MrAnderson wrote:
You mentioned fighting the Soviets would be a 'milder war'. I wasn't talking about Jews, I was talking about war with the USSR...but Stalin was just as bad for persecuting his own people.
Maybe the Jews would have gotten off lighter, I don't know...that's not entirely relevant. What I do know is that he had millions of his own people deported, imprisoned or executed based upon their race, heritage or politics, just as brutally as the Nazis treated their scapegoats.
Add on:
Antisemitic actions, up to a point, were not state policy in Stalin's USSR.
Example:
"The Soviet authorities considered the use of Hebrew language "reactionary" since it was associated with both Judaism and Zionism, and the teaching of Hebrew at primary and secondary schools was officially banned by the Narkompros (Commissariat of Education) as early as 1919, as part of an overall agenda aiming to secularize education. Hebrew books and periodicals ceased to be published and were seized from the libraries, although liturgical texts were still published until the 1930s. Despite numerous protests in the West, teachers and students who attempted to study the Hebrew language were pilloried and sentenced for "counter revolutionary" and later for "anti-Soviet" activities."
That said, antisemitism was against the law in Stalin's USSR. That doesn't mean that SOME of the population didn't hold antisemitic views.
The life of a Jew was only slightly better in the USSR then in Nazi Germany.
The years before the Holocaust were an era of rapid change for Soviet Jews, leaving behind the dreadful poverty of the Pale of Settlement. Forty percent of the population in the former Pale left for large cities within the USSR.
Due to Stalinist emphasis on its urban population, interwar migration inadvertently rescued countless Soviet Jews; Nazi Germany penetrated the entire former Jewish Pale—but were kilometers short of Leningrad and Moscow. The great wave of deportations from the areas annexed by Soviet Union according to the Nazi-Soviet pact, often seen by victims as genocide, paradoxically also saved lives of a few hundred thousand Jewish deportees. However horrible their conditions, the fate of Jews in Nazi Germany was much worse. The migration of many Jews deeper East from the part of the Jewish Pale that would become occupied by Germany saved at least forty percent of this area's Jewish population.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jews_in_Ru … rld_War_IIAs for what can and did happen to populations that Stalin didn't like, look up The Holodomor.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor
