Q&A: A conversation with Yuri Slezkine explains why Jews were so successful in the early Soviet Union:
The story of the Jews in the early Soviet Union is similar to the story of the Jews in America. That is, they were especially successful in the realms of education, journalism, medicine, and other professions that were central to the functioning of Soviet society, including science.Jews in the Soviet Union were much more literate than any other group, they were untainted by any association with the imperial regime, and they seem to have been very enthusiastic about what the Communist Party was doing. This was to some extent a conscious commitment to ideology, but mostly it was just because there were no more legal barriers against Jews. The doors opened, and they flooded in and did exceedingly well in the 1920s and the first part of the 1930s.
My belief is that you can?t understand the second part of the Jewish story in Russia — the anti-Semitic policies, and what happens to Soviet Jews later, their desire to emigrate, for example — unless you know the first part of the story, which is mostly about amazing success.