--- Russell Grinker <grinker at mweb.co.za> wrote:
>
> Well at least Jews won equality and civil rights in
> the 20s in the SU (not
> an insignificant gain)
Oh sure. By "progress" I meant "progress" in the ultimate goal of destroying national differences and replacing them with "Soviet man." I really don't know to what extent the Jewish community in say Kiev was separate from the Ukrainian one in 1941, or to what extent urbanization had driven rural Jews into the cities, especially given Stalin's attemot to tie farmers to the collective farms.
and Birobidjan was set up as
> a 'Jewish Autonomous
> Republic' (don't know what's happened there since).
It's still there. Here's a photo of the train station, complete with giant menorah, on the website of the Jewish Autonomous Republic: http://www.eao.ru/Images/Gorod/gen_018.jpg
And a bunch of other photos from their website: http://www.eao.ru/?p=419
As far as I know Yiddish is still an official language there alongside Russian, although Jews only make up 5% of the population.
\ The 'Doctors Plot' was
> the most famous instance
> of this. Jews were also vilified as 'rootless
> cosmopolitans'.
I have some documents written by Beria shortly after Stalin's death on the subject of the Jewish Plot that I have been meaning to get around to translating. Maybe I'll do that this weekend.
>
> Perhaps, if there was still a sufficient social
> weight of Jews around. The
> South African experience was that although there was
> a substantial Jewish
> population in the hundreds of thousands, Yiddish
> pretty much died out with
> the demise of the first generation of East European
> immigrants.
Yes, but those were immigrants. A Kievan Jew just had to walk across the city. Most of the languages spoken by the non-Russian peoples of Russia are living languages, and Jews were as or more numerous than any of them before the Holocaust.
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