Works, Vol. 13, July 1930-January 1934, Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing
House, 1955, p. 30
"Anti-Semitism: Reply to an Inquiry of the Jewish News Agency in the United States"
Joseph Stalin
In answer to your inquiry:
National and racial chauvinism is a vestige of the misanthropic customs characteristic of
the period of cannibalism. Anti-semitism, as an extreme form of racial chauvinism, is the
most dangerous vestige of cannibalism.
Anti-semitism is of advantage to the exploiters as a lightning conductor that deflects the
blows aimed by the working people at capitalism. Anti-semitism is dangerous for the
working people as being a false path that leads them off the right road and lands them in
the jungle. Hence Communists, as consistent internationalists, cannot but be
irreconcilable, sworn enemies of anti-semitism.
In the U.S.S.R. anti-semitism is punishable with the utmost severity of the law as a
phenomenon deeply hostile to the Soviet system. Under U.S.S.R. law active anti-semites
are liable to the death penalty.
