The Fifth problem: Math and Anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union
newcriterion.com
newcriterion.com
What if Edward Frenkel's father had been Russian and his mother Jewish instead of the other way round? Well, the commander of the Soviet Air Force in Ukraine when the Soviet Union broker up was Kostyantyn Morozov, then Konstantin Morozov. He had a Russian surname and his nationality was listed as Russian. If it had been known that he had a Ukrainian mother and had Ukrainian sympathies, he would never have been given such a powerful post by the Soviet authorities. As it was, Morozov announced his allegiance to the pro-independence cause to become the first defense minister of an independent Ukraine and to establish the Ukrainian armed forces.
Would the breakup of the Soviet Union have gone differently if all the high-ranking generals in control of Soviet forces in the biggest non-Russian republic were pro-Russian? It makes you wonder how many accidents of history can be traced to the arbitrary custom of inheriting surnames from fathers.
Bit of an aside, but this used to be pretty common. Religion, in practice a proxy for ethnicity, was only removed from Greek identity cards in 2000: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_identity_card#Removal_of_...
(It's a proxy for ethnicity in Greece because religion has traditionally been rooted in ethnic groups in the region, so whether someone's card said "Greek Orthodox" indicated whether they were ethnically Greek, vs. a member of the Turkish or Albanian minorities.)
In the early days under Lenin, Stalin was appointed to formulate the Party's nationalities policy. One of the policies they came up with was that each of the nationalities was supposed to have a national homeland. Under the Czars, Jews were required to live within a "Pale of Settlement" which was in the extreme west of their European holdings. So somewhere in that neighborhood would have been a logical spot. Instead Stalin decided to found the Jewish Autonomous Oblast, capital city Birobidzhan, on the border with China in far south-east Russia about 400 miles inland from the northern Japan Sea. Many thousands of Jews were deported to this wasteland, where needless to say they did not prosper.
It is a sad testament to how manipulated the US communists were that when I told this story to my grandmother who had been active in those movements, that she had heard of Birobidzhan, and that they used to sing songs about it in Yiddish and thought of it as a Jewish Worker's paradise.
This Birobidzhan? Doesn't particularly look like a wasteland.
Doesn't particularly look like a wasteland.
But truly, the jokes about frost-resistant Jews are so old now.
Those that did not want to stay (and who would? the government organs in Moscow didn't coordinate with ones in the Far East. As a result, housing was rationed in an extremely inefficient way: land was parceled out without first having been surveyed so that some plots didn't have running water and weren't ready for settlers) could ultimately go back to the cities they came from.
The reason Stalin didn't want to settle the Jews within the Pale of Settlement is because that experiment had already been tried with Jewish communal farms in the 1920s in Crimea[1], and the Soviet government had found that the people there weren't huge fans of Jews, so Birobidzhan was established to ease tensions there, "solve the Jewish problem," and to secure the Sino-Soviet border.
It's true, however, that many American Jewish groups in the late 1930s and again in the early 1950s were fed stories about how amazing life was in the Autonomous Jewish Region, complete with shining pictures of hearty, hale pioneers smiling near their plots of land. Ambijan (American Committee for Birobidzhan) [2] was an especially popular one that had celebrity spokespeople, starting with Einstein.
[1] http://www.yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/Crimea [2]http://www.swarthmore.edu/Home/News/biro/html/panel30.html
(...)
>It's not correct to say that "Jews were deported." It was most definitely a choice for most of the Jews that went there (my grandfather's family was among them,) and the government incentivized migration there with a stipend of several thousand rubles to those that decided to stay
Seeing the correction from somebody who actually knows about those facts, it seems that it's a sad testament to how manipulated the US version of USSR history is in general, not only to "US communists".
The odds of being hired when you have an Arab name in Western Europe is frightening, regardless of qualifications.
For the US, just look at the ethnic distribution of death row inmates.
Compared to the government-can-do-as-it-pleases, life-in-prison-for-having- done-3-BS-offenses, largest-incarceration-rate-in-the-world, disproportionate-amount-of-blacks-in-prison, slap-on-the-wrist-for-rich-folks, private-prison-racket system?
How is it for the average citizen, and normal disputes? Do they have something like a huge minority (blacks) that they consistently discriminate against in their justice system?
Do they have as absurd laws as the three-strikes?
Coral CDN link (since the author's file server seems ridiculously slow): http://www.ftpi.umn.edu.nyud.net/shifman/ComradeEinstein.pdf
Russia's kind of weird, didn't they just open a Jewish history museum dubbed the "Jewish Disney Land" to try to get more Jews to move back? http://www.themoscowtimes.com/arts_n_ideas/article/state-of-... Somehow I think leaders want Jews back but the public doesn't.
I've seen documentaries on a tiny community of Africans living in Beijing and how they are "stopped by police constantly" http://youtu.be/GURLHAM-KoI, and treated the same way in Israel by Jews. http://youtu.be/rYwvGHY1nAI. You think it's a "white people" problem because that's all you've seen your whole life. As multi-racial/multi-culturalism increases worldwide you'll realize it's something prevalent throughout humanity.
That's the compromise, without diversity a society might become stale but diversity brings up problems on it's own as one culture feels it's future is threatened by another.
Racism: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2006/sep/08/racismi... http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/10/opinion/10iht-edeltahawy.1...
Anti-semitism (too easy): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisemitism_in_the_Arab_world
Or the rest of the world:
A comparison of countries, not sure if you should trust this as an indicator: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2013/05/15...
Books with anti-semitic conspiracy theories are bestsellers in China: http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/10/02/china-anti-semi...
Discrimination against black people in China: http://www.cnn.com/2012/07/24/world/asia/china-tinted-prejud...
Socialism discriminated 'intellectuals' in favor of 'proletariat'. For example son of doctor had lower chances compared to son of factory worker. Jews were perceived as intellectuals.
Similar discrimination is today in US. Jews are discriminated for being white.
Places at universities were not 'for everyone'. One needed political connections, family history and bribes. If your father would emigrate to west, you may forget about higher education.
Most restricted were elite humanitarian studies (philosophy, film-making...). Technical studies were bit more free, but still had lot of restrictions.
If you are saying that being Jewish was only one of several reasons for being discriminated against in the Soviet Union, then I agree. If you deny that Jewishness had nothing to do with it and it all had to do with being intellectuals, not having the right connections, etc., then you are losing me.
Yes I do. There were so many Jews in soviet party, there is even "theory" that soviet revolution was Jewish conspiracy. [1]. Stalin initially supported Israel state with weapons.
Antisemitism started in 60ties, after Israel becomed US oriented and several people from soviet union emigrated there. After that several soviet jews had relatives on west and were perceived as 'politically unreliable' and potential spies. There were mainly political reasons for discrimination, it really turned into antisemitism in 90ties after soviet union.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_Bolshevism#Jews_in_the_B...
As for Stalin's initial support of Israel, well, he initially signed a secret non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany as well. One can read too much into foreign policy decisions.
Stalin, despite being non-Russian himself, targeted non-Russians in the Soviet Union in purges and deportations on the pretext that they were politically unreliable and potential spies. You can choose to take these excuses at face value, but in the end you have to recognize that in effect they suffered largely because of being the wrong ethnicity.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stalin_and_antisemitism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisemitism_in_the_Soviet_Unio...
He hated everyone, Jews were not exception.
Whatever Stalin's initial intentions were for the Doctors' Plot case, it ended up taking on a clearly antisemitic character, with the media hyping up the threat of Zionism. We may note that while Khrushchev denounced the Doctors' Plot as having been fabricated by Stalin, he didn't denounce the antisemitic rhetoric.
Anti-zionism is not antisemitism.
Anti-Zionism is not antisemitism, but when Anti-Zionist rhetoric is used to condemn anyone with Jewish names, that sounds pretty antisemitic to me.
Antisemitism in USSR was rampant before 60s as well, and in Eastern Slavic regions in general, even before USSR
Read history of cities such as Gomel or Bobruysk.
http://www.jewishgomel.com/en/Jewish-history-og-Gomel "... The wave of pogroms in Imperial Russia at the beginning of the twentieth century did not bypass Gomel. From August 29 - September 1, 1903, there was a pogrom in Gomel, during which ten Jews were killed, many were wounded and much Jewish property was looted. A Jewish self-defense was able to rebuff the pogrom, the first time in the history of the Russian Empire. After the pogrom there was a famous trial in Gomel (October 1904 - January 1905, November 1906), where not just the perpetrators of the pogrom were tried but also the 36 members of the Jewish self-defense. ...."
Also please do not forget one of the main drivers for the subsequent prosecutions, a document forgery called 'Protocols'
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Protocols_of_the_Elders_of_...
"... The Protocols appeared in print in the Russian Empire as early as 1903. The antisemitic tract was published as a serialized set of articles in Znamya, a Black Hundreds newspaper owned by Pavel Krushevan. It appeared again in 1905 as a final chapter (Chapter XII) of a second edition of Velikoe v malom i antikhrist (The Great in the Small & Antichrist), a book by Serge Nilus. In 1906, it appeared in pamphlet form edited by G. Butmi.[25] ..."
So your claim "... Antisemitism started in 60ties, after Israel becomed US oriented and several people from soviet union emigrated there. ..." is patently false.
This story in the OP brought tears to my eyes. I was no where near as good in mathematics as E Frenkel, but having a Jewish mother, and half Armenian father (and therefore Armenian last name) -- insured that even if I had 5 times more talent I did -- I would still not win the admission game.
Essentially the 'rektor' (or the dean) of University I was going to, apparently said (and, no, I did not hear it directly) -- that '... he was not going to prepare workforce for israel, and that's why admitting Jews was not in his interest).
Having parents whose last name is Armenian or/and Jewish-sounding, is the an obstacle that could realistically be overcome either by avoiding it (e.g. going to a place where Jews could get in) or 'special friends', or a bribe.
My grandparents, especially my maternal granddad had it much worse. Every time I think I am stressing over things -- all I had to do is to remember what he went through (Buchenwald than Russian prison, where he was tortured by authorities asking him how he could survive Buchenvald while being a Jew)
Important though that neither my grandparents, nor I, nor my parents -- ever wanted to have some kind of 'affirmative' action or 'institutionalized help' as a repayment for previous mistreatment. Instead, all we ever wanted is to be treated 'the same'.
I rarely write or reply on this kinds of topics, but seeing this story, and then a Altero's statement based, I presume, on the lack of knowledge, elicited this reply.
Apologies if it was a bit emotional.
Although it was nowhere as bad as in the Old World, Jews were historically discriminated against in the U.S.—universities had Jewish quotas, for example. This had nothing to do with "being white", even if we limit ourselves to white European Jews. The whole "reverse discrimination" angle you try to bring in is neither here nor there.
That is exactly what I am saying. Examiners could got orders to fail him, if for example his uncle lived on west. Officially there was no discrimination, so it was mostly done by bulling people at exams.
White (perhaps even heterosexual male) has statistically lower chances to study for free. It fits definition of discrimination as a glove.
In Frenkel's story, the lady from the correspondence school hears his name and that he wants to apply to MGU, and immediately asks for his nationality. When he replies "Russian", she keeps asking until he replies that his father is Jewish. Then she flat-out says, "Do you know that Jews are not accepted to Moscow University?". I think it is fairly clearly established that this is the reason he was denied a place there.
Jews were perceived as intellectuals.
Similar discrimination is today in US.
Jews are discriminated for being white.
The "fifth line" was not a problem. What is a problem is when russian jew with Soviet M Sc in maths goes through NARIC in the UK, he gets B Sc only. It is the West who is discriminating Soviet degrees.
My American university provided lots of financial aid to international students. Need-blind! Many of these students came from countries with very un-American political systems. And many of them simply returned to their home countries after college.
And yet these students did not have to go through the Kafka-esque (and just plain wrong) system that this author describes. They were treated like everyone else.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4752047
Top thread points out that the US obviously does the same thing.