REVIEWS

Wall Street Journal, May 8, 2001

"In his fascinating introduction to this collection of documents, Joshua Rubenstein notes that the trials of the committee members, together with the arrests of the alleged leaders of the Jewish "Doctors' Plot" in January 1953 (accused of conspiring to murder the Soviet leadership) were probably meant to be the beginning of a larger Jewish purge. Stalin apparently intended to hold public show trials of the Jewish doctors, to execute the defendants and then to arrest and deport the entire Jewish population of the Soviet Union's major cities."

"Just as this book brilliantly portrays Soviet attitudes to the Jews, it also reveals a great deal about Soviet attitudes to justice in general. Mr. Rubenstein describes the political context very well . . . But it is still hard not to be mystified by the spectacle of the defendants variously confessing, refusing to confess, testifying against one another in a fruitless attempt to curry favor, pleading their faith in Soviet communism and apologizing for having been "poisoned by bourgeois nationalism."

-Anne Applebaum

The New York Times, May 30, 2001

"Mr. Rubenstein fills in the historical background of the 15 victims, bringing them to life in biographical sketches, showing their records of achievement before their arrests and their varying degrees of complicity in their own victimization and their resistance to it. What might have been a dry document of bureaucratic terror, a bloodless verbatim text, turns out to be a vivid, tragic panorama full of prickly individuals."

-Richard Bernstein

Elie Wiesel endorsement

"Thank you for sending me STALIN'S SECRET POGROM. Yale University Press is to be commended for publishing it. I have rarely felt so strongly about a book on contemporary history. Joshua Rubenstein and Vladimir P. Naumov have given us a power-packed volume about one of the darkest and cruellest chapters of Stalinist anti-Semitism and its mockery of human decency and justice. It must be read and reread."

- Elie Wiesel