[9] Within these territories, the primarily Ashkenazi Jewish communities of many different areas flourished and developed many of modern Judaism's most distinctive theological and cultural traditions, while also facing periods of antisemitic discriminatory policies and persecution, including violent pogroms.

The Russian Civil War pogroms shocked world Jewry and rallied many Jews to the Red Army and the Soviet regime, strengthening the desire for the creation of a homeland for the Jewish people.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, many Soviet Jews took the opportunity of liberalized emigration policies, with more than half of the population leaving, most for Israel and the West: Germany, the United States, Canada and Australia.

Expelled en masse from England, France, Spain and most other Western European countries at various times, and persecuted in Germany in the 14th century, many Western European Jews migrated to Poland upon the invitation of Polish ruler Casimir III the Great to settle in Polish-controlled areas of Eastern Europe as a third estate, although restricted to commercial, middleman services in an agricultural society for the Polish king and nobility between 1330 and 1370, during the reign of Casimir the Great.

Their situation changed radically during the reign of Catherine II, when the Russian Empire acquired large Lithuanian and Polish territories which historically included a high proportion of Jewish residents, especially during the second (1793) and the third (1795) Partitions of Poland.

In the 1881 outbreak, there were pogroms in 166 Ukrainian towns, thousands of Jewish homes were destroyed, many families reduced to extremes of poverty;[citation needed] large numbers of men, women, and children were injured and some killed.

Many historians noted the concurrence of these state-enforced antisemitic policies with waves of pogroms[45] that continued until 1884, with at least tacit government knowledge and in some cases policemen were seen inciting or joining the mob.

When hundreds of thousands of refugees from Poland and Lithuania, among them innumerable Jews, fled in terror before enemy invasion[citation needed], the Pale of Settlement de facto ceased to exist.

[72] Between March and May 1918, various Red Guard squadrons, embittered by their military defeat and animated by revolutionary sentiment, attacked Jews in cities and towns across the Chernihiv region of Ukraine.

[75] Lenin was supported by the Labor Zionist (Poale Zion) movement, then under the leadership of Marxist theorist Ber Borochov, which was fighting for the creation of a Jewish workers' state in Palestine and also participated in the October Revolution (and in the Soviet political scene afterwards until being banned by Stalin in 1928).

Yiddish was a language of newspapers, magazines, book publishing, theater, radio, film, the post office, official correspondence, election materials, and even a Central Jewish Court.

While the pact had no basis in ideological sympathy (as evidenced by Nazi propaganda about "Jewish Bolshevism"), Germany's occupation of Western Poland was a disaster for Eastern European Jews.

Evidence suggests that some, at least, of the Jews in the eastern Soviet zone of occupation welcomed the Russians as having a more liberated policy towards their civil rights than the preceding antisemitic Polish regime.

Because of 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.

Lenin, who claimed to be deeply committed to egalitarian ideals and the universality of all humanity, rejected Zionism as a reactionary movement, "bourgeois nationalism", "socially retrogressive", and a backward force that deprecates class divisions among Jews.

Without changing his official anti-Zionist stance, from late 1944 until 1948 Joseph Stalin adopted a de facto pro-Zionist foreign policy, apparently believing that the new country would be socialist and hasten the decline of British influence in the Middle East.

[96] In a May 14, 1947 speech during the UN Partition Plan debate, published in Izvestiya two days later, the Soviet ambassador Andrei Gromyko announced: As we know, the aspirations of a considerable part of the Jewish people are linked with the problem of Palestine and of its future administration.

[citation needed] As a result of the persecution, both state-sponsored and unofficial, antisemitism was ingrained in the society and remained for years: ordinary Soviet Jews often suffered hardships, epitomized by often not being allowed to enlist in universities, work in certain professions, or participate in government.

More controversially, the Soviet media, when depicting political events, sometimes used the term 'fascism' to characterise Israeli nationalism (e.g. calling Jabotinsky a 'fascist', and claiming 'new fascist organisations were emerging in Israel in the 1970s' etc.).

A typical excuse given by the OVIR (ОВиР), the MVD department responsible for the provisioning of exit visas, was that persons who had been given access at some point in their careers to information vital to Soviet national security could not be allowed to leave the country.

Furthermore, Jews holding positions requiring specialized training tended to be highly concentrated in a small set of specialties, including medicine, mathematics, biology and music.

After Crimea, the most numerically significant populations were Sverdlovsk with 2,354 (2.81%) and Samara, with 2,266 (2.70%), followed by Tatarstan with 1,792 (2.14%), Rostov Oblast with 1,690 (2.01%), Chelyabinsk with 1,677 (2.00%), Krasnodar Krai with 1,620 (1.93%), Stavropol with 1,614 (1.92%), Nizhny Novgorod with 1,473 (1.76%), Bashkortostan with 1,209 (1.44%), Saratov with 1,151 (1.37%) and Novosibirsk with 1,150 (1.37%).

Antisemitism is one of the most common expressions of xenophobia in post-Soviet Russia, even among some groups of politicians,[110] despite laws against fomenting hatred based on ethnic or religious grounds (Article 282 of Russian Federation Penal Code).

[191] Recent olim and olot (עוֹלות) from the Former Soviet Union include notables such as Anna Zak, Natan Sharansky, Yuri Foreman, Yuli-Yoel Edelstein, Ze'ev Elkin, Nachman Dushanski, Boris Gelfand, Natasha Mozgovaya, Avigdor Lieberman, Roman Dzindzichashvili, Anastassia Michaeli, Haim Megrelashvili, Victor Mikhalevski, Evgeny Postny, Maxim Rodshtein, Tatiana Zatulovskaya, Maria Gorokhovskaya, Katia Pisetsky, Aleksandr Averbukh, Anna Smashnova, Jan Talesnikov, Vadim Alexeev, Michael Kolganov, Alexander Danilov, Evgenia Linetskaya, Marina Kravchenko, David Kazhdan, Leonid Nevzlin, Vadim Akolzin, Roman Bronfman, Michael Cherney, Arcadi Gaydamak, Sergei Sakhnovski, Roman Zaretski, Alexandra Zaretski, Larisa Trembovler, Boris Tsirelson, Ania Bukstein, and Margarita Levieva.

[2] Notable Russia, Imperial Russia, Soviet Union, and former Soviet Union, born Jewish Americans (living and deceased) include Alexei Abrikosov, Isaac Asimov, Leonard Blavatnik, Sergey Brin, Joseph Brodsky, Sergei Dovlatov, Anthony Fedorov, Israel Gelfand, Emma Goldman, Vladimir Horowitz, Gregory Kaidanov, Avi Kaplan, Anna Khachiyan, Jan Koum, Savely Kramarov, Mila Kunis, Leonid Levin, Lev Loseff, Alexander Migdal, Eugene Mirman, Alla Nazimova, Leonard Nimoy, Ayn Rand, Markus Rothkovich (Mark Rothko), Dmitry Salita, Menachem Mendel Schneerson, Yakov Sinai, Mikhail Shifman, Mikhail Shufutinsky, Regina Spektor, Willi Tokarev, and Arkady Vainshtein.

Large Russian Jewish communities include Brighton Beach and Sheepshead Bay in the Brooklyn Borough of New York City; Fair Lawn and nearby areas in Bergen County, New Jersey; Bucks and Montgomery Counties near Philadelphia; Pikesville, Maryland, a predominantly-Jewish suburb of Baltimore; Washington Heights in the Sunny Isles Beach neighborhood of South Florida; Skokie and Buffalo Grove, suburbs of Chicago; and West Hollywood, California.

[195][196] Notable Russian Jews in Germany include Valery Belenky, Maxim Biller, Friedrich Gorenstein, Wladimir Kaminer, Lev Kopelev, Elena Kuschnerova, Alfred Schnittke, Vladimir Voinovich, and Lilya Zilberstein.

[197] Notable Russian Jewish residents include judoka Mark Berger, ice hockey player Eliezer Sherbatov, voice actress Tara Strong,[198] and the musical group Tasseomancy.

Notable Russian Jews in France include Léon Bakst, Marc Chagall, Leon Poliakov, Evgeny Kissin, Alexandre Koyré, Ida Rubinstein, Lev Shestov, and Anatoly Vaisser.

Some other notable Russian Jews are Roman Abramovich, Vladimir Ashkenazy, Boris Berezovsky, and Maxim Vengerov (United Kingdom), Gennadi Sosonko (Netherlands), Viktor Korchnoi (Switzerland), and Maya Plisetskaya (Spain).