ABSTRACT
In September 1945, four Jewish frontoviks, members of the Communist Party from Kiev, addressed Stalin, Beriya, and Pospelov in a letter, in a desperate tone. The victim of the soldiers, by the narrative of the letter, took the constant anti-Jewish insults and anti-Semitism of Kiev as a personal insult, and killed the offenders with his revolver. For obvious reasons, the voice of Jews who were trying to regain their pre-war apartments, properties, and status was louder than the voice of those who complained about the perceived “Jewish oppression” after Kiev’s liberation. Although the latent tensions and social-political conflicts during and right after the war within Soviet society could take the form of anti-Semitic incidents, as happened in early September 1945 in Kiev, the reductio ad absurdum of these processes to unqualified anti-Jewishness, especially in the genre of the Geistesgeschichte of anti-Semitism, seems to the author as a grave oversimplification.
