Here is where anti-Semitism started in the USSR, from Wikipedia:
'A series of genocidal persecutions, or pogroms, against Jews took place in Russia. These arose from a variety of motivations, not all of them related to Christian anti-semitism. They have been attributed in part to religiously motivated anti-semitism arising from the canard that Jews were responsible for the crucifixion of Jesus. The primary trigger of the pogroms, however, was the assassination of Tsar Alexander II. The first pogrom is often considered to be the 1821 anti-Jewish riots in Odessa (modern Ukraine).'
And, from Wikipedia:
After World War II, Czechoslovakia initially enjoyed limited democracy. This changed with the February 1948 coup, carried out by the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia without the assistance of the Soviet Union.[3] According to literature scholar Peter Steiner, the one-partyCommunist state had to find or conjure up imaginary enemies from within to justify its continuing existence; this was the motive for show trials.[4] After the 1948 Yugoslav–Soviet split, a number of political trials against alleged Titoite and Western imperialist elements were carried out in Bulgaria, Hungary, and Albania, but these trials were not overtly antisemitic.[5]
The anti-cosmopolitan campaign, a thinly disguised antisemitic campaign in the Soviet Union, began in the fall of 1948 and continued until the dictator Joseph Stalin's 1953 death. During this period, the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee's leadership was murdered and antisemitic purges spread to other countries in the Eastern Bloc, including East Germany, Romania, Bulgaria, and Hungary.[5][6] The Slánský trial was immediately preceded by the 1949 trial of Hungarian communist László Rajk and his co-defendants, the first show trial victims accused of organizing a "worldwide Zionist conspiracy". Although Rajk was not Jewish, six of the other defendants were. Linking Zionism with Trotskyism and Titoism, as Rajk's prosecutors did, defied logic because both leftist movements were noted for their anti-Zionism.[7]
