There are several reasons why Soviet literature is of considerable importance for the study of politics and society in the USSR. First, it often provides information about the country which is not made available by any other Soviet sources. Even during the period of the Stalin terror, and still more during the more liberal period of the fifties and sixties, belles lettres were granted greater freedom than other forms of publication to describe reality. Thus, such important aspects of Soviet public life as the image of the Jews and the attitude of the general population towards Jews found broader, deeper, and often more objective expression in Soviet literature than they did anywhere else. At the same time, an examination of the literature published at any given moment makes it possible to trace the relationship of the Soviet authors of Jewish origin to their people.

The broad scope and complexity of the subject and the limited space available to us here preclude a detailed analysis of the content or the literary, documentary and political importance of each work. We shall therefore have to be content with a more general analysis of the important works, paying particular attention to the authors' aims in each period. As in the other chapters, we shall deal with the differences in Soviet policy in the Stalin, the post-Stalin, and the Brezhnev–Kosygin periods.

The Stalin period

Despite the fact that over five million Jews then lived in Russia in conditions of poverty, discrimination and pogroms, the Jewish theme was accorded only minor treatment in pre-Revolutionary Russian literature.