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Privilege and Prejudice: The Occupations of Jews in Russia in 1989

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Michael Paul Sacks
Michael Paul Sacks*
Affiliation:
Department of Sociology, Trinity College
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Extract

Published census data on Jews have been very scarce, but these data and other sources leave no doubt that in comparison with other groups Soviet Jews were very distinctive in terms of such characteristics as their urban concentration and their educational and professional achievement. This level of achievement occurred despite popular and official anti-Semitism of varying intensity. With the recent release of new data from the 1989 census, a more precise understanding of the opportunities available to Jews in Soviet Russia is now possible. These data show the number of men and women by major ethnic groups (including Jews) in 257 job categories. Surprisingly, this new information is not referred to even in the most recent Russian scholarship on Jews, and it receives no mention in western sources. In this article, I use the new occupational data to evaluate differences between Russians and Jews and to explore the way in which employment disparities may have shaped interaction between the two groups.

Type
Articles
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 57 , Issue 2 , Summer 1998 , pp. 247 - 266
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 1998

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References

I wish to thank Ralph Clem and three anonymous referees for Slavic Review for their helpful comments. I also wish to thank Robert J. Kaiser for informing me about the existence of the key census data that made this research possible. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the National Convention of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies held in Boston, Massachusetts, 14-17 November 1996.

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10. Krupnik, “Soviet Cultural and Ethnic Policies,” 74.

11. Ibid., 73; see also Clem, Ralph, “The Ethnic Dimension, Part II,” in Pankhurst, Jerry G. and Sacks, Michael Paul, eds., Contemporary Soviet Society: Sociological Perspectives (New York, 1980), 32–62.Google Scholar

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16. Friedgut, “Passing Eclipse,” 5.

17. Ryvkina, Evrei v postsovetskoi Rossii, 183. Ryvkina notes problems with these figures on the number emigrating, as not all those who were given permission actually emigrated, and those who emigrated illegally were not counted.

18. Friedgut, “Passing Eclipse,” 9.

19. Ibid., 10–11; Kagan, “Evreiskaia emigratsiia iz byvshego SSSR,” 6.

20. Friedgut, “Passing Eclipse,” 11.

21. Ryvkina, Evrei v postsovetskoi Rossii, 26–27.

22. Benjamin Pinkus presents the range of terms that have been used to classify ethnic groups in official Soviet ideology. The categories for Jews have been at the bottom of the status hierarchy. Russians, of course, were among those at the top. Pinkus, Jews of the Soviet Union, 211–14.

23. Krupnik, “Soviet Cultural and Ethnic Policies,” 75–77; Altshuler, Soviet Jewry, 111; Kaiser, Robert J., Geography of Nationalism in Russia and the USSR (Princeton, 1994), 225–35Google Scholar; Clem, “Ethnic Dimension,” 58.

24. Friedgut, “Passing Eclipse,” 11.

25. Ryvkina, Evrei v postsovetskoi Rossii, 15, 18, 183–84.

26. Tolts, Mark, “Jewish Marriages in the USSR: A Demographic Analysis,” Eastern European Jewish Affairs 22, no. 2 (1992): 3–19 CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; Mark Tolts, “Trends in Soviet Jewish Demography since the Second World War,” in Ro'i, ed., Jews and Jewish Life in Russia, 365–82.

27. Tolts, “Trends in Soviet Jewish Demography,” 366; Altshuler, Soviet Jewry, 21–4; Gitelman, “Reconstruction of Community,” 140.

28. Brym, Jews of Moscow, Kiev and Minsk, 21–22 (emphasis in the original).

29. Ibid., 30.

30. Ryvkina, Evrei v postsovetskoi Rossii, 35, 208.

31. Tolts, “Trends in Soviet Jewish Demography,” 374.

32. The Index of Dissimilarity is calculated from the difference between the proportion of the Jewish employed population and the proportion of the Russian population (or any other two groups) in each occupational category. The index equals one–half the sum of these absolute differences times 100. Duncan, Otis D. and Duncan, Beverly, “A Methodological Analysis of Segregation Indexes,” American Sociological Review 20 (1955): 210–17.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

33. The Index of Dissimilarity's “primary weaknesses is that it is insensitive to the hierarchical aspects of occupational groups and thus measures nominal distribution rather than inequality.” There is an alternative measure, the Index of Net Differences, but this requires having data on the ranking of occupations. Mark A. Fossett, Omer R. Galle, and Kelly, William R., “Racial Occupational Inequality, 1940–1980: National and Regional Trends,” American Sociological Review 51 (June 1986): 42.Google Scholar. The available data for Russia do not permit such a ranking.

34. See Sacks, Michael Paul, “Ethnic and Gender Divisions in the Work Force of Russia,” Post Soviet Geography 36 (January 1995): 5–7.Google ScholarPubMed

35. Federatsii, Goskomstat Rossiiskoi, Nekotoryie pokazateli, kharakterizuiushchie natsional'nyi sostav naseleniia Rossiiskoi Federatsii: Po dannym vsesoiuznoi perepisi naseleniia 1989 goda(Moscow, 1992): 2: 228–30, 234–26.Google Scholar

36. The number of Jews in the labor force of Ukraine was 258, 589, just 50, 237 fewer than in Russia. Jews in Ukraine formed just under 1 percent of the labor force, as compared with less than .5 percent for Russia. These and all other figures pertaining to Ukraine in this section are calculated from data in Ministerstvo statistiki Ukraini, Natsionalnii sklad naselennia Ukraini: Chastina 1 (Kiev, 1991), 136–49, 162–82.

37. The Index of Dissimilarity is influenced by the fact that there were one–third fewer occupational categories available for Ukraine than for Russia. Fewer categories mean that less segregation is likely to be revealed. There is evidence, however, that Russians in Ukraine had higher levels of socioeconomic achievement than Russians in Russia, and this may have contributed to less difference between Russians and Jews in Ukraine than in Russia. Michael Paul Sacks, “Employment Patterns of Russian Minorities and Non-Russian Majorities in the Former Republics in 1989” (paper, Fifth World Congress for Central and East European Studies, Warsaw, 6–11 August 1995).

38. For each of the 170 occupations, this calculation entailed multiplying the proportion Jewish in that occupation in Ukraine by the total number of people in that occupation in Russia. The resulting numbers were then used to produce a standardized distribution of Ukraine's Jews that was then compared with the actual distribution of Jews in Russia. For further discussion of this standardized measure, see Sacks, Michael Paul, Work and Equality in Soviet Society: The Division of Labor by Age, Gender, and Nationality (New York, 1982), 47–49.Google Scholar

39. The concentration of Jews in a smaller number of categories, however, may in part have been an artifact of the occupational classification. Occupations where Jews were concentrated could have been less detailed than those where Russians were concentrated.

40. Krupnik, “Soviet Cultural and Ethnic Policies,” 73.

41. Sacks, “Ethnic and Gender Divisions,” 10.

42. The way in which Jewish concentration in nonmanual occupations influences the measure of aggregate gender segregation is shown by applying a standardized Index of Dissimilarity in which each occupation has the same weight, rather than being weighted by the proportion of the group in the respective occupation. The resulting standardized measure for Russians was 53, within a few points of all other large ethnic groups in Russia except Jews. The standardized figure for Jews was 94. This seems to reflect the fact that among Jews, in contrast with other ethnic groups, many manual occupations comprised a very small proportion of the employed population and had especially few or even no Jewish females. Sacks, “Ethnic and Gender Divisions,” 12.

43. The total Jewish labor force was 43 percent female as compared with 49 percent female among Russians (see table 4). But this difference is due to the smaller proportion of females in the Jewish population as compared to the Russian population and not to lower female age–specific labor force participation rates. For example, data for 1989 show that amongJews ranging in age from 30 to 54, at least 94 percent were employed (males and females combined; no separate figures available). Jewish employment rates were equal to or above Russian rates in all age groups over 30. Statisticheskii komitet sodruzhestva nezavisimykh gosudarstv, Itogi vsesoiuznoi perepisi naseleniia 1989 goda, Vol. 7, Natsional'nyi sostav naseleniia SSSR, part 6 (Minneapolis, 1993), 52, 84–86.

44. It is interesting to note that gender differences also proved important in comparing ethnic groups of Muslim heritage and Russians in former Soviet Central Asia. Here too the men in the “minority” group had employment that overlapped with Russian women, but, in contrast with Jews, they were in lower status jobs and likely to be very much segregated from women of their own ethnicity. See Sacks, Michael Paul, “Roots of Diversity and Conflict: Ethnic and Gender Differences in the Work Force of the Former Republics of Soviet Central Asia,” in Ro'i, Yaacov, ed., Muslim Eurasia: Conflicting Legacies (London, 1995), 269–88.Google Scholar

45. Kaiser, Geography of Nationalism.

46. Gibson, James L., “Understandings of Anti-Semitism in Russia: An Analysis of the Politics of Anti-Jewish Attitudes,” Slavic Review 53, no. 3 (Fall 1994): 804 Google Scholar; Hesli, Vicki L., Miller, Arthur H., Reisinger, William M., and Morgan, Kevin L., “Social Distance from Jews in Russia and Ukraine,” Slavic Review 53, no. 3 (Fall 1994): 812.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

47. Tolts, “Jewish Marriages in the USSR,” 8–9.

48. Gitelman, “Reconstruction of Community,” 48.

49. For example, the ratio of Jews per 10, 000 Russians among heads of scientific organizations was 462, while the ratio among scientific personnel was 551; the ratio was 254 among heads of medical establishments and 363 among physicians.

50. Mininberg, L'vovich L., Sovetskii evrei v nauke i promyshlennosti SSSR v period vtoroi mirovoi voiny (1941–1945) (Noril'sk, 1995), 12–13.Google Scholar

51. Brym, Jews of Moscow, Kiev and Minsk, 48; L. Gibson, James and M. Duch, Raymond, “Attitudes toward Jews and the Soviet Political Culture,” Journal of Soviet Nationalities 2, no. 1 (1991): 100.Google Scholar

52. Gitelman, “Reconstruction of Community,” 48.

53. Ryvkina, Evrei v postsovetskoi Rossii, 32–33, 204.

54. Ibid., 25–27, 117–18, 195.