Chris Doss wrote:
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.
I would think that genuine "progress" of the sort you describe would hinge on the ability of the 'planned' economy to raise labour productivity and improve living standards to the extent that archaic national differences were naturally erased. Clearly the system remained relatively stagnant and archaic forms thus tended to persist together with all sorts of traditional prejudices as well as state-sponsored racism. I assume that in order to avoid persistent residual Soviet anti-Semitism, most surviving Jews did take on a local 'colouration' and effectively assimilated.