Did Joseph Stalin Drink the ‘L'chaim’ Toast?
‘Death of Communism’ provided a quote from a jewish writer named Louis Levine relating to the alleged jewishness of Joseph Stalin which I have been able to validate.
They write as follows:
‘The Jewish writer Louis Levine, in SOVIET RUSSIA TODAY (Nov. 1946) wrote: “Stalin & the father of his Jewish son-in-law drank Lachaim together in the Kremlin.”’ (1)
This is true since the original quote in Louis Levine’s 1946 article ‘Where Anti-Semitism is a Crime’ states that:
‘I need not add that the Soviet Jews greeted with joy the news that Stalin and the father of his prospective father-in-law drank “lachaim” together in the Kremlin!’ (2)
For transparency I also provide the page with the relevant passage in the top left:
However, what is Levine actually referring to?
The first is a point of historical context in that ‘Soviet Russia Today’ was the flagship Soviet propaganda publication in the United States whose principal audience was the membership of the ‘Friends of Soviet Russia’ – which became the ‘Friends of the Soviet Union’ in 1927 – in the United States.
Levine is also writing in the context of the immediate post-war period where the Soviet Union leaned heavily upon how it had ‘saved’ various peoples – most notably the jews but also the Poles – from the ‘evil Third Reich’ and in the wake of the first of the Nuremberg Trials that had just finished in October 1946. (3)
So obviously Levine is seeking to play up the Soviet Union’s image as the ‘real friend of the jews’; hence his absolute (and utterly implausible as well as outlandishly wrong) denial that any anti-Semitism existed in the Soviet Union. (4)
The second is this event refers to the marriage of Stalin’s daughter Svetlana Alliluyeva to a jewish student in Moscow named Grigory (Grisha) Morozov in 1944. (5) Stalin never approved of Morozov who had previous been a traffic policeman (6) and subsequently became a respected Soviet lawyer, (7) but despite frequent repetition by those who should know better: Stalin did not force Svetlana to divorce Morozov in 1947 (this false is also often used to buttress claims that Stalin was ‘anti-Semitic’) and this was entirely her own decision. (8)
Thirdly it is entirely possible that Stalin did indeed toast Morozov and Svetlana’s marriage in 1944 with the ‘l'chaim’ toast given that jews were a key element to the Soviet war effort and especially its relations with the United States, (9) but we should not read into that anything beyond the fact that Stalin need jews onside to help with the war with the Third Reich (much as he did the Russian Orthodox Church).
Fourthly it is entirely the story of the toast isn’t actually true but rather a apocryphal propaganda story either invented by Levine or simply repeated by him – the latter is far more likely – given that the Soviet Union was quite happy inventing things out of whole cloth if it suited them.
Thus, we can see that ‘Death of Communism’s’ quote is accurate – albeit lifted from another source (probably Irish Catholic theologian and historian Denis Fahey’s ‘The Rulers of Russia’ which ‘Death of Communism’ makes mention of) – but it doesn’t indicate that Stalin was jewish but does suggest that the jews were very powerful within Stalin’s Soviet Union which we know to be true. (10)
References
(1) https://www.deathofcommunism.com/stalin-the-jew/
(2) Louis Levine, ‘Where Anti-Semitism is a Crime’, Soviet Russia Today, November 1946, p. 32
(3)As summarized by Joshua Rubenstein, Vladimir Naumov, 2005, ‘Stalin’s Secret Pogrom: The Postwar Inquisition of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee’, 2nd Edition, Yale University Press: New Haven, pp. 25-40
(4) Levine, Op. Cit., p. 14
(5) Svetlana Alliluyeva, 1967, ‘Twenty Letters to a Friend’, 1st Edition, Hutchinson: London, p. 194
(6) Simon Sebag Montefiore, 2003, ‘Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar’, 1st Edition, Phoenix: London, p. 522
(7) Ibid., p. 574, n. 2
(8) Ibid., p. 574
(9) Rubenstein, Naumov, Op. Cit., pp. 14-19
(10) Directly implied by Bernard Wasserstein, 2012, ‘On the Eve: The Jews of Europe Before the Second World War’, 1st Edition, Profile: London, pp. 64-65