Start writing today. Use the button below to create your Substack and connect your publication with 20th Century Musings in the 21st Century Somewhere along the line the myth that there were never any Jewish communists in the USSR grew into the additional claim that Jews were the most persecuted group by the Soviet regime and the only one ever subjected to racial discrimination. While concrete information was difficult to get on Soviet history before the partial opening of the archives these claims should have been completely discredited by the limited data that was released from the archives. Aside from the famine deaths in Ukraine and Kazakhstan where Jews were underrepresented among deaths due to higher rates of urbanization and party membership there is the fact that they were neither targeted in the 1937-1938 national operations nor the 1937-1944 forced resettlement of entire nationalities. These two subsets of Soviet repression during the Stalin regime will be emphasized in this essay since they are the two subsets of Soviet repression that specifically targeted groups primarily on the basis of their natsional’nost’ rather than any other factors.
good work, I look forward to part 2