Originally Posted by jibber

the eastern bloc for sure, but russia was by far the most oppressive country out of all of them. The russian Pale was basically one big ghetto, what the warsaw ghetto in WWII was modeled after. pograms were legalized in many different times in russian history, and even the geography of the nation attributed to the situation for jews being worse in russia. By being such an isolated country from the rest of western europe, it was easy for the royal family to let the situation get far more escalated than in any other place in europe with little to no objection. Not that there would have been much objection anyways, at that time, anti-semitism was very popular.