The Fifth problem: Math and Anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union

http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/The-Fifth-problem--math---anti-Semitism-in-the-Soviet-Union-7446

by Multics • 13 years ago

37 62 13 years ago

Sadly, 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• 13 years ago

It'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.

jokoon2• 13 years ago

Still quite more worrying in Russia, there is not that much more freedom of speech in there nor a very good justice system.

dharmach• 13 years ago

Not only that. Racial discrimination is also part of inter-national relations where countries alliance are based on race, religion and/or culture.

jedmeyers2• 13 years ago

Propaganda 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.

dominotw2• 13 years ago

Mass 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• 13 years ago

Their 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.

nir• 13 years ago

The 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.

ommunist7• 13 years ago

Yup, and it ended up with a hell lot of PhDs trading socks in the bazaar in Haifa.

cema7• 13 years ago

The factual correctness of this statement is well below its humorous content, which is shallow.

Jongseong9• 13 years 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• 13 years 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_...

(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.)

Jongseong9• 13 years ago

The Resident ID Card of the People's Republic of China still lists the bearer's ethnicity: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resident_Identity_Card

11001• 13 years ago

ommunist7• 13 years ago

I 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.

cema7• 13 years ago

Oh 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.

ommunist7• 13 years ago

Oh 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

altero6• 13 years ago

It 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• 13 years ago

Anti-Semitism in Russia is a lot older than Socialism.

altero6• 13 years ago

Please 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.

woofyman• 13 years ago

In my personal experience, Jews are discriminated for being non-Christian.

stefantalpalaru• 13 years ago

Not an issue in communist countries where atheism was the state's policy.

Jongseong9• 13 years ago

Unless you claim that the officials of MGU went great lengths to keep young Edward Frenkel out of the university for some other reason than his Jewish surname, you are giving an ex post facto excuse for the continued and long-standing discrimination against Jews that the Soviets inherited from the Russian Empire.

Although it was nowhere as bad as in the Old World, Jews were historically discriminated against in the U.S.—universities had Jewish quotas, for example. This had nothing to do with "being white", even if we limit ourselves to white European Jews. The whole "reverse discrimination" angle you try to bring in is neither here nor there.

altero6• 13 years ago

Unless you claim that the officials of MGU went great lengths to keep young Edward Frenkel out of the university for some other reason than his Jewish surname

That is exactly what I am saying. Examiners could got orders to fail him, if for example his uncle lived on west. Officially there was no discrimination, so it was mostly done by bulling people at exams.

White (perhaps even heterosexual male) has statistically lower chances to study for free. It fits definition of discrimination as a glove.

cema7• 13 years ago

  Jews were perceived as intellectuals.

Uh... This was so among the regular people, but did not appear to play a large role in the decisions made by the Party (read: party leader). The anti-intellectual official line was stronger in the post-revolutionary times, and still my grandmother had no problem being accepted to Moscow State University (in the 1920s), Department of Chemistry. The Fifth Problem describes a much later time period, mid-1980s (and the problem, in the narrow sense, apparently started in late 1960s). A very different society.

  Similar discrimination is today in US.
  Jews are discriminated for being white.

We are not specifically discriminated. Yes, as perceived members of the white race category (whatever that means) we are, in effect, discriminated against, whenever Affirmative Action is employed. This kind of discrimination is not quite similar.

bradleyjg• 13 years ago

The 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• 13 years ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birobidzhan

This Birobidzhan? Doesn't particularly look like a wasteland.

cema7• 13 years ago

  Doesn't particularly look like a wasteland.

Not any longer.

But truly, the jokes about frost-resistant Jews are so old now.

vkb• 13 years ago

It'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 [2]http://www.swarthmore.edu/Home/News/biro/html/panel30.html

coldtea3• 13 years ago

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. reply

(...)

It'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

Seeing the correction from somebody who actually knows about those facts, it seems that it's a sad testament to how manipulated the US version of USSR history is in general, not only to "US communists".

brianpgordon• 13 years ago

If 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

dangoldin• 13 years ago

Happened to my dad as well. He couldn't get accepted into a PhD for quantum physics so ended up studying physical chemistry.

cema7• 13 years ago

I have collected some of the stories and links to further reading here: http://www.livejournal.com/community/kerosinka/1633.html Majority of the material is in Russian, but a large minority in English, for those interested.

ChrisNorstrom2• 13 years ago

Despite 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-... Somehow I think leaders want Jews back but the public doesn't.

cema7• 13 years ago

The "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• 13 years ago

I 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.

ChrisNorstrom2• 13 years ago

I 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, and treated the same way in Israel by Jews. 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.

zhewei• 13 years ago

Not true. Take the middle-east:

Racism: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2006/sep/08/racismi... http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/10/opinion/10iht-edeltahawy.1...

Anti-semitism (too easy): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisemitism_in_the_Arab_world

Or the rest of the world:

A comparison of countries, not sure if you should trust this as an indicator: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2013/05/15...

Books with anti-semitic conspiracy theories are bestsellers in China: http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/10/02/china-anti-semi...

Discrimination against black people in China: http://www.cnn.com/2012/07/24/world/asia/china-tinted-prejud...

guard-of-terra• 13 years ago

By the way, the jewish museum in Moscow is by far the most impressive museum I've ever been too. Looks to be made with help of Israel, tho, and not "leaders". As for public, it does not care: jews are near the bottom of russian xenophobia list as of today.

jacalata• 13 years ago

Actually, it is considered a problem in Japan - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_issues_in_Japan.

throwaway_yy2Di• 13 years ago

Previous HN discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4752047

Top thread points out that the US obviously does the same thing.

ommunist7• 13 years ago

For 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)

The Fifth problem: Math and Anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union

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