Fall of a New Soviet-Jewish Person: The Unmasking of Anti-Antisemite Aleksandr Litinskii, aka American Spy Big Boss

Abstract

The paper examines the unmaking of an exemplary individual in Stalin's Soviet Union, a New Soviet Person, caught in the anti-Jewish campaign of Stalin's last years, often remembered for the notorious Doctors’ Plot. Aleksandr Litinskii was a Soviet true believer, a veteran of the Second World War, and a Jew whose father died in the Holocaust. When confronted with the anti-Jewish campaign, he was not disillusioned but decided to save the Soviet project through an elaborate attempt at reverse psychology. He posed in letters as an American spy bent on undermining the Soviet Union through antisemitism. Evidence from this bizarre case, collected from police archives that Ukraine declassified after the Maidan Revolution and from Litinskii's memoir, suggests new insights into Soviet Jewish experiences and into the legacy of persecution among Eastern Europeans who supported the regimes that repressed them.