Tag #155315 - Interview #94498 (Evadiy Rubalskiy)

In 1948 trials against cosmopolitans [Campaign against ‘cosmopolitans’] [44] started. There were articles published in newspapers every day about another ‘rootless cosmopolitan’, activists of science or art, and of course, they were all Jews. At that time the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee [45], organized during the war and providing a big support to the country was routed. All members of the committee, and some rather outstanding people among them, were sentenced to death or long-term imprisonment in the GULAG camps. Solomon Mikhoels [46], a popular actor and chairman of the committee was not put in trial. In Minsk, where he went on business, he was hit by a truck ‘accidentally’. I don’t know about the others, but I understood there was actually no accident and that this was all plotted. Of course, these processes inspired negative feelings about Jews in the people, who did not do any evaluation or comparison and preferred to blindly believe everything the newspapers published. Anti-Semitism was growing. It gradually emerged on the state level. I think it reached the peak during the period of the ‘doctors’ plot [47] in January 1953. The central newspapers published the letter of Doctor Lidia Timoschuk entitled ‘Murderers in white robes’. It stated that the Kremlin doctors whose patient was Stalin were trying to poison him. Stalin was an idol of the Soviet people. Nobody doubted the Timoschuk’s statements. I didn’t believe that what this newspaper published was true. During the war I was in hospitals and I saw how devotedly the doctors worked and how they took every effort to bring their patients to recovery, but the majority of people were convinced that newspapers were publishing the truth. This caused aggravation of anti-Semitism. To abuse a Jew was almost a patriotic deed. Of course, this was particularly hard for Jewish doctors. People refused to visit them or have them in hospitals and demanded other doctors. Jews could not find a job or enter colleges. It’s hard to say what this would have brought the society to, if Stalin had not died on 5 March 1953. Now I understand that his death was probably our rescue, but at that time Stalin’s death was a common grief. People did not hide tears and I cried, too. The speech made by Khrushchev [48] at the 20th Congress of the party in 1956 revealed the truth for me about Stalin and his accomplices’ crimes. The collectivization [49], when the most skillful and experienced farmers were called kulaks [50] and exiled to Siberia, prewar arrests and postwar trials over cosmopolitans, the doctors… It’s hard to name all of them. Some people still believe that we had won the war thanks to Stalin and that our forces went in offensives with his name. It is true, we went in attacks with the words: ‘Hurrah, for Stalin!’, but it was not Stalin who defeated fascism, but the people despite Stalin. How many mistakes had been made and perhaps they were intentional actions rather than mistakes. We might have won with significantly fewer casualties if it had not been for these misdeeds of Stalin. Since 1936 he was gradually executing the best commanders, the elite of the army. New commanders had no experience. At times general were appointed as commanders of regiments and when they arrived in place, their acting predecessor in the rank of captain transferred the office to him. Then it turned out that all high ranks in this regiment had been executed by Stalin’s order. There were many such cases. Many army units were in camps at the beginning of the war and there was no communication with them. The Hitler’s army was significantly more numerous that our army. German soldiers were armed with machine guns and we had antediluvian rifles of the World War I type. Stalin failed to figure out the direction of the major blow of Hitler. Hitler’s tactic was to seize the capital and then the country was to be his, but Stalin believed that Hitler’s priority was Ukraine, and he made another mistake. His next mistake was fortification areas. It was not beneficial for us to build weapon emplacements along the new borders of the USSR – Belarus and Western Ukraine. These areas were annexed to the USSR in 1939. [Annexation od Eastern Poland] [51] They formerly belonged to Poland where the railroad track was 7 cm narrower than in the USSR. [In Europe, the standard gauge is 143.51 cm. In the USSR, among other reasons in order to prevent a fast railroad offensive from abroad, the standard gauge was 152 cm. In many of the ex-Soviet countries this system is still in use.] So, we had to replace the railroad track and build bridges and reconstruct the roads. This was to take a long time. Then came our army food stocks and weapon stocks. The government decided on their location. They had some located farther than the river Volga and others for the western direction. The government’s rationale was that our army was not to retreat, but advance and then we would just march from one stock to another while we retreated and Germans captured our stocks. At best our units managed to eliminate them to leave nothing to the enemy. The next mistake was the tank corps formed in 1932. They did not justify themselves. After the war in Spain [Spanish Civil War] [52] they were disbanded and the combat power of the army reduced. Stalin did not trust the intelligence. Our intelligence agent in German Richard Zorge [53] informed Stalin that Germans were planning to attack the USSR on 22 June 1941, but Stalin called this information a misinformation of the British intelligence and believed Zorge to be a double agent. We are still unaware of many things, but even this information is sufficient.