Yevreyskaya Autonomous Oblast - History
In the remote corners of the Russian Far East, between the Bira and Bidjan rivers, lies a particularly intriguing chapter in modern Jewish history - Birobijan, the Jewish autonomy that was a kind of second Uganda plan. The Jewish Autonomous Region was created by the Soviet government as an alternative to Zionism and for the development of sparsely populated areas, The Jewish Autonomous Region is the first Jewish national-territorial entity in modern history, located in the south of the Russian Far East. Long before the State of Israel and the establishment of the Jewish state, Joseph Stalin decided on the establishment of a Jewish state in the most remote place in the world, he issued a decree, published proclamations and embarked on a campaign that enticed tens of thousands of Jews from all over the world to come to the Jewish district of Birobidzhan in the Far East on the Chinese border. Today about 2% of Jews live there.
James von Geldern noted "it should not be dismissed as a Stalinist fantasy or conspiracy, without noting its appeal to some Jews. Yiddish was still a living language in 1928, as opposed to the dead language Hebrew; and secular life was the stronger draw for most Jews. Life in a place that welcomed Jews, contrasted to an increasingly anti-semitic Europe, or a Palestine populated by hostile Arabs and run by British imperialists, seemed attractive. Finally, life as farmers held a tremendous, if ironic appeal to many Jews, who had been confined to city life for centuries, and who felt that the right to plow the land would give Jews as a full a national existence as the peoples around them. Israeli kibbutzes would one day give them that, but the bleak and barren land of Birobidzhan did not."
Matthew Mintz wrote "This case is an example distinctive of Stalin's cunning. The idea behind it was to create a 'pseudo-autonomous territory' which will be almost empty of Jews. The benefit of its existence lay in the fact that it made it possible to uproot any Jewish establishment from the districts where the Jews actually lived. BirobidzhanIt was and remains a farce, a comedy of ridicule and ridiculousness. No less ridiculous and ridiculous is the invention of the Jewish communists outside the Soviet Union for Birobidzhan being 'Stalin's Zion'."
Lenin in his article 'Critical Notes on the National Question', published at the end of 1913, echoed the views of Karl Kautsky on the assimilation of the Jews. Lenin formulated a new approach, similar to the views of the territorialists who resigned in 1905 from the Zionist Organization. He suggested assigning a province within the borders of Russia and to establish a national home for Jews who would gather there, which would be granted Jewish national autonomy. Lenin returned to this idea after the seizure of power in November 1917, when he summoned Semyon (Shimon) Dimenstein, later head of the Hivsektion, to discuss the situation of the Jews after the revolution.
Lenin proposed that with the establishment of the new regime should be granted for the Jews a district, and offered Kuban (a region of land in the Caucasus), with Dimenstein the role of commissar. In 1924, followingJewish pressure, the Soviet government discussed the issue. It adopted these ideas and established an 'authority? for converting the toiling Jews to agriculture', and Komzet for short (the initials in Russian). In the first colony, the Comzat Presidency established the Society for the Promotion and Encouragement of the Conversion of the Workers. It was a Jewish national organization, The Jews into agriculture', and in short: Ozet.
The Komzet platform which sought to ensure a compact land area in the Dnieper region the southern, near the old Jewish colonies and around them, and in the northern Crimea, to allow 100,000 Jewish families to settle in agricultural farms and establish a suitable infrastructure for a national republic Soviet Jewes. The first initiatives to allocate land for a Jewish settlement in Crimea met with opposition from the Ukrainian Republic.
Martin Latsis, member of the Commissariat for Agricultural Affairs of the Russian Federation in the 1920s, submitted in 1924 a working paper at the request of the Commissar of Agriculture of the Russian Federation. In the work paper he was careful to stick to the plan to settle 100,000 families, but focused on the possibility of implementing the plan. The sites were scattered throughout the territory of the Russian Federation, with the exception of the Republic of Crimea. The outline of the settlement he described moves from the eastern shore of the Sea of Azov through the northern Kuban and from there to the east on the southern slopes of European Russia, passed the Ural Mountains and continued east along the line of the Trans-Siberian railway in Khabarovsk.
This settlement policy resolved the “problem of the Jews” who – in the eyes of some Soviet leaders including Stalin – were suspected of not being loyal enough to the new Communist regime. Birobidzhan was seen as an alternative to the Zionist plan of resettling them in Palestinian territories and therefore a win-win solution – except for the Jews. Parts of the Jewish world were enthusiastic about this "Siberian Zion" project. US associations such as the American Birobidzhan Committee – of which Albert Einstein was the honorary president – made significant financial contributions to the establishment of this region. In fact, the idea was to turn Birobidzhan into an agricultural province, but the Jews who went there often had no farming experience and the land in the region was not really suitable for growing crops.
At the beginning of the affair, Stalin was the commissarfor national affairs (narcomanac). Stalin wanted to realise Lenin's plan to create autonomous socialist nations for the ethnic minorities within the Soviet Union, says Jeff Hawn, a Russia specialist and consultant for the New Lines Institute, a US geopolitical research centre. Stalin had another idea in mind when he proposed that Soviet Jews move to this province, which is slightly smaller than the Netherlands. He wanted to establish a Russian presence in this remote area because he was afraid that the Chinese, Koreans or even “White Russians” (Russians with tsarist or anti-Soviet sympathies in the period following the 1917 Russian Revolution) would try to take it over, explains Stephen Hall, a specialist in Russian politics at the University of Bath.
Stalin sat in all the meetings of the Political Bureau and no issue or proposal came up for discussion without his consent. Stalin chose the site that would be the most arduous and expensive, in Lazis' estimation, as a cornerstoner for Jewish national territory, and added to it vast areas of 37,000 square kilometers. Stalin choose the site in the frozen mud of Birobidzhan. It was a deliberate decision whose purpose is to drown the 'insolent and arrogant' national ambitions of the 'pseudo-Jewish nation', which is, as he said, 'something mystical, incomprehensible, that rose from its grave', He made sure that the implementation and supervision were not handed over to a Jewish authority, so that no national Jewish authority would be established.
The starting point for the formation of the region was 1928, when the Central Executive Committee of the USSR decided to assign the Committee for Land Development of Working Jews for the needs of resettlement of working Jews to the Birsko-Bidzhansky district of the Far Eastern Territory of the RSFSR. In 1930, the Biro-Bidzhan national region was formed, which in 1934, by decision of the union government, was transformed into the Jewish Autonomous Region with its center in the city of Birobidzhan.
In 1930, the national sections of the propaganda office of the Communist Party were abolished. This organizational move also cut off the Hibsektion management people, and The Hibsektionitself was also canceled. Only Avraham Marzhin, the secretary of Comzat, remained intact, by virtue of a party appointment. Esther Frumkin and Rahmiel Weinstein were among the leaders of the Bund in Russia before the Bolshevik Revolution. The revolution motivated them to establish the Communist Bund which was absorbed into the Bolshevik Party. after their integrationFor the party, they were included in the leading team of Hivskation. Along with others, they resigned from it or were asked to cease their activities in it.
On 08 July 1936, the political bureau of the party made a decision to cancel the authorityfor the transfer of a population that was subordinate to the Soviet government and entrusting the matter to the NKVD, The People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs, headed by Genrich Yagoda. The activity to encourage Soviet Jews to settle Birobidzhan ceased, and Ozat now concentrated on taking care of Jews outside the Soviet Union. A Jewish national movement that fought for the establishment of a Jewish Soviet Republic, while Yagoda believed that the methods of the Commissariat of Internal Affairs should be used, that is, the use of coercion.
On August 2, 1936, the Presidency of the Central Executive Committee of the Soviet Union, published a statement opening with the sentences: "For the first time in historyThe Jewish people's burning longing for the implementation of their homeland, for the establishment of their national statehood, was realized.Under the leadership of the great party of Lenin-Stalin and with the active assistance of the Soviet public they developedThe Jewish toiling masses and strengthened their Soviet statehood in ways befitting theThe conditions of the national identity of their people."
The great and horrifying purge in 1937 eliminated the members of the historical Bolshevik Party. The purge ended the formal presence of the Jews as a nation among the Soviet nations. The entire Jewish elite that operated in Komzet and Ozet was murdered, including the old Bolshevik Dimenstein and an associate of Lenin. From then on, the Jewish nation in the Soviet Union remained solely as an object of hatred for Soviet anti-Semites, whose numbers were far from being eliminated.
After the Second World War there was an attempt to renew the settlement as a solution for refugees, but the idea was not successful. At that time the number of Jews reached a peak of about a third of the local population. The establishment of the State of Israel, the doctors' trial and Stalin's second wave of persecutions closed the door on the plan.
Stalin's position was that anti-Semitism is inevitable in capitalist countries and therefore the need for a Jewish state must be understood, but since in a communist state there is no anti-Semitism at all, contact between Jews in these countries and Israel is fundamentally wrong. When the first diplomatic delegation on behalf of the State of Israel arrived in Moscow, Russian Jews welcomed them with demonstrable joy. The Jews, most of whom lost many family members in the terrible holocaust, hoped that the Israeli government would be able to act for their departure from Russia. When Golda Meir, who headed the diplomatic delegation, brought up the issue in her conversation with Stalin, Stalin asked her to forward the list of applicants to him. In their innocence, the members of the diplomatic delegation prepared a detailed list of the aliyah applicants, and forwarded the list to Stalin's office. Much to their surprise, in a short time all the Jews who appeared on the list - were arrested and sent to remote labor camps in Siberia.
During the second wave of persecution, Jewish leaders were again arrested and the Judaica collection in the local library was burned. In the years that followed, the idea of ??the Jewish region was forgotten. Some claim that Stalin planned to round up all the Jews in the area and then exterminate them. The doctors' trial was the first step in the plan. Stalin's plan was organized and calculated down to the last detail: the doctors would be convicted, the indignation of the masses of the people would reach its peak, and at the last moment Stalin, the "Father of the Nations", would be rescued, so to speak, for the protection of the Jews. The "protection" will be carried out by the mass deportation of the Jews to Siberia. The plan was cut short by Stalin's death on March 5, 1953.
Stalin's death was initially greeted with shock. The citizens of the Soviet Union, who from their childhood were brought up to sing and praise the "Sun of the Nations", who every day heard radio programs or read articles in the press that praised and raised Stalin, and his personal concern for every citizen throughout the empire - found it difficult to imagine how Russia could continue to exist without him. People believed that Stalin was the keeper of world peace. "The Father of Nations" they called him. In every book, whatever the subject, the author had to write in the introduction words of praise and praise to Stalin, for his contribution to the subject of the book.
With the fall of the Soviet Union and the introduction of a liberal immigration policy, most of the region's Jews left for Germany and Israel. In 1991, the region received the status of an autonomous republic, but by then most of the Jews had left, and those who remained made up about two percent of the population. Despite this, Yiddish is again taught in the schools and there is a Yiddish radio station.
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