What's your opinion on the initial Soviet suuport for Israel?
^^^^ CB: I don't know that I know enough about it. I don't claim that the long "tradition" of anti-Semitism was wiped out in the SU. However, I think the CPSU had a genuine policy of outlawing and ending anti-Semitism and other types of racism, which like all policies has success and failure in actual practice. The first Bolshevik President of the USSR was a Jew. Forgot his name for a minute. There was a Jewish autonomous region in the SU. High percentage of Jews in professions in the long run. Anyway, besides whatever ulterior and unsavory motives of Beria, the Soviets recognized legitimate Jewish concerns about having a state for self-protection, especially after the Holocaust , of course. Soviets and Jews had the unhappy commonality of being the main victims of the Nazis.
Later, Soviet policy was to support two states , Palestinian and Jewish.
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In his book on his dad, Sergo Beria wrote the following:
My father and Stalin thought that by helping the state of Israel to come into being they would ensure the support of international finance for the Soviet Union. They saw in this state a base from which to influence the world of Jewry, with all its financial resources, in the interest of the USSR. It mattered little to my father that the new state's leaders were not Communists, provided that they were useful to us. We should put our money on Israel and not on the Arab countries as we had resources enough. He tried to help the Jews to create their state, in the first instance with Stalin's approval. He succeeded in giving military aid to Israel. Stalin did not know everything and did not necessarily approve of everything that my father did in this connection, in a sphere where he could act discreetly and without asking for permission, by using his personal network of agents. In return the Jews gave him information about the Arab world. I have met Israelis who received military training in the Soviet Union, certainly with Stalin's approval. But Stalin later abandoned the Jewish policy advocated by my father, which he had supported at the outset. My father wanted to continue with it, believing that it might prove fruitful in the less immediate future.