The Wende Museum and the UCLA Center for European and Russian Studies present a lecture by Arch Getty, Distinguished Research Professor of History at the University of California.

Anti-Semitism in the USSR had several often contradictory faces. Well before the Revolutions of 1917, Russia was one of the most anti-Semitic countries in Europe. It was the land of pogroms. In both official policy and popular culture, anti-Semitism was deeply embedded in Tsarist society. But after 1917, the situation was more complex and for various political reasons official Soviet policy toward Jews had its own changing trajectories, with alternating highs and lows that encouraged or discouraged traditional anti-Semitism. This talk explores official Soviet policy toward Jews from 1917 to 1991.