9 ms·

Can you elaborate on what you mean by being an "'enemy of the people' due to his ethnicity"? I've studied a fair bit of Soviet law and never heard of someone be

Can you elaborate on what you mean by being an "'enemy of the people' due to his ethnicity"? I've studied a fair bit of Soviet law and never heard of someone being targeted for their ethnicity specifically.

twelvechairs 10y ago
Not OP but the following describes for several ethnic groups https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racism_in_the_Soviet_Union https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racism_in_the_Soviet_Union
WilliamDhalgren 10y ago
I don't know the answer, but there was an antisemitic campaign after the war (eg 52' Night of the Murdered Poets, campaign against "rootless cosmopolitans" etc). Shostakovich Symphony No.13 (Babi Yar) and the poem there used, Yevtushenko's Babiyy Yar was a protest of both soviet antisemitism and the government's refusal to recognise the site as a holocaust location (Jewish identity of the victims being denied; they were generalized as Soviet instead), even in the early 60s.
- lostlogin 10y ago
  Also, and perversely ironically, the death of Stalin had a twist where a lot of the Jewish medical doctors had been implicated in a plot and therefore weren't readily available when Stalin fell ill. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctors%27_plot https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctors%27_plot
ivan_gammel 10y ago
A lot of people were targeted specifically for their ethnicity. Germans, Tatars, Chechens, Jews to name few examples (Jews not so officially, but there were unspoken bans for Jews in universities, for example). Family of my grandmother was deported from Ukraine to Kazakhstan, because they were Germans. These repressions were caused by World War II and are the reason why Germany now has a repatriation program for Jews and Germans from ex-USSR. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Germans_in_Russia,_Ukraine_and_the_Soviet_Union https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Germans_in_Russia,_...
- frozenport 10y ago
  Actually the ethnicities you named where officially targeted. See for other posts in this thread.
lostlogin 10y ago
The deep and continual paranoid suspicion of difference and of everything is well covered in a great book by Simon Sebag Montefiore called "Stalin: Court of the Red Czar". Actually, anything by Montefiore is great - His book on Jerusalem is particularly excellent.
ptaipale 10y ago
In theory it was espionage or sabotage, in practice it was mostly ethnicity, i.e. person with wrong background at a wrong time in the wrong place. The bad luck of being in sight when someone had to meet his efficiency target in the process of purging any political opposition. In this particular case, ethnic Ingrian near Leningrad. (Ingrians were the Finnish-speaking population in Leningrad oblast, i.e. people who had stayed there since Sweden ceded the area to Russia in the Treaty of Nystad ending the Great Northern War in 1721, and Peter the Great started to build St. Petersburg.) Speaks a language other than Russian, confesses a minority religion, could quite easily be a spy and get information and then slip across the border. No real evidence was needed to put people in camps, kill them, or declare them enemies of the people. Stalin's repression killed hundreds of thousands in extermination camps where, by the way, Nazi officials visited to learn the trade of killing by hunger. Today, the ethnic cleansing of Ingrians is all but complete; it was finalized by Finland allowing the Finnish-speaking population to immigrate in 1990s, leaving only some old people who are all soon dead. To clarify, of course also ordinary Russians were thrown into this machinery of destruction. Another ethnicity just increased the likelihood quite a lot. Stalin himself was Georgian, not Russian. The joking advice given to people eaten up by this machinery of killing was: 1. Do not confess anything. 2. If you confess, do not sign anything. 3. If you confess and sign, do not be surprised. Of course, in reality, upon entering the system you were most likely dead already.
- type0 10y ago
  I'm familiar with this, my family has some Ingrian ancestry, part of Estonia that is now Leningrad oblast. When Estonia became part of USSR before the WWII, land owners were "relocated" to Siberia, remaining population either fled to Finland or changed their names to disguise themselves as russians.
  - ptaipale 10y ago
    Another historical anecdote: When the Soviet-minded (i.e. repressive) Estonian SSR party head Karl Vaino was replaced by more liberal Vaino Väljas in 1988, people came up with signs something like "Elagu Vaino Väljas!" This had two meanings: ostensibly "Hurrah Vaino Väljas!", but also "Hurrah, (Karl) Vaino is out!" (Vaino is a name that can be either a first or last name in Estonian, but in Finnish it means "persecution". Karl Vaino's grandson Anton Vaino was recently nominated the Chief of Staff of the Presidential Executive Office of Russia.)
solong 10y ago
as a russian, I'll try to clarify. i believe there were two different concepts. the first one — an enemy of the state, or enemy of the people (враг народа) — is not about ethnicity. it's about "criminals" who deed horrible things to Soviet state and Soviet people. some of these people were indeed criminals (although someone could argue that their crimes are usually not so horrible, i.e. banal theft), some of them — a lot, I think — were innocent. enemy of the state/people was a working concept in 1930-1950s. the second concept is about ethnicity. i don't know is there a name for it though. all of the ethnicities in Soviet Russia were declared equal, USSR was extremely anti-racist and anti-nationalist. at the same time there were some nuances. for example, it was very hard to go to the top university if you are a jew (or jewish? I don't want to cause offence here). no one will tell you that you are not qualified because you are jewish, but you won't be there anyway. there were two reasons behind that. the first one: it was too dangerous to give a good education to someone who could leave USSR for Israel later. the second one is quite obvious, i think. I don't know when it began but it was relatively difficult for jewish kids to get to the top faculties of top universities even in 1980s. the same could be said about top-secret research and some other areas.
- ptaipale 10y ago
  I would call this "the risk of divided loyalties". If you spoke a foreign language, if you had relatives abroad, if you had been born abroad, if you had a distinct ethnicity, if you had a religion, if you had neighbours or friends who had anything of the above. Any of these would make someone think that you might be disloyal to the Soviet state and loyal to something else, and therefore increase your likelihood of being arbitrarily picked up for espionage, treason or sabotage charges. And once picked up, the guilty one had been arrested, because the system does not make mistakes. At this point, it's only the crime that needs to be found. (It is attributed to Stalin that he said "there are no innocent people, only people who haven't been properly investigated yet." Not sure if he actually said this anywhere.) The risk of Jewish people having shared loyalties to Israel is mostly a post-1948 thing of course so it was in a different form during the Great Purges.
  - _delirium 10y ago
PeterisP 10y ago
Studying Soviet law outside the context of how it was "applied" in practice is very likely to lead to misunderstandings. There's an saying from the time "Был бы человек, а статья найдётся" (lit. "If we have the man, we'll find the law paragraph [necessary for a conviction]" attributed to either Beria or Stalin, but considered illustrative of the applied law.

twelvechairs 10y ago

Not OP but the following describes for several ethnic groups https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racism_in_the_Soviet_Union https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racism_in_the_Soviet_Union

WilliamDhalgren 10y ago

I don't know the answer, but there was an antisemitic campaign after the war (eg 52' Night of the Murdered Poets, campaign against "rootless cosmopolitans" etc). Shostakovich Symphony No.13 (Babi Yar) and the poem there used, Yevtushenko's Babiyy Yar was a protest of both soviet antisemitism and the government's refusal to recognise the site as a holocaust location (Jewish identity of the victims being denied; they were generalized as Soviet instead), even in the early 60s.

lostlogin 10y ago
Also, and perversely ironically, the death of Stalin had a twist where a lot of the Jewish medical doctors had been implicated in a plot and therefore weren't readily available when Stalin fell ill. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctors%27_plot https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctors%27_plot

ivan_gammel 10y ago

A lot of people were targeted specifically for their ethnicity. Germans, Tatars, Chechens, Jews to name few examples (Jews not so officially, but there were unspoken bans for Jews in universities, for example). Family of my grandmother was deported from Ukraine to Kazakhstan, because they were Germans. These repressions were caused by World War II and are the reason why Germany now has a repatriation program for Jews and Germans from ex-USSR. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Germans_in_Russia,_Ukraine_and_the_Soviet_Union https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Germans_in_Russia,_...

frozenport 10y ago
Actually the ethnicities you named where officially targeted. See for other posts in this thread.

lostlogin 10y ago

The deep and continual paranoid suspicion of difference and of everything is well covered in a great book by Simon Sebag Montefiore called "Stalin: Court of the Red Czar". Actually, anything by Montefiore is great - His book on Jerusalem is particularly excellent.

ptaipale 10y ago

In theory it was espionage or sabotage, in practice it was mostly ethnicity, i.e. person with wrong background at a wrong time in the wrong place. The bad luck of being in sight when someone had to meet his efficiency target in the process of purging any political opposition. In this particular case, ethnic Ingrian near Leningrad. (Ingrians were the Finnish-speaking population in Leningrad oblast, i.e. people who had stayed there since Sweden ceded the area to Russia in the Treaty of Nystad ending the Great Northern War in 1721, and Peter the Great started to build St. Petersburg.) Speaks a language other than Russian, confesses a minority religion, could quite easily be a spy and get information and then slip across the border. No real evidence was needed to put people in camps, kill them, or declare them enemies of the people. Stalin's repression killed hundreds of thousands in extermination camps where, by the way, Nazi officials visited to learn the trade of killing by hunger. Today, the ethnic cleansing of Ingrians is all but complete; it was finalized by Finland allowing the Finnish-speaking population to immigrate in 1990s, leaving only some old people who are all soon dead. To clarify, of course also ordinary Russians were thrown into this machinery of destruction. Another ethnicity just increased the likelihood quite a lot. Stalin himself was Georgian, not Russian. The joking advice given to people eaten up by this machinery of killing was: 1. Do not confess anything. 2. If you confess, do not sign anything. 3. If you confess and sign, do not be surprised. Of course, in reality, upon entering the system you were most likely dead already.

type0 10y ago
I'm familiar with this, my family has some Ingrian ancestry, part of Estonia that is now Leningrad oblast. When Estonia became part of USSR before the WWII, land owners were "relocated" to Siberia, remaining population either fled to Finland or changed their names to disguise themselves as russians.
- ptaipale 10y ago
  Another historical anecdote: When the Soviet-minded (i.e. repressive) Estonian SSR party head Karl Vaino was replaced by more liberal Vaino Väljas in 1988, people came up with signs something like "Elagu Vaino Väljas!" This had two meanings: ostensibly "Hurrah Vaino Väljas!", but also "Hurrah, (Karl) Vaino is out!" (Vaino is a name that can be either a first or last name in Estonian, but in Finnish it means "persecution". Karl Vaino's grandson Anton Vaino was recently nominated the Chief of Staff of the Presidential Executive Office of Russia.)

solong 10y ago

as a russian, I'll try to clarify. i believe there were two different concepts. the first one — an enemy of the state, or enemy of the people (враг народа) — is not about ethnicity. it's about "criminals" who deed horrible things to Soviet state and Soviet people. some of these people were indeed criminals (although someone could argue that their crimes are usually not so horrible, i.e. banal theft), some of them — a lot, I think — were innocent. enemy of the state/people was a working concept in 1930-1950s. the second concept is about ethnicity. i don't know is there a name for it though. all of the ethnicities in Soviet Russia were declared equal, USSR was extremely anti-racist and anti-nationalist. at the same time there were some nuances. for example, it was very hard to go to the top university if you are a jew (or jewish? I don't want to cause offence here). no one will tell you that you are not qualified because you are jewish, but you won't be there anyway. there were two reasons behind that. the first one: it was too dangerous to give a good education to someone who could leave USSR for Israel later. the second one is quite obvious, i think. I don't know when it began but it was relatively difficult for jewish kids to get to the top faculties of top universities even in 1980s. the same could be said about top-secret research and some other areas.

ptaipale 10y ago
I would call this "the risk of divided loyalties". If you spoke a foreign language, if you had relatives abroad, if you had been born abroad, if you had a distinct ethnicity, if you had a religion, if you had neighbours or friends who had anything of the above. Any of these would make someone think that you might be disloyal to the Soviet state and loyal to something else, and therefore increase your likelihood of being arbitrarily picked up for espionage, treason or sabotage charges. And once picked up, the guilty one had been arrested, because the system does not make mistakes. At this point, it's only the crime that needs to be found. (It is attributed to Stalin that he said "there are no innocent people, only people who haven't been properly investigated yet." Not sure if he actually said this anywhere.) The risk of Jewish people having shared loyalties to Israel is mostly a post-1948 thing of course so it was in a different form during the Great Purges.
- _delirium 10y ago

PeterisP 10y ago

Studying Soviet law outside the context of how it was "applied" in practice is very likely to lead to misunderstandings. There's an saying from the time "Был бы человек, а статья найдётся" (lit. "If we have the man, we'll find the law paragraph [necessary for a conviction]" attributed to either Beria or Stalin, but considered illustrative of the applied law.