When the leader of the Soviet Union Joseph Stalin died on March 5, 1953, millions in the country wept with grief. Many millions more wept, unsure of why. For almost three decades, the Soviet people had endured one of the most brutal regimes in modern history.
Terror, purges, and repression had been part of everyday life. Stalin’s death brought an uncertain pause – a fleeting hope that the days ahead might be quieter. For those who longed for calm, the rise of Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev would prove to be a mixed blessing.
Though the mass purges were halted, Khrushchev’s leadership was anything but tranquil. This was a man of contradictions, as unpredictable as the country he ruled. He denounced his leader, Stalin, and began the process of de-Stalinization.
He pounded his shoe on his delegate-desk at the United Nations, dragged the world to the brink of nuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis, sent astronaut Yuri Gagarin soaring into space, and brought Soviet culture into the swinging Sixties.
He oversaw the building of the Berlin Wall, cementing the physical Iron Curtain across Europe, crushed the Hungarian Uprising, and constantly kept the world guessing. Things were never quiet when Nikita Sergeyivich was around.
But what of his attitude toward the Jews?
Khrushchev’s views on Jews can be broadly divided into two periods. In his youth and rise to power under Stalin, he reflected the typical Russian suspicion of Jews as “different,” though his sentiments were far less virulent than those of many of his contemporaries.
This article, the first of two parts, looks at Khrushchev’s early life and rise within the Communist Party against his interactions with Jews. Later, as will be addressed in the second part, as the supreme leader of the Soviet Union his attitude evolved, shaped by his dealings with the United States and the rise of Israel as a regional power.
The rise to power
Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev was born on April 15, 1894, in the village of Kalinovka, near the Ukrainian border. His early years were marked by hardship and rural poverty. Raised in a family of peasants, Khrushchev spent much of his youth working as a shepherd and later as a metalworker.
His modest upbringing would shape his political persona as a man of the people – a practical, blunt leader with deep disdain for the aristocratic elite. During his formative years in Ukraine, Khrushchev witnessed the brutal realities of life in the Russian Empire, including the violent persecution of Jews.
Khrushchev’s views on Jews were shaped, in part, by a harrowing childhood experience in Yuzovka (now Donetsk, Ukraine), where he witnessed a brutal pogrom. He later recalled the event in vivid and chilling detail.
“In my own childhood in the Donbass, I once witnessed a pogrom with my own eyes,” he wrote in his memoirs. “A volley of rifle fire rang out. Someone shouted that they were shooting into the air. Someone else shouted that they were shooting with blanks and that only one or two soldiers were shooting with live bullets just to scare the Jews a little.”
Rumors swirled that for three days, Jews could be attacked with impunity. Khrushchev, still a young boy, decided to see the aftermath for himself.
“I heard that many of the Jews who had been beaten were in the factory infirmary. I decided to go and look with one of my friends, another little boy. We found a horrible scene. The corpses of Jews who had been beaten to death were lying in rows on the floor.”
The brutality was fueled by wild accusations, including a claim that Jews had paraded through the streets with their leader, the “yid tsar,” and anti-Russian banners. “The Russians set this factory on fire, and the ‘yid tsar’ was burned alive inside,” Khrushchev wrote.
Yet even in the midst of such violence, Khrushchev observed a contradiction that may have influenced his later political pragmatism. “The workers realized that the Jews were not their enemies when they saw that many leaders of the factory strikes were Jews, and the main speakers whom the workers eagerly listened to at political meetings were Jews.”
This duality – seeing Jews as both victims of violence and influential figures in the workers’ movement – may have shaped his ambivalent stance toward Soviet Jews later in life, when he distanced himself from Stalinist antisemitic purges yet remained deeply suspicious of Zionism and Jewish nationalism.
Although Khrushchev’s views on Jews were shaped by the prejudices of his time, his exposure to such violence likely planted the seeds of a more complex attitude toward Jewish people – less virulent than many of his peers but still tinged with suspicion and condescension.
He was later to recall to Lavrentiy Beria, Stalin’s feared secret police chief, that “My father was illiterate, but he never took part in a pogrom. It was considered a disgrace.” Khrushchev’s writings offer a fascinating insight into his attitude and mentality toward all facets of Soviet ideology and policy.
Yet, they must be treated with a certain level of wariness, as with all first-person historical recollections. Written after his fall from power, his desire to paint himself in a positive light and to free himself from guilt associated with the Stalinist years should be weighed up against genuine feelings that he expresses, while his insights toward antisemitism and Jews are perceptive.
It would seem that Khrushchev personally had no deep antisemitic feelings. He repeatedly references Jewish communists he was close to and gladly worked with for many years and is reluctant to bring their faith into it.
Khrushchev’s life took a dramatic turn with the outbreak of World War I. While he did not see front line combat, he became politically active during the chaotic years that followed. With the fall of Tsar Nicholas II in February 1917 and the subsequent takeover by the Bolsheviks the following October, Khrushchev’s life would change forever.
The Russian Civil War (1917–1922) swept through Ukraine, and Khrushchev sided with the Bolsheviks after much deliberation. This period of conflict and revolution not only solidified his Marxist-Leninist beliefs but also provided him with the military and political experience that would later serve him well.
Khrushchev served as political commissar for the Red Army, a role in which he was expected to indoctrinate troops on the tenets of communism and promote troop morale. In the early 1920s, he maintained several uninspiring roles in local party affairs, but it was in 1925 that his ascent in the Communist Party began in earnest.
This owed much to his relationship with Lazar Kaganovich, one of Stalin’s closest associates and key figure in Soviet politics. Kaganovich, born in 1893 to a working-class Jewish family in Ukraine, was a relentless political operator known for his loyalty to Stalin and his ruthless efficiency in enforcing party directives.
His Jewish heritage in a deeply antisemitic empire made his rise in the Bolshevik ranks remarkable, and his influence over Soviet policy during the 1920s and 1930s was significant. As the leader of the Ukrainian Communist Party from 1925, Kaganovich played a pivotal role in Khrushchev’s early career. He took Khrushchev under his wing, mentoring him in party politics and administration, and helped him rise through the ranks in Ukraine.
Khrushchev described Kaganovich in his memoirs as a hard but pragmatic mentor who taught him how to navigate the treacherous waters of Soviet politics. Kaganovich was instrumental in appointing Khrushchev to key roles, including head of the Party’s Moscow city organization – a stepping stone to national prominence.
By 1934, Khrushchev had risen to become the Party leader of Moscow and a member of the Central Committee, a rapid ascent he attributed to his connection with Nadezhda Alliluyeva, Stalin’s wife, who spoke well of him to her husband, although this is disputed by historians.
He was also, by now, a rising member of Stalin’s inner circle.
Stalin’s inner circle
Through his rapid ascent to the upper echelons of the Communist Party, Khrushchev ironically stood out among other leading Bolsheviks – perhaps Stalin aside – simply for the fact that he was so unremarkable.
He was not a theoretician nor an intellectual. He was a worker. His whole life was spent trying to play catch-up intellectually and culturally, and he always felt out of place among those until his final years as leader.
His down-to-earth, peasant style initially made him popular with people, but he was never one slated for the state’s top position. He was a true Marxist, devoted to the ideals and believed in Stalin.
It was this faith and apparent “lowliness” that partly appealed to Stalin and allowed Khrushchev to become an intimate member of the leader’s inner circle.
All peoples and nations in the Soviet Union suffered under Stalin. Nobody was safe from his mania, the purges of the 1930s, or the terrible ethnic cleansing that he wrought upon many regions across the country.
Whole nations were uprooted from their homes of centuries and transplanted somewhere on the other side of the USSR. The Jews, naturally, were not to be spared, and Stalin’s antisemitism became infamous, bordering on a manic obsession.
Khrushchev’s role in the purges is not to be overlooked. As a Central Committee member, he, as was party policy, was required to approve the arrests of thousands of people. He saw friends and colleagues whom he had known for years wiped from the pages of history.
He later claimed in his memories that most committee members were unaware of the real truth as to how many people were shot or sent to the Gulag, and part of this must be put down to self-preservation.
There is, however, some truth in the fact that Khrushchev was not intimately aware, unlike others in Stalin’s gang, of the true extent of the purges. He was also at this time still completely enraptured with Stalin and a belief in the communist system as the best political ideology possible.
By late 1937, Khrushchev was back in Ukraine, this time as secretary general of the entire Ukrainian Communist Party. It was there that he was witness to the effects of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the non-aggression agreement signed in August 1939 between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, which gave the Soviets free rein to enter western Ukraine and Poland.
He witnessed Jews attempting to flee Ukraine westward to Poland to escape the Soviets, despite the fact that they “must have known how the Germans were dealing with Jews” and “wanted to get back to a land where fascism now ruled.”
When Nazi Germany invaded the USSR in June 1941, Khrushchev resumed his role as military political commissar, inspiring troops with political theory and attempting to keep up troop morale. He was in Kiev as the city fell to the German forces, and then spent time traveling all over the front, particularly in Stalingrad, as the city bore witness to one of the fiercest battles in history.
He returned to Ukraine as the Red Army succeeded in driving the Germans back, recalling encounters with Jews on the streets of Ukraine.
After the liberation of Kiev in November 1943 and Khrushchev’s return to the city, he remembered that he and his colleagues were walking along Lenin Street when “we suddenly heard a hysterical scream, and a young man came running toward us. He kept shouting, ‘I’m the only Jew left! I’m the last Jew in Kiev who’s still alive!’ I tried to calm him down. I could see he was in quite a state, and I worried that maybe he had gone insane.
“I asked him how he had survived. ‘I have a Ukrainian wife,’ he said, ‘and she kept me hidden in the attic. She fed me and took care of me. If I’d shown myself in the city, I would have been exterminated along with all the other Jews.’”
Despite cases like these, there is, however, a notable absence on Khrushchev’s part in discussing the fate of the Jews under the Nazis. The massacre at Babyn Yar (to which the Jew Khrushchev met was referring) was swept aside and not recognized for years by Soviet authorities, who tried to cover it up. To Khrushchev, the Jews had suffered no worse than ordinary Soviet citizens under German occupation, despite all the evidence to the contrary.
Post-war, Stalin’s paranoia had increasingly turned toward Jews, whom he saw as potential agents of Western imperialism, particularly in light of the creation of the State of Israel in 1948. The Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (JAC), originally established during World War II to rally international Jewish support for the Soviet war effort, became a target of this suspicion.
“While we were still pushing the Germans out of Ukraine, an organization had been formed called the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee of the Soviet Bureau of Information (Sovinformburo),” Khrushchev wrote.
“It was set up for gathering materials…and for the distribution of these materials to the Western press, principally in America, where there is a large, influential circle of Jews.” Initially viewed as useful for Soviet propaganda, the JAC became a liability in Stalin’s eyes when its members proposed turning Crimea into a Jewish Soviet Republic.
“Once the Ukraine had been liberated, a paper was drafted by members of the Lozovsky committee,” Khrushchev recounted.
“It was addressed to Stalin and contained a proposal that the Crimea be made a Jewish Soviet Republic within the Soviet Union after the deportation of the Crimean Tatars. Stalin saw behind this proposal the hand of American Zionists operating through the Sovinformburo.
“The committee members, he declared, were agents of American Zionism. They were trying to set up a Jewish state in the Crimea and to establish an outpost of American imperialism on our shores.”
This paranoia culminated in the arrest and eventual execution of key JAC figures, including its chairman Solomon Lozovsky, and the assassination of prominent Yiddish actor and committee member Solomon Mikhoels.
Mikhoels, who had once been the face of Soviet Jewish culture, was brutally murdered in what was staged to appear as a car accident – an event that Khrushchev himself later confirmed as an orchestrated killing.
During this period, the purges of Jews under Stalin from government and public life intensified. One case in point is the infamous Doctors’ Plot. Not so much for Khrushchev’s involvement. More for the fact that when recalling it in his memoirs, there is no mention of Jews at all.
The Doctors’ Plot was an antisemitic campaign orchestrated by the Soviet government, alleging that a group of primarily Jewish doctors in Moscow was conspiring to assassinate top Communist Party and state officials.
Also referred to as the case of the “killer doctors” or “saboteur doctors,” the accusations emerged between 1951 and 1953. The Soviet press fueled the hysteria with publications warning of the dangers of Zionism and singling out individuals with Jewish surnames.
As a result, many doctors – Jewish and non-Jewish – were dismissed from their positions, arrested, and subjected to torture to extract confessions. However, just weeks after Stalin’s death in 1953, the new Soviet leadership dismissed the case due to insufficient evidence, later officially acknowledging it as a fabrication.
Despite a whole chapter devoted to it in his memoirs, Khrushchev neglects to bring in the antisemitic element of Stalin’s purge, simply referring to it as “The doctors’ case was a cruel and contemptible thing.” Khrushchev later admitted that he and others in the Soviet leadership had been conditioned to accept Stalin’s reasoning, recalling:
“A question of substance: Was it necessary to create a Jewish Union or autonomous republic within the Russian Federation or the Ukraine? I don’t think it was. A Jewish autonomous region had already been created, which still nominally exists, so it was hardly necessary to set one up in the Crimea.”
Khrushchev once again admits the hold that the long-serving Soviet leader held over his underlings. “We had been conditioned to accept Stalin’s reasoning.”
“I’ve tried to give Stalin his due and to acknowledge his merits, but there was no excuse for what, to my mind, was a major defect in his character – his hostile attitude toward the Jewish people,” Khrushchev would state.
“As a leader and a theoretician, he took care never to hint at this antisemitism in his written works or in his speeches. When he happened to talk about a Jew, Stalin often imitated in a well-known, exaggerated accent the ways Jews talk. This is the same way that thick-headed, backward people who despise Jews talk when they mock the negative Jewish trait.
“Antisemitism grew like a growth inside Stalin’s own brain. Then, after Stalin’s death, we arrested the spread a bit, but only arrested it. Unfortunately, the germs of antisemitism remained in our system.”
When Stalin passed away in early 1953, a power struggle arose among his closest comrades: Lavrentiy Beria, Georgy Malenkov, Khrushchev, Kaganovich, Kliment Voroshilov, Vyacheslav Molotov, and Nikolai Bulganin. It would take time, but by the end Khrushchev would become the dominant force in Soviet politics for a decade.
Nikita Khrushchev was a product of the Soviet system, spending decades within its rigid ideological framework. Like his contemporaries, he absorbed many of Stalin’s suspicions about Jews, particularly regarding their perceived dual loyalties.
Throughout Stalin’s rule, Soviet Jews were both instrumentalized and vilified – encouraged to help generate pro-Soviet sentiment among Western Jewish communities during World War II, only to later be accused of treachery for maintaining those very same connections.
This contradiction encapsulated the tragedy of Soviet Jewry: They were exploited as a means of garnering external support, then demonized as a fifth column within Soviet borders.
Post-World War II, there was a growing paranoia within the Soviet leadership, where Jews – once indispensable to the war effort – were now viewed as politically unreliable and dangerously connected to the West.
Khrushchev, wholly enmeshed in the Stalinist system at this time, did nothing to challenge these views. His engagement with Jewish issues became more pronounced when he was assigned key leadership roles in Soviet-annexed territories, particularly in western Ukraine and parts of Poland between 1939 and 1941, and again after 1944 when the Soviets were in control.
The Soviet occupation of these areas brought him into direct contact with Jewish communities that had long existed outside the original Soviet framework. In these newly acquired territories, Khrushchev encountered Jewish populations that were more politically diverse and less integrated into Soviet ideology than those in Moscow or Leningrad.
However, his leadership in these regions did not translate into a more nuanced approach to Jewish concerns. Instead, his policies largely mirrored broader Soviet trends – supporting Jews when politically convenient, and suppressing them when their loyalties were called into question.
Ultimately, Khrushchev’s approach to Jews and antisemitism was shaped by the massive contradictions within the Soviet system itself. He was not an ideological antisemite in the mold of some of his peers, but neither was he an ally to Soviet Jews.
His de-Stalinization efforts did not extend to addressing antisemitism as a systemic issue, and he remained deeply suspicious of Zionism and any Jewish connections to the West. While he later attempted to position himself as a critic of Stalin’s paranoia, he had spent too many years complicit in that very same fear-mongering to be absolved of responsibility.
The years he spent as leader would feature fewer domestic-based policies concerning Jews; and as Khrushchev helped to power the Cold War forward through the 1950s and ‘60s, his focus became more and more foreign policy, with a particular interest in the Middle East and the Arab states.
Khrushchev’s time in power, as well as his policies on Soviet Jewry and his relationship with Israel, Zionism, and the Middle East, will be addressed in Part II in the coming weeks.
