Remembering the Night of Murdered Poets
History has haunting echoes, as well as stories that we should honor
It is coincidental — but maybe a bit of cosmic irony — that the Night of Murdered Poets often falls near Tisha B’Av. This year, the evening when the holy day begins, when we sit on the floor to remember the destruction of the Temples, and of Jerusalem, was August 12. Every year, August 12 is the anniversary of the Night of the Murdered Poets, which happened not two millennia ago but in 1952, within living memory.
The day, and the event it commemorates, is as grim as it sounds, Alexander Smukler of Montclair said. Mr. Smukler grew up in Moscow, left the Soviet Union with his family in 1991, just months before it imploded, and has family history to a nightmare that preceded and predicted the terrible story of the poets.
Because if the name popularly given to that night were more precise, it would be the Night of the Murdered Jewish Poets.
There is a great deal of accurate detail about the night of August 11-12 available on the internet, Mr. Smukler began, but he wanted to lay out the basic facts.
“On that night, 13 of the most distinguished, respected Jewish leaders in the Soviet Union were purged,” he said. “The Soviet Supreme Court convicted them of treason; of spying and being the agents of an international Zionist organization, the Joint” — that is, the New York-based American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, which was created in 1914 and still is hard at work helping poor Jews around the world today. “The claim was that during the Second World War, they were members of the Jewish Antifascist Committee, and that they established contacts and relationships with western, mostly American Jewish organizations, and they used them as a channel for spying on the Soviet Union, and supplying information about it to the imperialists in the West.”
To pile more irony on irony, Josef Stalin — the Soviet dictator whose crimes often seem to pale in comparison to Hitler’s, but who in reality was a madman who historians say is directly responsible for about six million deaths, and who should be classed with Hitler for pure evil — founded that committee. It was created during World War II to influence public opinion. “People sometimes ask why this happened right after the war, when the Soviet Union was allied with the United States, and the relationship was the friendliest it had been. But it happened at the beginning of the Cold War, when Stalin shifted his country’s foreign policy away from those allies.
“At that time, he was busy creating enclaves in Eastern Europe that the Soviet controlled. He separated himself from Europe and Western influence.” It was then that he built the Berlin Wall, which had both symbolic and practical implications.
The Jewish Antifascist Committee was chaired by Solomon Mikhoels, a famous and influential actor; he was the director of the Moscow State Jewish Theater.
“The whole tragedy started in 1947, when Stalin and his Politburo adopted and signed a secret protocol about dismantling the Jewish Antifascism Committee,” Mr. Smukler said. “That was because Stalin got a report from the NKVD” — the agency, then formally the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs, later renamed the KGB, and now the FSB; it’s always been an agent of fear and death — “that the committee had strong ties with the Jewish diaspora, mostly in the United States. That was mostly because most of the European Jewish communities had been destroyed by the Shoah. The report said that those contacts weren’t useful to the Soviet government.
“Instead, they became annoying to the NKVD. They didn’t understand the role of the JAC after the war. It was made up of the crème de la crème of Jewish intelligentsia, and during the war its major goal had been to fundraise in the U.S. and buy weaponry for the Red Army. But when the war was over, the world rebuilt its structure.”
In 1946, Winston Churchill gave a speech where he said “From Stettin in the Baltic, to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent.” And the rest of the world changed too. Israel was recognized, the British empire crumbled, and India gained independence in 1948. “The world was very busy creating an infrastructure of coexistence,” Mr. Smukler said.
That didn’t leave room for the JAC. “So Stalin decided to dismantle it, and he started by giving the order to kill its president, Mikhoels.” The Soviet government declared it nonexistent in 1948, and later that year “NKVD agents convinced Mikhoels to go to Minsk to the Belarusian Jewish Theater, which they told him needed more attention. They killed him there, and then they put him under a truck. The official story was that he’d been run over because he was drunk, but many years later, one of the heads of the NKVD published his memoir, and in it he admitted that Mikhoels was liquidated by Stalin’s order.”
And there’s more.
“The NKVD agent who convinced Mikhoels to go to Minsk in the first place was also killed by the same truck,” Mr. Smukler said. “Obviously he knew too much.” Years later, another Soviet premier, Nikita Khrushchev, who took power during the destalinization that followed the strongman’s death, admitted as much.
“Obviously Mikhoels’ death reminds us of the death of Alexei Navalny in a Russian prison earlier this year,” Mr. Smukler said. “He was a young, strong man, who survived at least two assassination attempts, and then suddenly he died of natural causes in prison, according to the Russian official statement.”
That brings us to the Night of Murdered Poets, in 1952, “when 13 of the most distinguished Jewish leaders, most but not all of them writers and poets, died in NKVD headquarters in downtown Moscow, called Lubyanka.
“They executed lots of people down there, including Raoul Wallenberg,” the Swedish diplomat who saved thousands of Jews from the Nazis before he was disappeared by the Soviets, Mr. Smukler said. “Sources say that he died there in 1947, the year before the Jewish poets were rounded up and charged.”
Some of the 13 Jews were arrested in 1948, the others in 1949. They went on trial together in June of 1952, and they were executed on August 12. All but one were sentenced to death. That one, Lina Stern, was sentenced to the gulag. “She wasn’t a writer or poet, but one of the most famous Soviet scientists,” Mr. Smukler said. “She was a gerontologist. When Stalin received the list of the people sentenced to death to sign, he cut away her name and said that she was an asset.
“Stalin saved her life because he was old, and he wanted her services.”
All the 13 imprisoned Jews were tortured, Mr. Smukler said, “using medieval methods of torture. They all went through hell.
“During their interrogations, they signed whatever absurd documents the NKVD wanted them to sign. They were completely destroyed. They gave information about each other. They pled guilty to being spies, they admitted to being part of the U.S. intelligence system, they admitted the existence of the world Jewish conspiracy, and they admitted to many other completely absurd things.
“They admitted to them because they were tortured and broken. That’s why the trial of 13 people took two months. There was nothing for the judge to do. They all pled guilty to everything.”
Despite everything, the lead judge, Alexander Cheptsov, felt sorry for the defendants, Mr. Smukler said. “He understood that they were afraid that they would be returned to their cells and tortured again.
“So he sent a secret message to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, asking their permission to postpone their sentencing. He said, ‘I don’t believe that most of them are guilty.’ He saw them in front of him, with broken arms and broken legs and missing eyes, and he saw that they were tortured. Even this Soviet judge was amazed at how they looked, and how they answered the prosecutor, admitting everything.
“The judge felt bad for them. He didn’t want to confirm the death sentence. He didn’t want to be complicit in it. He didn’t want to take responsibility. He didn’t want history to show that he murdered the innocent.”
So he sent the request to the Central Committee. And he got a response from the committee’s secretary, Georgy Malenkov, who became the prime minister of the Soviet Union after Stalin died.
“The response said that these people are the enemies of their country. The Central Committee made its decision. If you don’t want to find yourself among those people, you’d better approve the death sentence.”
Unsurprisingly, he did. The very next day. “And the day after that, all of them were shot, right there in Lubyanka. They didn’t even bother to move them. They didn’t give them a single day to meet with their families, to say goodbye.”
When Stalin murdered those 13 prominent Jews, most of them writers who worked not in Russian, nor in Hebrew, but in Yiddish, he also killed off everything that was left of Yiddish language and culture in Europe, Mr. Smukler said. “He liquidated not only people but a culture. That was the only island of Yiddish culture left. After the executions, everyone was afraid to speak Yiddish.”
Of all the murdered poets, the one whose execution is perhaps most painful to Mr. Smukler was Leib Kvitko, a children’s writer whose work he loved.
He was able to read Mr. Kvitko’s books because “during the Khrushchev time, the Soviet government and the Central Committee realized that the executions were a mistake.” The victims were all pardoned posthumously. “Their books were published and circulated, and every child grew up with the work of Lev Kvitko.” Yes, executing him would have been not entirely unlike executing Dr. Seuss, Mr. Smukler confirmed.
Mr. Smukler has his own window on this terrible history. He can see it through the experiences of his wife’s grandfather.
His wife is Alla Shtraks. Her great-grandfather, Isaac Shuv, was the rabbi of Gaysin, in Ukraine — and the father of 13 children — when the Nazis and their Ukrainian collaborators showed up. They shot most of the Jews in town, but Rabbi Shuv instead was buried alive, and then a tank drove over the filled-in hole.
Her grandfather, Shaul Shuv, was among Rabbi Shuv’s surviving children — three of them already had moved to Palestine, and two others were married and had left Gaysin. He’d already run away, and he’d become a devout Bolshevik. “He was a hardline communist,” Mr. Smukler said. Eventually, after the war, he was the deputy general manager of Zis, which then was the biggest Soviet auto manufacturer, in Moscow.
“He was arrested in February 1949. He was an active member of the Jewish Antifascist Committee. He was prosecuted for basically the same reasons as the murdered poets. He was interrogated and tortured, but he refused to plead guilty. He said that everything they were trying to get him to say was absurd. That it was a lie. That there was no proof. And the judge refused to sentence him to death.
“Everyone who was tried with him and pled guilty got the death penalty — the trial itself took 10 minutes — but he was sent to the gulag for 25 years. But he returned home in 1957, because Khrushchev brought him back from the gulag. He was pardoned and released, and they gave him back his apartment and his job at the factory.”
So how did he survive?
Mr. Smukler not only knew Mr. Shuv, he was able to help him move from Russia to New Jersey, at the end of his life. “I was able to spend many years and many days with him. I always asked him how he survived Lubyanka, and then Lefortovo,” another infamous Russian prison — the one where the newly freed American Jewish Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich was held. “And then he survived five or six years working as a slave in a coal mine in the gulag.
“So when I was reading stories about the murdered poets, and how brutally they were tortured, I asked him, ‘Grandpa, Sheulik, how did you survive being tortured? Why didn’t you plead guilty?’
“And he said, ‘I don’t know how I survived, but I do know that everybody was tortured differently. It depended on the interrogator assigned to you.’
“‘My interrogator never beat me up.’” Mr. Smukler continued with Mr. Shuv’s story. “‘He never used a knife to cut off my fingers.” Other interrogators gouged out eyes or cut off penises, Mr. Smukler reported. “My interrogator did it differently,’” Mr. Shuv continued. “‘When he read me papers blaming me as a spy working with members of the Joint, which he said was a leading organization in the international Zionist conspiracy against the Soviet Union, and that I was linked to the United States intelligence world, I refused to sign.
“‘Why? Because I saw people from the Joint only once, in 1934, when a delegation came to our factory because they were buying our equipment for the Jewish agricultural farm in Crimea. I spent maybe one hour with the delegation. I didn’t use an interpreter, because they spoke Yiddish. They came to my office. We had tea or coffee. I told them that we’d give them good terms if they bought our equipment, but they eventually decided not to buy Russian agricultural equipment. Instead, they bought mainly from Ford.’
“So I said, ‘Grandpa, I understand that you never spied, and that you never were a member of the Joint. But how did you get so strong that you were able not to sign the documents?’
“He said, ‘It’s likely just because my interrogator was a different man. He didn’t want to beat me up.
“‘He just put me in a private cell, two meters by three meters, with no bed, no nothing, just a concrete floor. The lightbulb in the ceiling made me blind because it was so bright, and it never went off, and because the heat from it was incredible.
“‘And the floor was always very cold, and it was always covered with water, because of the incredible heat from the huge bulb, so there always was condensation.
“‘There was a metal door with a little window, which opened once a day, and someone would throw a piece of bread or something else to eat and a metal bottle of water. I never saw the face of the person who threw it in.
“‘There was a hole in the floor that I used for a toilet.’”
Mr. Shuv did not leave that tiny hellhole for nine months.
“And I said, ‘You were in solitary confinement for nine months, without seeing anybody?’ And he said, ‘The interrogator told me, Citizen Shuv — because they wouldn’t call me Comrade because I was under arrest — if you decide to sign the documents — and we know that you are guilty, that you are a member of the underground Jewish conspiracy, and that you supplied information to the United States — so when you decide to plead guilty, bang on the door and they will open it.
“‘But until then, we don’t need to talk to you.’
But he never pled guilty. He never admitted to anything because he was not guilty. Solitary confinement did not break him.
“He spent nine months in there and he didn’t knock on the door,” Mr. Smukler said reverently. He remembers asking, “How did you survive, with no bed, no shower, for nine months. And he said, ‘Because I had long nails, and with them I was trying to write poems on the walls. And I talked to myself.’”
Although Mr. Shuv said that he thinks that had he been kept another month, he would have gone crazy, still, “‘You might be surprised, but I don’t remember anything about those nine months,’” Mr. Smukler reported him saying. “He said, ‘It seemed like a day. You lose any sense of the passage of time. Somehow you just exist. You don’t think about death, love, life. When they finally came to me and opened the door and said now you are going to your trial, to my mind it was all like one day.’”
Mr. Smukler reported his grandfather-in-law telling him that he was cleaned up — given a shower, and had his beard shaved and his hair and nails cut — but that he couldn’t see the courtroom because he wasn’t accustomed to the light.
And yet, Mr. Smukler said, when Mr. Shuv came back from the gulag, “he was still a communist.”
Mr. Shuv was 83 when he came to the United States, and he lived in New Jersey until he died four years later. He had developed diabetes in the gulag — the only food available was sweet condensed milk — and because of that he developed huge, painful sores on his legs.
“I was standing next to him in Morristown Hospital, where they were working on his wounds. And suddenly I saw tears coming from his eyes,” Mr. Smukler said. “I said, ‘Grandpa, wait. If this is making you uncomfortable, they will give you an injection, and the pain will stop.’
“And he said, ‘No, son. I am not crying because of the pain. I am crying because all my life I was a communist, fighting to get people a better future. And now the people who I believed were my worst enemies are treating my wounds.
“‘My life was wasted. Don’t make the same mistake I made. Communism is fake.’”
He died soon after.
To return to the story of the murdered poets, there is a big question it demands. Why did Stalin feel the need to act with such savagery? Yes, part of it is that he was a savage. But, still, “why was Stalin so angry that he decided not only to liquidate the organization but its leaders?” Mr. Smukler asked.
“The story is that Mikhoels and the committee made a huge mistake, and it cost them their lives.
“In 1946, right after the end of the war, they sent a secret letter to Stalin, appealing to him to help those who had survived the Shoah in Eastern Europe and the Russian territories to create a Jewish state in Crimea.
“Although many of those leaders had been allowed to travel outside the Soviet Union and meet with diaspora leaders, they did not know or did not believe how close their Zionist brothers and sisters were to creating Israel. They did not know or did not believe that the United Nations would approve it. They were looking for another place where they could live as Jews. They knew that there were hundreds of thousands of Jews who had been displaced and had no place to live. They could not live in their ancestral homes.
“In their letter, the Jewish leadership, especially Mikhoels, believed that the Jews who had survived the Shoah needed a place where they could survive, and Yiddish culture could too.
“So they asked Stalin to give them Crimea. They said that it would be another socialist republic, part of the Soviet Union, and that it would be a land of prosperity, because their brothers in the United States would help them rebuild that area, which had been completely destroyed during the war.
“That was a great mistake.
“Stalin got so mad. He said that they were Jewish nationalists, and they had to be executed.
“Why? Because Stalin knew about the Zionist attempts to create Israel. He voted in favor of it. He believed that Israel would be his ally in the Middle East. Most Zionists were leftists, and he was convinced by his minister of foreign affairs, Vyacheslav Molotov, that Israel would be a strong ally. Stalin was excited by this opportunity.
“Also, there already was a Jewish republic in Birobidzhan,” albeit one that attracted few Jews. “So now they also wanted Crimea?” Which is, as Mr. Smukler said, a beautiful place. “It is a gem,” he said.
So that’s why he ordered the execution of the 13 poets, “and with their deaths, we Russian Jews lost any connection with Yiddish,” Mr. Smukler said. “That was the end of Yiddishkeit there.
“They were the last of the Mohicans.”
So maybe one of the many lessons of this hard, sad story is that there are even more tragedies connected to Tisha B’Av than we realize.
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