Solomon Mikhoels

[4] 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.

[5] 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].

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.

[citation needed] On the morning of 13 January 1948, workmen discovered Mikhoels's dead body lying in snow in a quiet street in Minsk.

[11] 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.

"[12]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".

[2][better source needed] 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.

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.

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.