Soviet Zion: Why did the Jewish Autonomous Oblast Fail?
In the desolate east of Russia, bound on three sides by the Amur River, and bordering Heilongjiang, China, there exists the world’s largest menorah. The menorah is 21 metres high and demands the use of nine 500-watt lamps. The Jewish Autonomous Oblast, located in remote Siberia, was, for a brief few years, the only Yiddish speaking state to have ever existed.
At its height in the post-war period, the Jewish population of Russia’s only autonomous oblast amounted to 46-50,000. As of the 2010 census, this has declined to a meagre 1,628 individuals of the Jewish faith. In order to address as to how the JAO became a byword for Soviet hubris, it is pertinent to initially outline as to how it came into existence.
Granted self-governing status in 1934, Birobidzhan offered Russian Jewry, at the time 30% of whom were unemployed due to pogroms and discriminatory hiring practices, a linguistic alternative to the fledgling Hebrew-speaking Israeli state. This played upon Jewish fears of the erosion of the Yiddish language. Conceptually, Yiddish was synergetic with the pathos of the Bolshevik revolution; existing in transmutation from household jargon to a cultural, literary, intellectual lingua franca. Further in this way, settlement in Birobidzhan at the time of its establishment offered an escape from stringent Soviet regulation of private property within political centres; presenting Soviet Jews with the opportunity to eke out a living as artisans or small businessmen, as many did prior to the revolution.
The regime propaganda film ‘seekers of happiness’ offers microcosmic insight into the mindset of these emigres; set about three central motifs - dreams, work, and happiness - it synthesis Marxism-Leninism with Jewish religious institutions. Simultaneously, from the perspective of Soviet power elites, the settlement of perceived counter-revolutionary insurrectionaries on the wild frontier of their nation annulled one problem domestically, and likewise formed an essential defensive outpost against White Russian and Chinese resistance forces that were rife in the area.
There is much to be said in support of the notion that the JAO was doomed from the beginning, or even more nefariously, doomed by design: Birobidzhan, atop the aforestated, had a harsh geography and climate, being in equal parts mountainous, forested and swampy, meaning any settlers would have to build their lives entirely from scratch. In the Spring of 1928, 654 Jews arrived to settle, by October, they had halved in number, broadly as a consequence of the torrential conditions which had resulted in en-masse crop failures and an anthrax outbreak among bovine livestock.
The JAO’s failure can likewise be attributed to circumstance, most notably The Great Patriotic War, Many holocaust survivors were sent into the Oblast against their will, as a result of their wartime absenteeism, which rendered them prone to eviction – a truly tragic irony. Post-war, Birobidzhan essentially became a holding pen for Soviet Jews, with anecdotal evidence pointing toward local authorities’ refusal to allow the returning survivors of Nazi persecution to settle anywhere outside of the JAO.
The death knell for the Siberian-Zionist dream was almost certainly sounded by Stalin’s purges. Launching a brutal campaign against ‘rootless cosmopolitans’, a thinly veiled euphemism for Jews, the JAO, naturally having a high concentration of Jews (as a direct result of his own policymaking), became an obvious candidate for persecution. Poets, writers, and the general intelligentsia of Birobidzhan were arrested, simultaneously accused of the crimes of ‘nationalism’ and ‘cosmopolitanism’ – the very virtues Lenin intended to foster in the creation of a Jewish statelet. Again, in the ultimate twist of irony of this whole tale, those who had moved or had been forced to the JAO, solely because of their Jewishness, became afraid of publicly professing their faith and speaking Yiddish due to antisemitic purges in their nominally Jewish state. The existence of a Jewish state permitted Stalin to steal the impetus from the two main Jewish activist groups of the time: the Zionists and secular Jewish communists. By accommodating their goal of national recognition (albeit in Siberia), Stalin isolated them and precluded any potential agitation. Likewise, if Birobidzhan were to fail, this would subversively reaffirm the notion that the Jews were incapable of running an oblast, much less a nation unto itself. At least 2000 Birobidzhan Jews were murdered in this period.
Throughout the Cold War period, the JAO stagnated further, its sole synagogue closed in the 1960’s due to damage sustained in a fire, and it failed to maintain its upkeep arguably due to a Jewish population decline of approximately 50%, down to 14,269 as of the 1959 census. The refusenik phenomenon in the wake of the six-day war likewise played a role in the spirit of anomie existent within and surrounding Birobidzhan; rather than ‘staying and fighting’, the paradigm among the Russian Jewish intelligentsia firmly shifted in the direction of Israel.
The contemporary JAO in the wake of 1991 is defined by the politics of gesture and performative allusion. As of 2012, Judaism is practiced by a mere 1% of the oblast’s population – a pitiful 1628 Jews remain. Yiddish is taught in three of the region’s schools, but the Russian language is predominantly spoken in what remains of the community. Symbols, icons and vestiges of the past remain, exhibited in statues of great Yiddish authors, the home of the Jewish chamber theatre, a Yiddish community centre, and a synagogue without a minyan. As of 2012, the local newspaper, the Birobidzhaner Shtern, continues to publish two or three pages a week in Yiddish, and Kosher meat arrives every few weeks by train from Moscow. With the advent of the state of Israel and the fall of the USSR, ideologically pure and historically credible, Birobidzhan is fundamentally redundant as a Jewish state.
In conclusion, the Jewish Autonomous Oblast failed due to its geographic harshness, lack of historical accordance with the Jewish people, and circumstantial abuses of power; firstly, co-opting Birobidzhan settlers to be defenders of a wild hinterland frontier, and thereafter victimising them in arbitrary purges. While as recently as 2016 the governor of the JAO has made comments to the effect of his ‘readiness’ to ‘welcome Jews from European countries, where they may face attacks by antisemitic elements’, this, as aforestated, drips with the politics of gesture and allusion that has come to define contemporary Birobidzhan. The future of the oblast lies within Deputy Prime-Minister Khusnullin’s premonition – immediate annexation into bordering Khabarovsk; thus spelling the end for the world’s first Jewish homeland, an albeit well-intentioned project marred by mismanagement, hubris, and ultimately murderous evil.
Image courtesy of Rusik_z via WikiCommons, ©2018, some rights reserved.
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the wider St. Andrews Foreign Affairs Review team.
