Classical antiquity Jewish presence is documented in classical antiquity in several locations along the northern coast of the
Black Sea, within the territory of modern-day
Krasnodar Krai. Among these finds is a
manumission text from
Phanagoria, dating to 52 AD, which consecrates freed
slaves to a local
synagogue (
proseuche), with the latter serving as their legal guardian. Similar patterns are attested on the opposite side of the Kerch Strait at
Panticapaeum. There is also an inscription from Gorgippia (modern
Anapa), dating to 59/60 AD, that mentions "Jews by race". Centuries later,
Jerome, a Christian writer who flourished in the late 4th and early 5th centuries AD, mentions a Jewish tradition concerning the settlement of Jewish captives by
Hadrian in the
Cimmerian Bosporus, likely in the aftermath of the
Bar Kokhba revolt of 132–136 which was suppressed by Hadrian. (650–850)
Kievan Rus' In the 11th and 12th centuries, the Jewish population may have been restricted to a separate quarter in Kiev, known as the Jewish Town (Old East Slav: Жидове,
Zhidovye, i.e. "The Jews"), the gates probably leading to which were known as the Jewish Gates (Old East Slavic: Жидовская ворота,
Zhidovskaya vorota). The Kievan community was oriented towards
Byzantium (the
Romaniotes),
Babylonia and
Palestine in the 10th and 11th centuries, but appears to have been increasingly open to the
Ashkenazim from the 12th century on. Few products of Kievan Jewish intellectual activity exist, however. Other communities, or groups of individuals, are known from
Chernigov and, probably,
Volodymyr-Volynskyi. At that time, Jews were probably found also in northeastern Russia, in the domains of Prince
Andrei Bogolyubsky (1169–1174), although it is uncertain to which degree they would have been living there permanently. The 'decree of August 26, 1827' made Jews liable for military service and allowed their conscription between the ages of twelve and twenty-five. Each year, the Jewish community had to supply four recruits per thousand of the population. However, in practice, Jewish children were often conscripted as young as eight or nine years old. At the age of twelve, they would be placed for their six-year military education in cantonist schools. They were then required to serve in the
Imperial Russian Army for 25 years after completing their studies, often never seeing their families again. Strict quotas were imposed on all communities, and the
qahals were given the unpleasant task of implementing conscription within the Jewish communities. Since the
merchant-guild members, agricultural colonists, factory mechanics, clergy, and all Jews with secondary education were exempt, and the wealthy
bribed their way out of having their children conscripted, fewer potential conscripts were available; the adopted policy deeply sharpened internal Jewish social tensions. Seeking to protect the socio-economic and religious integrity of Jewish society, the
qahals did their best to include “non-useful Jews” in the draft lists so that the heads of tax-paying middle-class families were predominantly exempt from conscription. In contrast, single Jews, as well as "heretics" (
maskilim "
Haskalah-influenced individuals"), paupers, outcasts, and orphaned children were drafted. They used their power to suppress protests and intimidate potential informers who sought to expose the arbitrariness of the
qahal to the Russian government. In some cases, communal elders had the most threatening informers murdered (such as the
Ushitsa case, 1836). The zoning rule was suspended during the
Crimean War, when conscription became annual. During this period,
qahal leaders would employ informers and kidnappers (, ), as many potential conscripts preferred to run away rather than voluntarily submit. In the case of unfulfilled quotas, younger Jewish boys of eight and even younger were frequently taken. The official Russian policy was to encourage the
religious conversion of
hazzanim to the
state religion, the
Russian Orthodox Church, and Jewish boys were coerced into
baptism. As
kosher food was unavailable, they were faced with the necessity of abandoning
dietary laws. Polish
Catholic boys were subject to similar pressure to convert and assimilate because the Empire was hostile both to Catholicism and Polish nationalism.
Haskalah in the Russian Empire , nicknamed the "most famous railroad king" of the 19th century. He co-founded the
World ORT in the 1880s, the largest Jewish education organization in the Russian Empire, perpetuating a vocational education program influenced by the values of Haskalah. The cultural and habitual isolation of the Jews gradually began eroding. An ever-increasing number of Jewish people adopted Russian customs and the Russian language. Russian education was spread among the Jewish population. Several Jewish-Russian periodicals appeared.
Alexander II was known as "Tsar liberator" for the
abolition of serfdom in 1861. Under his rule, Jews could not hire Christian servants, could not own land, and were restricted in travel.
Alexander III was a staunch reactionary and an antisemite (influenced by
Pobedonostsev) who strictly adhered to the old
doctrine of
Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality. His escalation of anti-Jewish policies sought to ignite "popular antisemitism," which portrayed the Jews as "
Christ-killers" and the oppressors of Christian Slav victims. A large-scale wave of
pogroms swept Ukraine in 1881, after Jews were
scapegoated for the assassination of Alexander II. In the 1881 outbreak, there were pogroms in 166 Ukrainian towns, thousands of Jewish homes were destroyed, many families reduced to extremes of poverty; large numbers of men, women, and children were injured, and some were killed. Disorders in the south again drew the government's attention to the
Jewish question. A conference was convened at the Ministry of Interior, and on May 15, 1882, so-called
Temporary Regulations were introduced that stayed in effect for more than thirty years and became known as the
May Laws. The repressive legislation was repeatedly revised. Many historians noted the concurrence of these state-enforced antisemitic policies with waves of pogroms that continued until 1884, with at least tacit government knowledge and in some cases, policemen were seen inciting or joining the mob. The systematic policy of discrimination banned Jewish people from rural areas and towns of fewer than ten thousand people, even within the Pale, assuring the slow death of many
shtetls. In 1887, the
quotas placed on the number of Jews allowed into secondary and higher education were tightened down to 10% within the Pale, 5% outside the Pale, except Moscow and Saint Petersburg, held at 3%, even though the Jewish population was a majority or plurality in many communities. It was possible to evade these restrictions upon secondary education by combining private tuition with examination as an "outside student." Accordingly, within the Pale, such outside pupils were almost entirely young Jews. The restrictions placed on education, traditionally highly valued in Jewish communities, resulted in an ambition to excel over peers and increased emigration rates. Special quotas restricted Jews from entering the profession of law, limiting the number of Jews admitted to the bar. In 1886, an Edict of Expulsion was enforced on the historic Jewish population of
Kiev. Most Jews were expelled from Moscow in 1891 (except few deemed
useful) and a newly built synagogue was closed by the city's authorities headed by the Tsar's brother. Tsar Alexander III refused to curtail repressive practices and reportedly noted: "But we must never forget that the Jews have crucified our Master and have shed his precious blood." In 1892, new measures banned Jewish participation in local elections despite their large numbers in many towns of the Pale. The
Town Regulations prohibited Jews from the right to elect or be elected to town
Dumas. Only a small number of Jews were allowed to be members of a town Duma, through appointment by special committees. During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the Russian Empire had not only the largest Jewish population in the world, but actually a majority of the world's Jews living within its borders. In 1897, according to
Russian census of 1897, the total Jewish population of Russia was 5,189,401 persons of both sexes (4.13% of the total population). Of this total, 93.9% lived in the 25 provinces of the
Pale of Settlement. The total population of the Pale of Settlement amounted to 42,338,367—of these, 4,805,354 (11.5%) were Jews. About 450,000 Jewish soldiers served in the Russian Army during
World War I, and fought side by side with their Slavic fellows. When hundreds of thousands of refugees from Poland and Lithuania, among them innumerable Jews, fled in terror before enemy invasion, the Pale of Settlement de facto ceased to exist. Most of the education restrictions on the Jews were removed with the appointment of Count
Pavel Ignatiev as Minister of Education.
Mass emigration founded
Wissotzky Tea in 1849, which would become the largest tea manufacturer in the Russian Empire and the world. In response to the pogroms of the 1880s, he funded the
Hovevei Zion movement to encourage immigration to Ottoman Palestine. The family tea company itself was seized and confiscated by the Bolsheviks after 1917. Even though the persecutions provided the impetus for mass emigration, other relevant factors account for the Jews' migration. After the first years of large emigration from Russia, positive feedback from the emigrants in the U.S. encouraged further emigration. Indeed, more than two million Jews fled Russia between 1880 and 1920. While a large majority emigrated to the United States, some turned to Zionism. In 1882, members of
Bilu and
Hovevei Zion made what came to be known as the
First Aliyah to
Palestine, then a part of the
Ottoman Empire. The Tsarist government sporadically encouraged Jewish emigration. In 1890, it approved the establishment of "The Society for the Support of Jewish Farmers and Artisans in
Syria and
Palestine" (known as the "
Odessa Committee" headed by Leon Pinsker) dedicated to practical aspects in establishing
agricultural Jewish settlements in Palestine.
Jewish members of the Duma In total, there were at least twelve Jewish deputies in the First
Duma (1906–1907), falling to three or four in the Second Duma (February 1907 to June 1907), two in the Third Duma (1907–1912) and again three in the fourth, elected in 1912. Converts to Christianity like
Mikhail Herzenstein and
Ossip Pergament were still considered as Jews by the public (and antisemitic) opinion and are most of the time included in these figures. , founder of the
Society for the Promotion of Culture among the Jews of Russia and the father of
Horace Günzburg. , the most decorated Jewish soldier in the
Imperial Russian Army for his bravery in the
Russo-Japanese War, before conducting operations in the Ottoman Empire. At the 1906 elections, the
Jewish Labour Bund had made an electoral agreement with the Lithuanian Labourers' Party (
Trudoviks), which resulted in the election to the Duma of two (non-Bundist) candidates in the Lithuanian provinces: Dr.
Shmaryahu Levin for the
Vilnius province and
Leon Bramson for the
Kaunas province. The Second Duma included seven Jewish deputies:
Shakho Abramson,
Iosif Gessen,
Vladimir Matveevich Gessen,
Lazar Rabinovich,
Yakov Shapiro (all of them Kadets) and
Avigdor Mandelberg (
Siberia Social Democrat), plus a convert to Christianity, the attorney
Ossip Pergament (
Odessa). Friedman was the only one reelected to the Fourth Duma in 1912, joined by two new deputies,
Meer Bomash, and Dr.
Ezekiel Gurevich. However, Jews were quickly charged with treachery by some Russian military leaders and right-wing politicians, and more than half a million Jews were expelled from western regions of the Russian Empire close to the frontline to the interior of Russia on the grounds that they might collaborate with the enemy. Others fled from the frontline areas voluntary. Ironically, all this broke the confinement of the Russian Jews to the
Pale of Settlement.
Revolution and civil war For Russia the year 1917 brought two revolutions:
February Revolution that ended the tsarist rule and the
October Revolution that started the long-lasting
Bolshevik rule. After the February Revolution Jews gained full equality with all other Russian citizens and many became active in politics. There were about 3,000 people in the Russian political elite in the interrevolutionary months of 1917 and more than 300 of them were Jewish, twice the proportion of Jews in the Russian population as a whole. Jews were prominent in the Russian
Constitutional Democrat Party,
Russian Social Democratic Party (
Mensheviks) and
Socialist-Revolutionary Party. The Russian Anarchist movement also included many prominent Jewish revolutionaries. In Ukraine,
Makhnovist anarchist leaders also included several Jews. Soon after seizing power, the Bolsheviks established the
Yevsektsiya, the Jewish section of the
Communist party in order to destroy the rival Bund and
Zionist parties, suppress
Judaism and replace traditional Jewish culture with "proletarian culture". The chaotic years of World War I, the February and October Revolutions, and the
Russian Civil War were fertile ground for the antisemitism that was endemic to tsarist Russia. During the
Russian Civil War the Jewish communities of
Ukraine, and to a lesser extent
Belarus, suffered
the worst pogroms ever to take place in these regions. They were performed by various armed units: by the
White Army of
Anton Denikin, by troops of the
Ukrainian People's Republic headed by
Symon Petliura, by gangs of warlord atamans and
"Green" insurgent peasants, and even by some
Red Army units. 31,071 civilian Jews were killed during documented pogroms throughout the former
Russian Empire; the number of Jewish orphans exceeded 300,000. A majority of pogroms in Ukraine during 1918–1920 were perpetrated by the Ukrainian nationalists, miscellaneous bands and anti-Communist forces. In February 1918, as German forces advanced on the capital of
Petrograd, the Soviet government signed the
Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, which stipulated that Russia would withdraw from
World War I and cede large swaths of territory in eastern Russia to the German Empire. Even after the signing of the treaty, however, the Germans continued to advance and seize territory, as the Soviets had no choice but to retreat across Ukraine. At this point in the war, the
Red Guard comprised mostly untrained workers and peasants with no overarching command structure, leaving the state with virtually no control over the volunteer forces. Between March and May 1918, various Red Guard squadrons, embittered by their military defeat and animated by revolutionary sentiment, attacked Jews in cities and towns across the
Chernihiv region of Ukraine. One of the most brutal instances of this violence occurred in the city of
Novhorod-Siverskyi, where it was reported that 88 Jews were killed and 11 injured in a pogrom incited by Red Guard soldiers. Similarly, after the successful capture of the city of
Hlukhiv, the Red Guard murdered at least 100 Jews, whom the soldiers accused of being 'exploiters of the proletariat.' In all, Jewish activist
Nahum Gergel estimated that the Red forces were responsible for about 8.6% of pogroms during the years 1918–1922, while Ukrainian and
White Army forces were responsible for 40% and 17.2%, respectively. When Jewish historian
Simon Dubnow heard in May 1918 about a pogrom in which Red Army soldiers took part, he noted sardonically, “We die at the hands of the Bolsheviks and are killed because of them.” In March 1919,
Vladimir Lenin delivered a speech "On Anti-Jewish Pogroms" on a
gramophone disc. Lenin sought to explain the phenomenon of antisemitism in
Marxist terms. According to Lenin, antisemitism was an "attempt to divert the hatred of the workers and peasants from the exploiters toward the Jews". Linking antisemitism to class struggle, he argued that it was merely a political technique used by the tsar to exploit religious fanaticism, popularize the despotic, unpopular regime, and divert popular anger toward a scapegoat. The Soviet Union also officially maintained this Marxist-Leninist interpretation under
Joseph Stalin, who expounded Lenin's critique of antisemitism. However, this did not prevent the widely publicized repressions of Jewish intellectuals during 1948–1953 when Stalin increasingly associated Jews with "cosmopolitanism" and
pro-Americanism. After 1917, the number of Jews in Russia in governmental posts and in higher education rose sharply, which later led to the myth of a Jewish association with communism and socialism.
Dissolution and seizure of Jewish properties and institutions . It was shut down by the Soviet Government in 1929. The Bolshevik regime restricted Jewish religious practice and education in Hebrew. In August 1919 Jewish properties, including synagogues, were seized and many Jewish communities were dissolved. New laws against all expressions of religion and religious education were imposed upon Jews and other religious groups. Many Rabbis and other religious officials were forced to resign from their posts under the threat of violent persecution. This type of persecution continued into the 1920s. In 1921, a large number of Jews opted for Poland, as the
Peace of Riga entitled them to choose the country they preferred. Several hundred thousand joined the already numerous
Jewish population of Poland.
Soviet Union Before World War II ,
Lev Kamenev and
Grigory Zinoviev, later executed or assassinated on Stalin's orders Continuing the policy of the Bolsheviks before the Revolution, Lenin and the Bolshevik Party strongly condemned the pogroms, including official denunciations in 1918 by the Council of People's Commissars. Opposition to the pogroms and to manifestations of Russian antisemitism in this era were complicated by both the official Bolshevik policy of assimilationism towards all national and religious minorities, and concerns about overemphasizing Jewish concerns for fear of exacerbating popular antisemitism, as the White forces were openly identifying the Bolshevik regime with Jews. Lenin recorded eight of his speeches on gramophone records in 1919. Only seven of these were later re-recorded and put on sale. The one suppressed in the
Nikita Khrushchev era recorded Lenin's feelings on antisemitism: in 1936 Lenin was supported by the
Labor Zionist (
Poale Zion) movement, then under the leadership of Marxist theorist
Ber Borochov, which was fighting for the creation of a Jewish workers' state in
Palestine and also participated in the October Revolution (and in the Soviet political scene afterwards until being banned by Stalin in 1928). While Lenin remained opposed to outward forms of
antisemitism (and all forms of racism), allowing Jewish people to rise to the highest offices in both party and state, certain historians such as
Dmitri Volkogonov argue that the record of his government in this regard was highly uneven. A former official Soviet historian (turned staunch anti-communist), Volkogonov claims that Lenin was aware of pogroms carried out by units of the Red Army during the war with Poland, particularly those carried out by
Semyon Budyonny's troops, though the whole issue was effectively ignored. Volkogonov writes that "While condemning antisemitism in general, Lenin was unable to analyze, let alone eradicate, its prevalence in Soviet society". The hostility of the Soviet regime towards all religion made no exception for
Judaism, and the 1921 campaign against religion saw the seizure of many synagogues (whether this should be regarded as antisemitism is a matter of definition—since Orthodox Christian churches received the same treatment). In any event, there was still a fair degree of tolerance for Jewish religious practice in the 1920s: in the Belarusian capital Minsk, for example, of the 657 synagogues existing in 1917, 547 were still functioning in 1930. set up a government committee (the
Komzet) and a public society (the OZET). According to
Zvi Gitelman: "Never before in Russian history—and never subsequently has a government made such an effort to uproot and stamp out antisemitism." According to the
census of 1926, the total number of Jews in the USSR was 2,672,398—of whom 59% lived in
Ukrainian SSR, 15.2% in
Byelorussian SSR, 22% in
Russian SFSR and 3.8% in other Soviet republics. Russian Jews were long considered to be a non-native ethnic group among the
Slavic Russians, and such categorization was solidified when ethnic minorities in the
Soviet Union were categorized according to ethnicity (). In his 1913 theoretical work
Marxism and the National Question, Stalin described Jews as "not a living and active nation, but something mystical, intangible and supernatural. For, I repeat, what sort of nation, for instance, is a Jewish nation which consists of Georgian, Daghestanian, Russian, American and other Jews, the members of which do not understand each other (since they speak different languages), inhabit different parts of the globe, will never see each other, and will never act together, whether in time of peace or in time of war?!" According to Stalin, who became the
People's Commissar for Nationalities Affairs after the revolution, to qualify as a nation, a minority was required to have a culture, a language, and a homeland. (centre), reading the 1937 indictment against
Karl Radek during the 2nd
Moscow Trial.
Yiddish, rather than Hebrew, would be the
national language, and
proletarian socialist literature and arts would replace Judaism as the quintessence of culture. The use of Yiddish was strongly encouraged in the 1920s in areas of the USSR with substantial Jewish populations, especially in the Ukrainian and Belarusian Soviet Socialist Republics. Yiddish was one of the Belarusian SSR's four official languages, alongside Belarusian, Russian, and Polish. The equality of the official languages was taken seriously. A visitor arriving at main train station of the Belarusian capital Minsk saw the city's name written in all four languages above the main station entrance. Yiddish was a language of newspapers, magazines, book publishing, theater, radio, film, the post office, official correspondence, election materials, and even a Central Jewish Court. Yiddish writers like Sholem Aleichem and Mendele Mocher Seforim were celebrated in the 1920s as Soviet Jewish heroes. Minsk had a public, state-supported Yiddish-language school system, extending from kindergarten to the Yiddish-language section of the Belarusian State University. Although Jewish students tended to switch to studying in Russian as they moved on to secondary and higher education, 55.3 percent of the city's Jewish primary school students attended Yiddish-language schools in 1927. At its peak, the Soviet Yiddish-language school system had 160,000 students in it. Such was the prestige of Minsk's Yiddish scholarship that researchers trained in Warsaw and Berlin applied for faculty positions at the university. All this leads historian Elissa Bemporad to conclude that this “very ordinary Jewish city” was in the 1920s “one of the world capitals of Yiddish language and culture." Jews also played a disproportionate role in Belarusian politics through the Bolshevik Party's Yiddish-language branch, the Yevsekstsia. Because there were few Jewish Bolsheviks before 1917 (with a few prominent exceptions like
Zinoviev and
Kamenev), the Yevsekstia's leaders in the 1920s were largely former Bundists, who pursued as Bolsheviks their campaign for secular Jewish education and culture. Although for example only a bit over 40 percent of Minsk's population was Jewish at the time, 19 of its 25 Communist Party cell secretaries were Jewish in 1924. Jewish predominance in the party cells was such that several cell meetings were held in Yiddish. Yiddish was spoken at citywide party meetings in Minsk into the late 1930s. on the map of Russia To offset the growing Jewish national and religious aspirations of
Zionism and to successfully categorize Soviet Jews under Stalin's definition of nationality, an alternative to the
Land of Israel was established with the help of
Komzet and
OZET in 1928. The
Jewish Autonomous Oblast with its center in
Birobidzhan in the
Russian Far East was to become a "Soviet Zion". Despite a massive domestic and international state propaganda campaign, however, the Jewish population in the Jewish Autonomous Oblast never reached 30% (in 2003 it was only about 1.2%). The experiment ground to a halt in the mid-1930s, during Stalin's first campaign of purges. The
CPSU's Yiddish-language Yevsekstia was dissolved in 1930, as part of the regime's overall turn away from encouraging minority languages and cultures and towards Russification. Many Jewish leaders, especially those with Bundist backgrounds, were arrested and executed in the purges later in the 1930s, and Yiddish schools were shut down. The Belasusian SSR shut down its entire network of Yiddish-language schools in 1938. In his January 12, 1931, letter "Antisemitism: Reply to an Inquiry of the Jewish News Agency in the United States" (published domestically by
Pravda in 1936), Stalin officially condemned antisemitism: In answer to your inquiry: National and racial chauvinism is a vestige of the misanthropic customs characteristic of the period of
cannibalism. Antisemitism, as an extreme form of racial chauvinism, is the most dangerous vestige of cannibalism. Antisemitism is of advantage to the exploiters as a lightning conductor that deflects the blows aimed by the working people at capitalism. Antisemitism is dangerous for the working people as being a false path that leads them off the right road and lands them in the jungle. Hence Communists, as consistent internationalists, cannot but be irreconcilable, sworn enemies of antisemitism. In the U.S.S.R. antisemitism is punishable with the utmost severity of the law as a phenomenon deeply hostile to the Soviet system. Under U.S.S.R. law active antisemites are liable to the death penalty. , who died in a
Gulag. The
Molotov–Ribbentrop pact—the 1939 non-aggression pact with
Nazi Germany—created further suspicion regarding the Soviet Union's position toward Jews. According to the pact, Poland, the nation with the world's largest Jewish population, was divided between Germany and the Soviet Union in September 1939. While the pact had no basis in ideological sympathy (as evidenced by Nazi propaganda about "
Jewish Bolshevism"), Germany's occupation of Western Poland was a disaster for Eastern European Jews. Evidence suggests that some, at least, of the Jews in the eastern Soviet zone of occupation welcomed the Russians as having a more liberated policy towards their civil rights than the preceding antisemitic Polish regime. Jews in areas annexed by the Soviet Union were deported eastward in great waves; as these areas would soon be invaded by Nazi Germany, this forced migration, deplored by many of its victims, paradoxically also saved the lives of several hundred thousand Jewish deportees. made after his arrest during Stalin's
Great Purge. Jews who escaped the purges include
Lazar Kaganovich, who came to Stalin's attention in the 1920s as a successful bureaucrat in
Tashkent and participated in the purges of the 1930s. Kaganovich's loyalty endured even after Stalin's death, when he and Molotov were expelled from the party ranks in 1957 due to their opposition to
destalinization. Beyond longstanding controversies, ranging from the
Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact to
anti-Zionism, the Soviet Union did grant official "equality of all citizens regardless of status, sex, race, religion, and nationality". The years before
the Holocaust were an era of rapid change for Soviet Jews, leaving behind the dreadful poverty of the Pale of Settlement. Forty percent of the population in the former Pale left for large cities within the USSR. Emphasis on education and movement from countryside
shtetls to newly
industrialized cities allowed many Soviet Jews to enjoy overall advances under Stalin and to become one of the most educated population groups in the world. , field commander of the Red Army. Because of Stalinist emphasis on its urban population, interwar migration inadvertently rescued countless Soviet Jews;
Nazi Germany penetrated the entire former Jewish Pale—but were kilometers short of
Leningrad and Moscow. The migration of many Jews farther East from the Jewish Pale, which would become occupied by Nazi Germany, saved at least 40 percent of the Pale's original Jewish population. By 1941, it was estimated that the Soviet Union was home to 4.855 million Jews, around 30% of all Jews worldwide. However, the majority of these were residents of rural western
Belarus and
Ukraine—populations that suffered greatly due to the German occupation and the
Holocaust. Only around 800,000 Jews lived outside the occupied territory, and 1,200,000 to 1,400,000 Jews were eventually evacuated eastwards. Of the three million left in occupied areas, the vast majority is thought to have perished in German
extermination camps.
World War II and the Holocaust , one of the Red Army's most influential tank commanders. . Burned down in 1942, during the Great Patriotic War with Soviet soldiers in 1942 Over two million Soviet Jews are believed to have died during the Holocaust, second only to the number of Polish Jews who fell victim to
Hitler (see
The Holocaust in Poland). Among some of the larger massacres which were committed in 1941 were: 33,771 Jews of
Kiev shot in ditches at
Babi Yar; 100,000 Jews and Poles of
Vilnius killed in the forests of
Ponary, 20,000 Jews killed in Kharkiv at Drobnitzky Yar, 36,000 Jews machine-gunned in Odessa, 25,000 Jews of
Riga killed in the woods at
Rumbula, and 10,000 Jews slaughtered in
Simferopol in the Crimea. Although mass shootings continued through 1942, most notably 16,000 Jews shot at Pinsk, Jews were increasingly shipped to concentration camps in German Nazi-occupied Poland. Local residents of German-occupied areas, especially Ukrainians, Lithuanians, and Latvians, sometimes played key roles in the genocide of other Latvians, Lithuanians, Ukrainians, Slavs,
Romani, homosexuals and Jews alike. Under the Nazi occupation, some members of the Ukrainian and Latvian Nazi police carried out deportations in the
Warsaw Ghetto, and Lithuanians marched Jews to their death at Ponary. Even as some assisted the Germans, a significant number of individuals in the territories under German control also helped Jews escape death (
see Righteous Among the Nations). In
Latvia, particularly, the number of Nazi-collaborators was only slightly more than that of Jewish saviours. It is estimated that up to 1.4 million Jews fought in
Allied armies; 40% of them in the
Red Army. In total, at least 142,500 Soviet soldiers of Jewish nationality lost their lives fighting against the German invaders and their allies about the military decorations of Jews during the war (1.8% of the total number). Some antisemites attempted to accuse Jews of lack of patriotism and of hiding from military service. The typical Soviet policy regarding the Holocaust was to present it as
atrocities against Soviet citizens, not emphasizing the genocide of the Jews. For example, after the liberation of
Kiev from the Nazi occupation, the
Extraordinary State Commission (Чрезвычайная Государственная Комиссия; ''Chrezv'chaynaya Gosudarstvennaya Komissiya'') was set out to investigate Nazi crimes. The description of the
Babi Yar massacre was officially
censored as follows:
Stalinist antisemitic campaigns The revival of Jewish identity after the war, stimulated by the creation of the state of Israel in 1948, was cautiously welcomed by Stalin as a means to put pressure on Western imperialism in the Middle East, but when it became evident that many Soviet Jews expected the revival of Zionism to enhance their own aspirations for separate cultural and religious development in the Soviet Union, a wave of repression was unleashed. Mass arrests of prominent Jewish intellectuals and suppression of Jewish culture followed under the banners of campaign against "
rootless cosmopolitans" and
anti-Zionism. On August 12, 1952, in the event known as the
Night of the Murdered Poets, thirteen of the most prominent
Yiddish writers, poets, actors and other intellectuals were executed on the orders of Joseph Stalin, among them
Peretz Markish,
Leib Kvitko,
David Hofstein,
Itzik Feffer and
David Bergelson. In the 1955
United Nations General Assembly's session a high Soviet official still denied the "rumors" about their disappearance. The
Doctors' Plot allegation in 1953 was a deliberately antisemitic policy: Stalin targeted "corrupt Jewish bourgeois nationalists", eschewing the usual code words like "rootless cosmopolitans" or "cosmopolitans". Stalin died, however, before this next wave of arrests and executions could be launched in earnest. A number of historians claim that the Doctors' Plot was intended as the opening of a campaign that would have resulted in the mass
deportation of Soviet Jews had Stalin not died on March 5, 1953. Days after Stalin's death the plot was declared a
hoax by the Soviet government. These cases may have reflected Stalin's paranoia, rather than state ideology—a distinction that made no practical difference as long as Stalin was alive, but which became salient on his death. In April 1956, the
Warsaw Yiddish language Jewish newspaper
Folkshtimme published sensational long lists of Soviet Jews who had perished before and after the Holocaust. The world press began demanding answers from Soviet leaders, as well as inquiring about the current condition of the Jewish education system and culture. The same autumn, a group of leading Jewish world figures publicly requested the heads of Soviet state to clarify the situation. Since no cohesive answer was received, their concern was only heightened. The fate of Soviet Jews emerged as a major human rights issue in the West.
The Soviet Union and Zionism (left),
Albert Einstein and
Solomon Mikhoels in the United States in 1943. Feffer was executed on the
Night of the Murdered Poets and rehabilitated posthumously in 1955, after Stalin's death. Marxist
anti-nationalism and
anti-clericalism had a mixed effect on Soviet Jews. Jews were the immediate benefactors, but they were also long-term victims, of the Marxist notion that any manifestation of
nationalism is "socially retrogressive". On one hand, Jews were liberated from the religious persecution of the Tsarist years of "
Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality". On the other, this notion was threatening to Jewish cultural institutions, the Bund,
Jewish autonomy,
Judaism and
Zionism. Political Zionism was officially stamped out as a form of
bourgeois nationalism during the
entire history of the
Soviet Union. Although
Leninism emphasizes the belief in "self-determination", this fact did not make the Soviet state more accepting of Zionism. Leninism defines self-determination by territory or
culture, rather than by
religion, which allowed Soviet minorities to have separate oblasts, autonomous regions, or republics, which were nonetheless symbolic until its later years. Jews, however, did not fit such a theoretical model; Jews in the
Diaspora did not even have an agricultural base, as Stalin often asserted when he attempted to deny the existence of a Jewish nation, and they certainly did not have a territorial unit.
Marxist notions even denied the existence of a Jewish identity beyond the existence of a religion and caste; Marx defined Jews as a "chimerical nation". dominating the main square in Birobidzhan, in the
Jewish Autonomous Oblast, founded in the Russian Far East in 1936 Lenin, who claimed to be deeply committed to egalitarian ideals and the universality of all humanity, rejected Zionism as a reactionary movement, "bourgeois nationalism", "socially retrogressive", and a backward force that deprecates class divisions among Jews. Moreover,
Zionism entailed contact between Soviet citizens and westerners, which was dangerous in a closed society. Soviet authorities were likewise fearful of any mass-movement which was independent of the
monopolistic Communist Party, and not tied to the state or the
ideology of
Marxism-Leninism. Without changing his official
anti-Zionist stance, from late 1944 until 1948
Joseph Stalin adopted a
de facto pro-Zionist foreign policy, apparently believing that the new country would be socialist and hasten the decline of British influence in the Middle East. In a May 14, 1947 speech during the
UN Partition Plan debate, published in
Izvestiya two days later, the
Soviet ambassador Andrei Gromyko announced: Soviet approval in the
United Nations Security Council was critical to the UN partitioning of the
British Mandate of Palestine, which led to the founding of the
State of Israel. Three days after
Israel declared its independence, the Soviet Union legally recognized it
de jure. In addition, the USSR allowed
Czechoslovakia to continue supplying arms to the Jewish forces during the
1948 Arab–Israeli War, even though this conflict took place after the Soviet-supported
Czechoslovak coup d'état of 1948. At the time, the U.S. maintained an arms embargo on both sides in the conflict. See
Arms shipments from Czechoslovakia to Israel 1947–1949. By the end of 1957 the USSR switched sides in the
Arab–Israeli conflict and throughout the course of the
Cold War unequivocally supported various Arab regimes against Israel. The official position of the Soviet Union and its satellite states and agencies was that Zionism was a tool used by the Jews and Americans for "racist imperialism". as "Jew". As
Israel was emerging as a close Western ally, the specter of
Zionism raised fears of internal dissent and opposition. During the later parts of the Cold War, Soviet Jews were suspected of being possible traitors, Western sympathisers, or a security liability. The Communist leadership closed down various Jewish organizations and declared Zionism an ideological enemy. Synagogues were often placed under police surveillance, both openly and through the use of informers. As a result of the persecution, both state-sponsored and unofficial, antisemitism was ingrained in the society and remained for years: ordinary Soviet Jews often suffered hardships, epitomized by often not being allowed to enlist in universities, work in certain professions, or participate in government. However, it should be mentioned that this was not always the case and this kind of persecution varied depending on the region. Still many Jews felt compelled to hide their identities by changing their names. The word "Jew" was also avoided in the media when criticising undertakings by
Israel, which the Soviets often accused of racism, chauvinism etc. Instead of
Jew, the word
Israeli was used almost exclusively, so as to paint its harsh criticism not as antisemitism but anti-Zionism. More controversially, the Soviet media, when depicting political events, sometimes used the term 'fascism' to characterise Israeli nationalism (e.g. calling Jabotinsky a 'fascist', and claiming 'new fascist organisations were emerging in Israel in the 1970s' etc.).
1967–1985 (above) and
Evsei Liberman said that as Soviet Jews they opposed the
Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry. A mass emigration was politically undesirable for the Soviet regime. As increasing numbers of Soviet Jews applied to emigrate to Israel in the period following the 1967
Six-Day War, many were
formally refused permission to leave. A typical excuse given by the
OVIR (ОВиР), the
MVD department responsible for the provisioning of
exit visas, was that persons who had been given access at some point in their careers to information vital to Soviet
national security could not be allowed to leave the country. After the
Dymshits–Kuznetsov hijacking affair in 1970 and the crackdown that followed, strong international condemnations caused the Soviet authorities to increase the emigration
quota. From 1960 to 1970, only 4,000 people left the USSR; in the following decade, the number rose to 250,000. In 1972, the USSR imposed the so-called "diploma tax" on would-be emigrants who received higher education in the USSR. In some cases, the fee was as high as twenty annual salaries. This measure was possibly designed to combat the
brain drain caused by the growing emigration of Soviet Jews and other members of the
intelligentsia to the West. Although Jews now made up less than 1% of the population, some surveys have suggested that around one-third of the emigrating Jews had achieved some form of higher education. Furthermore, Jews holding positions requiring specialized training tended to be highly concentrated in a small set of specialties, including medicine, mathematics, biology and music. At first almost all of those who managed to get exit visas to Israel actually made
aliyah, but after the mid-1970s, most of those allowed to leave for Israel actually chose other destinations, most notably the United States.
Glasnost and end of the USSR In 1989 a record 71,000 Soviet Jews were granted exodus from the USSR, of whom only 12,117 immigrated to Israel. At first, American policy treated Soviet Jews as refugees and allowed unlimited numbers to emigrate, but this policy eventually came to an end. As a result, more Jews began moving to Israel, as it was the only country willing to take them unconditionally. In the 1980s, the liberal government of
Mikhail Gorbachev allowed unlimited Jewish emigration, and the Soviet Union itself collapsed in 1991. As a result, a mass emigration of Jews from the former Soviet Union took place. Since the 1970s, over 1.1 million Russians of Jewish origin immigrated to Israel, of whom 100,000 emigrated to third countries such as the United States and Canada soon afterward and 240,000 were not considered Jewish under
Halakha, but were eligible under the
Law of Return due to Jewish ancestry or marriage. Since the adoption of the
Jackson–Vanik amendment, over 600,000 Soviet Jews have emigrated.
Modern-day Russia Judaism today is officially designated as one of Russia's four "traditional religions", alongside
Orthodox Christianity,
Islam and
Buddhism. As of the 2021 census, most Russian Jews are Ashkenazi (82,644 of the 83,896 total, or 98.51%). The second largest community are the
Krymchaks, who numbered 954, or 1.14% of the Jewish population. There were 266 Mountain Jews (0.32%) and some Bukharan and Georgian Jews, who numbered 18 (0.02%) and 14 (0.02%) respectively. In addition to this, there were 500
Crimean Karaites, who have historically not identified as Jews. Most Crimean Karaites lived in Crimea (215, or 43.00%) or Moscow (60); most Krymchaks lived in Crimea (864, or 90.57% of the total) or Sebastopol (35, or 3.68%) meaning 899, or 94.23% of the Russian Krymchak population, still lives on the Crimean peninsula, largely rurally. The Crimean Karaite population in Crimea has declined by well over 50% since the Ukrainian census of 2001. Conversely, most
Juhurim have left the
Caucasus region, and the largest single community still in Russia (84, 31.58%) is found in Moscow. Of the Jewish populations remaining in the northern Caucasus, most are now Ashkenazi, with only a few being Mountain Jews. There are still 145 Mountain Jews scattered throughout the northern Caucasus, of which 60 are in
Dagestan (amounting to 6.49% of the republic's Jewish population), 47 are in
Kabardino-Balkaria (6.02%), 29 are in
Stavropol (1.80%), 6 are in Krasnodar (0.37%) and 3 are in
Adygea (2.24%). There are no Mountain Jews remaining in Chechnya, Ingushetia, North Ossetia-Alania or Karachay-Cherkessia. Most Russian Jews are secular and identify themselves as Jews via ethnicity rather than religion, although interest about
Jewish identity as well as practice of Jewish tradition amongst Russian Jews is growing. The
Lubavitcher Jewish Movement has been active in this sector, setting up synagogues and Jewish kindergartens in Russian cities with Jewish populations. In addition, most Russian Jews have relatives who live in Israel. There are several major Jewish organizations in the territories of the former USSR. The central Jewish organization is the
Federation of Jewish Communities of the CIS under the leadership of Chief Rabbi
Berel Lazar. , Russia's most decorated artist, was often described as the 'Russian
Sinatra' A linguistic distinction remains to this day in the Russian language where there are two distinct terms that correspond to the word
Jew in English. The word
еврей ("yevrey" – Hebrew) typically denotes a Jewish ethnicity, as "Hebrew" did in English up until the early 20th century. The word
иудей ("iudey" – Judean, etymologically related to the English
Jew) is reserved for denoting a follower of the Jewish religion, whether he or she is ethnically Jewish or ethnically Gentile; this term has largely fallen out of use in favor of the equivalent term
иудаист ("iudaist"-Judaist). For example, according to a 2012 Russian survey,
евреи account for only 32.2% of
иудаисты in Russia, with nearly half (49.8%) being Ethnic Russians (
русские). An ethnic slur, жид (borrowed from the
Polish Żyd, Jew), also remains in widespread use in Russia. Antisemitism is one of the most common expressions of
xenophobia in post-Soviet Russia, even among some groups of politicians, despite laws against fomenting hatred based on ethnic or religious grounds (Article 282 of
Russian Federation
Penal Code). In 2002, the number of antisemitic neo-Nazi groups in the republics of the former Soviet Union, led
Pravda to declare in 2002 that "Anti-Semitism is booming in Russia". In January 2005, a group of 15
Duma members demanded that Judaism and Jewish organizations be banned from Russia. In 2005, 500 prominent Russians, including some 20 members of the nationalist
Rodina party, demanded that the state prosecutor investigate ancient Jewish texts as "anti-Russian" and ban Judaism. An investigation was in fact launched, but halted after an international outcry. , a billionaire businessman and co-owner of
Stroygazmontazh. He is considered a close confidant of Vladimir Putin. Overall, in recent years, particularly since the early 2000s, levels of antisemitism in Russia have been reportedly low, and steadily decreasing. In 2019, Ilya Yablogov wrote that many Russians were keen on antisemitic conspiracy theories in 1990s but it declined after 2000 and many high-ranking officials were forced to apologize for the antisemitic behavior. In Russia, both historical and contemporary antisemitic materials are frequently published. For example, a set (called
Library of a Russian Patriot) consisting of twenty five antisemitic titles was recently published, including
Mein Kampf translated to Russian (2002), which although was banned in 2010,
The Myth of Holocaust by
Jürgen Graf, a title by
Douglas Reed,
Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and others. , the youngest
Prime Minister of Russia Antisemitic incidents are mostly conducted by extremist, nationalist, and Islamist groups. Most of the antisemitic incidents are against Jewish cemeteries and buildings (such as community centers and synagogues) such as the assault against the Jewish community's center in Perm in March 2013 and the attack on Jewish nursery school in Volgograd in August 2013. Nevertheless, there were several violent attacks against Jews in Moscow in 2006 when a neo-Nazi stabbed 9 people at the Bolshaya Bronnaya Synagogue, the failed bomb attack on the same synagogue in 1999. Attacks against Jews made by extremist Islamic groups are rare in Russia although there has been increase in the scope of the attacks mainly in Muslim populated areas. On July 25, 2013, the rabbi of Derbent was attacked and badly injured by an unknown person near his home, most likely by a terrorist. The incident sparked concerns among the local Jews of further acts against the Jewish community. , who served as the Mayor of
Yekaterinburg from 2013 to 2018. He was arrested in 2022 after denouncing the
war in Ukraine. deputy
Alexander Khinshtein was appointed as acting governor of
Kursk Oblast in 2024 After the passage of some anti-gay laws in Russia in 2013 and the incident with the "
Pussy Riot" band in 2012 causing a growing criticism on the subject inside and outside Russia a number of verbal antisemitic attacks were made against Russian gay activists by extremist activists and antisemitic writers such as
Israel Shamir who viewed the "Pussy Riot" incident as the war of Judaism on the Christian Orthodox church. The contemporary Jewish population of Russia is shrinking due to small family sizes, and high rates of assimilation and intermarriage. This shrinkage has been slowed by some Russian-Jewish emigrants having returned from abroad, especially from Germany. The great majority of up to 90% of children born to a Jewish parent are the offspring of mixed marriages, and most Jews have only one or two children. The EuroStars young adults program provides Jewish learning and social activities in 32 cities across Russia. Some have described a 'renaissance' in the Jewish community inside Russia since the beginning of the 21st century. The Chief Rabbi of Moscow,
Pinchas Goldschmidt, left Russia after he refused a request from state officials to publicly support the Russian invasion of Ukraine. On 30 June 2023, Goldschmidt was designated in Russia as a
foreign agent. == Historical demographics ==