Nadene Goldfoot
Formation of USSR
A 1922 treaty between Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and Transcaucasia (modern Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan) formed the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). The newly established Communist Party, led by Marxist revolutionary Vladimir Lenin, took control of the government. He was of mixed parentage, whose father, IIya, married Maria Alexandrovna Blank in mid-1863. Well educated, she was the daughter of a wealthy German–Swedish Lutheran mother, and a Russian Jewish father who had converted to Christianity and worked as a physician. So it was Lenin's grandfather who was born Jewish. Lenin only had Jewish roots, which many Russians are finding that they also do through DNA testing today. Czars had been anti-Semitic. A socialist country should have fixed that, thought most Jews.
Before this date, the country was run by Czars. The Pale of Settlement was created in 1791 by Catherine II out of 25 provinces of Czarist Russia from Poland, Lithuania, White Russia, Ukraine, Bessarabia and Crimea where Jews were permitted permanent residence. Jews could not live outside this confined area unless they had special permission. For starters, you had to be a high school graduate in a liberal profession, a big businessman, a skilled artisan, or an ex-Cantonists. If you were found outside the Pale without papers, your fate was decided by the local governor. Most Ashkenazi Jews lived within the Pale in small villages called shtetls, or in the largest of towns. Laws were created about Jews that were oppressive in; 1835, and in 1882 they came up with the MAY LAWS of May 3, 1882 affecting all Jews.
1. Jews had to live in towns in the Pale of Settlement, could not live in Russia proper.
This caused anti-Semitism, recurrent local expulsions, intolerable overcrowding, blocking of economic opportunities causing Jewish emigration from Russia during the period they were in force.
Catherine II (born Sophie of Anhalt-Zerbst; 2 May 1729 – 17 November 1796), most commonly known as Catherine the Great, was the last reigning Empress of Russia (from 1762 until 1796) and the country's longest-ruling female leader. She came to power following the overthrow of her husband and second cousin, Peter III. Under her long reign, inspired by the ideas of the Enlightenment, Gentile Russia experienced a renaissance of culture and sciences, many new cities, universities and theaters were founded, a large number of European immigrants moved to Russia, and Russia was recognized as one of the great powers of Europe. For Jews, she was cruel and unreasonable, a tyrant.
Jews had gone to Russia to live after living in Germany and after leaving Rome first since Jerusalem fell in 70 CE. The first was simply demographic: the Jewish population exploded during the 19th century. It is estimated that at the time of the Napoleonic Wars (i.e. the beginning of the 1800s) there were about 2.25 million Jews in the world. By 1880, that figure had reached 7.5 million. By 1900 it approached 9 million! Still and all, the Jewish population is but 0.02% of world population.
It's amazing that ancestors acclimated to the cold harsh snowy climate of Russia after spending over 4,000 years in hot sandy Israeli climate.
"Many reasons are given for this population explosion. One is that it is not so much that the Jewish rate of birth increased as that the Jewish rate of death decreased, especially in the area of infant mortality. Jews also married younger. The average age of marriage in Eastern Europe was estimated to be between 14 and 16. These young marriages helped increase the number of families and of children being born." Usually, they would live with the boy's parents and the boy would continue with his schooling."
The dissolution of the Soviet Union (1988–1991) was the process of internal disintegration within the Soviet Union (USSR) which resulted in the end of the country's and the federal governments existence as a sovereign state, thereby resulting in its constituent republics gaining full sovereignty. With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Ukraine became an independent state, formalised with a referendum in December 1991. So for the past 30 years, Ukraine has been a state standing on its own platform without Russia, and now Russians have invaded and killed thousands in order to gain it back again. Thirty years has brought a lot of changes, and one is that Ukraine has had a Jewish president, Zelensky, who has become a favorite with the democratic world.
The 1917 Russian Revolution overthrew a centuries-old regime of official antisemitism in the Russian Empire, dismantling its Pale of Settlement. Two revolutions in 1917, the first of which, in February (March, New Style), overthrew the imperial government and the second of which, in October (November), placed the Bolsheviks in power.
However, the previous legacy of antisemitism was continued by the Soviet state, especially under Joseph Stalin. After 1948, antisemitism reached new heights in the Soviet Union, especially during the anti-cosmopolitan campaign, in which numerous Yiddish-writing poets, writers, painters and sculptors were killed or arrested. This culminated in the so-called Doctors' plot, in which a group of doctors (almost all of whom were Jewish) were subjected to a show trial for supposedly having plotted to assassinate Stalin.
In 1980, when I made aliyah from Oregon, USA, I found myself in a classroom with 40 other teachers from Russia who were just allowed to leave their country. We were all English teachers! My Israeli teacher was also writing to a Russian Jew, Natan Sharansky, who was in prison in Russia for studying Hebrew. She was teaching him via letters. He finally made aliyah and became a member in the Knesset.
April 12, 2022 (Reuters) - Russia's economy is on track to contract by more than 10% in 2022, the biggest fall in gross domestic product since the years following the 1991 fall of the Soviet Union, former finance minister Alexei Kudrin said on Tuesday. Russia is facing soaring inflation and capital flight while grappling with a possible debt default after the West imposed crippling sanctions to punish President Vladimir Putin for sending tens of thousands of troops to Ukraine on Feb. 24 of which many were ill prepared and were killed.
Putin has grandiose dreams of reviving his old USSR. I think it should remain as we teachers have used it as an Uninterrupted Sustained Silent Reading period.
From 1922 to 1991, 69 years of people being forced to live under Communist Rule of Russia, may have been fine for the Russian rulers, but not for the people who have been so brain-washed. Russia’s Soviet era was distinguished not by economic growth or human development, but by the use of the economy to build national power. On the centenary of the Bolshevik revolution of 1917, while the education of women and better survival rates of children improved opportunities for many citizens, Soviet Russia was a tough and unequal environment in which to be born, live and grow old. The Soviet economy was designed for the age of mass production and mass armies. That age has gone, but the idea of the Soviet economy lives on, fed by nostalgia and nationalism.
The opening of the Soviet archives in the early 1990s, along with easier access to Eastern Europe and thus to testimonials and memories, uncovered sources that confirmed earlier hypotheses: citizens of the Eastern Bloc were not the “blind puppets” or “helpless victims” of dictatorial regimes; rather, they developed a whole host of tactics and ruses in their daily lives that allowed them to either accommodate or resist the regime, to either help shape its norms or circumvent them altogether. " Isn't this how all animals learn to adapt to their changing climate? Russians have spoken:
—The USSR collapsed of its own accord because the system became obsolete. The arguments offered in support of this interpretation include the economic and political features that distinguish contemporary Russia from the USSR: a market economy of the liberal type, with a strong public sector; a minimally socialist state instead of a “big socialist state”; the ideology of state capitalism rather than state socialism. Experts sharing this view point to the economic, political, social, and ideological contradictions of the socialist system, which made the collapse inevitable." In other words, socialism and Communism do not work.
—The USSR was destroyed from within by representatives of political and ethnic elites because they wanted to derive maximum profit from creating independent states and establishing the new balance of power within those states and in the international arena. An argument offered in support of this interpretation is the absence of substantial steps in pursuit of economic and political integration among the former Soviet republics. Experts sharing this view bring up the inefficient approach to interethnic relations in the USSR and certain contradictions that had accumulated within the multinational country and could not be resolved within the existing system.
—The USSR was destroyed from the outside, a victim of the arms race imposed on it by the West and of the subversive activities of Western intelligence, which used the union’s domestic opposition to undermine the Soviet system. This claim is usually defended by pointing to ex post factors, such as the military and political weakening of post-Soviet Russia, the expansion of NATO, and the confrontational relationship Russia now has with the West. President Vladimir Putin is often seen as a supporter of this view because he famously referred to the dissolution of the Soviet Union as “a major geopolitical disaster !
Putin has become a Tzar of the past, a dictator that they can't get rid of, making all the decisions. His table keeps everyone more than arms distance away from him as he questions them. Here we see 5 men at the very long end, quivering, fearful of the next question. As the president of the Russian Federation, he is the supreme head of state of the Russian Federation, as well as the commander-in-chief of the Russian Armed Forces. It is the highest office in Russia. President=Dictator. He has been president since May 7, 2012, 10 years so far. The most an American can be president is 8 years.
Today, one finds many getting out of Russia, aware of what they have done to Ukraine by attacking her.
Ukraine has shown us what it's all about. They are fighting for their life and the lives of their children to live in a free Democratic Society. They had attained that finally with Zelensky who made fun of former political people by his TV characterizations who had not caught onto how to carry out their duties without profiting personally like the old-time rulers did. They needed to become Democratic.
Resource:
https://www.history.com/topics/russia/history-of-the-soviet-union#:~:text=A%201922%20treaty%20between%20Russia,took%20control%20of%20the%20government.
https://www.cairn-int.info/article-E_ANNA_682_0305--everyday-life-under-communism-practices.htm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catherine_the_Great
https://www.wilsoncenter.org/blog-post/soviet-unions-demise-seen-todays-russians
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_III_of_Russia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/President_of_Russia
https://www.britannica.com/event/Russian-Revolution
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