Soviet Jews and Josef Stalin
In the years before World War II, resentment towards the Jews of the world grew large. ... Stalin’s treatment of Polish and Soviet Jews is questionable. Life wasn’t too bad for Jews in the USSR in the late 1920s and early 1930s. ... When the Nazi-Soviet Pact was signed, anti-Semitic events started to occur within the government and in society. So a question arises, was Stalin for the Jews or against them? The Soviet leader was given many chances to halt Hitler from his torment of Jews but instead did very little. As a result of this inaction, a third of the Soviet Union’s Jewish population was eliminated. The dream of a democratic, multi-national state had become a reality for Jews in the Soviet Union. ... This region was the center for Jewish culture and became very important to Russian Jews. The Russian government had hoped for one hundred thousand people to emigrate to Birobidjan but only about twenty thousand Jews remained as permanent residents. Outside of Birobidjan, life was on the up-swing for Jews. By 1939, most of the Jews moved from small towns to live in large urban areas. ... In the book, “The Reconstruction of the Jews in the USSR” by J. Cantor, he notes the entry of Jews into various industries. ... One can see for oneself by visiting such giant industrial projects as the dynamo-plant which bears Stalin’s name, the electricity plant in Moscow, the Red-Pulitov factory, as centers in Leningrad, Selmash, Uralmash, Magnitogorsk, and many others. ... The rise in anti-Semitism in Soviet Russia is directly related to the Hitler-Stalin Pact. “On August 22, 1939, however, like a bombshell, came the astonishing announcement that German Foreign Minister Ribbentrop was in Moscow to sign an agreement: the Nazi-Soviet Pact,” writes Robert Paxton in his book “Europe in the Twentieth Century. ... Nearly two million Jews were added to the Soviet Jewish population bringing the total to nearly five million Jews in Russia. ... Mein Kampf is Hitler’s autobiography written in 1925 in which he discusses his strong dislike of Jews and Communist ideals.