Solomon Mikhoels

Born Shloyme Vovsi to a family of Jewish heritage in Dvinsk, Russian Empire (now Daugavpils, Latvia), Mikhoels studied law in Saint Petersburg, but left school in 1918 to join Alexis Granowsky's Jewish Theater Workshop, which was attempting to create a national Jewish theater in Russia in Yiddish. The workshop moved to Moscow in 1920, where it established the Moscow State Jewish Theater. That was in keeping with Vladimir Lenin's policy 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.Leftwich, Joseph (2007). "Solomon Mikhailovich Mikhoels". Encyclopaedia Judaica. 2nd ed. Macmillan Reference USA. Retrieved via Biography in Context database, 2016-12-16. His memorable roles included Tevye in an adaptation of Sholom Aleichem's novel Tevye the Milkman (which was adapted for an American audience as Fiddler on the Roof) and the title role in a Yiddish translation of Shakespeare's King Lear, in 1935.Wasserstein, Bernard (2012). [https://books.google.com/books?id=HJSQZJKHX_8C&pg=PA292 On the Eve: The Jews of Europe Before the Second World War]. New York: Simon & Schuster. {{ISBN|9781416594277}}. p. 292. As a director he commissioned a new Bar Kochba, written by Shmuel Halkin, which the company successfully staged as a socialist turn on the traditional story.Wasserstein (2012), [https://books.google.com/books?id=HJSQZJKHX_8C&pg=PA292 p. 292-293].

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{{citation needed|date=February 2021}}. Ukrainian director Les Kurbas seems to have had a lasting influence on Mikhoel's directing style.{{citation needed|date=February 2021}}

By the mid-1930s, Mikhoels's career was threatened because of his association with other{{who?|date=April 2024}} leading intelligentsia members who were victims of Stalin's Great Purge.{{citation needed|date=February 2021}}

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.{{cite book |last1=Gessen |first1=Masha |title=Where the Jews aren't : the sad and absurd story of Birobidzhan, Russia's Jewish autonomous region |date=2016 |location=New York |isbn=9780805242461 |edition=First}}{{rp|79–80}}

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.{{Cite web |title=Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee |url=https://eleven.co.il/jews-of-russia/state-and-anti-semitism/10244/ |access-date=16 April 2022 |website=Jewish Electronic Encyclopaedia}} 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|date=February 2021}}

On the morning of 13 January 1948, workmen discovered Mikhoels's dead body lying in snow in a quiet street in Minsk. The theatre critic {{ill|Vladimir Golubov-Potapov|ru|Голубов, Владимир Ильич}} 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.{{cite book |last1=Joshua Rubenstein |first1=and Vladimir P. Naumov |title=Stalin's Secret Pogrom, The Postwar Inquisition of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee |date=2001 |publisher=Yale U.P. |location=New Haven |isbn=0-300-08486-2 |page=1}} He was praised in a Pravda obituary and accorded a state funeral, with prominent members of the party and government officials among the mourners.{{Cite book|last=Roberts|first=Geoffrey|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=5GCFUqBRZ-QC&pg=PA424|title=Stalin's Wars: From World War to Cold War, 1939-1953|date=2006|publisher=Yale University Press|isbn=978-0-300-11204-7|pages=424|language=en}} His daughter, Natalya, and her composer husband Moisei Weinberg hosted a stream of mourners at their flat, including the composer Dmitri Shostakovich.{{cite book |last1=McSmith |first1=Andy |title=Fear and the Muse Kept Watch, The Russian Masters - from Akhmatova and Pasternak to Shostakovich and Eisenstein - Under Stalin |date=2015 |publisher=The New Press |location=New York |isbn=978-1-59558-056-6 |page=269}} He was buried at the New Donskoy Cemetery, in Moscow.Vovsi-Mikhoels, Natalia, Mon père Salomon Mikhoëls. Souvenirs sur sa vie et sur sa mort. Montricher: Les Editions Noir sur Blanc, (1990) {{ISBN|978-2-88250-015-1}}, page 101

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.{{Better source needed|reason=The New York Times Article does not cite any sources and may not be objective.|date=December 2023}}

Stalin's daughter, Svetlana Alliluyeva, later wrote that:

{{quote|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."{{cite book |last1=Alliluyeva |first1=Svetlana |title=Only One Year |date=1971 |publisher=Penguin |location=Harmondsworth, Middlesex |pages=139–40}}|}}

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".{{Better source needed|reason=The New York Times Article does not cite any sources and may not be objective.|date=December 2023}}

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 Belorussian republic, 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.{{cite web |title=Постановление Президиума ЦК КПСС о результатах проверки обстоятельств убийства С. М. Михоэлса и наказании виновных. 3 апреля 1953 г. (Decree of the Praesidium of the Central Committee of the CPSU on the results of the verification of the circumstances of the murder of S.M.Mikhoels and the punishment of those responsible. 3 April 1953) |url=https://istmat.org/node/57751 |website=Реабилитация: как ето было, документы президиума ЦК КПСС и другие материалы, март 1953-феврал 1956 |publisher=Международный фонд "демократияя" (Moscow) |access-date=26 January 2023}} 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 chekists because he was an "inconvenient witness".{{cite book |last1=Sudoplatov |first1=Pavel |title=Special Tasks, The Memoirs of an Unwanted Witness, a Soviet Spymaster |date=1995 |publisher=Warner Books |location=London |isbn=0-7515-1240-0 |pages=296–97}}

File:Solomon Mikhoels Postal card Russia 2015.jpg, 2015.]]

Mikhoels was married to Anastasia Pototskaya, a Russian of Polish descent. He had two daughters from his first marriage to Sara Kantor, Nina and Natalya Vovsi.{{cite book |title=At his side: the last years of Isaac Babel |last=Pirozhkova |first=Antonina Nikolaevna |publisher=Steerforth Press |year=1996 |location=University of California |pages=75}}

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.{{citation needed|date=February 2021}} 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.

• Jewish Theater School Artistic Director, Professor
• Member of Moscow City Council
• Member of the Stalin Prize Committee

• Order of Lenin
• People's Artist of the USSR
• Stalin Prize Laureate

{{reflist}}

• [https://yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/Mikhoels_Solomon_Mikhailovich Mikhoels, Solomon] yivoencyclopedia.org
• {{Internet Archive author |sname=Solomon Mikhoels}}
• {{FAG|228421319}}
• [http://lib.ru/PROZA/LEWASHOW/mihoels.txt Виктор Левашов. Убийство Михоэлса] at lib.ru
• [http://jewishhistorylectures.org/2013/03/10/solomon-mikhoels-jews-and-jewish-art-under-communism/ Video Lecture on Solomon Mikhoels by Dr. Henry Abramson of Touro College South]

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Category:1890 births

Category:1948 deaths

Category:Actors from Daugavpils

Category:People from Dvinsky Uyezd

Category:Latvian Jews

Category:Jewish male actors

Category:People's Artists of the USSR

Category:Soviet theatre directors

Category:Soviet Jews

Category:Jewish socialists

Category:Jewish anti-fascists

Category:Jews executed by the Soviet Union

Category:Yiddish theatre performers

Category:Recipients of the Stalin Prize

Category:People murdered in the Soviet Union

Category:Soviet male stage actors

Category:People killed in Soviet intelligence operations

Category:Burials at Donskoye Cemetery