54 However, other voices immediately came out
in defence of P. Teacher K. made the following remarks:

P. told me and R. that she understood that she was wrong to speak about Jews the way
she had, that perhaps she should apologise before the comrades. I think that if we start
talking about firing her, we should think about how she will live. She is unmarried and
it will be very difficult for her. She has realised what she has done wrong and is very
upset about it.55

Another teacher, B., condemned P.’s actions, but argued that they should not be seen
as indicative of the state of the school as a whole:

The conversations that P. had in the teachers’ lounge after the information about the
saboteur-doctors was published can be explained by her political illiteracy. She sees the
ethnic question the way an uneducated person does. This is the only such case in our
school and it should not be generalised. Nor is there any need for a public discussion of
 East European Jewish Affairs 11

it. The principal did not ignore this incident. He consulted the party’s district committee
about it, and appropriate measures were taken with respect to P. Our local section of the
trade union should organise political briefings and lectures for the teachers.56

In addition to conducting political briefings as a way to fight antisemitism, B.

recommends avoiding publicity and being more discreet in general: “Teachers should
refrain from talking about party matters in the teachers’ lounge. We are constantly
being warned to be vigilant.”57 The administration did indeed consult with the party’s
district committee. Therefore, the party’s district committee representative who
attended the meeting held to elect new officials several months later addressed this
matter directly. He began by considering the school’s other problems and shortcom-
ings (among them the fact that “former students of grades 5–7 are on trial for writing
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poems, anti-Soviet satires”58) and then went on to give a balanced analysis of the case
of teacher P.: “ideological immaturity among the faculty caused P. to be swayed by
philistine opinions. Jewish comrades G. and Gr. were wrong to stop saying hello to
teacher P.”59
However, despite the emphatically repeated wish that people speak less about this
topic, teachers continued discussing antisemitism and even did so at an open party
meeting (that is, at a meeting attended by the whole faculty, not just the party
members) on 26 October 1955. Teacher N. (to judge by her last name, a Jew) was the
first to speak:

Comrade S., a teacher at our school, permitted herself to make antisemitic insults
unworthy of a Soviet teacher against certain teachers at our school. I consider it neces-
sary to censure her, to explain to her the unacceptability of her actions, to force her to
learn, to raise her ideological-theoretical level. How can the education of children be
entrusted to comrade S. given her backward views?60

Teacher N. was supported by teacher L., who in addition indicated that S. was not the
only one who deserved criticism: “Teachers S. and K. throw antisemitic insults at
certain teachers. I think we must intensify the internationalist and atheistic education
of the students and the teachers.”61
The representative of the school’s administration, however, gave a simple expla-
nation for the expressions of antisemitism: “I explain cases of antisemitism among the
teachers by the fact that the faculty at the school don’t get along.”62

A view from above: the stance of the regulatory agencies toward education
The work of the schools was directly overseen by the district and municipal boards of
public education. Here, too, the surviving records of party meetings make it possible
to raise the curtain on what took place. In 1949, the head of the Petrograd district board
of education (to judge by her last name, a Jewish woman) was accused of fostering
clannishness and sycophancy among the teachers (specifically, officials examined
allegations that a certain female teacher by name of Nukhimovich – another Jew – had
once prepared dinner for her while she was sick), and above all of “polluting the
personnel.” “The most serious mistake,” as she herself admitted, “is polluting the
personnel.”63 Despite this admission, she was dismissed from her post.
At the municipal board of education, the problem of “polluting the personnel”
received a fair amount of attention. This naturally did not refer exclusively to teach-
ers’ ethnic backgrounds (for example, at one of the meetings there were complaints
 12 A. Karp

that students entering pedagogical institutes provided insufficient biographical infor-

mation about themselves – “and then you find out later that their father was arrested”),
but the ethnic question was clearly not forgotten either.64 For example, the question of
firing various teachers with Jewish names came up on several different occasions, and
moreover there were frequent complaints that the district boards were delaying firing
these teachers.65 Already in April (that is, after the Doctors’ Plot was called off), one
reads of a paradoxical complaint against the party’s city committee, which did not
support the idea of firing the teachers: “I should like to mention employees that have
compromised themselves and that have quite justifiably been relieved of their duties.
Apparently, the party’s city committee does not trust our decisions and proposes to
reinstate these individuals at their jobs.” The representative of the party’s city commit-
tee who was present at the meeting answered quite diplomatically: “The school
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division is proposing relieving certain workers of their duties and this proposal is
sound. But new jobs will have to be found for these workers.”66 This response did not
satisfy the municipal board of education. They believed that such a policy on the part
of the party’s city committee “leads to pollution of the personnel and difficulties in
working with such personnel” and they continued to raise the same question again at
subsequent meetings.67
The specific position of the municipal board of education is made somewhat
clearer by the minutes of the meeting devoted to the debunking of Beria. At this meet-
ing, a question about the Doctors’ Plot was posed. Municipal board of education head
Patrikeyev conveyed his understanding of the issue, explaining that the report about
the winding down of the doctors’ case had been printed by Beria in the newspapers
without coordination with the government and was highly tendentious.68 No such
accusation was ever made against Beria, however, in the party’s official publications
and propaganda.

Discussion
Many discussions of antisemitism in Soviet education during the 1970s and 1980s
have been published in recent years, but earlier periods should also not be neglected.69
Not least as the question of antisemitism in the USSR remains politically charged to
this day. Many books are published in Russia today that continue to deny the existence
of antisemitism in the USSR.70 Therefore, it is important to collect evidence about
what happened in school education, which remains, as has already been noted, a
subject practically untouched by researchers. The collection and analysis of such data
is also important, however, because it helps us to understand the history of Soviet
education, its life and practical aspects, how it took shape and how it functioned.
If in Arkady Gaidar’s famous short story “The Blue Cup,”71 written in 1935, one
boy calls another a “fascist” and a “White Russian” and threatens to beat him up for
calling a girl a “yid,” then already in 1938 Lenin’s widow, Krupskaia, was writing to
Stalin about the fact that traditional Russian bigotry was rearing its ugly head among
schoolchildren and that “kids have started using the word ‘yid’.”72
The October Revolution of 1917, which brought the Bolsheviks into power,
took place under the banners of internationalism and equality for all ethnic groups.73
Gradually, however, it turned out that some ethnic groups were more equal than
others.74 The anti-cosmopolitan campaign brought about a kind of qualitative leap
in the development of Soviet antisemitism. Its most prominent side was the
government’s personnel policy and the establishment of hiring quotas, vividly
 East European Jewish Affairs 13

demonstrated by the statistics from the Leningrad Pedagogical Institute cited above,
and sometimes observable at the school level as well, where, at the very least, Jews
were unable to become secretaries of their party organisations. Meanwhile, the
government – for the time being, at least – continued to feel constrained by the
ideology and the political terminology that it employed. Not only did it hesitate to
establish explicit quotas on Jewish enrolment in educational institutions, as was
done under the Tsars; it could also not speak openly about any sinister role of Jews
in general.75
Nonetheless, as the analysed minutes demonstrate, antisemitism flourished in
schools. Its growth was fuelled by two factors: firstly, by a kind of external encour-
agement of personal antisemitic impulses and, secondly, by the absence of any signif-
icant censure of antisemitism. Naturally, the personal sentiments of various
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pedagogical administrators exerted a certain influence on the way in which they

commented on the events. One might suppose, for example, that Comrade Patrikeyev
from the Leningrad municipal board of education – who provided his own interpreta-
tion of how the Doctors’ Plot was called off – was motivated either by his personal
disappointment at the fact that it had been called off, or by his personal understanding
of what was appropriate in the new political environment. An episode described by
the already cited “saboteur-doctor” Rappoport illustrates the different ways in which
different teachers could act. Shortly before his arrest, his daughter had got only a “4”
(the Russian equivalent of a “B”) for an excellent response about the American
Constitution. When on the following day the other students asked why she had been
given such an unfair grade, the teacher, mimicking and mocking her, accused the girl
of excessively praising the United States. Consequently, Rappoport himself went to
the school principal with a complaint. As it turned out, the principal (a “reasonable
woman,” according to Rappoport) had herself attended the lesson during which his
daughter had given her response, and she had not found anything objectionable in it.
As a result of Rappoport’s complaint, the excessively zealous teacher was forced to
apologise.76 (It is noteworthy, however, that the “reasonable woman” principal herself
had not reacted in any way to the unfair treatment of Rappoport’s daughter until she
received a complaint about it.)
Returning to the general issue of the interaction between society and government,
it must be emphasised that the government did not give to the children who wrote
“beat the yids” – or who actually beat up Jews – any direct instructions to act in this
fashion.77 Moreover, such episodes not only went against the state’s officially
proclaimed ideology, but compromised the order and discipline that were so vital for
Stalin-era schools. Those who beat up Jews acted on their own initiative. And as the
minutes quoted above make clear, school administrators sometimes even took steps to
restrain such impulses to some degree. Both the children and the adults were in a posi-
tion to make a choice, and consequently one might ask what factors influenced their
decisions in each particular case (and the surviving documents make it possible to
offer different explanations for such phenomena, including both ideological enmity
toward Jews and non-Russians in general, on the one hand, and simple self-interested
careerism, on the other). The government’s control was not absolute,78 and indeed the
government itself was to some extent constrained by its own policies, so that, for
example, it allowed Jewish teachers to fight for their rights to some degree – although
only after Stalin’s death.
But the government’s influence on society – the instigation of impulses “from
below” – was very considerable. Even if newspaper articles about the saboteur-doctors
 14 A. Karp

had not been discussed with children in schools – and, as we have seen, even this was
known to happen – but had only been talked about in front of them by their parents,
in conjunction with rumours about Jews getting fired from their jobs, this would have
been sufficient to inflame some part of the student population (just as it inflamed some
of the teachers). An audience of children, generally speaking, is much more easily
incited to violence than an audience of adults, and therefore such an influence led to
violence in the schools much more readily than it did to violence on the street. Whether
the government desired such violence, with the aim of subsequently using it as a
pretext to relocate Jews to another part of the country, as had been done with other
“traitor nationalities,” as if in order to shield them from the people’s wrath79 – or, on
the contrary, whether it did not desire such violence, but wished merely to “indoctri-
nate” the population sufficiently to prepare it for any measures that might be taken
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against its former neighbours – is a discussion that we cannot go into here. It is not
always possible to determine the exact extent of such indirect influence on society
(things become more predictable when direct orders are given). Suffice it to say that
the schools did not remain blocked off from the broader developments that were
unfolding in the country.
Soviet textbooks from the 1940s and 1950s never contained any explicitly anti-
semitic pronouncements or materials, but they did emphatically glorify the achieve-
ments of the Russian people – “the most outstanding people of all the peoples that
make up the population of the Soviet Union.”80 This was an integral part of teaching
Soviet patriotism, which was considered one of the schools’ most important tasks. The
glorification of the most outstanding people implicitly suggested to teachers and
students that they could identify the “least outstanding peoples” on their own.
Another means of inciting antisemitism was remaining silent about its manifesta-
tions. While Stalin was alive, no one talked about antisemitism in schools. The
discussions cited above took place later, after the official condemnation of the
Doctors’ Plot. And the most significant fact about the minutes is that they vividly
demonstrate that the schools’ administrators and the regulatory agencies above them
were most concerned with not attracting too much attention to what was taking place.
This stance was no longer the result of any personal initiative, but of a government
policy, carried out at various locations and recommended by party instructors. “Don’t
generalise,” “Don’t say more than you need to” – these were the basic demands. A
teacher who had been too candid in expressing her antisemitic sentiments was repri-
manded. But those who object to her remarks too actively turned out to have been
wrong as well. The problem, according to the party leadership, consisted not in anti-
semitism, but in a lack of general political culture. Although when teachers at another
school specifically mentioned the lack of a political culture – which expressed itself
in antisemitism – it turned out that the problem really stemmed from the fact that the
“faculty at the school don’t get along”: in other words, everyone was a little bit to
blame.
No broad discussion or condemnation of the events was permitted (and a discus-
sion at a closed party meeting cannot be considered very broad to begin with). More
precisely, all criticism was directed specifically at the Doctors’ Plot, which had
unfolded beyond the walls of the schools; but its reverberations inside the schools
were not subjected to criticism, and thus continued to exist and to be felt in the
schools in the future, although of course in a less acute form than previously (if only
because the propaganda campaign in the press had subsided). Today, the very short-
age of literature on antisemitism in Soviet school education demonstrates that the
 East European Jewish Affairs 15

policy of keeping silent about what happened in schools during the 1940s and 1950s
has turned out to be successful.

Notes on contributor
Alexander Karp is an associate professor of mathematics education at Teachers College,
Columbia University, New York. He received his Ph.D. in mathematics education from Herzen
Pedagogical University in St Petersburg, Russia, and also holds a degree from the same univer-
sity in history and education. For many years, Karp worked as a teacher in a school for the
mathematically gifted in St Petersburg and as a teacher educator. Currently, his scholarly
interests span several areas, including the history of education and, in particular, the history of
mathematics education, gifted education, mathematics teacher education and the theory of
mathematical problem solving. He is the managing editor of the International Journal for the
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History of Mathematics Education and the author of over 90 publications, including over 20
books.

Notes
1. For example, Borschagovsky, Zapiski balovnia sud’by or Rappoport, Na rubezhe dvukh
vekov.
2. For example, Kostyrchenko, Tainaia politika Stalina; idem, Out of the Red Shadows;
Vaksberg, Stalin protiv evreev.
3. Nadzhafarov, Stalin i kosmopolitizm; Kostyrchenko, Gosudarstvennyi antisemitizm v SSSR.
4. Konstantinov, “Higher Education”; idem, “Soviet Jewish Scientific Personnel.”
5. For example, Zubkova et al., Sovietskaia zhizn’; Zubkova, Russia after the War; Fitzpatrick,
Everyday Stalinism.
6. Fitzpatrick, “New Perspectives on Stalinism,” 358.
7. See Holmes, The Kremlin and the Schoolhouse.
8. Ewing, Teachers of Stalinism.
9. Fitzpatrick, Cultural Revolution in Russia.
10. See for example Gurvits and Filichev, “Trebovaniia k pis’mennym rabotam po matema-
tike,” 40–54.
11. Anweiler, “Monism and Pluralism in Soviet Education,” 169–79.
12. Ewing, in Teachers of Stalinism, discusses the problem of discipline in Soviet schools
before the Second World War; the discipline did not improve after the war, particularly in
boys’ schools.
13. Kelly, Children’s World, 93.
14. This occurred even in such seemingly apolitical spheres as mathematics education; see
Karp, “The Cold War in the Soviet School,” 23–43.
15. Nadzhafarov, Stalin i kosmopolitizm.
16. For example, they are described in Grossman, Life and Fate.
17. See, for example, Lustiger, Stalin and the Jews; Gilboa, The Black Years of Soviet Jewry.
18. Nadzhafarov, Stalin i kosmopolitizm, 232–40.
19. Ibid., 239. All translations are by the author unless otherwise noted.
20. See Kostyrchenko, Out of the Red Shadows; or, as an example of a historical study of these
events, Azadovskii, “From Anti-Westernism to Antisemitism,” 66–80.
21. Ardamatsky, “Pinya iz Zhmerinki.”
22. Quoted in Kostyrchenko, Out of the Red Shadows, 290.
23. Ibid., 293.
24. Vaksberg, Stalin protiv evreev.
25. Quoted in Rappoport, Na rubezhe dvukh vekov, 184.
26. Pravda, 7 April 1953.
27. Konstantinov, “Higher Education.”
28. Ibid., 50.
29. Kostyrchenko, Tainaia politika Stalina, 591.
30. Ibid., 591–3.
31. Zubkova et al., Sovetskaia zhizn’, 468.
32. Kopelev, Utoli moi pechali, 233.
 16 A. Karp

33. Rappoport, Na rubezhe dvukh vekov, 92.

34. Eidelman, Dnevniki Natana Eidelmana, 31.
35. Leder, My Life in Stalinist Russia, 302.
36. Solzhenitsyn, V kruge, 165.
37. “Itogi odnogo ekzamena” [The results of one exam], Uchitelskaia gazeta, 24 January 1953.
38. About Vygodsky, see, for example, Borodin and Bugai, Biografichesky slovar’ deyateley v
oblasti matematiki.
39. Tsentralnyi gosudarstvennyi arkhiv istoriko-politicheskikh dokumentov (Central Govern-
ment Archive of Historical–Political Documents, St Petersburg; henceforth “TSGA IPD”),
f. 24, op. 46, d. 77.
40. Ibid., 10, 77–9, 95.
41. Note that what was happening in this institute resembled what was happening in the coun-
try as a whole. See Konstantinov, “Higher Education.”
42. Mention should also be made of fiction, in which the topic of antisemitism in the schools
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during the 1950s has been addressed in considerable detail. See, for example, Shmukler,
Ukhodim iz Rossii.
43. TSGA IPD, f. 3329, op. 3, d. 1, 36.
44. TSGA IPD, f. 3782, op. 4, d. 2, 45.
45. TSGA IPD, f. 4170, op. 3, d. 16, 7.
46. TSGA IPD, f. 3329, op. 4, d. 1, 24.
47. Ibid., 46.
48. Ibid.
49. Ibid., 47.
50. TSGA IPD, f. 3329, op. 6, d. 1, 27.
51. Ibid., 27.
52. Ibid., 40.
53. TSGA IPD, f. 3001, op. 1, d. 8, 12.
54. Ibid., 12.
55. Ibid.
56. Ibid., 13.
57. Ibid.
58. Ibid., 26.
59. Ibid.
60. TSGA IPD, f. 3001, op. 1, d. 10, 20.
61. Ibid., 21.
62. Ibid., 22.
63. TSGA IPD, f. 262, op. 3, d. 8, 40
64. TSGA IPD, f. 285, op. 4, d. 38, 19.
65. Ibid., 22.
66. Ibid., 46.
67. Ibid.
68. Ibid., 49.
69. For example, Shifman, You Failed Your Math Test.
70. For example, Kara-Murza, Evrei, Dissidenty, Evrokommunizm. One should also mention
Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s controversial book, Dvesti let vmeste.
71. Arkady Gaidar is considered (or at any rate was considered) a classic writer of Soviet chil-
dren’s literature. This short story went through numerous editions. For example, it may be
found in Gaidar, Golubaia chashka.
72. Kostyrchenko, Gosudarstvennyi antisemitizm v SSSR, 14.
73. Changes in the attitude toward nationalistic questions in the USSR have been treated in the
scholarly literature; e.g. see Martin, “Modernization or Neo-traditionalism,” 348–67.
74. During and after the Second World War, some ethnic groups were accused of being traitors
and deported en masse. See, for example, one of the first books devoted to this topic:
Nekrich, The Punished Peoples.
75. The government felt freer when confronting cases in which the contradiction with the offi-
cial ideology appeared weaker and, more importantly, that were expected to have a smaller
public resonance. For example, in its resolution concerning V. Muradeli’s opera The Great
Friendship, the Politburo did not hesitate to write that: “The Chechens and the Ingushes
hindered the development of friendship among peoples … in the North Causcasus”:
Nadzhafarov, Stalin i kosmopolitizm, 160.
 East European Jewish Affairs 17

76. Rappoport, Na rubezhe dvukh vekov, 92–3.

77. The surviving reports of top party officials show that open calls for violent action against
Jews were seen as “incorrect manifestations and views” outside the schools as well; see
Altshuler, “More about Public Reaction to the Doctors’ Plot,” 36.
78. See Fitzpatrick, “New Perspectives on Stalinism,” for a discussion of the structure of
Stalin’s government which argues that the government had less actual control than it
claimed.
79. Substantial evidence that certain major steps to this end were being prepared has survived,
for example, Kaverin, Epilog.
80. The quotation is taken from a toast made by Stalin at a reception in the Kremlin on 24 May
1945: Stalin, O Velikoy Otechestvennoy voine Sovetskogo Soiuza.

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