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Solomon (Shloyme) Mikhoels ( also, , – 13 January 1948) was a Soviet actor and the artistic director of the Moscow State Jewish Theater. Mikhoels served as the chairman of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee during World War II. However, as Joseph Stalin pursued an increasingly anti-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 allegedly assassinated in Minsk in 1948 by order of Stalin or Lavrentiy Beria.
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 of Joseph Stalin's regime and assertions of Jewish national identity. Ukrainian director Les Kurbas seems to have had a lasting influence on Mikhoel's directing style.
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 writer David Bergelson. (2025). 9780805242461 ISBN 9780805242461
Mikhoels actively supported Stalin against Adolf Hitler and, in 1942, was made the chairman of the Jewish 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 against Nazi Germany.
That was useful to Stalin during World War II, but after the war, Stalin opposed contacts between Soviet Jews and Jewish communities in noncommunist countries, particularly Mikhoels' aims of establishing Jewish autonomy in Crimea, which he regarded as a plot by American capitalists. 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.
Even at the time, many people suspected that his death was not an accident, including the Yiddish poet Peretz Markish, who hinted in a poem that Mikhoels's name should be added to the six million victims of The Holocaust. Stalin's daughter, Svetlana Alliluyeva, later wrote that:
Two weeks after Mikhoels' death, his alleged assassin, Lavrentiy Tsanava, was secretly given the Order of Lenin "for exemplary execution of a special assignment from the government".
After Stalin's death in March 1953, Lavrentiy Beria regained control of the Ministry 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 the Belarus, and Soviet Deputy 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. 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 country dacha, 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 the Cheka because he was an "inconvenient witness". (1995). 9780751512403, Warner Books. ISBN 9780751512403
Mikhoels' cousin Miron Vovsi was a famous physician. He was arrested during the Doctors' plot affair but released after Stalin's death in 1953, as was Mikhoels' son-in-law, the Polish-born composer Mieczysław Weinberg. 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.
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