“Arkady Epshtein lived and worked in Ukraine – a front-line soldier, professor of history and a long-time Soviet ideologist who, after the war, made a career out of anti-Israel and anti-Zionist propaganda. This was reported by Israeli journalist Shimon Briman in his personal post. The author mentions Arkady Isaakovich Epstein as a person with a difficult fate – a Jew from Kharkov, who in the summer of 1941”, — write on: ua.news
Arkady Epshtein lived and worked in Ukraine – a front-line soldier, professor of history and a long-time Soviet ideologist who, after the war, made a career out of anti-Israel and anti-Zionist propaganda.
This was reported by Israeli journalist Shimon Briman in his personal post.
The author mentions Arkady Isaakovich Epshtein as a person with a difficult fate – a Jew from Kharkiv, who in the summer of 1941 was a first-year student at the history department of Kharkiv University. He was not yet 19 years old when he volunteered for the First Student Battalion.
At that time, Kharkiv was a city of almost a million people, where every sixth resident was a Jew, and among student youth, almost every fourth. The studbat, in which Epshtein served, was thrown to the defense of Kyiv without weapons. After the defeat of the South-Western Front, he miraculously got out of the encirclement wounded.
Later, he fought near Artemivsk (now Bakhmut), was wounded again, served as a political engineer on the Volkhov Front, where he received severe wounds to both legs, and in March 1942, a through wound to the head. His orderly, Ukrainian Vasyl Dmytrenko, took Epshtein out of the entourage, believing him to be dead, but discovered that he was still alive.
After half a year in hospitals, Epstein was left to serve in Tashkent. In 1944, he received the Order of the Patriotic War, II degree. He joined the party in 1945.
In October of the same year, he returned to Kharkiv University – only ten of the pre-war 1,200 student-fighters remained alive, among them the future writer Oles Gonchar and Epstein himself.
After graduating from the Faculty of Arts, he defended his thesis and for decades worked as a professor at the theater and aviation institutes of Kharkiv. The author emphasizes: Epstein was an ideological communist — he sincerely believed in the system.
In the 1970s, the party entrusted him with a new “mission”: the fight against Zionism. Over the course of 15 years, Epstein published dozens of pamphlets and books with high-profile titles such as “The Reactionary Essence of Zionism,” “Zionism Without a Mask,” “Terrorism in the Ideology and Practice of Zionism,” and “The Bankruptcy of the Zionist Soul Catchers.”
The last such work was published in 1987.
In the same year, Epshtein already gave lectures on Stalin’s repressions, and later joined the leadership of the Kharkiv “Memorial”. He survived the collapse of Soviet ideology and the regime he had served since his youth.
The Israeli journalist notes that after years of anti-Israel propaganda, Epstein never went to live in Israel. He died in Kharkiv in 2005 — as the last living fighter of the university’s student battalion.
The author concludes: this story is an example of how war, ideology and personal choices shaped the destinies of people in Soviet Ukraine, and how even victims of Nazism later became part of the repressive machine.
It will be recalled that the new files revealed the details of how Epstein selected the girls.
Also, Epstein tried for 8 years to organize a meeting with Putin.
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