I forwarded this to a guy who actually lived in the Brezhnev era, and this is what he said (yes, it's the same guy):
Truly, there exists a widespread opinion that anti-semitism was running wild in the Soviet Union during Brezhnev time. And there are people who can present numerous examples. But look: Brezhnev era had lasted for 20 years and the Soviet Union was a huge country. I bet it's easy to dig up several hundreds of examples of blatant chauvinism in the States over a period of equal length. What I insist on is that BY AND LARGE the Brezhnev era Soviet Union was not at all an anti-Semitic country. On the contrary! Suffice is to say that Jews represented over 50 percent among the top science, scholar and artistic elite and were widely represented in the power structures and in prestigious professions. BY AND LARGE, the living standard of the Jews in the Brezhnev era USSR was higher compared to Russians and other nations. People's attitude toward the Jews was ALL IN ALL very friendly and the numerous jokes about the Jews cannot be counted as anti-Semitism. Russians love jokes and there have been numerous jokes about politicians, chukchas, Africans, etc. Telling what is called "anti-semitic joke" a person did not imply any offence. I can say it for sure that real anti-Semitism was a criminally punishable offense in the Soviet Union and if, say, an employer was proven to discriminate against the Jews he would be expelled from CPSU and sacked, to say the least. Individual incidents cannot be generalized. I had many Jewish friends back then and all of them made good careers, though loved to speak about "discimination," I think only because it was kind of fashionable. Perhaps the only problem was emigration to Israel: For a long time USSR did not allow Jews to emigrate. But this was not because they were Jews but because they were Soviet citizens. It was very difficult for ANY Soviet citizen to go abroad, even for a vacation. This was because USSR was sort of paranoic about spies and state secrets. And Jews were mostly employed at positions where they had access to what USSR authorities classified as secrets.
-----Original Message----- From: ChrisD(RJ) Sent: Wednesday, April 17, 2002 11:43 AM To: AlexKondor(RJ) Subject:
Sasha,
Ya soryus s lyudmi na Internet, kotoriye goveryat chto, v bremya Brezhneva, byly tak mnogo antisemitizma, chto bylo trudno yevreyam postupat v institut. Ya znayu, chto ty dumayesh', chto eto erunda. Ty mozhesh' napisat' neskol'ko slov pro etu temy, oru svoi opyt, kotoriye ya smogu posylat? Ya khochy zashchishchat' chest' Rossii! Spasibo.
>>
>
>Actually, as far as I can tell, this wasn't true in Russia either. There
>used to be a joke that a meeting of the Russian Academy of Sciences was
>like a meeting of the 12 Tribes of Israel. I suspect that what you have in
>the case of the story I sent is a Western writer ignorant of actual Soviet
>reality who is regurgitating Cold War propaganda he or she believes to be
>fact. You come across this a lot in the Western press. This is why I almost
>never read anything on the Soviet Union written by somebody who didn't live
>there. 99% of Western Sovietology is garbage.
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