Socialist Circles Have an Anti-Semitism Problem - They're Called Tankies | New Voices
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In the days following the results of the 2016 American presidential election, I actively searched for places to express my frustration as a young American socialist living abroad who was frankly devastated by the election results. I was overjoyed to find one Facebook group made up of Bernie Sanders supporters who wanted a place to […]

I’m from the global South, so I don’t know minute details in the western history that well. Yes, this post should have gone under a political community, but since I’m interested in the history, I believe that this is the right place to post them.

I am interested in this part of the article:

According to the Jewish Encyclopedia, this town’s population was 80 percent Jewish at the start of the twentieth century. In contrast, at the start of World War II, only 26 percent of the town was Jewish, after Jews fled or were imprisoned and killed in gulags. Devastatingly, the remainder of the Jewish population was killed in one mass slaughter by the Nazis in 1942.

However, from this Wikipedia page:

…in the 1930s the Jews were underrepresented in the Gulag population

Not just that, but according to this page mentions how most of the pogroms were carried out by the ASFR army and UNA, although the Green and Red army were also complicit to some extent.

Anything else I should be looking out for?

  • boywar3@lemmy.world
    3·
    4 months ago

    Unfortunately, I’m not qualified to really help your exact question. However, it should be noted that the Russian Civil War displaced and killed a lot of people, and the Russian Empire had problems with pogroms against Jews. It’s not inconceivable that many of those towns were depopulated as a direct consequence of not just the Russian Civil War, but also the actions of the USSR before WW2.

    My first thought at the mentioning of the underrepresentaion of Jews in gulags was questioning how many had simply been killed outright instead of imprisoned, or simply fled the town/country before then. I’d look into the numbers of Jewish people who fled the USSR after 1900 to get a clearer picture.

    Overall, the history seems pretty accurate to my knowledge, but again, I’m not an expert by any means!

  • huf [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
    31·
    4 months ago

    apparently something made the jewish population drop from ~3k to ~1k during the time the town grew to at least twice its size? i dunno what happened and who did it, we’d need more info and i cant find any (in english, after a quick google).

    but then the town took in thousands of fleeing refugees (jews from poland) supposedly? and then the nazis captured it and killed all the jews, locals and polish jews.

    so yeah, based on this info, i dont see how you can jump straight to blaming the bolsheviks. could’ve been them, could’ve been the whites.

    more information is needed.

    • velox_vulnusOPEnglish
      31·
      4 months ago

      There’s some information about it, but that’s just part of it, and so I believe that it could be misleading. From what I’ve read, Jewish population actually increased in imperial Russia. They were restricted to live in Pale of Settlement. During the Tsarist regime, there were also multiple waves of pogroms, leading to death and migration.

      Interestingly, there’s also a page on Jewish Bolshevism and Economic antisemitism. From what I know, there’s no information about pogroms after 1921.