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Which leaders of the Soviet Union belonged to ethnic minorities?

Question #95436. Asked by author.

Jay_in_LA
Answer has 4 votes
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Jay_in_LA

Answer has 4 votes.

Currently voted the best answer.
Of Lenin, Stalin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Andropov, Chernenko, and Gorbachev, Stalin was ethnically Georgian link https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Stalin , Brezhnev was born in the Ukraine and had an Ukrianian mother link https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonid_Brezhnev , and Andropov was a secular Jew link https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuri_Andropov. The rest were Russian, although Lenin was of mixed ethnicity. link https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Lenin

May 10 2008, 2:26 AM
author
Answer has 4 votes
author
23 year member
2834 replies

Answer has 4 votes.
With the notable exception of Lenin (Vladimir Ulyanov), most of the leading Communists who took control of Russia in 1917-20 were Jews. Leon Trotsky (Lev Bronstein) headed the Red Army and, for a time, was chief of Soviet foreign affairs. Yakov Sverdlov (Solomon) was both the Bolshevik party's executive secretary and -- as chairman of the Central Executive Committee -- head of the Soviet government. Grigori Zinoviev (Radomyslsky) headed the Communist International (Comintern), the central agency for spreading revolution in foreign countries. Other prominent Jews included press commissar Karl Radek (Sobelsohn), foreign affairs commissar Maxim Litvinov (Wallach), Lev Kamenev (Rosenfeld) and Moisei Uritsky.

Lenin himself was of mostly Russian and Kalmuck ancestry, but he was also one-quarter Jewish. His maternal grandfather, Israel (Alexander) Blank, was a Ukrainian Jew who was later baptized into the Russian Orthodox Church.

link http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v14/v14n1p-4_Weber.html

This page says that Malenkov was of Macedonian descent, but I don't know if that is correct.

link https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malenkov

May 10 2008, 12:53 PM
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