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The Fifth problem: Math and Anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union
- colinbartlett 13y agoSadly, ethnic discrimination is still pretty rampant in areas of the former Soviet Union. Although it does seem to be getting better. I suppose it takes more than a generation or two for that to fade away.
- sspiff 13y agoIt's also pretty rampant in the US and in Europe. The odds of being hired when you have an Arab name in Western Europe is frightening, regardless of qualifications. For the US, just look at the ethnic distribution of death row inmates.
- jokoon 13y agoStill quite more worrying in Russia, there is not that much more freedom of speech in there nor a very good justice system.
- ommunist 13y agoWe have different systems of censorship. In Russia it is your cage, in the US it is your skeleton.
- jokoon 13y agowhat
- coldtea 13y ago>nor a very good justice system Compared to the government-can-do-as-it-pleases, life-in-prison-for-having- done-3-BS-offenses, largest-incarceration-rate-in-the-world, disproportionate-amount-of-blacks-in-prison, slap-on-the-wrist-for-rich-folks, private-prison-racket system?
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- TazeTSchnitzel 13y agoThe US justice system is flawed but is nowhere near as bad as Russia's.
- coldtea 13y agoI'm not so sure. What I hear about Russia's is mostly cronyism. That happens in the US too, but let's say that it happens way less. How is it for the average citizen, and normal disputes? Do they have something like a huge minority (blacks) that they consistently discriminate against in their justice system? Do they have as absurd laws as the three-strikes?
- dharmach 13y agoNot only that. Racial discrimination is also part of inter-national relations where countries alliance are based on race, religion and/or culture.
- jedmeyers 13y agoPropaganda at those times said that Jewish people will get "the best education in the world" for free and then leave the USSR without paying back for it.
- dominotw 13y agoMass immigration to Israel from USSR was true though. Stalin was also irked that Israel didn't go communist. So their fears were well founded at that time
- lostinnyc 13y agoTheir fears were well-founded only if you use the hateful and twisted "logic" that the USSR used at the time. My American university provided lots of financial aid to international students. Need-blind! Many of these students came from countries with very un-American political systems. And many of them simply returned to their home countries after college. And yet these students did not have to go through the Kafka-esque (and just plain wrong) system that this author describes. They were treated like everyone else.
- dominotw 13y agoYou have to understand the place the time this "logic" was applied. America was not brutally attacked twice with a span of couple of decades. America did not loose 30 million people in resource/territorial aggressions. America was not surrounded by technologically and economically advanced nations salivating at its riches.
- nir 13y agoThe mass immigration began only after the USSR collapsed - until then the Soviets denied most Jews from leaving the country, so it wasn't really a rational fear.
- jedmeyers 13y agoNope. There were several migration waves of Jews from USSR. First one in the 70's fueled the hate against the ones who stayed.
- Jongseong 13y ago"The fifth line" on the Soviet passport which listed the bearer's "nationality" (what we would usually call ethnicity in English) was only removed from Russian passports in 1997. But Edward Frenkel was picked out as a Jew because of his surname even though his nationality was listed as Russian, like most children of mixed marriages between Russian and non-Russian parents. What if Edward Frenkel's father had been Russian and his mother Jewish instead of the other way round? Well, the commander of the Soviet Air Force in Ukraine when the Soviet Union broker up was Kostyantyn Morozov, then Konstantin Morozov. He had a Russian surname and his nationality was listed as Russian. If it had been known that he had a Ukrainian mother and had Ukrainian sympathies, he would never have been given such a powerful post by the Soviet authorities. As it was, Morozov announced his allegiance to the pro-independence cause to become the first defense minister of an independent Ukraine and to establish the Ukrainian armed forces. Would the breakup of the Soviet Union have gone differently if all the high-ranking generals in control of Soviet forces in the biggest non-Russian republic were pro-Russian? It makes you wonder how many accidents of history can be traced to the arbitrary custom of inheriting surnames from fathers.
- mjn 13y ago"The fifth line" on the Soviet passport which listed the bearer's "nationality" (what we would usually call ethnicity in English) was only removed from Russian passports in 1997. Bit of an aside, but this used to be pretty common. Religion, in practice a proxy for ethnicity, was only removed from Greek identity cards in 2000: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_identity_card#Removal_of_religion_and_nationality http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_identity_card#Removal_of_... (It's a proxy for ethnicity in Greece because religion has traditionally been rooted in ethnic groups in the region, so whether someone's card said "Greek Orthodox" indicated whether they were ethnically Greek, vs. a member of the Turkish or Albanian minorities.)
- Jongseong 13y agoThe Resident ID Card of the People's Republic of China still lists the bearer's ethnicity: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resident_Identity_Card http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resident_Identity_Card
- 11001 13y agoSee also: http://arxiv.org/abs/1110.1556 http://arxiv.org/abs/1110.1556
- ommunist 13y agoI shall tell you one name - Landau. The "fifth line" was not a problem. What is a problem is when russian jew with Soviet M Sc in maths goes through NARIC in the UK, he gets B Sc only. It is the West who is discriminating Soviet degrees.
- cema 13y agoOh please. Nobody discriminated against my degree from Kerosinka, the 5-year course of classes was admitted as equivalent of MS in Applied Math. There is discrimination, in a very certain way, against medical degrees, for a variety of reasons, some are good reasons, some not; that seems to be an exception.
- ommunist 13y agoOh man, you trapped. There was a special research about disproportionally high level of Jewish students and graduates in Kerosinka. http://kerosinka.livejournal.com/1633.html http://kerosinka.livejournal.com/1633.html
- cema 13y agoDo you even understand what I said? The conversation was about (alleged) discrimination against Soviet education in Western countries. I said I graduated from Kerosinka and was not discriminated against (in the US), on the contrary, my 5-year course of education was counted (in the US) in as an equivalent of an MS degree in Applied Math. Don't play a fool.
- altero 13y agoIt is bit more complex. Socialism discriminated 'intellectuals' in favor of 'proletariat'. For example son of doctor had lower chances compared to son of factory worker. Jews were perceived as intellectuals. Similar discrimination is today in US. Jews are discriminated for being white.
- forktheif 13y agoAnti-Semitism in Russia is a lot older than Socialism.
- altero 13y agoPlease read something about Russian history. Most early socialists leaders were Jews. Some prominent anti-socialism authors are bordering antisemitism (Solzhenitsyn). Places at universities were not 'for everyone'. One needed political connections, family history and bribes. If your father would emigrate to west, you may forget about higher education. Most restricted were elite humanitarian studies (philosophy, film-making...). Technical studies were bit more free, but still had lot of restrictions.
- Jongseong 13y agoHow does any of that contradict the assertion that antisemitism is older than Socialism? Are you denying that antisemitism continued under the Soviet Union, even after the death of Stalin, couched in the language of anti-Zionism? If you are saying that being Jewish was only one of several reasons for being discriminated against in the Soviet Union, then I agree. If you deny that Jewishness had nothing to do with it and it all had to do with being intellectuals, not having the right connections, etc., then you are losing me.
- altero 13y ago> Are you denying that antisemitism continued under the Soviet Union Yes I do. There were so many Jews in soviet party, there is even "theory" that soviet revolution was Jewish conspiracy. [1]. Stalin initially supported Israel state with weapons. Antisemitism started in 60ties, after Israel becomed US oriented and several people from soviet union emigrated there. After that several soviet jews had relatives on west and were perceived as 'politically unreliable' and potential spies. There were mainly political reasons for discrimination, it really turned into antisemitism in 90ties after soviet union. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_Bolshevism#Jews_in_the_Bolshevik_party http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_Bolshevism#Jews_in_the_B...
- bradleyjg 13y agoThe line about how under official doctrines all nationalities were equal reminds me of a story I learned in college. In the early days under Lenin, Stalin was appointed to formulate the Party's nationalities policy. One of the policies they came up with was that each of the nationalities was supposed to have a national homeland. Under the Czars, Jews were required to live within a "Pale of Settlement" which was in the extreme west of their European holdings. So somewhere in that neighborhood would have been a logical spot. Instead Stalin decided to found the Jewish Autonomous Oblast, capital city Birobidzhan, on the border with China in far south-east Russia about 400 miles inland from the northern Japan Sea. Many thousands of Jews were deported to this wasteland, where needless to say they did not prosper. It is a sad testament to how manipulated the US communists were that when I told this story to my grandmother who had been active in those movements, that she had heard of Birobidzhan, and that they used to sing songs about it in Yiddish and thought of it as a Jewish Worker's paradise.
- RodericDay 13y agohttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birobidzhan http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birobidzhan This Birobidzhan? Doesn't particularly look like a wasteland.
- cema 13y agoDoesn't particularly look like a wasteland. Not any longer. But truly, the jokes about frost-resistant Jews are so old now.
- vkb 13y agoIt's not correct to say that "Jews were deported." It was most definitely a choice for most of the Jews that went there (my grandfather's family was among them,) and the government incentivized migration there with a stipend of several thousand rubles to those that decided to stay (most families didn't and the huge influx of population in the 1920s, again in the late 30s and early 50s was balanced out by an enormous population decline that continues today as the population leaves for America and Israel.) Those that did not want to stay (and who would? the government organs in Moscow didn't coordinate with ones in the Far East. As a result, housing was rationed in an extremely inefficient way: land was parceled out without first having been surveyed so that some plots didn't have running water and weren't ready for settlers) could ultimately go back to the cities they came from. The reason Stalin didn't want to settle the Jews within the Pale of Settlement is because that experiment had already been tried with Jewish communal farms in the 1920s in Crimea[1], and the Soviet government had found that the people there weren't huge fans of Jews, so Birobidzhan was established to ease tensions there, "solve the Jewish problem," and to secure the Sino-Soviet border. It's true, however, that many American Jewish groups in the late 1930s and again in the early 1950s were fed stories about how amazing life was in the Autonomous Jewish Region, complete with shining pictures of hearty, hale pioneers smiling near their plots of land. Ambijan (American Committee for Birobidzhan) [2] was an especially popular one that had celebrity spokespeople, starting with Einstein. [1] http://www.yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/Crimea http://www.yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/Crimea [2]http://www.swarthmore.edu/Home/News/biro/html/panel30.html http://www.swarthmore.edu/Home/News/biro/html/panel30.html
- brianpgordon 13y agoIf you're interested in seeing some of these "killer questions" there's a book of them called "You failed your math test, Comrade Einstein." Coral CDN link (since the author's file server seems ridiculously slow): http://www.ftpi.umn.edu.nyud.net/shifman/ComradeEinstein.pdf http://www.ftpi.umn.edu.nyud.net/shifman/ComradeEinstein.pdf
- dangoldin 13y agoHappened to my dad as well. He couldn't get accepted into a PhD for quantum physics so ended up studying physical chemistry.
- cema 13y agoI have collected some of the stories and links to further reading here: http://www.livejournal.com/community/kerosinka/1633.html http://www.livejournal.com/community/kerosinka/1633.html Majority of the material is in Russian, but a large minority in English, for those interested.
- ChrisNorstrom 13y agoDespite being messed up, there's a sort of cultural logic to it. Here's the thing, a lot of cultures really want to keep things to themselves. The mentally goes like this: "This land is ours, our ancestors fought for it so our culture can have a place to flourish and live on, it's not here for you, get out please." It's not just a European thing, Asian countries are the same way they don't even give you the chance to become a citizen. I've learned to understand it as a natural part of human psychology. It's also not a problem when there's only one ethnicity in the whole country like Japan which is 98% ethnic Japanese but a lot of European countries tend to let others in who are different than them (Jews, Roma, North Africans, Arabs, Indians) and then have problems with assimilation and integration. Russia's kind of weird, didn't they just open a Jewish history museum dubbed the "Jewish Disney Land" to try to get more Jews to move back? http://www.themoscowtimes.com/arts_n_ideas/article/state-of-art-jewish-museum-opens-in-moscow/471347.html http://www.themoscowtimes.com/arts_n_ideas/article/state-of-... Somehow I think leaders want Jews back but the public doesn't.
- cema 13y agoThe "public" has no problems with Jews, for the most part. These days, being Jewish in Russia is mostly not a problem, even on the contrary. Things may change very quickly, though.
- daffodil08 13y agoI only partially agree with you. Xenophobia is everywhere and in every country of the world, but racism and antisemitism, which are not really based on ethnicity or national identity, seem to be a particularly European disease.
- ChrisNorstrom 13y agoI disagree. If you were to add 10 million Africans, 5 million Arabs, 3 million Jews, 20 Million Europeans to Japan over the next 20 years you can bet your arm and leg that "racism and antisemitism" will sprout in Japan. People feel threatened when someone different starts moving in on their space. I've seen documentaries on a tiny community of Africans living in Beijing and how they are "stopped by police constantly" http://youtu.be/GURLHAM-KoI http://youtu.be/GURLHAM-KoI, and treated the same way in Israel by Jews. http://youtu.be/rYwvGHY1nAI http://youtu.be/rYwvGHY1nAI. You think it's a "white people" problem because that's all you've seen your whole life. As multi-racial/multi-culturalism increases worldwide you'll realize it's something prevalent throughout humanity. That's the compromise, without diversity a society might become stale but diversity brings up problems on it's own as one culture feels it's future is threatened by another.
- throwaway_yy2Di 13y agoPrevious HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4752047 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4752047 Top thread points out that the US obviously does the same thing.
- ommunist 13y agoFor those interested in deeper understanding and more interesting facts (yes, distribution of Jewish Math university entrants was not even, and applied sciences in the USSR gained a lot from that) - the classy article by Mark Saul, Kerosinka: An Episode in the History of Soviet Mathematics. Notices of the AMS, vol.46, no.10, November 1999. (http://www.ams.org/notices/199910/fea-saul.pdf http://www.ams.org/notices/199910/fea-saul.pdf)