What effect would having Stalin deport the Soviet Union's Jews to the JAO en masse have on Anglo-American support?

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Re: What effect would having Stalin deport the Soviet Union's Jews to the JAO en masse have on Anglo-American support?

#16

Post by wm » 03 Dec 2020, 01:40

Of course, a conduit for spy activities, for sabotage. That's a perfect potential threat. Exactly like the Koreans.

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Re: What effect would having Stalin deport the Soviet Union's Jews to the JAO en masse have on Anglo-American support?

#17

Post by Futurist » 03 Dec 2020, 02:25

Makes one wonder why Tsarist Russia didn't deport Pale of Settlement Jews en masse to the Russian interior during World War I. After all, wasn't there a belief that some among them were potential German subversives?


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Re: What effect would having Stalin deport the Soviet Union's Jews to the JAO en masse have on Anglo-American support?

#18

Post by Futurist » 03 Dec 2020, 03:06

Anyway, it seems like the best way for this to work would be to have the USSR get the Curzon Line as its western border in 1920-1921 and then for Poland to try making a huge effort to appeal to Soviet Jews and to recruit secret agents among them. That could be enough for Stalin to deport the Soviet Union's entire Jewish population to the JAO, no?

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Re: What effect would having Stalin deport the Soviet Union's Jews to the JAO en masse have on Anglo-American support?

#19

Post by Futurist » 03 Dec 2020, 03:06

Futurist wrote:
03 Dec 2020, 02:25
Makes one wonder why Tsarist Russia didn't deport Pale of Settlement Jews en masse to the Russian interior during World War I. After all, wasn't there a belief that some among them were potential German subversives?
The German Empire did treat its Jews better than the Russian Empire did, after all. Ditto for Austria-Hungary.

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Re: What effect would having Stalin deport the Soviet Union's Jews to the JAO en masse have on Anglo-American support?

#20

Post by wm » 03 Dec 2020, 04:09

Tsarist Russia deported lots of Jews in 1914, the Russians were afraid they would support the Germans - and the idea of the Jewish-led League of East European States.

The Poles didn't need Soviet Jews, there would be millions of willing Poles in the USSR in that scenario.

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Re: What effect would having Stalin deport the Soviet Union's Jews to the JAO en masse have on Anglo-American support?

#21

Post by Futurist » 03 Dec 2020, 04:52

Just how many Russian Jews were deported eastward in 1914?

As for Soviet Poles, there were less than a million of them before Molotov-Ribbentrop:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poles_in_ ... mographics

That, and their use as Polish secret agents would be too obvious for the Soviet Union (sort of how having Israel use Iranian Jews as secret agents in Iran might not be the smartest idea)!

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Re: What effect would having Stalin deport the Soviet Union's Jews to the JAO en masse have on Anglo-American support?

#22

Post by wm » 03 Dec 2020, 22:34

That doesn't look realistic. The Soviet actions, although monstrous, were triggered by a real threat to the Soviets - not just because some people could have been bought with money.

The Koreans were part of the Empire of Japan and many of them, if not the majority, accepted it. For them, Japan was their homeland. They had common goals with it. It wasn't any different from the Ossetians or Chechens conquered by the Russians and faithfully fighting for Russia in the ww1.
So it was possible they would work for their homeland, spy for Japan not only for money but for nationalistic reasons too.

Similarly, the Soviet Jews enthusiastically welcomed the creation of the hostile to the Soviets Israel. The Soviet Jews suddenly had common goals with a hostile power.

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Re: What effect would having Stalin deport the Soviet Union's Jews to the JAO en masse have on Anglo-American support?

#23

Post by Futurist » 04 Dec 2020, 01:26

What exactly made Japan so appealing to the Koreans?

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Re: What effect would having Stalin deport the Soviet Union's Jews to the JAO en masse have on Anglo-American support?

#24

Post by wm » 04 Dec 2020, 02:06

Necessity, it seemed the Empire of Japan (like the USSR) would exist forever.

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Re: What effect would having Stalin deport the Soviet Union's Jews to the JAO en masse have on Anglo-American support?

#25

Post by Futurist » 04 Dec 2020, 02:19

Interesting. Did this same logic make France incredibly appealing to Algerians?

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Re: What effect would having Stalin deport the Soviet Union's Jews to the JAO en masse have on Anglo-American support?

#26

Post by wm » 04 Dec 2020, 03:02

During this period, a small but influential French-speaking indigenous elite was formed, made up of Berbers, mostly Kabyles.

I think the difference was that a possibility of a successful uprising always existed there, the Ottomans were defeated earlier so why not the French.

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Re: What effect would having Stalin deport the Soviet Union's Jews to the JAO en masse have on Anglo-American support?

#27

Post by Futurist » 04 Dec 2020, 04:43

When did the Algerians defeat the Ottomans?

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Re: What effect would having Stalin deport the Soviet Union's Jews to the JAO en masse have on Anglo-American support?

#28

Post by wm » 04 Dec 2020, 12:03

The Ottomans were defeated by the Allies and as result their empire desintegreated.
Algeria was part of the Ottoman Empire in name only anyway.

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Re: What effect would having Stalin deport the Soviet Union's Jews to the JAO en masse have on Anglo-American support?

#29

Post by Terry Duncan » 04 Dec 2020, 18:24

Futurist wrote:
04 Dec 2020, 04:43
When did the Algerians defeat the Ottomans?
Was this difficult to type into Google or any other search engine to find an answer? Seriously, sometimes it is possible to find answers to simple questions in seconds.

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Re: What effect would having Stalin deport the Soviet Union's Jews to the JAO en masse have on Anglo-American support?

#30

Post by Sheldrake » 04 Dec 2020, 20:30

Futurist wrote:
02 Dec 2020, 00:09
What effect would having Stalin deport the Soviet Union's Jews (including the Jews in the territories that the Soviet Union conquered in 1939-1940) to the Jewish Autonomous Oblast (JAO) en masse sometime between 1934 and 1941 have on Anglo-American support for the Soviet Union during World War II? However, I was wondering what effect such a move on Stalin's part would have had on Anglo-American support for the Soviet Union after Operation Barbarossa? Would this have caused the Anglo-Americans to give significantly less support to the Soviet Union after June 1941 than they gave the Soviet Union in real life, or what? After all, I certainly can't imagine the British and US publics being very pleased about a forcible massive Soviet deportation of millions of Soviet Jews to the remote Far East--even if this move would have ironically ultimately saved a lot of their lives! On the other hand, though, I don't think that the British and US publics were that concerned with the welfare and well-being of the Jews before 1945, were they? Defeating Nazi Germany was by far the most urgent and important priority for them, no?

Anyway, what do you personally think about all of this?
The short answer is that the fate of people under Soviet control was not a consideration in Allied decision making. When questioned about the alliance with Stalin Churchill is supposed to have said that if Hitler invaded Hell he would have had a favourable word for the devil. The allies were willing to overlook the murder of the Polish professional classes, going along with the fiction that the Germans were responsible for Katyan. Why would the British and Americans get more excited about Soviet treatment of the Jews than Kulaks, Greeks, Cossacks or Poles?

There is a modern popular view that the Second World War was about the holocaust. It wasn't. WW2 was about Nazi and the other axis powers violating other countries. Crimes against humanity was only one of the charges at Nuremburg. Had Hitler only exterminated German Jews it is possible that no country would have intervened.

The allied leadership downplayed the Jewish dimension to the war. There was a streak of antisemitism in American and British popular opinion. Neither country's leaders wanted to create the impression that they were fighting for the Jews, which was the propaganda line that the Nazis played.
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