Country: Russia

Group: Jews

Date Finalized: 11/17/2022

Team: Gabby Staker (lead), Juwairiah Afridi, Noelle Colling, Kelsey Dwyer, Aria Robinson

Content Warning: anti-Semitism, gulags

Approximate Time Period: 1930s- 1970s

            The Jews are an ethno-religious group that have historically faced marginalization and discrimination in Russia (Minority Rights Group, 2020). This culminated in their experience of forced labor in Russian gulags after World War II.

They first encountered the Russian Empire during the 18th Century with the incorporation of Polish and Lithuanian territories. By the end of the 19th Century, nearly five million Jews lived under Russian imperial rule (Lederhendler, 2008). The region where the majority of Jews in Russia lived was referred to as the “Pale of Settlement” and was much more impoverished and economically deprived than the rest of the country. This contributed to the emigration of approximately one third of the Jewish population to the United States from the late 1870s until 1920 (Lederhendler, 2008).

During the Soviet Union, Russian gulags with forced labor camps operated from the 1930s-1950s. A report published in November 1951 by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency reported that thousands of Jews within the Soviet Union were prisoners in Soviet labor and internment camps. The report claimed that Soviets imprisoned Jews on account of their “unreliability” due to Western or bourgeois origin, “cosmopolitanism,” “Zionism,” “Jewish nationalism, ” “bourgeois objectivism, ” “abstract scholasticism, ” and “reactionary ideology“ (Jewish Telegraphic Agency, 1951).

CURRENT STATE: The population of Jews in Russia continues to decline significantly (Minority Rights Group, 2020). Anti-Semitic verbal attacks have been reportedly increasing in Russia as recently as 2017 (Minority Rights Group, 2020).

The data quality is rated a 1/3 for the Jewish experience of forced labor in Russia.

Sources

  • Lederhendler, E. (2008). Classless: On the Social Status of Jews in Russia and Eastern Europe in the Late Nineteenth Century. Comparative Studies in Society and History, 50(2), 509–534. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0010417508000224
  • Jewish Telegraphic Agency. (1951, November 20). Jews held in slave camps in Russia, Jewish committee reports. https://www.jta.org/archive/jews-held-in-slave-camps-in-russia-jewish-committee-reports
  • Minority Rights Group. (2020, December). Jews. https://minorityrights.org/minorities/jews-5/