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Soviet Union [USSR] Jews
Jews first appeared in eastern Europe several centuries before
the birth of Christ. By the first century A.D., Jewish settlements
existed along the northern shores of the Black Sea. In the eighth
century, the descendants of these early Jewish settlers converted
the nomadic Turkic Khazars to Judaism. Jewish communities existed
in Kiev and other cities of Kievan Rus'. They were destroyed,
however, during the Mongol invasion in the thirteenth century.
Persecuted in western Europe, Jews began migrating to Poland in
the fourteenth century, and from there they moved to the presentday Lithuanian, Ukrainian, and Belorussian republics, until by the
mid-seventeenth century they numbered in the hundreds of thousands.
Although initially they were under royal protection and enjoyed
communal autonomy, life for the great majority of Jews in Poland
worsened, and they became as oppressed as Poland's Christian
subjects. Forbidden to own land, many Jews served as estate
managers and as middlemen between the Catholic Polish landowning
nobility and the Orthodox Ukrainian and Belorussian enserfed
peasants living on the nobles' estates. On the estates, they often
collected taxes for the nobles, controlled the sale of salt and
fish, ran the grain mills, and acted as overseers of peasant labor.
Jews also owned the local village taverns. Particularly insidious
was the Polish Catholic nobles' practice of making the Jews collect
taxes on Orthodox churches. As a result, in addition to disliking
them as foreigners and non-Christians, the peasants held Jews
directly responsible for their oppressed and miserable lives. These
early resentments were the seeds of primitive anti-Semitism in
eastern Europe and later in the Russian Empire. When the Orthodox
peasantry joined the Ukrainian Cossacks in the mid-seventeenth
century in a revolt against the Poles and the Catholic Church,
thousands of Jews were also killed. When Russian armies swept into
Polish-Lithuanian territories following Muscovy's alliance with the
Ukrainian Cossacks in 1654, they killed additional thousands of
Jews, forcibly converting some to Christianity and driving others
into exile. From 100,000 to 500,000 Jews perished, some 700 Jewish
communities were destroyed, and untold thousands fled the warravaged areas.
Although Jews had been expelled from Russia in 1742, the
subsequent incorporation of Polish territory as a result of the
partitions of Poland meant that by the end of the eighteenth
century Russia had the largest Jewish community in the world. The
tsarist government prohibited Jews from living anywhere except in
the area known as the Pale of Settlement, which included the Baltic
provinces, most of Ukraine and Belorussia, and the northern shore
of the Black Sea.
About 1.5 million Jews lived in the Russian Empire in the
beginning of the nineteenth century. Confined within the Pale of
Settlement, they were subjected to stringent anti-Jewish
regulations. Although for the next century restrictions on Jews
were periodically eased, they were reimposed or even made harsher
during the frequent periods of reaction that followed. Nicholas I
(1825-55) promoted forced induction of Jewish youth into military
service, where they were often coerced into being converted to
Christianity. Jewish rights to lease land and keep taverns were
rescinded, and the Pale of Settlement was reduced in size. However,
the reign of Alexander II (1855-81) brought a relaxation of the
restrictions imposed on the Jewish population: some Jews were
permitted to settle outside the Pale of Settlement, to attend
universities, and to enter government service. After the
assassination of Alexander II, however, the old restrictions were
reimposed, and persecution of Jews continued until the February
Revolution in 1917. Government-sanctioned pogroms against Jewish
communities, during which Jews were beaten or killed and their
personal property destroyed, were particularly brutal. The pogroms
were led by the Black Hundreds, an officially sanctioned
reactionary group composed largely of civil servants.
In spite of persecution, the Jewish population in the Russian
Empire expanded rapidly during the nineteenth century. Later, on
the eve of World War I, it was estimated at 5.2 million. Jewish
culture had flourished within the bounds imposed on their
community, Jews were becoming more active politically, and the more
radical among them joined the spreading revolutionary movements.
For Jews, World War I and the Civil War that followed the
revolutions in Russia were great calamities. The Pale of Settlement
was the area where most of the prolonged military conflict took
place, and Jews were killed indiscriminately by cossack armies,
Russian White armies, Ukrainian nationalist forces, and anarchist
peasant armies. In addition, the emergence of an independent
Poland, Lithuania, and Latvia and the annexation of Bessarabia by
Romania left large numbers of Jews outside the Soviet state
borders. By 1922 the Jewish population in the Soviet Union was less
than half of what it had been in the former Russian Empire.
The early years of the Soviet state provided unusual
opportunities for Jews to mainstream into Soviet society. Although
the majority of Jews had opposed the Bolsheviks during the Civil
War, many supported the creation of the new, "non-national" state,
which they expected would tolerate Jews. Hundreds of thousands of
Jews were integrated into Soviet cultural and economic life, and
many Jews occupied key positions in both areas. Jews were
particularly numerous in higher education and in scientific
institutions. Official anti-Semitism ceased, restrictions on Jewish
settlement were banned, Jewish culture flourished, and Jewish
sections of the CPSU were established. Many Jews, such as Leon
Trotsky, Grigorii V. Zinov'ev, Lev B. Kamenev, Lazar M. Kaganovich,
and Maksim M. Litvinov, occupied the most prominent positions in
party leadership. The purges in the mid- to late 1930s, however,
reduced considerably the Jewish intelligentsia's participation in
political life, particularly in the party's top echelons.
The 1941 German invasion of the Soviet Union was particularly
horrific for Soviet Jewry. About 2.5 million Jews were annihilated,
often by collaborators among the native populations in the occupied
territories who aided the Germans in killing Jews. Paradoxically,
in Soviet territories that escaped German occupation, anti-Semitism
also reemerged in the local population's resentment against the
often better educated, wealthier Jews who were evacuated there
before the advancing German armies.
Jews were the most dispersed nationality in the Soviet Union.
In 1989 a majority of the 1.4 million Jews in the Soviet Union
lived in the three Slavic republics. Approximately 536,000 lived in
the Russian Republic, 486,000 in the Ukrainian Republic, and
112,000 in the Belorussian Republic. Large Jewish minorities also
lived in the Uzbek and Moldavian republics, and smaller numbers of
Jews lived in all the remaining republics.
Although the Jewish (Yevreyskaya) Autonomous Oblast in the
Soviet Far East was designated as the homeland of the Soviet Jews,
only 8,887 Jews lived there in 1989, just over 4 percent of the
population of the oblast. Never high, the number of Jews in the
Jewish Autonomous Oblast has been declining--14,269, or 8.8
percent, of the oblast's population in 1959 and 11,452, or 6.6
percent, in 1970.
Between 1959 and 1989, the Jewish population in the Soviet
Union declined by about 900,000. The decline was attributed to
several factors--low birth rate, intermarriage, concealment of
Jewish identity, and emigration.
Although 83 percent of the Jews regarded Russian as their
native language in 1979, Soviet authorities recognized Yiddish as
the national language of Soviet Jewry. Small groups of Soviet Jews
spoke other "Jewish" languages: in Soviet Central Asia some Jews
spoke a Jewish dialect of Tadzhik, in the Caucasus area Jews spoke
a form of Tat, while those in the Georgian Republic used their own
dialect of the Georgian language.
Soviet Jews were overwhelmingly urban. In 1979 over 98 percent
of all Jews in the Soviet Union lived in urban areas. Four cities
in particular--Moscow, Leningrad, Kiev, and Odessa--had large
concentrations of Jews. Along with being the most urbanized
nationality, in the 1970s Jews also ranked first among all
nationalities in educational level and in numbers of scientific
workers per thousand.
Traditionally, Jews have been highly represented in the CPSU,
and their membership exceeded considerably their proportion of the
total population. Soviet statistics show that 5.2 percent of all
CPSU members in 1922 were Jews; in 1927 the figure declined to 4.3
percent. In 1976 the figure was 1.9 percent, almost three times the
percentage of Jews in the general population.
Data as of May 1989
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