 | Some of this article'slisted sourcesmay not bereliable. Please help improve this article by looking for better, more reliable sources. Unreliable citations may be challenged and removed.(February 2021) (Learn how and when to remove this message) |
Solomon (Shloyme) Mikhoels (Yiddish:שלמה מיכאעלס [also spelled שלוימע מיכאעלס during the Soviet era],Russian:Cоломон (Шлойме) Михоэлс, 16 March [O.S. 4 March] 1890 – 13 January 1948) was a Soviet actor and the artistic director of theMoscow State Jewish Theater. Mikhoels served as the chairman of theJewish Anti-Fascist Committee duringWorld War II. However, asJoseph Stalin pursued an increasinglyanti-Jewish line after the War, Mikhoels's position as a leader of the Jewish community led to increasing persecution from the Soviet state. He was assassinated inMinsk in 1948 by order of Stalin.[1][2]
Born Shloyme Vovsi to a family of Jewish heritage in Dvinsk,Russian Empire (nowDaugavpils,Latvia), Mikhoels studied law inSaint Petersburg, but left school in 1918 to joinAlexis Granowsky's Jewish Theater Workshop, which was attempting to create a national Jewish theater in Russia inYiddish. The workshop moved to Moscow in 1920, where it established theMoscow State Jewish Theater. That was in keeping withVladimir Lenin'spolicy on nationalities, which encouraged them to pursue and to develop their own cultures under the aegis of the Soviet state.
Mikhoels was the company's leading actor and, as of 1928, its director.[3] His memorable roles included Tevye in an adaptation ofSholom Aleichem's novelTevye the Milkman (which was adapted for an American audience asFiddler on the Roof)[3] and the title role in a Yiddish translation of Shakespeare'sKing Lear, in 1935.[4] As a director he commissioned a newBar Kochba, written byShmuel Halkin, which the company successfully staged as a socialist turn onthe traditional story.[5]
These plays were ostensibly supportive of the Soviet state; however, the historian Jeffrey Veidlinger has argued that closer readings suggest that they actually contained veiled critiques ofJoseph Stalin's regime and assertions of Jewish national identity[citation needed]. Ukrainian directorLes Kurbas seems to have had a lasting influence on Mikhoel's directing style.[citation needed]
By the mid-1930s, Mikhoels's career was threatened because of his association with other[who?] leadingintelligentsia members who were victims of Stalin'sGreat Purge.[citation needed]
On August 24, 1941, Mikhoels led a gathering of thousands in central Moscow's Gorky Park. It was explicitly a Jewish rally and aimed to raise funds for the Soviet war effort from the international Jewish community. Speakers included the writerDavid Bergelson.[6]: 79–80
Mikhoels actively supported Stalin againstAdolf Hitler and, in 1942, was made the chairman of theJewish Anti-Fascist Committee. In that capacity, he travelled around the world and met with Jewish communities to encourage them to support the Soviet Union in its war againstNazi Germany.
That was useful to Stalin duringWorld War II, but after the war, Stalin opposed contacts between Soviet Jews and Jewish communities in noncommunist countries, particularly Mikhoels' aims of establishingJewish autonomy in Crimea, which he regarded as a plot by American capitalists.[7] The Jewish State Theater was closed, and the members of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee were arrested. All but two were eventually executed in the purges shortly before Stalin's death.[citation needed]
On the morning of 13 January 1948, workmen discovered Mikhoels's dead body lying in snow in a quiet street inMinsk. The theatre criticVladimir Golubov-Potapov [ru] was lying dead beside him. It was announced that they had been killed in a traffic accident. Mikhoels's body lay in state for a day in the Jewish National Theatre.[8] He was praised in aPravda obituary and accorded astate funeral, with prominent members of the party and government officials among the mourners.[9] His daughter, Natalya, and her composer husbandMoisei Weinberg hosted a stream of mourners at their flat, including the composerDmitri Shostakovich.[10] He was buried at theNew Donskoy Cemetery, in Moscow.[11]
Even at the time, many people suspected that his death was not an accident, including the Yiddish poetPeretz Markish, who hinted in a poem that Mikhoels's name should be added to the six million victims ofThe Holocaust.[8][2][better source needed]Stalin's daughter,Svetlana Alliluyeva, later wrote that:
One day, in my father's dacha ... I entered his room when he was speaking to someone on the telephone. Something was being reported to him and he was listening, Then, as a summary of the conversation he said, 'Well, it's an automobile accident.' I remember so well the way he said it ... He wasn't asking: he was suggesting 'an automobile accident' ... a little later, he said: 'Mikhoels has been killed in an automobile accident'. But the next day ... a girl student told me, weeping, how brutally Mikhoels had been murdered."[12]
Two weeks after Mikhoels' death, his alleged assassin,Lavrentiy Tsanava, was secretly given theOrder of Lenin "for exemplary execution of a special assignment from the government".[2][better source needed]
After Stalin's death in March 1953,Lavrentiy Beria regained control of theMinistry for State Security (MGB), which he had temporarily lost, and on 2 April, he informed the party praesidium that Mikhoels and Golubov had been murdered. The men he accused of the murders, Tsanava,Minister of State Security for theBelorussian republic, and SovietDeputy Minister State Security,Sergei Ogoltsov, were arrested. When Beria was himself arrested, in June, Ogoltsov's wife and Tsanava pleaded for the case to be overturned.[13] Ogoltsov was released, though Tsanava died in prison.
According the former MGB officer Pavel Sudoplatov, who was assigned in 1953 to investigate the murder, Mikhoels was lured to Tsanava's countrydacha, ostensibly to meet some of Byelorussia's leading dramatic artists, and was stabbed with a poison needle by an MGB officer named Lebedev, with Tsanava and Ogoltsov supervising the operation. Golubov was an MGB informer, who was also killed by thechekists because he was an "inconvenient witness".[14]
Mikhoels was married toAnastasia Pototskaya, a Russian of Polish descent. He had two daughters from his first marriage to Sara Kantor, Nina and Natalya Vovsi.[15]
Mikhoels' cousinMiron Vovsi was a famous physician. He was arrested during theDoctors' plot affair but released after Stalin's death in 1953, as was Mikhoels' son-in-law, the Polish-born composerMieczysław Weinberg.[citation needed] In 1983, Mikhoels' daughter, Natalia Vovsi-Mikoels, wrote a biography of her father:My Father Shlomo Mikhoels: The Life and Death of a Jewish Actor.
{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)