Tony Judt makes the following astute observation in his Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945:
It was a Marxist commonplace and Soviet official doctrine that Nazism was merely Fascism and that Fascism, in turn, was a product of capitalist self-interest in a moment of crisis. Accordingly, the Soviet authorities paid little attention to the distinctively racist side of Nazism, and its genocidal outcome, and instead focused their arrests and expropriations on businessmen, tainted officials, teachers and others responsible for advancing the interests of the social class purportedly standing behind Hitler.
The reason why Stalin couldn’t afford to draw attention to Hitler’s racism is that, during WWII and immediately after, Stalin was engaged in his own racist persecution of entire ethnic groups. It’s kind of hard to say, “Look at this guy! He wanted to exterminate the Jews! What an evildoer!” when you are planning to exile all of the Jews in your own country to Siberia with no plans for them to survive the move.
Soon after the victory over Nazism, the very word “Jew” would become offensive and nobody would want to say it aloud. When I was 6, my best friend Yulia shared with me in a whisper a huge secret. “We are Jews,” she said. “Do you know what this means?”
“No,” I said. “But I will ask my Mommy.”
I asked my Mommy and she said she had been planning to have this conversation with me when I was older but that she guessed I was old enough to know.
So she told me. I didn’t really understand why some people thought that my Daddy was different and disliked him for that but I knew that there was some darkness hidden in the whole issue.
“So Daddy isn’t Russian?” I asked.
“No,” my mother said. “I just told you he is Jewish.”
“So are you at least Russian?” I asked, hopefully.
“No,” she said. “I’m Ukrainian.”
“Then who is Russian in this family?” I exclaimed, feeling very disappointed. “Can I be Russian?”
When I was told it wasn’t possible, I knew we were all one hopeless family.
Clarissa's Blog 
Soviet policy towards Jews like other ethnic groups changes. But, the only mass deportation of Jews takes place in 1940 and involves Polish Jewish refugees from the Nazis who refuse Soviet citizenship. They get sent to the Far North and Urals until a deal with the Polish government two years later gets them released from the special settlements and most of them are evacuated with other Polish citizens out to Iran.
Soviet Jews proper are in an ambiguous position in the 1930s and 1940s.. They are not one of the diasporas connected to foreign states like Poles, Germans, Koreans, Finns, etc. so there is no national operation against them in 1937-1938. Nor are they subjected to mass deportations during WWII, although many are voluntarily evacuated eastward along with other Soviet citizens. On the other hand they are not a rooted indigenous nationality like Uzbeks or Buriats so they don’t get a real territory with all the rights and privileges that entails. Instead they get the Birobidzhan Jewish Autonomous Oblast on the Chinese border where almost no Jews live. So Jews are defacto denied many of the national and cultural rights instituted during korenizatsiia. This increases after 1948 with the formation of Israel. Hence the shutting down of the Jewish theater in Moscow and the elimination of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee. There is some speculation that in 1953 that Stalin was planning a mass deportation of Jews eastward like had happened with Germans in 1941. However, nobody has found any surviving archival documents that would verify the rather ambiguous evidence that exists in favor of such an interpretation. So it is not clear at all that Stalin was planning to deport the all Jews like he did the Koreans, Germans, Finns, Karachais, Kalmyks, Chechens,Ingush, Balkars, Crimean Tatars, Greeks, and Meskhetian Turks. The deportations in 1945-1953 unlike those from 1941-1944 were all partial even though the entire population for instance of Estonia was less than the Germans exiled to special settlements.
In the post-Stalin era there is defacto discrimination against Jews in education and some jobs. The educational discrimination was actually worst in the non-Russian republics and was a result of affirmative action in favor of titular nationalities. That is Uzbeks got priority over non-Uzbeks to attend university in Tashkent. This meant that fewer Jews were admitted than would have been if it were based on a pure meritocracy. But, they were still by far the single most over represented nationality in the USSR in terms of receiving higher education. A far higher percentage of Jews received university degrees than any other nationality. This is much more of relative discrimination than for instance that against Germans who went from being one of the most educated groups in the Russian Empire to one of the least in the USSR, below that of all the Central Asian groups.
What really triggered the emigration movement in the late 1960s was the realization that Soviet Jews were because of the national structure of the USSR never going to have the ability to succeed like they could in the US or Israel. Nor would they be completely accepted or have institutions of their own. There would always be discrimination, defamation, and a huge pressure to give up their own culture, but without ceasing to be regarded by outsiders as Jews. Thus both assimilation and autonomy were foreclosed options. Nationality counted in everything and preference was always given to titulars or Russians. Without a national territory Jews would never benefit from this setup to nearly the same degree they could elsewhere or to the same degree as most other Soviet nationalities. The preferred solution was thus to emigrate to places where they would have equality and be free from discrimination and forced acculturation.
http://jpohl.blogspot.com/2008/04/factors-of-emigration-movements-in-ussr.html
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I had a dream last night that I sent a very large manuscript to a Jewish man. I dropped it in the post box, but then I realized I had forgotten to address it.
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I’m curious, I’m sure there were people with a ‘Jewish’ father and non-Jewish mother from the USSR who wanted to emigrate to Israel (scare quotes are due to the traditional, or so I thought, practice of tracing Jewishness only through the mother).
Did/does Israel respect claims of Jewishness based on the father or is some kind of conversion process required?
And again, the USSR’s rules of nationality seem incredibly weird – a folk model (and a not very good one at that) being raised to official doctrine, hardly the only example, but it’s always weird for me.
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It is not so much a folk model, but volk becoming the basis of racialization like happened in South Africa.
http://jpohl.blogspot.com/2005/07/russian-germans-as-racial-catagory.html
http://jpohl.blogspot.com/2011/11/another-post-on-racism-in-ussr-and-its.html
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I’m sure we could have emigrated to Israel back in the 1970s or 80s. I know some families like us who emigrated and there was never a problem. My grandfather emigrated in 1994 with his Russian wife and it was fine. She said once they were in Israel she suffered discrimination, though.
I have to say, however, that I’m glad my parents chose not to emigrate anywhere. I used to wonder if they should have but now I’m glad they didn’t.
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This thread is reminding me of a joke I read in one of Zizek’s books (I forget which one):
In the 1980s, an elderly Jewish man walks into a government building in the USSR and tells the official there that he wants to emigrate to Israel. When the official asks him why he wishes to leave the Soviet Union, the man replies: “Two reasons. My first reason is that I think the collapse of the communist system may be coming soon, and I worry that when that happens people will scapegoat the Jews, and there will be pogroms like we had in the old days.” “But that’s nonsense!” the official replies, “There won’t be any collapse. The Soviet Socialist state will stand forever!”. To which the old man replies “That’s my second reason.”
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We have good friends, with female part of the couple being very remotely Jewish (from Ukraine as well). She somehow was admitted to Israel as a child, but later she was not even allowed to marry her Jewish husband in Israel, they had to do it on Cyprus, or somewhere…
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The history of Stalin’s (and Soviet) treatment of non-Russians needs to be fully exposed, especially now when so many are lifting Stalin up as a hero-savior!
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\\ Did/does Israel respect claims of Jewishness based on the father or is some kind of conversion process required?
I see a great deal of confusion about a very simple issue, so, as a citizen of Israel, will clarify.
The Law of Return (1950) grants every Jew, wherever he may be, the right to come to Israel as an oleh (a Jew immigrating to Israel) and become an Israeli citizen.
For the purposes of this Law, “Jew” means a person who was born of a Jewish mother, or has converted to Judaism and is not a member of another religion.
Since 1970, the right to immigrate under this law has been extended to include the child and the grandchild of a Jew, the spouse of a child of a Jew and the spouse of the grandchild of a Jew. The purpose of this amendment is to ensure the unity of families, where intermarriage had occurred; it does not apply to persons who had been Jews and had voluntarily changed their religion.
http://www.mfa.gov.il/mfa/aboutisrael/state/pages/acquisition%20of%20israeli%20nationality.aspx
\\ She somehow was admitted to Israel as a child, but later she was not even allowed
Israel has only religious marriage, which makes any two members “of different religions” (whether they are atheists or religious) unable to marry inside the country. F.e. a Jew can’t marry an Arab, a Christian can’t marry a Muslim, etc.
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