Have you ever wondered why Jewish people flocked to Communism in Russia?
1. It is because the Communist promised to stop the constant pogroms. (A lie, mind you, but a pretty one.)
2. The other political parties were closed to Jooooos and were little more than Russian fascists.
In short, Russian racism.
>> It is because the Communist promised to stop the constant
>> pogroms. (A lie, mind you, but a pretty one.)
Well, after they won the Russian Civil War, during which many atrocities happened to many groups of people, they did. Not to say the Communists were/are nice guys, but the first couple of decades of the new USSR were pretty much free of the traditional Russian antisemitism. Yes, traditional/religious life of the Jews was suppressed, but so was everyone else’s - in favor of “internationalism”. The Bolsheviks were busy destroying Orthodox Christianity and implementing collectivization policies.
Not until after WWII, the late-day Stalinism, did official state antisemitism emerge again. With the Michoels affair and then the Doctor’s Affair. Fortunately, Stalin died before it got much worse. I still think its a good possibility someone (maybe Beria) strategically gamed Stalin’s paranoid personality to instigate the whole Doctor’s Plot so that the Jewish doctors who were very succesfully treating Stalin all those years were removed (remember, it all started with a letter from a “patriotic” nurse who allegedly witnessed Jewish doctors attempting to poison the party leadership.) After he got new doctors and new treatments, guess what, he did not live very long.
>> The other political parties were closed to Jooooos and were
>> little more than Russian fascists.
There were actually at least two parties in which Jews figured prominent in pre-1917 Russia.
The Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, which split up into Bolsheviks (who later became what is known as Communist Party) and Mensheviks. There was also Socialist-Revolutionary Party.
Both of which initially shared power for a little while in a coalition with the Bolsheviks, but later when Bolsheviks seized complete power, were disbanded and their members persecuted.