are pleased to announce the publication of

DOCUMENTS ON ISRAELI-SOVIET RELATIONS, 1941-1953
Part I 1941-May 1949 528pp
Part II May 1949-1953 536 pp.

Forewords by David Levy, Foreign Minister of the State of Israel and Igor Ivanov, Foreign Minister of the Russian Federation

The volume appears In accordance with a special bilateral agreement on an official joint publication concluded by the Israeli and Russian foreign ministries in 1993. Teams of experts from the Cummings Center for Russian Studies of Tel Aviv University and the Israel State Archive, in cooperation with their colleagues from the Russian Foreign Ministry, laboured for five years to select, annotate and prepare 500 Russian and Israeli documents for publication. The majority of the documents appear here for the first time.

The materials contained in the collection fill gaps in our understanding of a number of controversial topics, among them:

• the evolution of the Soviet position on the UN Partition vote, including Soviet planning for a settlement which would turn Palestine into a Soviet trusteeship or a collective trusteeship of Britain, the US and the USSR

• the process of Soviet intelligence gathering and policy formulation during this period, including some startling evidence that sensitive information was passed systematically by members of the Knesset foreign affairs committee to high-level Soviet diplomats

• internal conflict within the Soviet Foreign Ministry over Eastern bloc arms sales to Jews and Arabs

• the evolution of the issue of emigration of Jews from the USSR and Eastern Europe, from Maiskii and Weizmann's theoretical discussions regarding the possible emigration of five million Central European Jews to Palestine in 1941, to official protests accusing the Israeli legation in Moscow of engaging in illegal activity to encourage the emigration of Soviet Jews

• the USSR's non-intervention in the emigration of Jews from Poland in 1945-46

• proof of Stalin's direct intervention in commissioning the famous article of Erenburg of 1948 which signalled a change in the Soviet position regarding Israel and its own Jewish population

• the prolonged conflict over the status of Russian property in Palestine and the impact it had on the formulation of Soviet policy vis-a-vis Jerusalem

• the process of disintegration of Israel's proclaimed stance of neutrality in global politics and its turn toward the West

• the process of deterioration and eventual dissolution of diplomatic relations between Israel and the USSR in the 1950s

• evidence of the interaction of domestic and foreign policy in both countries

Frank Cass Publishers
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Cummings Center Series Vol. 13 ISSN: 1365-3733
0 7146 4843 4 cloth $195 set
20 b/w illustrations, abstracts, biographies, glossary, index

A full set of abstracts is available at www.tau.ac.il/~russia/Events.htm