In December 1927 Stalin (pictured) launched a massive public campaign against “anti-semitism”, declaring at the Fifteenth Party Congress: “This evil has to be combated with utmost ruthlessness, comrades”. [65] The Party sponsored countless formal appeals, celebrity speeches, mass rallies and newspaper exposés to this effect – from 1927 to 1932, Soviet publishing houses produced no fewer than 56 books condemning “anti-semitism” and, says Slezkine, at the height of the campaign “articles on the subject appeared in the Moscow and Leningrad newspapers almost daily”. [66] There was, however, as he notes, a certain incoherence in the messaging as it insisted, simultaneously, that Jews did not occupy a special place in Soviet society and that Jews occupied a special place in Soviet society “for perfectly wholesome and understandable reasons”. [67]