Solomon Abramovich Lozovsky

Solomon Lozovsky was a veteran revolutionary who joined the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in 1901, organized trade union work in Parisian exile, and after the revolution gave half his life to building the red axis of the international labor movement. As general secretary of the Red International of Labour Unions (Profintern) from 1921 to 1937 he bound left trade unions of dozens of countries into a single international, and as a multilingual theorist and organizer he was one of the international communist movement's foremost specialists on labor. In 1939 he became a deputy people's commissar of foreign affairs.

The war gave him a new podium. As deputy chief of the Soviet Information Bureau (Sovinformburo), created in June 1941, he held regular briefings for foreign correspondents in Moscow and Kuibyshev. In the darkest weeks of autumn 1941, with the Wehrmacht at the approaches to Moscow, his seasoned, calm, and often sharp-tongued briefings were the channel through which the world press learned that the Soviet Union was not collapsing. From 1945 to 1948 he headed the Sovinformburo.

Under his supervision the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (JAC) and several other anti-fascist committees were organized in 1942. The JAC's American tour, led by Mikhoels, raised large solidarity funds for the Soviet war effort and helped bind world opinion into the anti-fascist front. No one then could know that this work, given to the cause of victory, would a few years later be twisted into the charge that destroyed him.

With the dissolution of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee at the end of 1948 and the hardening of the postwar antisemitic campaign, Lozovsky's fate was sealed. In January 1949 he was expelled from the party and arrested. The charges, including a plot to establish a Jewish republic in Crimea and hand it to the United States, were fabricated from beginning to end, and over three years of investigation a confession was wrung out of a man in his seventies.

At the closed trial before the Military Collegium from May to July 1952, Lozovsky did something remarkable. He retracted his confession in open court and, in testimony spread over several days, dismantled the logic of the indictment point by point. This defense, in which an old revolutionary with half a century in the movement proved from memory and logic alone that the entire case was fiction, gave his co-defendants the courage to withdraw their own confessions. Even the presiding judge, Cheptsov, asked his superiors to return the case for reinvestigation and was refused. On July 18, 1952 the death sentence was pronounced, and on August 12 Lozovsky was shot together with the poets Peretz Markish, David Bergelson, Leib Kvitko and others. The date is remembered as the Night of the Murdered Poets.

In November 1955 the Soviet military court acknowledged that the whole case had been fabricated and rehabilitated all the defendants. The trial transcript, opened in the 1990s, preserves Lozovsky's defense in full and has been published in the English edition prepared by Rubenstein and Naumov. His final days, fighting with logic and dignity even inside a rigged courtroom, remain the brightest record within the dark chapter of the postwar antisemitic campaign.