Jews were persecuted in the Soviet Union for the same reason they were in Nazi Germany: they were successful in business. But the Soviets had a far greater hatred for Entrepeneurism than the Nazis. And they disguised their mistreatment of them in more creative ways. Instead of just killing them, they “deported” them. Do you know what that really means? Putting them in buses disguised as cargo vehicles and dumping them into the most inhospitable regions of Siberia that could be found, by orders of Lenin and later Stalin. Stalin used slightly more direct means of massacre, but the result was just the same. Death by starvation, the elements, sometimes by outright torture of whole towns. The forced collectivism used any means necessary to collect and instead of redistribute according to true communist dogma, sell for profit on the international market. Jews suffered no worse than Christians, but unlike Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union was very successful at hiding its crimes against humanity. Even to this day communists are not regarded with the same level of evil as Nazis.
The Soviets would have been far less successful against the rebellions if they had not already disarmed the public, by the way. Another lesson liberals refuse to learn. The army was armed to the teeth, the poor with pitch forks, at best.
The PLC was home to 60% of world Jewry and Jews were free to not only practice but expand their religion -- this was where Chassidism originated and also devout "Lithuanian Jews" or Litvaks
Until the Russian grab of PLC lands, they had next to no Jews, but they suddenly got a huge chunk of Jewish people (if you look at a map of Jews in Tsarist russia in 1910, this coincides exactly with the PLC -- this was called the Russian "Pale of Settlement" where Jews were "kept" -- they were not allowed to move out and their conditions were bad (though arguably the life of most non-elite in the Tsarist state was bad)
Incidently this "pale of settlement" was also the location of the "killing lands" in the Second World War when not only 6 million Jews but also 6 million Poles and Lithuanians and at least 6 to 10 million Ukrainians, Belarussians and Russians died, plus Germans and Roma etc.
The PLC was home to 60% of world Jewry and Jews were free to not only practice but expand their religion -- this was where Chassidism originated and also devout "Lithuanian Jews" or Litvaks
Until the Russian grab of PLC lands, they had next to no Jews, but they suddenly got a huge chunk of Jewish people (if you look at a map of Jews in Tsarist russia in 1910, this coincides exactly with the PLC -- this was called the Russian "Pale of Settlement" where Jews were "kept" -- they were not allowed to move out and their conditions were bad (though arguably the life of most non-elite in the Tsarist state was bad)
Incidently this "pale of settlement" was also the location of the "killing lands" in the Second World War when not only 6 million Jews but also 6 million Poles and Lithuanians and at least 6 to 10 million Ukrainians, Belarussians and Russians died, plus Germans and Roma etc.
Anyway, so Jews were treated bad, but then they had pogroms against them, so life became unbearable. At the same time rising national consciousness meant that Russians tried to make everyone Russian (and the English did the same to the Welsh, etc. etc) so there was Jewish resistance to this in the form of Zionism
however some people of Jewish origin went the opposite way, rejecting Judaism not only religiously but also culturally -- they embraced the heady winds of socialism and then communism along with many other groups of people.
Some of the best thinkers were of these -- including Tolstoy
Tolstoy was the guy who saved the USSR in 1919 --> when the Bolsheviks came to power, they liquidated the army officers. But then they discovered that without officers they could not fight the White Russian army in the murderous Russian civil war. And officers who joined were liable to switch sides immediately. Tolstoy came up with dual command - officers and commisars
But he had a big rival in his affections for power -- Stalin
With Tolstoy's fall in the 20s and then Stalin's death in 1954, the latent wicked anti-semitism arose.