Anti-Semitism And Stalin

Joe Stalin took a position on Anti-Semitism in 1931. Whether it was always his view is another matter. He is alleged to have had Jews as wives and as mistresses. See inter alia the Jewish Love Affair of Stalin

 

From http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1931/01/12.htm

 

Anti-Semitism

January 12, 1931

Reply to an Inquiry of the Jewish News Agency in the United States


Source: Works, Vol. 13, 1930 - January 1934
Publisher: Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow, 1954
Transcription/HTML Markup: Salil Sen for MIA, 2008
Public Domain: Marxists Internet Archive (2008). You may freely copy, distribute, display and perform this work; as well as make derivative and commercial works. Please credit "Marxists Internet Archive" as your source.


In answer to your inquiry :

National and racial chauvinism is a vestige of the misanthropic customs characteristic of the period of cannibalism. Anti-semitism, as an extreme form of racial chauvinism, is the most dangerous vestige of cannibalism.

Anti-semitism is of advantage to the exploiters as a lightning conductor that deflects the blows aimed by the working people at capitalism. Anti-semitism is dangerous for the working people as being a false path that leads them off the right road and lands them in the jungle. Hence Communists, as consistent internationalists, cannot but be irreconcilable, sworn enemies of anti-semitism.

In the U.S.S.R. anti-semitism is punishable with the utmost severity of the law as a phenomenon deeply hostile to the Soviet system. Under U.S.S.R. law active anti-semites are liable to the death penalty.

J. Stalin
January 12, 1931

First published in the newspaper Pravda, No. 329, November 30, 1936