A century of ambivalence

A century ago the Russian Empire contained the largest Jewish community in the world, numbering about 5 million people. Today, the Jewish population of the former Soviet Union has dwindled to half a million, but remains probably the third largest Jewish community in the world. In the intervening century the Jews of that area have been at the centre of some of the most dramatic events of modern history - two world wars, revolutions, pogroms, political liberation, repression, and the collapse of the USSR. They have gone through dizzyingly rapid upward and downward economic and social mobility and experienced great enthusiasms and profound disappointments. In startling photographs and lively narrative, A Century of Ambivalence traces the historical experience of Jews in Russia from a period of creativity and repression in the second half of the nineteenth century through the paradoxes posed by the post-Soviet era.