Soviet anti-Zionism


Soviet anti-Zionism was a propaganda doctrine promulgated in the Soviet Union during the course of the Cold War, which intensified after the 1967 Six-Day War. It was officially sponsored by the department of propaganda of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and by the KGB. It alleged that Zionism was a form of racism, and argued that Zionists were similar to Nazis. The Soviet Union framed its anti-Zionist propaganda in terms of the ideological doctrine of Zionology, in the guise of a study of modern Zionism.

Background

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 favour of the United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine, which paved the way for the creation of the State of Israel. On 17 May 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.
In his 1969 book Beware! Zionism, Yuri Ivanov, Soviet Union's leading Zionologist, defined modern Zionism as follows:
Soviet leaders insisted that Soviet anti-Zionism was not anti-Semitic. As proof, they pointed to the fact that several notable Zionologists were ethnic Jews representing an expert opinion. Many—including some within the Soviet Union itself—argued that Zionology exhibited anti-Semitic themes. For example, in November 1975, the leading Soviet historian and academic M. Korostovtsev wrote a letter to the Secretary of the Central Committee, of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union Mikhail Suslov, regarding the book The Encroaching Counter Revolution by Vladimir Begun: "...it perceptibly stirs up anti-Semitism under the flag of anti-Zionism."
Some Zionology books, "exposing" Zionism and Judaism, were included in the mandatory reading list for military and police personnel, students, teachers and Communist Party members and were mass published.
The third edition of the thirty-volume Great Soviet Encyclopedia, published in 1969-1978, qualifies Zionism as racism and makes the following assertions:
The official position of the Soviet Union and its satellite states and agencies was that Zionism was a tool used by the Jews and Americans for "racist imperialism." The meaning of the term Zionism was defined by the ruling Communist Party of the Soviet Union: "the main posits of modern Zionism are militant chauvinism, racism, anti-Communism and anti-Sovietism... overt and covert fight against freedom movements and the USSR."
In his book A History of the Jews in the Modern World, Howard Sachar argues that the atmosphere of the Soviet "anti-Zionist" campaign in the wake of the Six-Day War was anti-Semitic, and even compares it to Nazism:
"In late July 1967, Moscow launched an unprecedented propaganda campaign against Zionism as a "world threat." Defeat was attributed not to tiny Israel alone, but to an "all-powerful international force."... In its flagrant vulgarity, the new propaganda assault soon achieved Nazi-era characteristics. The Soviet public was saturated with racist canards. Extracts from Trofim Kichko's notorious 1963 volume, Judaism Without Embellishment, were extensively republished in the Soviet media. Yuri Ivanov's Beware: Zionism, a book essentially replicated The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, was given nationwide coverage."

A similar picture was drawn by Paul Johnson:
The Israeli government was also referred to as a "terrorist regime" which "has raised terror to the level of state politics." Even regarding the Entebbe hostage crisis, Soviet media reported: "Israel committed an act of aggression against Uganda, assaulting the Entebbe airport."
Paul Johnson and other historians have also argued that United Nations General Assembly Resolution 3379 of 10 November 1975 that equated "Zionism" with "racism" was orchestrated by the Soviet Union. Resolution 3379 was pioneered by the Soviet Union and passed with numerical support from Arab, Muslim and African states amidst accusations that Israel was supportive of the apartheid regime in South Africa. Though ten days before the Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Soviet sponsored United Nations General Assembly Resolution 46/86 was adopted on 16 December 1991 which revoked the determination in
Resolution 3379.
On 1 April 1983, official newspaper of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Pravda, ran a full front-page article titled From the Soviet Leadership:
Also, at the same time, the CPSU set up the Anti-Zionist Committee of the Soviet Public as an anti-Zionist propaganda tool.
Another recurring Zionology theme was the allegation of secret ties between the Nazis and the Zionist leadership. The thesis of 1982 doctoral dissertation of Mahmoud Abbas, a co-founder of Fatah and one of the leaders of the Palestine Liberation Organization and President of the Palestinian National Authority who earned his Ph.D. in history at the Oriental College in Moscow, was The Secret Connection between the Nazis and the Leaders of the Zionist Movement. According to HNN, "Abbas claimed in his work that the Zionist leadership was interested in convincing the world that a large number of Jews were killed during the war in order to “attain larger gains” after the war and to "divide the booty." Abbas’ primary claim in his thesis is that the Zionist movement and its various branches worked hand in hand with the Nazis against the Jewish people, collaborating with them for the Jews’ destruction because the Zionist leaders viewed “Palestine” as the only legitimate place for Jewish immigration." The doctoral thesis was published as a book in 1984 under the title .
In March 1985 Mikhail Gorbachev became the Secretary General of the CPSU and in April he declared perestroika. It took more than six years before Moscow consented to restore diplomatic relations with Israel on 19 October 1991, just 2 months before the collapse of the USSR and ten days before the Dissolution of the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union was one of the sponsors of United Nations General Assembly Resolution 46/86 which was adopted on 16 December 1991 and revoked Resolution 3379 that had called Zionism a form of racism.