Jews evacuated into the Soviet Union
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The topic is Jews evacuated into the Soviet Union. Stay on it. If anyone wants to discuss an unrelated topic, start a new thread.
Last edited by David Thompson on 22 Dec 2005, 06:26, edited 1 time in total.
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nny,
Thanks for the link.
It shows that Lysenkoism did not receive official endorsement from the Soviet Government until 1948, which accords with my own recollection.
Thus, Pieter Kuiper's comment is shown to be incorrect. As of 1941, Lysenko did not yet reign supreme, and genetic concepts could still exist in the ideology of the Soviet Establishment.
Thus, in 1941 it was entirely possible for the Soviet Establishment to think of the Jews as a people with special talents, and worth preserving by evacuating them from the danger posed by the invading Germans.
Even if eugenic ideas, such as those propagated in relation to the Jews by the Lenin Institute and the Institute of the Brain, referred to by Lenin's sister, Anna Elizarova in her letters to Stalin in the early 1930s, were falling in dsirepute in the Soviet Union, the fraternal feelings toward the Jewish people publicly declared by Stalin, due to their being the people from which Marx originated, must have been a powerful incentive to the Soviet Establishment to take speacial measures to protect the Jews of the Soviet Union from the danger threatening them.
The fact is that the statistics show that Jews were evacuated from the west into the interior of the Soviet Union at between five and 10 times the rate that corresponded to the proportion that the Jewish nationality represented of the total Soviet population. That cannot have been because Jews were greatly over-represented among the class of skilled workers required for the Soviet war effort, since Soviet Jews were more concentrated among the class of "sluzhashchie", administrators and bureaucrats.
It is clear that Jews were proportionately favoured over other Soviet nationalities for evacuation away from the path of the German invasion. I am arguing that that favouring was a result of the essential philosemitism of Soviet ideology, and I have given some examples of how that philosemitism was expressed in words by different parts of the Soviet Establishment, including by Stalin himself.
Thanks for the link.
It shows that Lysenkoism did not receive official endorsement from the Soviet Government until 1948, which accords with my own recollection.
Thus, Pieter Kuiper's comment is shown to be incorrect. As of 1941, Lysenko did not yet reign supreme, and genetic concepts could still exist in the ideology of the Soviet Establishment.
Thus, in 1941 it was entirely possible for the Soviet Establishment to think of the Jews as a people with special talents, and worth preserving by evacuating them from the danger posed by the invading Germans.
Even if eugenic ideas, such as those propagated in relation to the Jews by the Lenin Institute and the Institute of the Brain, referred to by Lenin's sister, Anna Elizarova in her letters to Stalin in the early 1930s, were falling in dsirepute in the Soviet Union, the fraternal feelings toward the Jewish people publicly declared by Stalin, due to their being the people from which Marx originated, must have been a powerful incentive to the Soviet Establishment to take speacial measures to protect the Jews of the Soviet Union from the danger threatening them.
The fact is that the statistics show that Jews were evacuated from the west into the interior of the Soviet Union at between five and 10 times the rate that corresponded to the proportion that the Jewish nationality represented of the total Soviet population. That cannot have been because Jews were greatly over-represented among the class of skilled workers required for the Soviet war effort, since Soviet Jews were more concentrated among the class of "sluzhashchie", administrators and bureaucrats.
It is clear that Jews were proportionately favoured over other Soviet nationalities for evacuation away from the path of the German invasion. I am arguing that that favouring was a result of the essential philosemitism of Soviet ideology, and I have given some examples of how that philosemitism was expressed in words by different parts of the Soviet Establishment, including by Stalin himself.