Jewish Autonomous Oblast: Encyclopedia II - Jewish Autonomous Oblast - History

Jewish Autonomous Oblast - History

Jewish Autonomous Oblast - Early history

In prehistoric times the Amur River region was sparsely inhabited by independent tribes (notably the Daurs, Duchers, and Tunguses). They lived according to patrimonial and tribal laws, mainly on river valleys, especially on the banks of the Amur River and its tributaries. From the middle of the seventeenth century a gradual penetration by Russians into the region began. "Soldiers and people of industry, carrying out the Tsar's will, discovered new and new lands". To discover new places with no settled population, and to "bring them under the hand of the High and Mighty Tsar", was the aim set before them.

The history of settlement of the territory of the Jewish Autonomous Region is closely connected with that of the lands along the Amur River. It began with the campaign of Vassili Poyarkov, who in June, 1644 boated the Amur River from the Khingan up to the Tunguska River, made a list of the rivers, and reported that "those lands are crowded, full of bread and sables, and there are a lot of other animals, and those rivers are full of fish". The campaigns of Yerofey Khabarov and his companions strengthened Russian influence in the Amur Valley and began the joining of these lands and their population to Russia. Soon these places were occupied by people of every station in Russian society - fugitive Cossacks, free industrialists, peasants, and Old Believers.

However, in the eighteenth century and in the first half of the nineteenth century this rich country remained rough. Its further development has been credited to the governor-general of East Siberia, Count Nikolay Muravyov-Amursky. Realizing that, without the navigable Amur River, Siberia and the Russian Far East had no outlet to the ocean and were doomed to stagnate, he concluded the Aigun (1858) and Beijing (1860) treaties with China. A Captain Nevelskoy, who had taken possession of the mouth of the Amur, played a considerable role in joining the region to Russia by thus opening an outlet to the Pacific Ocean.

In December 1858 the Russian government authorized formation of the Amur Cossacks for protection of the southeast boundary of Siberia and communication on the rivers of Amur and Ussuri. This military colonization included settlers from Transbaikalia. In 1858-1882, sixty three settlements were founded, including, in 1857, Radde settlement; in 1858, Pashkovo, Pompeyevka, Puzino, Yekaterino-Nikolskoye, Mikhailo-Semyonovskoye, Voskresenovka, Petrovskoye, and Ventzelevo; in 1860, Storozhevoye, Soyuznoye, and Golovino; later in the decade, Babstovo, Bidzhan, and Bashurovo settlements. Expeditions of scientists - including such geographers, ethnographers, naturalists, and botanists as Venyukov, Schrenck, Maksimovich, Radde, and Komarov - promoted the development of the new territories. Their achievements produced the first detailed "map of the Amur land".

Construction began in 1898 on a railroad line connecting Chita and Vladivostok, starting at each end and meeting halfway. The project produced a large influx of new settlers and the foundation of new settlements. In 1908 Volochayevka, Obluchye, and Bira stations appeared; in 1910, Birakan, Londoko, and In stations; in 1912, Tikhonkaya station. The railroad was completed in October 1916, with the opening of the 2600-meter bridge across the Amur at Khabarovsk.

In the pre-revolutionary period most local inhabitants were farmers. The only industrial enterprise was the Tungusskiy timber mill, although gold was mined in the Sutara River, and there were some small railway workshops.

During the civil war the territory of the future Jewish Autonomous Oblast was the scene of terrible battles. The economy declined, though it was recovering in 1926 and 1927.

Jewish Autonomous Oblast - Jews in the region

The Jewish administrative division was founded with the help of Komzet in 1928 as the Jewish National District. It was the result of Stalin's nationality policy, by which each of the national groups that formed the Soviet Union would receive a territory in which to pursue cultural autonomy in a socialist framework. In that sense, it was also a response to two supposed threats to the Soviet state: Judaism, which ran counter to official state policy of atheism; and Zionism, which countered Soviet views of nationalism. The idea was to create a new "Soviet Zion", where a proletarian Jewish culture could be developed. Yiddish, rather than Hebrew, would be the national language, and a new socialist literature and arts would replace religion as the primary expression of culture.

Stalin's theory on the National Question held that a group could only be a nation if they had a territory, and since there was no Jewish territory, per se, the Jews were not a nation and did not have national rights. Jewish Communists argued that the way to solve this ideological dilemma was by creating a Jewish territory, hence the ideological motivation for the Jewish Autonomous Oblast. Politically, it was also considered desirable to create a Soviet Jewish homeland as an ideological alternative to Zionism and the theory put forward by Socialist Zionists such as Ber Borochov that the Jewish Question could be resolved by creating a Jewish territory in Palestine. Thus Birobidzhan was important for propaganda purposes as an argument against Zionism which was a rival ideology to Marxism among left-wing Jews. The propaganda impact was so effective that several thousand Jews immigrated to Birobidzhan from outside of the Soviet Union, including several hundred from Palestine who had become disillusioned with the Zionist experience.

In hindsight, it can be said that the experiment was doomed from the start. Another important goal of the Birobidzhan project was to increase settlement in the remote Soviet Far East, especially along the vulnerable border with China. In 1928, there was virtually no settlement in the area, while Jews had deep roots in the western half of the Soviet Union, in Ukraine, Belarus and Russia proper. In fact, there had initially been proposals to create a Jewish Soviet Republic in the Crimea or in part of Ukraine but these were rejected because of fears of antagonising non-Jews in those regions.

The geography and climate of Birobidzhan were harsh, and any new settlers would have to build their lives from scratch. Some have even claimed that Stalin was also motivated by anti-Semitism in selecting Birobidzhan: he wanted to keep the Jews as far away from the centers of power as possible. On the other hand, it must be said that the Ukrainians and Crimeans were reluctant to have a Jewish national home carved out of their territory, even though most Soviet Jews lived there, and there were very few alternative territories without rival national claims to them.

Despite the hardships, a trickle of Jewish settlers arrived. By the 1930s the Jewish National District was promoted to the status of an Autonomous Region and a massive propaganda campaign was underway to induce more Jewish settlers to move there. Some of these incorporated the standard Soviet propaganda tools of the era, and included posters and Yiddish-language novels describing a socialist utopia there. Other methods bordered on the bizarre. In one instance, leaflets promoting Birobidzhan were dropped from an airplane over a Jewish neighborhood in Belarus. In another instance, a government-produced Yiddish film called Seekers of Happiness told the story of a Jewish family that fled the Depression in the United States to make a new life for itself in Birobidzhan.

As the Jewish population grew, so did the impact of Yiddish culture on the region. A Yiddish newspaper, Der Birobidzhaner Shtern (Биробиджанер Штерн / ביראָבידזשאנער שטערן, "Star of Birobidzhan"), was established; a theater troupe was created; and streets in the new city being built were named after prominent Yiddish authors, such as Sholom Aleichem and Y. L. Peretz. At the same time, some efforts were also made to Russify Yiddish culture: the most notable of these was an attempt to replace the Hebrew alphabet used for writing Yiddish with the Cyrillic one.

The Birobidzhan experiment ground to a halt in the mid-1930s, during Stalin's first campaign of purges. Jewish leaders were arrested and executed, and Yiddish schools were shut down. Shortly after this, World War II brought concerted efforts to bring Jews east to an abrupt end. There was a slight revival in the Birobidzhan idea after the war as a potential home for Jewish refugees. During that time, the Jewish population of the region peaked at almost one-third of the total. Efforts in this direction ended, however, with the Doctors' plot, the establishment of Israel as a Jewish state, and Stalin's second wave of purges shortly before his death. Once again, the Jewish leadership was arrested and efforts were made to stamp out Yiddish culture—even the Judaica collection in the local library was burned. In the ensuing years the idea of an autonomous Jewish region in the Soviet Union was all but forgotten.

Some scholars such as Louis Rapoport, Jonathan Brent and Vladimir Naumov assert that Stalin had devised a plan to deport all of the Jews of the Soviet Union to Birobidzhan much as he had internally deported other national minorities such as the Crimean Tatars and Volga Germans, forcing them to move thousands of miles from their homes. The Doctors' Plot may have been the first element of this plan. If so the plan was aborted by Stalin's death on March 5, 1953.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union and new liberal emigration policies, most of the remaining Jewish population left for Germany and Israel. In 1991, the Jewish Autonomous Oblast was transferred from under the jurisdiction of Khabarovsk Krai to the jurisdiction of the Federation, but by that time most of the Jews had gone and the remaining Jews now constituted less than two percent of the local population. Nevertheless, Yiddish is once again taught in the schools, the Birobidzhaner Shtern publishes a Yiddish edition, and a Yiddish radio station still operates. Some political observers — particularly those sympathetic to the Palestinian cause in the Middle East — have proposed resurrecting the Jewish Autonomous Republic as both an alternative to Israel as the Jewish national homeland and as a permanent solution to the ongoing Arab-Jewish difficulties. The idea has yet to demonstrate that it has garnered any significant support from the world community at large, however.

L'Chayim, Comrade Stalin!, a documentary on Stalin's creation of the Jewish Autonomous Region and its settlement by a few Jews was released in 2003. In addition to being a history of the creation of the proposed Jewish homeland, the film features scenes of contemporary Birobidzhan and interviews with Jewish residents.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "History", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki