That time Stalin went full Zionist

I’m starting to do some work on a part of this book that will be about antisemitism in the Soviet Union. One thing that I want to get into is the big issue of Stalin and Jews and Zionism, a weird and contradictory zone full of unexpected and unbelievable events — everything from Stalin surprising everyone by going full Zionist in 1947 to people seriously believing that he was on the verge of gulaging and genociding Soviet Jews just a few years later, right before he died.

Looking through some notes I’ve amassed on this topic, I came across an entry from the diary of Ivan Maisky that gives you a glimpse into this weird world.

Maisky was a diplomat who served as the Soviet ambassador to the United Kingdom from 1932 to 1943. He kept a diary. That, apparently, was something few top Soviet politicians did. I guess they were paranoid that anything they wrote could and would be used against them if things turned and they found themselves on the wrong side of a purge. And they were probably right. Because true to that fear, Maisky eventually had his diaries confiscated when he himself was arrested in 1953 and accused of being a British spy. He probably would have seen his own words twisted and used against him and then executed, had Stalin not died a few weeks after the arrest. Maisky’s diaries then languished forgotten in the Foreign Ministry’s archives, until they were accidentally discovered in the early 1990s…