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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Is she actually a Russian that was born in Ukraine? Or Ukrainian that like so many speaks Russian in her family? I think I heard her say in interviews that she is Russian.[/quote]
She is neither. She is Jewish and that’s why her family was able to get an immigrant visa to the US.[/quote]
That makes no sense. Plus there are plenty of Russian and Ukrainian Jewish people. She can identify as both, like so many here identify as both. I am sure Jews in the U.S. would take offense to your telling them they are not American.[/quote]

It was very different in the Soviet Union.  Your passport listed your ethnicity.  Jewish was listed as a separate ethnicity, as were Russian and Ukrainian.  There were basically no practicing Jews in the Soviet Union (or very few, since religion had been banned for decades), so Judaism was mainly an ethnicity, not a religion.  Most of the Soviet provinces were heavily settled by Russians, including Jews of Russian extraction, as part of the Soviet attempt to integrate the provinces into the larger Soviet community.  After the breakup of the Soviet Union, many of these Russian families were very unwelcome in many of the provinces (regardless of whether they were born there), and the Jews even more so.  Many emigrated.  Anyway, within 20th century Russia, most Jews would consider themselves as having a dual ethnic identity as Russian and as Jewish, but its not as simple as an American Jew just saying that they are "America" but "Russia" wasn't even a country from 1917 to 1991 -- it was a republic and ethnicity within the country of the Soviet Union.   But a Russian Jew living in Moldova, for instance, would not consider themselves Moldovan, nor would the people in Moldova consider them Moldovan.

While it's a separate historical point, I don't think there were a ton of Ukrainian Jews that survived the Holocaust.  My husband's family was from a Jewish town in the Ukraine and  literally the entire town was killed.[/quote]
Of course Jews in Moldova would not consider themselves Moldovan. That is where some of the worst pogroms happened! Kishinev? Priest calling for killing of Jews? I though that initially identification by ethnicity was meant to allow for education in the USSR to be more inclusive. In the first few years of it, of course it back fired terribly when Germans entered Ukraine and could track every single Jewish person all over the place. Clearly, Stalin was also anti Semite and a mass murderer. Killing Jewish doctors left and right in some perceived conspiracy theory. If Soviets identified everyone by their ethnicity, was this any different for Kazahs or Jews? 
About her family, you are essentially saying that they were persecuted because they identified as Russian in Ukraine? Not just because they were Jewish? So, this was a backlash against the Russian hegemony in the USSR?[/quote]

To answer your question, no, I doubt they ever identified as Russian and the Russians were not persecuted in Ukraine for being Russian back when they lived there. They were persecuted for being of Jewish ethnicity. They couldn’t get into good universities/were prohibited from getting higher level jobs and generally were mistreated by the ruling elite. It didn’t matter in what part of the USSR they lived since the Soviet government made sure to make them feel unwelcome in all parts of the country. That’s why most of them got out as soon as they were able to obtain a visa to the US/Israel/Germany,etc.[/quote]

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