World History

There are a lot of parallels there with the quasi-denial of the Holocaust that took place in the USSR after WWII. The Holocaust was not a good fit in the Soviet government's framing and commemoration of the war. Given their emphasis on class identity and the immense suffering that the Soviet people at large endured, they did not appreciate the idea of Jews being singled out as a special victim class. They preferred that the Holocaust be subsumed into a larger narrative of Soviet victimhood, thus the slogan 'Don't Divide the Dead.' There were very few honest treatments of the Holocaust during the war in the Soviet press, with the notable exception of the Yiddish language press, where most references to the Holocaust as a specifically anti-Jewish crime were segregated.

Part of it was probably old-fashioned anti-Semitism as well. During the war a common rumor held that Soviet Jews were not doing their part to contribute to the war effort and instead served on the 'Tashkent Front' (Tashkent is in Uzbekistan - a lot of Soviets fled there to escape the oncoming Germans during the war). It's not for nothing that Stalin's later years witnessed the 'Doctor's Plot' and the campaign against 'rootless cosmopolitans,' the latter a code-word for Jews.