Stalin's Forgotten Zion: Birobidzhan and the Making of a Soviet Jewish Homeland: An Illustrated History, 1928–1996 - Hardcover

Weinberg, Robert

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0520209893 ISBN 13: 9780520209893

Publisher: University of California Press, 1998

Synopsis

Robert Weinberg and Bradley Berman's carefully documented and extensively illustrated book explores the Soviet government's failed experiment to create a socialist Jewish homeland. In 1934 an area popularly known as Birobidzhan, a sparsely populated region along the Sino-Soviet border some five thousand miles east of Moscow, was designated the national homeland of Soviet Jewry. Establishing the Jewish Autonomous Region was part of the Kremlin's plan to create an enclave where secular Jewish culture rooted in Yiddish and socialism could serve as an alternative to Palestine. The Kremlin also considered the region a solution to various perceived problems besetting Soviet Jews. Birobidzhan still exists today, but despite its continued official status Jews are a small minority of the inhabitants of the region. Drawing upon documents from archives in Moscow and Birobidzhan, as well as photograph collections never seen outside Birobidzhan, Weinberg's story of the Soviet Zion sheds new light on a host of important historical and contemporary issues regarding Jewish identity, community, and culture. Given the persistence of the "Jewish question" in Russia, the history of Birobidzhan provides an unusual point of entry into examining the fate of Soviet Jewry under communist rule.

About this title

About the Author

Robert Weinberg is Associate Professor of History at Swarthmore College. He is author of The Revolution of 1905 in Odessa: Blood on the Steppes (1993) and coeditor of a book-length edition of the journal Russian History (1996). Bradley Berman is the Associate Curator/Project Director for "Stalin's Forgotten Zion" at the Judah L. Magnes Museum in Berkeley, California. Zvi Gitelman is Professor of Political Science at the University of Michigan and author of numerous books on Jews in the Soviet Union.

Reviews

The creation of a Jewish homeland in the Soviet Far East remains one of the more bizarre episodes of Stalin's nationality policy. Weinberg's (The Revolution of 1905 in Odessa, Indiana Univ., 1995) short history of the Jewish Autonomous Region (JAR) includes an excellent collection of photographs and documents and conveys a sense of the impossible odds of heroic settlers "unprepared psychologically and physically" for the ordeal they underwent in the JAR. In its first decade, nearly 40,000 Jews arrived in the JAR, of which perhaps half would remain. After the war, some 10,000 more followed, only to experience the "mortal blow" of "anti-Zionist" policies in late Stalinism. By the mid-1980s, not quite five percent of the JAR's 214,000 residents were Jewish. They could witness the official revival of Yiddish culture under Gorbachev. While the JAR still exists, so does the unsolved "mystery" surrounding its creation. Despite excellent writing, the scholarship here is not as exceptional as the pictures, never before published. Recommended for larger libraries and those with strong Slavic or Jewish collections.?Zachary T. Irwin, Pennsylvania State Univ., Erie
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Stalin's Forgotten Zion: Birobidzhan and the Making of a Soviet Jewish Homeland: An Illustrated History, 1928-1996

By Robert Weinberg

University of California Press

Copyright 1998 Robert Weinberg
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0520209893
Introduction


Zvi Gitelman

The project to settle Jews in Birobidzhan was one of the most exotic and controversial attempts to solve what was perceived as a "Jewish problem" in the Russian Empire and its successor state, the Soviet Union. That such a problem existed was a commonplace. But people had radically different opinions as to its cause. Some believed that the problem lay in the intrinsic characteristics of the Jewish people. After all, they had killed Christ and were inherently untrustworthy and evil; whatever disadvantages they suffered were justified punishments for the deicide and the subsequent evils they had brought to the world. Others saw the problem as stemming from the artificially imposed and unfortunate position of Jews in the social and economic structures of the country Still others believed that the "Jewish problem" was really the problem of the Russian and Soviet states, which imposed disabilities on Jews. Whatever one's persuasion, at the beginning of the twentieth century, the "Jewish problem" drew the attention of Jews and non-Jews alike.

The Russian Empire had the largest Jewish population in the world. The census of 1897 enumerated 5,215,800 Jews, but between 1881 and 1914 nearly two million emigrated, seeking better economic opportunities and escaping persecution. The tsars had barred Jews from living in their empire until the late eighteenth century, when they annexed eastern Poland with its large Jewish population. They did not want the Jews, but they coveted the territories the Jews inhabited. In an era in which genocide and "ethnic cleansing" were not yet widely practiced, the tsars hit on the device of annexing the territories but confining the Jews in them in what came to be known as the "Pale of Settlement" (see map on p. 17). Over 90 percent of the Jews were confined to the Pale, with only the privilegedmerchants of the first and second "guilds" (that is, the wealthy), people with highly specialized skills, and long-term soldiersallowed to live outside the fifteen western provinces of the empire which made up the Pale.

All Jews, irrespective of their residence, were subject to a second kind of restriction, the numerus clausus , a quota system that limited severely the number of Jews who could be admitted to secondary and higher educational institutions and to the professions. Yet, as Robert Weinberg points out in this book, tsarist

(and Soviet) policies were contradictor); for along with these restrictions, the authorities attempted to assimilate the Jews by driving them into state schools, where they would be weaned from their religious and ethnic loyalties. Some Jews saw the latter policy as a way of "emancipating" the Jews and gaining cultural and, eventually, political and legal equality Other Jews regarded the offer of general education as a seductive snare designed to lead to mass conversion to Christianity and the destruction of the Jewish people by cultural means.

Jews were also subjected to a variety of political and economic restrictions. They could not be civil servants or military officers, or engage in commerce outside the Pale except with special permits, and few were allowed to own land. This was crucial because agriculture was the source of income of about 80 percent of the empire's population.1 These restrictions condemned most Jews to poverty and desperation. Jews were also victimized by pogroms (riots), which the government did little to prevent and which led to considerable loss of property and lives. After a wave of pogroms broke out in the southern parts of the empire in 1881, following the assassination of Tsar Alexander II for which Jews were blamed, mass emigration began.2

In the nineteenth century Jews and others devised a number of solutions to the "Jewish problem." Some blamed the Jewish situation mainly on the Jews themselves and pointed to their physical and cultural isolation from the rest of the population as the source of their troubles. The obvious remedy was to promote Jewish integration into the larger society and its cultures, provided that society would accept them. When some of the tsars seemed to move toward such reforms, the advocates of assimilation eagerly seized on this and urged Jews to melt into Russian society A more moderate stance was adopted by the "enlighteners" (maskillin ) who, unlike their West European counterparts, did not advocate abandoning Jewish culture for European cultures but rather adding those cultures to the repertoire of East European Jews, at the same time reforming East European Jewish mores and culture. They urged that modern hygienic standards be adopted, secular education be made widely available, and the original Jewish language, Hebrew, displace what they saw as the bastardized "jargon" of Yiddish.3 A modernized, acculturated Jewry would emerge and prove itself worthy of acceptance by the peoples among whom it dwelled. As one maskil put it, "Now that the good graces of the Tsar have appeared among us to lighten our darkness," Jews should "remove their filthy garments which set them off from their neighbors" and reform the rabbinate.4 Writing in 1866, the poet Judah Leib Gordon called to his fellow Jews:

This land of Eden [Russia] now opens its gates to you
Her sons now call you "brother"!

How long will you dwell among them as a guest,
And why do you now affront them? ...

Raise your head high, straighten your back,
And gaze with loving eyes upon them,
Open your heart to wisdom and knowledge,
Become an enlightened people and speak their language....

Be a man abroad and a Jew in your tent,
A brother to your countrymen and a servant to your king....5

In the Russian Empire, as in most of Europe, complete assimilation entailed adoption of Christianity, which meant a definitive break not only with Judaism but with the Jewish people and with one's own family Not surprisingly, relatively few were willing to go this far. The alternative of reforming the Jewish appearance, culture, and way of life had a wider appeal. Haskalah (enlightenment) was the impetus for the rebirth of Hebrew literature and of attempts to introduce secular education under Jewish auspices. In the empire, however, it did not entail the far-reaching religious changes that it brought about in Western Europe. Reform Judaism remained largely unknown in the Russian Empire.

The pogroms of the 1880s and the reactionary reigns of Tsar Alexander III (1881-94) and Nicholas II (1894-1917) east a dark shadow on the vision of Jewish acculturation and acceptance into the larger society. Instead of adopting "Europe," many gave up on it. People such as the physician Leon Pinsker were convinced by the pogroms that anti-Semitism was a disease endemic to Europe and could not be eradicated by enlightenment and the rationality on which it was predicated. Instead, drawing from both the traditional Jewish aspiration of shivat Zion (return to Zion) and the romantic nationalism then sweeping through Eastern and Central Europe, they argued that Jewish ills could be treated only in an independent Jewish state. Although the leadership of modern political Zionism came initially from Central and Western Europe, the masses who were to turn this seemingly fantastic idea into a movement to be reckoned with were the Jews of the Russian Empire and other areas of Eastern Europe. In the Zionist scheme, the Jews would obtain a territory on which they would create a state. Moreover many Zionists argued that this state could solve a basic socioeconomic problem by providing land for the Jews to farm, thereby making them physically and economically healthy. The rnaskilim had already pointed to the "lack [of] farmers and plowmen for land they have not had" as a fundamental problem for Jews.6 Perhaps they were influenced by popular images of "noble savages" and the glories of agricultural labor, as depicted in Tolstoy's Anna Karenina and elsewhere in Russian literature. Anyone

looking for a solution to the "Jewish problem" would naturally hit on the obvious anomaly of a people deprived of land living in agricultural societies. Socialist Zionists, such as Ber Borochov; A. D. Gordon, and Nachman Syrkin, combined variants of socialism with the Zionist idea in visions of an agricultural, egalitarian society to be created by European migrants to an independent Jewish state in Palestine.

To some Jewish socialists these schemes seemed unrealistic and reactionary. In the late nineteenth century some Jews had joined the narodnik (populist) movement, which sought to mobilize the peasantry to overthrow tsarism and establish a just, egalitarian order based on socialist principles. Many, however, became disillusioned by the anti-Jewish actions of peasants. Some of these narodniks embraced Marxism as a more promising form of socialism. Marxism identified the proletariat, not the peasantry, as the revolutionary class. It postulated that socialism was inevitable and did not depend on the will of benighted peasants to come to power.7 By 1897 there were enough Jewish Marxists to found the General League (Bund) of Jewish Workingmen of Russia, Poland, and Lithuania.8 Though at first committed merely to bringing the message of Marxism to the Yiddish-speaking masses who, they assumed, would learn enough Russian to make a separate Jewish socialist movement unnecessary, the leaders of the Bund found themselves pushed by their nationally conscious constituency to insist on an autonomous Jewish party. Though the Bund helped found the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP) in 1898, it demanded that the party be federal in structure, giving each nationality party considerable autonomy. The Bund's demand that it retain control in matters affecting the Jewish proletariat exclusively was rejected both by the Bolshevik faction of the RSDLP, led by Vladimir Lenin, and by the Mensheviks, led by Iulii Martov, the grandson of a maskil , who just a few years earlier had argued the need for an independent Jewish socialist party.9 Though Lenin and Martov accused the Bund of Jewish nationalism, the Bund rejected Zionism as both unrealistic and reactionary. In the Bund's view, the idea of enticing millions of Jews to migrate to a barren land far from Europe was a chimera. Moreover, by insisting on a Jewish state and attempting to concentrate world Jewry in one territory; Zionists were isolating working-class Jews from the rest of the proletar at and diverting their energies from world revolution to the hopeless task of creating a Jewish state. Furthermore, the attempt to make Hebrew the Umgangssprache of the Jews was ridiculous, since it was obvious that Yiddish was the language of the people, especially of the "lower" classes. The solution to the "Jewish question," in the Bund's view, lay in the world socialist revolution. It would abolish all ethnic animosities, disabuse people of the illusions of religion, resolve social and economic conflicts in favor of the down-

trodden masses, and lead to the formation of egalitarian, just societies. All peoples would eventually amalgamate, but their ethnocultural needs would be served as long as ethnic groups existed.

Though these ideologies are dazzling in their range and intellectual ingenuity, only a minority of the Russian Empire's Jews became active adherents of one or another.10 Nearly half the Jews instead "voted with their feet." About two million emigrated, mostly to the United States, Western Europe, and Latin America. Whereas the assimilationists gave up on Jewishness, the maskilim on tradition, the Zionists on the diaspora, and the Bund on capitalism and democratic reform, millions gave up on Russia and Europe.

There were three prominent issues in the ideological competition of a century ago that later arose in the Birobidzhan experiment: land and agriculture, language, and autonomy Those who devised the scheme for an autonomous Jewish region in the Soviet Union were consciously competing with Zionism, as this book makes clear, and tried to provide the most important incentives for settlement that Zionists, Bundists, and emigration advocates had proffered, each in their own ways. They offered economic rehabilitation and social respectability through agricultural work; the preservation and promotion of language, cultureand implicitlyof the Jewish people itselfthrough compact settlement; and a political structure that would facilitate all of those.

Few would have predicted that Bolsheviks would promote a scheme whose effect would be to consolidate the Jewish population and possibly lead to the establishment of a Jewish territory After all, before the Bolshevik Revolution both Lenin and Joseph Stalin had vehemently argued that the Jews were not a nation. They lacked the prerequisites for nationhood which Stalin had postulated: a territory, common language, and economy. Lenin condemned discrimination against Jews and prescribed assimilation as the answer to the Jewish problem. He praised the Jews of Western Europe for being in the vanguard of the assimilationists. Once their East European brethren followed suit and amalgamated with other peoples, the Jewish problem would be solved since it stood to reason that if there were no Jews there would be no Jewish problem.

Like the expectation that world revolution would break out in the advanced capitalist countries first and spread immediately to the rest of the world, this schematic, mechanistic conception of the "Jewish problem" and its solution had to be abandoned soon after the revolution. Within a year, the Bolsheviks established Jewish Sections (Evreiskie sektsii , or Evsektsii ) within the Communist Party, though in form, at least, these seemed similar to what the Bund had proposed for the party's predecessor, the RSDLP. A Commissariat for Jewish Affairs (Evkom ) was set up within the Commissariat of Nationalities, the latter headed by none other than Stalin. Because such a large sector of the Jew-

ish population had only a weak comprehension of Russian, pragmatism won out over principle. Yiddish was used to convey the party's message to the Jewish masses who could not yet be reached in Russian.

Bolshevism had little support among the Jewsthere were fewer than a thousand Jews in the Bolshevik ranks before 1917. But once the civil war ended and the Jewish parties were forcibly dissolved, some experienced Jewish socialist and even Zionist activists entered the ranks of the Evsektsii , enabling them to launch campaigns to destroy the traditional Jewish way of life and its institutions. The old battle between Yiddish and Hebrew was refought, but this time the weight of state power was thrown behind Yiddish. Hebrew became the only language the Soviets made virtually illegal, as the Evsektsii activists persuaded the party that Yiddish was the language of the "toiling masses," whereas Hebrew was the language of the "class enemy" the bourgeoisie, Zionists, and clerics.

Zionism was another target of the Evsektsii . Picking up on the critique of Zionism first advanced by the Bund, Lenin, and Stalin, the Evsektsii mobilized the Soviet state against Zionist activity and drove Zionists underground, out of the country, to prisons and labor camps, or into political retirement. Finally, the Jewish religion was attacked with a ferocious zeal, which aroused the envy of non-Jewish militant atheists. Judaism was portrayed as superstition, a reactionary ideology which blocked scientific and intellectual progress and which the bourgeoisie had used to divert the attention of the proletariat from its misery.11

By the mid-1920s the Communists claimed to have established a monopoly of power "on the Jewish street." Some were content to stop there and let the ineluctable forces of assimilation complete the task they had started by destroying the former Jewish way of life. Others argued that there was still a significant Jewish population that had to be helped toward socialism, either because they were economically dispossessed as former petty traders or self-employed artisans, had vocations made irrelevant by the revolution, or because they were culturally disadvantaged. Still other Jewish Communists saw the preservation of Jewish nationality and culture as a positive goal, though they paid lip service to the ultimate goal of assimilation. The Evsektsii had an institutional interest in not declaring victory prematurely because they wanted to justify their continued existence. Their campaigns against Hebrew, Zionism, and Judaism had cleared the way for the construction of a new type of Jewishness and Jewry, and the Evsektsii launched several campaigns designed for that purpose.

The first campaign was part of the party and government's drive for korenizatsiia , "implanting" Bolshevism among the non-Russians. This would be done by having party and government institutions operate in their languages

and educating their children with a Bolshevik content but a national form, as Stalin put it. For Jews this meant the creation of networks of Yiddish schools, newspapers, journals, and theaters. Two academic institutions operating in Yiddish were set up in Kiev and Minsk. Courts, trade unions, and even party cells were encouraged to operate in Yiddish. This was the only time in history that a state invested heavily in Yiddish institutions and the promotion of Yiddish culture. Ironically, the Jews, by and large, rejected this effort. Traditional Jews saw it as an attempt to replace authentic, grassroots Judaism with an ersatz product imposed "from above" by the state, one that would erode Jewish values and traditions, not preserve them. Those uninterested in traditional forms of Jewishness saw no reason to remain loyal to Yiddish culture when the broader horizons of Russian culture beckoned to them. Jews rushed to take advantage of the educational and vocational opportunities the revolution had opened to them. Clearly, Russian was much more useful than Yiddish. As one Jewish porter put it poignantly when the transport workers were discussing the use of Yiddish in union affairs: "For many years I have carried hundreds of pounds on my back, day in and day out. Now I want to learn some Russian and become a kontorshchik [office worker]."12 The Yiddishization campaign failed for the same reasons the language has faded in the United States: as Yiddish speakers moved to the big cities and as younger generations were able to enter higher educational institutions and mainstream occupations, Yiddish seemed outmoded, provincial, and irrelevant, associated with a not very pleasant past. Just as English was seen as the key to Americanization and social mobility by immigrants to the United States, Russian and Russian culture were seen as "higher," more useful, and socially prestigious than the provincial Yiddish by Soviet Jews, many of whom were streaming out of the shtetlekh to the larger cities. Therefore, the idea of a territory in which Yiddish would be the dominant language, such as Birobidzhan, had limited appeal to Soviet Jews in the 1920s.

The Evsektsii debated whether the small-scale artisans and craftsmen so common among the Jews were self-employed "bourgeois" or whether they were proletarians. Having resolved the issue in favor of working-class status for these kustar (artisans), they launched a campaign, "mitn ponim tsum kustar!" (Attention to the artisan!). They promoted cooperatives so that the kustars would move from capitalist self-employment to socialist collectivism. This effort was soon eclipsed by the far more ambitious Five-Year Plan (1928), which swept the kustar , along with millions of peasants and other workers, into state-owned factories.

The most dramatic effort at constructing a Soviet, secular, socialist Jewry was the attempt to settle Jews on the land. The plan was to settle 100,000 Jews in agricultural colonies within a few years. Earlier, the mystique of agricultural

labor had moved Baron Maurice de Hirsch to finance Jewish colonies in the pampas of Argentina; the Am Olam movement settled Jews in colonies in North America; and "territorialist" organizations envisioned the establishment of agriculturally based autonomous Jewish areas in several parts of the world.13 The "bourgeois" American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) and the Jewish Colonization Organization were enthusiastic about the idea of Soviet Jews working the land. In 1928 there were nearly 220,000 Jewish farmers. By the mid-1930s, the JDC had expended $13.8 million on agricultural work and an additional $10.3 million on other assistance. In 1939, when Agro-Joint and ORT (Organization for Rehabilitation and Training) ended their assistance, James Rosenberg, a JDC leader, wrote in an internal report, "Anti-semitism in Russia is a crime. The ghetto dwellers of Russia have been transformed into hardy workers on farms and in factories. For us in the United States there is no Jewish problem in Russia."14 But collectivization of agriculture and the merger of ethnically distinct collective farms in a process called "internationalization" diminished the attractiveness to Jews of the colonies in Belarus, Ukraine, and the Crimea. The number of Jewish family units on the farms declined from 38,100 in 1926 to 25,000 in 1939.

In the end, the drive to industrialize Russia, the core of Stalin's program, overtook all the schemes the Evsektsii and the party had devised for the economic rehabilitation and political socialization of the Jews. The Evsektsii were abolished in 1930 and Jewish economic and cultural institutions began to wither. All Soviet nationalities were now mobilized to transform their "common homeland," the Soviet Union, from a backward agricultural state into a modern industrial power. The Birobidzhan project continued to attract support from the state and from some foreign organizations, but as this book makes clear, not very much from Soviet Jews themselves.

As Robert Weinberg makes clear, the Birobidzhan project failed and was probably designed to do so. The agricultural settlements in Ukraine, Belarus, and Crimea, which were within or near the former Pale of Settlement, were more likely to attract and retain Jewish colonists. Clearly, Birobidzhan was designed to buttress Soviet claims to a territory that might be claimed by China or Japan and, perhaps, to ensure the failure of the Jewish colonies in the European republics lest they become the centers of a new Jewish nationalism or even of a "reconstructed" Jewish people. Even if the project was not designed to fail, the fate of Soviet Jewry raises serious questions about the viability of secular Jewishness outside a Jewish state. The secular, socialist Jewishness offered by the Evsektsii as a replacement for Judaism and Zionism and traditional ways of life in Birobidzhan and elsewhere did not attract many, just as Yiddishist secularism outside the USSR did not sustain itself much beyond the

immigrant generation. The ideologist of Yiddishist secularism, Chaim Zhitlovsky, had confidently asserted that the "Yiddish culture sphere ... has succeeded in building a 'spiritual-national home,' purely secular, which can embrace all Jews throughout the world.... We are beginning to be equal in our national-cultural character with all other cultural peoples in the world."15 Just as secular Yiddishism failed to prove to be a long-term alternative to traditional forms of Jewish life, so has socialism failed to replace capitalism in most parts of the world. Even the more modest aim of solving the "Jewish problem" in the USSR was not reached by those who directed the Soviet state for over seventy years. Despite claims to having created a "new Soviet man" and to having formed a "society of a new type," where all ethnic tensions were eliminated, in the 1980s glasnost ' revealed the failures of the system. The fissiparous nationalisms that led to the breakup of not only the former USSR but of Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia prove dramatically and tragically that the "national question" was not settled by Soviet-style socialism.

Thus, the attempt to create a Jewish Autonomous Region in the Soviet Far East remains largely forgotten in both Soviet and Jewish history It is so partly because history is written by winners, and Birobidzhan's chief competitors, the Zionists, have emerged triumphant. We need to be reminded, however, that many intelligent and discerning men and women committed themselves strongly to an idea that failed. We should ask why they made that commitment and ponder whatever lessons we think we may derive from this episode. As anyone who has ever conducted a laboratory experiment realizes, we learn as much from failed experiments as we do from the few that are ultimately successful.

View of the J A.R. countryside, mid-1930s.

Continues...

Excerpted from Stalin's Forgotten Zion: Birobidzhan and the Making of a Soviet Jewish Homeland: An Illustrated History, 1928-1996 by Robert Weinberg Copyright 1998 by Robert Weinberg. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Publication date: 1998
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0520209893
• ISBN 13: 9780520209893
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 128
• Editor: Berman Bradley