Birobidzhan in Khrushchev’s Thaw: the soviet and the western outlook

ABSTRACT

The present article looks into the little-researched period in the nine-decade long history of the Jewish Autonomous Region (JAR), which is still present atavistically in the administrative-territorial structure of contemporary Russia. The region in the Siberian Far East, better known by the name of its main town, Birobidzhan, never turned into what it was supposed to be, namely the centre of Jewish life in the Soviet Union. Nonetheless, while being demographically and culturally insignificant, the low-statused JAR played a key and essentially detrimental role in determining the entitlements that the Jews had in the Soviet pecking order. The government consistently used the Birobidzhan-centered model of Jewish life as an instrument for justifying internationally its active assimilationist policy. In the 1950s, rumours – first about the liquidation of Jewish autonomy and then about a planned expulsion of Jews to the JAR – attracted the attention and concern of the foreign press and Jewish organizations. International pressure forced Moscow to modify its Jews-related policy, but changed little in the JAR. The 1959 census revealed 14,269 Jews in the JAR’s population. Compared with 1939, the number of Jews in the region had decreased almost by a fifth. This decline continued in the coming years.

KEYWORDS:

• Soviet Jews
• assimilation
• expulsion
• Mikoyan
• census
• Yiddish

Acknowledgements

The research for this article was conducted as part of the Shvidler Project for the History of the Jews in the Soviet Union at New York University, and within the framework of the Basic Research Program at the National Research University Higher School of Economics and subsidies by the Russian Academic Excellence Project “5–100.” I want to thank the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions, and to thank Elena Sarashevskaia and Valery Gurevich for archival material.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Gennady Estraikh is a professor in the Skirball Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies at New York University, where he also directs the Shvidler Project for the History of the Jews of the Soviet Union. In 1988–1991, he was Managing Editor of the Moscow Yiddish literary journal Sovetish Heymland. He received his doctorate from the University of Oxford. His fields of expertise are Jewish intellectual history, Yiddish language and literature, and Soviet Jewish history. His publications include Soviet Yiddish (1999), In Harness:Yiddish Writers’ Romance with Communism (2005), Yiddish in the Cold War (2008), Yiddish Literary Life in Moscow, 1917–1991 (2016, in Russian), Yiddish Culture in Ukraine (2016, in Ukrainian), and over a dozen co-edited volumes, including 1929: Mapping the Jewish World (2013), Soviet Jews in World War II (2014), and Children and Yiddish Literature (2016).

Notes

1 In fact, Jews did work in building and metallurgy (Konstantinov 2007, 220).

2 Judging by letters sent to various office-holders, expulsion of Jews to Birobidzhan would be welcomed by some segments of the Soviet population (Dobson 2009, 29; Hopf 2012, 56).

3 In 1948 the name of Mikoyan, an Armenian, appeared on the JAR map, but after the September 1957 decree, which banned naming towns, streets, etc. after live people, the settlement of Mikoyanovsk has been known as Khingansk.

4 See also Corry 1953, 519, 521, 568.

5 Vergelis, however, described himself as a “young daredevil, / who spent his life at a camp-fire” and did not think twice to go “with a knife at a tiger” (Estraikh 2008, 55).