Soviet Zion: The Quest for a Russian Jewish Homeland

by Allan Laine Kagedan

This book tells the remarkable story of the efforts by leading Russian Jews to secure a Jewish homeland in the Soviet Union. Helped by an improbable alliance of Moscow revolutionaries and New York Jewish philanthropists, this attempt to remake a portion of Soviet Jewry into a prosperous peasant farmer class - and construct a nationality-based republic similar to other Soviet creations - gripped the attention of Jews everywhere. The scheme failed, both in Ukraine and the Crimea, and ultimately led to the creation of the implausible "Jewish Autonomous Region" of Birobidzhan, an enormously distant, infertile, and gloomy piece of the Russian Far East. However, as an attempt to create a Soviet alternative to the Jewish settlements in Palestine and as a cautionary tale about policy-making in a multi-ethnic state, this remains a fascinating and (until now) oddly neglected area of Jewish history.

157 pages, Hardcover

First published April 1, 1994

Reviews

[Rhuff · Rating 4 out of 5]

Allen Kagedan offers a good if superficial review of Soviet colonization policy in Soviet Crimea during the 1920s - the only study in English of this subject, to my knowledge. As such it is a valuable window into the history of the period USSR, before it hardened into the forms we recognize. The post-revolutionary semi-glasnost of the 1920s left much room for debate and experiment, and colonizing Jews on exploitable land as an anti-Zionist Zion was seen as a patriotic substitute for the external charisma of Palestine.

Only, there were problems. Kagedan outlines them pretty well: the Crimea was not actually "vacant" any more than Palestine, and local Muslim Tartars did not take to the idea of sharing their ancestral topography with outsiders of any ethnicity. Their pushback led to Moscow promoting a new real estate scheme: the notion of a Jewish republic in Borobidzhan, in the far northeast against China, a hare-brained idea that was more a post of soft exile than a real settlement plan, that not even Stalin seriously enforced.

Kagedan outlines the soon-unthinkable alliance with American Jewish agencies in funding the project, contacts that would in time prove lethal for their Soviet counterparts. He also thoroughly analyzes the policy debates within the Communist Party and Soviet state agencies, in the light of their nationality theories and Lenin's views on the subject. Party politics intertwined with practical on-ground dilemmas, with collectivization driving the final coffin nails into the concept of Jewish settlers on Jewish land within the "multinational state."

Which brings us to Kagedan's cental conclusion: that the deepest reason for the lack of a Soviet Zion was the fissuring of the Soviet state along ethnic lines, which not only encouraged local nationalisms but ultimately shook apart that state's surface structure. In light of at-writing developments in Ukraine it's a point hard to dispute, though Kagedan is honest enough to admit that any form of government that did not "pander" to ethnicity would have been an extremely hard sell in the Wilsonian world of the 1920s. In the end only the Party's dictatorship kept the Soviet in union; removing this, like removing the Tzar, left a vacuum reclaimed from below.

I wish there had been more reference to the settlements and settlers themselves; their locations, their struggles to adapt to pioneering life and to their often-hostile neighbors, to the ever-shifting "lines" from Moscow. We have a glimpse of that on the jacket cover, with a group of such settlers in a Ukrainian colony taking a photo-op break. Perhaps such evidence was not readily available at the time of Kagedan's writing, but that is why I must give this little monograph four instead of five stars. It is still a good introduction to the semi-serious attempt at an "alt Palestine." How a successful "Soviet Jewish homeland" could have prevented the debacle of 2014 is unknowable; for that very reason, who can say?