what if the Soviet union its own holocaust.

Rarename91

Banned
A how could this happen. B What would happen if somehow the stalin was racist towards jews like hitler and he also did a holocaust?
 
Stalin was racist towards the Jews, and it's possible that had he lived there would have been a Soviet Holocaust. The Doctor's Plot has been mentioned, but to expand: Stalin seems to have been planning to create a situation where Jews would be seen as enemies of the Soviet state, much in the same way the Cossacks, Chechens, and numerous other ethnic groups were. At that point he would have deported them. Another possibility is that Stalin was stirring up anti-Semitism, and would then use the anti-Semitism as an excuse to deport the Jews under the guise of protecting them. We don't know what the final plan was for certain because Stalin died before it could go forward (heck, there may not have been a planned deportation at all).

Whatever form the plan would take it would be a disaster for the USSR. Jews made up an important part of several sectors of the Soviet economy, such as healthcare and education. Losing them (along with the fact that Stalin was planning on launching another general purge of society) would have a devastating impact on the Soviet economy. If word got out about it the Soviet state would become a pariah and Stalin would be seen as certainly the most evil man to have ever lived (rather than being one candidate for the title). For the roughly 2.5 million Soviet Jews (plus the Jews in the Eastern Bloc) it would lead to mass death. The number of dead depends on how long Stalin lives (which in any case wouldn't be very long due to his poor health). The typical pattern for deportees was that the majority of deaths would happen during the deportation and in the years immediately following it.

I also imagine that the Soviet state post-Stalin would keep this Holocaust quiet. They could recover reputation-wise from deporting the Crimean Tartars and other groups, but because of the parallels to Nazism a deportation of the Jews is simply too far beyond the pale. Thus the Jews probably would not be allowed to move back and would be kept in out of the way places in Siberia and Central Asia until the fall of the Soviet Union (which for a variety of reasons would be sooner than IOTL).

Another thing to think about is how the world would react to another Holocaust. "Never Again" would feel like a sick joke, and there would be a lot of soul searching as to how the world could have allowed this to happen twice in a decade. Israel's position in the world is probably strengthened, with support for Israel in much of the West being something that is virtually unquestioned. Communism would be even more discredited, and probably seen as being just as bad as Nazism (which opens the door for other far-left ideologies to become mainstays). From a historiographical standpoint the Eastern Front in WWII would be seen as grimdark and evil vs. evil, while the West's support of Stalin would be even more controversial than IOTL (it would probably be the most controversial part of FDR and Churchill's legacies).
 
Was Stalin during his last months (the time of the "Doctors' Plot") planning to have Soviet Jews deported to Siberia?

Well, there definitely was an "open letter" going around, to be published in *Pravda*, which prominent Soviet Jews were being pressured to sign, which acknowledged the strong feelings aroused by the Doctors' Plot, and in order to save the country's Jews from the "wrath of the people", asked Stalin to send the country's Jews to Siberia and Birobidjan where they would be housed and protected. Ilya Ehrenburg clearly, though cautiously, referred to this open letter in his memoirs:

"I will omit the story of how I tried to prevent the appearance in print of a certain collective letter. Happily, the project, which was absolutely insane, did not come about. I thought at the time that I dissuaded Stalin with my letter; now it seems to me the whole business was delayed and Stalin did not succeed in doing what he wanted to do. This is history, of course, a chapter of my biography, but I believe the time has not yet come for me to say more."

As Ehrenburg indicated, he not only refused to sign the "open letter" but sent a letter objecting to it to Stalin, a translation of which is provided in Joshua Rubenstein's *Tangled Loyalties: The Life and Times of Ilya Ehrenburg*, pp. 274-5, where Ehrenburg shrewdly argued that the open letter and the proposal would actually strengthen Jewish nationalism and anti-Soviet forces in general:

"Dear Joseph Visarionovich!...

"It seems to me that the only radical solution to the Jewish Question in our Socialist State is full assimilation and the merging of individuals of Jewish origin with the peoples among whom they live. I am afraid that a collective statement by a number of people active in Soviet cultural life, united only by their origin, could strengthen nationalistic tendencies. The text of the letter speaks of a 'Jewish people'; this could encourage nationalists and others who have not yet understood that there is no such thing as a Jewish nation.

"I am particularly worried about the influence of such a 'letter to the editor' on the broadening and strengthening of the world movement for peace. Whenever, in various commissions and press conferences, the question has been raised as to why there are no Jewish schools or newspapers in the Soviet Union, I have replied that after the war there no longer remained any breeding-grounds for the former 'Pale of Settlement' and that new generations of Soviet citizens of Jewish descent do not wish to set themselves apart from the peoples among whom they live. The publication of this letter, signed by scientists, writers and composers, who speak of a so-called Soviet Jewish community, could fan repellent anti- Soviet propaganda which is at present being spread by Zionists, Bundists, and other enemies of our Motherland..."

Ehrenburg added that if nevertheless Stalin decided that signing the open letter would be helpful to the cause of the Peace Movement and the Motherland, he would sign it. This sort of self-humiliation (and the posing of ideological [1] and practical objections to the open letter, not moral objections which would obviously have no impact on Stalin) was necessary if the letter was to have any effect.

According to Rubenstein, after Ehrenburg's letter was sent, no more signatures were collected; the organizers of the campaign understood that they could not proceed further until Stalin made some sort of response. He concludes that it is unclear whether Ehrenburg's letter made Stalin reconsider or at least hesitate--and whether this hesitation coupled with Stalin's death, saved the Soviet Jews. In his footnote 60 on page 434 Rubenstein writes that Alexander Yakovlev--the famed "liberal" adviser to Gorbachev, and a man who would not seem to have any motive to whitewash Stalin--concluded, based on research into secret Kremlin archives, that Stalin was not directly behind the plan to exile the country's Jews. Yakovlev believes that Stalin put an end to the scheme before he died, and that Ehrenburg's letter may have played a role. Rubinstein also notes that "Nikita Khrushchev once provided a completely different view of what happened. He claimed that Mikoyan and Molotov objected to the deportation plan and that even Voroshilov said it would be criminal and resemble the acts of Hitler. Khrushchev claimed that Stalin grew furious in the face of their objections and that he suffered his fatal stroke a few days later; see *Le Monde*, April 17, 1956, p. 3." (I think we can dismiss this at least as nonsense, as an attempt by the post-Stalin leadership yo portray themselves as heroes who stood up to Stalin.)

In short, there definitely was an organized campaign to get Soviet Jews to urge their own deportation, and it is difficult to imagine people as prominent as the campaign's organizers proposing such a radical measure unless they were at least led to believe it had Stalin's support. Nevertheless, it is possible it was a "trial balloon" that Stalin would have reconsidered had he lived longer--or that he already had reconsidered before his death in OTL. OTOH, it is perfectly possible he would have gone through with it.

One other possibility which I do not seem to have seen considered (but I admit that apart from Rubenstein I have not read much specifically about this subject): Maybe the "open letter" itself was a provocation, and not those Soviet Jewish "prominents" who refused to sign but those who signed (Vasily Grossman among others) were in the most danger! After all, the open letter claimed that Jews needed to be "protected" from the Soviet people, who apparently could not distinguish between ordinary working people of Jewish origins and the fiendish Zionist doctor-plotters! "Is this not defamation of the Soviet people, comrades? Is this not giving aid to the Zionists and Bundists who slanderously call the Soviet Union anti-Semitic?" Etc., etc.

[1] Note Ehrenburg's emphasis that there is no such thing as a Jewish nation--a point which Stalin had long ago argued in *Marxism and the National Question.* ("Bauer speaks of the Jews as a nation, although they 'have no common language'; but what 'common destiny' and national cohesion is there, for instance, between the Georgian, Daghestanian, Russian and American Jews, who are completely separated from one another, inhabit different territories and speak different languages?")

***

The above was based on something I had written for soc.history.what-if some years ago. More recently, Rubenstein has written a book *The Last Days of Stalin* in which he throws some doubt on the alleged plan:

"In one crucial respect Rubenstein alters our picture of the anti-Jewish campaign. People have long thought that in 1953 Stalin was planning to transfer Soviet Jews to Birobidzhan, the Siberian Jewish “homeland” developed in 1928, just as he had earlier transferred the Chechens, the Crimean Tatars, the Ingush, and other ethnic groups. Scholars have supposed that this massive deportation failed to occur only because Stalin died before he could make it happen. But Rubenstein finds no actual evidence of a plan to transfer the Jews.

"He argues that the anti-Semitic atmosphere was so intense in the months before Stalin’s death that many simply assumed such a project was in the works; the deportation swiftly became a worldwide rumor and within a few years would be reported in the Western press. [Stalin’s successor Nikita] Khrushchev later said that he himself had convinced Stalin not to deport the Jews, but he seems to have invented this story to give himself credit for undoing one of Stalin’s evil plots. . . ." https://mosaicmagazine.com/picks/2016/06/stalins-last-days-and-his-plans-for-soviet-jews/
 
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what did he say all i saw was snip?
It's basically a way of condensing the entire post in one word; usually a sign to not have to the original lengthy post cluttering up the quoter's post and getting people to see the "snipped" post in question.

And to further answer your question, the USSR would rightly be seen in the same negative light as the Nazis (more so than OTL but I digress) had they pulled this holocaust on the Jews.
 
The Soviet Union was the most racist country in Europe after World War 2. They committed unspeakable atrocities to their minorities, including deliberate schemes to dilute the native populations under their boot by importing Russians in. The Russians killed more then Hitler did. See Holodomor, among other mass-killings.
 
The world wouldn't find out (or wouldn't know the full extent of it). We know about Hitler's atrocities because the Allies discovered the concentration camps. There was irrefutable proof.

The Soviet encore would have been carried out in Siberia and thus would have been far easier to keep under wraps. The evidence would be limited enough that present day communist sympathizers would claim that the second Holocaust was capitalist propaganda, designed to undermine communism and deflect from the sins of the right.
 
The world wouldn't find out (or wouldn't know the full extent of it). We know about Hitler's atrocities because the Allies discovered the concentration camps. There was irrefutable proof.

The Soviet encore would have been carried out in Siberia and thus would have been far easier to keep under wraps. The evidence would be limited enough that present day communist sympathizers would claim that the second Holocaust was capitalist propaganda, designed to undermine communism and deflect from the sins of the right.

Which is what modern communists do when others mention the atrocities committed by Communist regimes.
 
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