On 1 April 1983, the CPSU official newspaper, Pravda, ran a full front-page article titled From the Soviet Leadership: The fundamental idea of the anti-Zionist manifesto was that potential Jewish emigrants from the Soviet Union were to be considered enemies of the Soviet Union. The anti-Zionist manifesto was signed by 8 anti-Zionist Jews:
From late 1944, Joseph Stalin adopted a pro-Zionist foreign policy, apparently believing that the new country would be socialist and would speed the decline of British influence in the Middle East. Accordingly, in November 1947, the Soviet Union, together with the other Soviet bloc countries voted in favor of the United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine, which paved the way for the creation of the State of Israel. On May 17, 1948, three days after Israel declared its independence, the Soviet Union officially granted de jure recognition of Israel, becoming only the second country to recognise the Jewish state and the first country to grant Israel de jure recognition. By 1983, the Soviet regime needed a new propaganda weapon in the Cold War, as well as against increasingly active internal dissident movement, to arrest or discredit the mass emigration of Soviet Jews and to alleviate the Arab concerns about its effects on Israel's demographics. By the dramatic stepping-up of "anti-Zionist" activities, the AZSCP was designed to solve these problems. David Abramovich Dragunsky, Colonel-General, twice Hero of the Soviet Union and World War II hero, well known inside the country and abroad, was designated its chairman. The writers who specialized in the Soviet-invented and sponsored doctrine of Zionology considered any expressions of Jewishness as Zionist and therefore subject to being stamped out. In November 1975, the leading Soviet historian academic M. Korostovtsev wrote a letter to the Secretary of the Central Committee, Mikhail Suslov, regarding the book The encroaching counterrevolution by prominent Zionologist Vladimir Begun: "...it perceptibly stirs up anti-Semitism under the flag of anti-Zionism". In addition to propaganda in the mass media and publishing, the AZCSP's projects included the "International symposium on contemporary problems of anti-Zionism" and preparation for an "International anti-Zionist congress". By the end of the 1980s, with the new policies of glasnost and perestroika, and with the impending dissolution of the Soviet Union, the old Soviet regime had lost its stability and many of those plans had to be cancelled. Finally it was dismantled in October 1994. Some materials produced by the AZCSP were used by ultra-nationalist groups such as Pamyat.
List of members
David Dragunsky, chairman — Colonel-General, Hero of the Soviet Union
