The Soviet regime’s position toward its Jewry followed a perplexing trajectory during its 72 year history. If, during the interwar period, the Jewish population generally benefitted from the state’s affirmative nationality policies, a volte-face followed in the aftermath of the Holocaust.   Both primary and secondary sources indicate a rise in both official and mass-level antisemitism in the late Stalinist period, which slowly evolved into a policy of tacit prohibition of public references to Jews as an ethnic group and as individuals but with a creeping antisemitism that manifested itself in several different forms. Were there any links between the physical obliteration of a significant part of Soviet Jewry during the Holocaust and the regime’s demonstrated change towards this group in the post-war period? Why and how did Soviet Jewry become an “invisible group” in the postwar era? This project explores these and other questions and, more broadly, examines new challenges for feeling and acting Jewish in the Soviet Union in the aftermath of the Holocaust.

A full-length study is available here.