Soviet Jewry in the immediate postwar years

The end of World War II found the Soviet Union in a shambles. True, it emerged victorious from the war, but the victory had been gained at enormous cost. An estimated 22 million civilians and military personnel had been killed, not to speak of the numberless maimed and wounded. A large part of the country had been overrun by the German army, and the devastation that followed in its wake included the siege of Leningrad and the total destruction of many townships and villages. Moreover, whole branches of the economic activity necessary to a normal existence were either out of gear or destroyed since the entire economy had been diverted to the war effort at least since the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, which marked the beginning of the “Great Fatherland War.”

The mood of the country was complex. On the one hand stood the general bereavement, the trauma of a war that had been fought throughout vast areas of the country and the anxiety that resulted from a serious shortage of food and housing as well as from a certain lack of confidence in the efficacy of Soviet power against Germany's modern, highly mechanized war machine. The technological gap in favor of the capitalist West had been experienced personally by Soviet soldiers, who had seen the outside world for themselves as prisoners-of-war, deserters or conquering heroes.