On January 12, 1931, Stalin gave the following answer to an inquiry on the subject of the Soviet attitude toward anti-semitism from the Jewish News Agency in the United States:
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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. [10]
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This answer was subsequently published as an item in the Soviet newspaper Pravda on November 30, 1936, and was again republished as part of a posthumous 1954 volume of Stalin's collected Works.[10]