At best, Soviet tolerance toward Jewish culture was never anything more than a temporary political tactic. And even then the Soviet claims were contemporaneous with the 1917 revolution, when the communists were seeking support from all quarters. Stalin’s _Marxism and the National Question_, the acknowledged communist classic on the subject, though consisting of 222 pages, contains only twenty pages written after 1927, with the most important single part having been written in 1913. By the late 1930’s alleged concessions to the cultures of the various minority groups gave way to a policy of forcible denationalization rivaling the brutal “Russification” tactics of the Czars. To illustrate: In 1917 there were a total of forty-nine Yiddish or Hebrew newspapers in the Soviet Union. By 1921 these had increased to sixty-two; but no less than fifty were communist-controlled, while the forty-nine not under communist control in 1917 had dwindled to twelve in 1921. Jewish literature suffered a similar fate. From 1928 to 1933 books published in Yiddish rose from 238 to 668, but there was a marked decline in books dealing with Jewish history and tradition. In 1932 there were thirty-six books in Yiddish classified as history—of these, sixteen were memoirs chiefly of old Bolsheviks; six were studies on the Communist International; six dealt with the revolution and history of the Communist Party; five consisted of speeches of Stalin and other communist leaders; and only three actually dealt with matters pertaining to Jewish culture. These related to the labor movement and were an attempt to rewrite history to conform with Marxist-Leninist doctrine. The Soviet purge trials of 1936-37 should have made clear to the world the communist objective mercilessly to crush the leadership of any minority groups whose cultural resurgence conflicted with the advance of Marxism-Leninism. To cite an example: of the ten representatives of minority groups who served on the draft committee for the 1936 Soviet constitution, only one was alive at the end of 1937. The other nine were branded as “spies,” “enemies of the people,” and were shot, committed suicide, or had disappeared. The sad fate of the Jewish school system in the Ukraine proves the lie to the Soviet propaganda claim of furthering Jewish culture. In 1925, government reports reflected a total of 39,474 students in the Ukrainian schools where Yiddish was the language of instruction. In 1931 the number of such students reached its peak of 90,000. By 1940 this figure had declined to 50,000, and the Jewish schools were completely suppressed when the Nazis took over the Ukraine in World War II. Since the war the efforts of Jewish educators to have the Soviet government construct new schools have apparently failed.