Night of the Murdered Poets
처형된 시인들의 밤
On 12 August 1952, thirteen Soviet Jewish intellectuals associated with the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (JAC) were executed in Moscow's Lubyanka Prison. Among the victims, convicted of espionage and treason after three years of torture and solitary confinement, were five of the most prominent Yiddish literary figures: poets Peretz Markish, Dovid Hofshteyn, Itzik Fefer, and Leib Kvitko, and novelist David Bergelson. The executions marked the violent climax of the postwar state antisemitic campaign against 'rootless cosmopolitans' and directly preceded the Doctors' Plot.
In depth
Background
The Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (JAC) was formed in 1942 to mobilise world Jewish opinion behind the Soviet war effort against Nazi Germany, chaired by actor Solomon Mikhoels. After the war the JAC turned to documenting the Holocaust and rebuilding Jewish culture inside the USSR, including a proposal for Jewish autonomy in Crimea. Stalin viewed these activities with growing suspicion, and in January 1948 Mikhoels was assassinated by MGB agents in Minsk in a staged car crash.
The Case
On 20 November 1948 the JAC was dissolved by Politburo decree, and between autumn 1948 and summer 1949 fifteen of its leaders, Yiddish writers, doctors, and scholars were arrested. The defendants endured three years of beatings and torture in Lubyanka Prison, forcing most into false confessions; only Boris Shimeliovich refused to confess, later testifying he had received over two thousand blows. The trial ran from 8 May to 18 July 1952 before three military judges, with no prosecutors and no defence counsel. The presiding judge, Alexander Cheptsov, twice appealed to the leadership to reopen the investigation because of the glaring contradictions in the evidence; both appeals were denied.
Victims
Thirteen defendants were shot in the Lubyanka basement. Lina Stern, a biochemist and the first woman academician of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, received a three-and-a-half year sentence and was the sole survivor; Solomon Bregman fell into a coma during the trial and died in prison in January 1953. On 22 November 1955 the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court found that there was 'no substance to the charges' and closed the case.
Commemoration
Anniversaries of the execution were marked from the 1960s by the Soviet Jewry Movement in the West. A memorial to the JAC victims was dedicated in Jerusalem in 1977. Radio Liberty broadcast regular anniversary programmes from the 1970s onward, featuring readings of the murdered poets' works and survivor testimony.
Related historical events
Sources
- Wikipedia (EN) English Wikipedia: full account of the 12 August 1952 execution of 13 JAC defendants, the victims list including five Yiddish writers, the three-year torture/interrogation, the trial structure with no prosecutors or defence, Cheptsov's appeals, and the 1955 rehabilitation
- Wikipedia (RU) Russian Wikipedia: detailed history of the JAC case from the Committee's wartime origins through Mikhoels's assassination, the arrests of 1948-49, the trial, and the execution, with context on the anti-cosmopolitan campaign and the broader antisemitic purges
- archivum.org Blinken OSA Archivum (academic archive): scholarly article by Anastasia Felcher on the 70th anniversary, confirming the execution of 13 JAC members, the link to the Doctors' Plot, Radio Liberty's commemorative broadcasts, and the Western memorialisation from the 1960s onward