perhaps they are skeptical
>of anything that smacks of socialist (from my discussions with non-left
>Russians (I also know leftist ones) who hear of my political leanings, they
>sometimes attempt to dissuade me of my views by describing their lives in
>the USSR and equating Soviet Communism with any possible
>Marxist/Socialist...
Emigrees are weird. The majority of Russians have positive feelings associated with the USSR. ---
I add: Now that I think about it, this difference in opinion makes sense. Jews tended to be relatively priviliged members of the Soviet intelligentsia and "middle class," who liked to bitch and whine about how "oppressed" they were and how much better off they would be in the West (even though they lived better than most other people). There were not exactly a huge number of Jewish miners and factory workers, who live much worse today than they did in the Soviet era, so the reference group is different, and emigrees obviously don't have to deal with the fallout of the Soviet collapse.
There used to be a Soviet joke about a Jewish father warning his son against emigrating to Israel: "Remember, son, here you are just a Jew; there you will be just a Russian."
I used to work with a returnee to Russia from Israel, a very friendly beer-swilling computer programmer. He was fond of justifying Israel treatment of Palestinians by saying that "Arabs are like Chechens," meaning you can't reason with them.
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