Cultural Construction in the Soviet Empire (HIST 354)

What struck me the most about Chapters 14-18 was how much the lives of (former) Kazakh nomads had changed. I read with this meta-question in mind: how does Mukhamet mourn – or not – the passing of the nomadic way of life? And how does he understand his new, Sovietised way of life? It’s impossible underestimate what has changed. Geographically, the steppes have given way to industrial complexes and collective farms; all connected at a grand scale through Soviet steamer and train, yes, but paradoxically leaving Mukhamet and his relations more disconnected than ever:

“[…]the traditional socializing between neighboring aul had almost ceased due to lack of transport. (172)

More intriguingly, Kazakh nomadic folkways and customs have given way to new structures and hierarchies that Soviet administration has imposed on life – the demands of settled argriculture vs. pastoral nomadism, old clan elites versus Soviet administrative elites, and, most perversely of all, a famine that eventually catches up with Mukhamet and his family.

It’s an entirely new world for him. But Mukhamet isn’t constantly pointing out these differences between the nomadic way of life, and the new Sovietised way of life. To answer the meta-question and understand what Mukhamet makes of his new way of life, then, we ask a more specific question: how does Mukhamet comment all of these changes, and what do they reveal about him? I can’t fully answer this question, but I’ll sketch out precisely how Mukhamet’s writing resists a question like this.

For one, we aren’t given an official Soviet view on what settling Kazakh nomads on collective farms was meant to accomplish – in fact, it’s telling that Mukhamet isn’t glossing his memories with an official Soviet view. Why does Mukhamet choose not to give the Soviet perspective on events like collectivization and the famine? We aren’t given anything comparable to the rhetoric of “backwardness” and “uplift” that accompanied the Turksib, for example.

Here’s another way in which Mukhamet resists giving us a straight answer: despite all the evident misfortune that Mukhamet suffers, he offers limited criticism of Soviet power. What can Mukahmet’s criticisms of Soviet power, to the extent that he does criticise Soviet power, tell us about what he rejects – and what he accepts – of Soviet power? Soviet power may have reduced his family to a precarious life of informal employment – ironically enough, a nomadic life; it has also permanently separated him from his father, and destroyed the usual familial ties that would have helped Mukhamet and his family in times of crisis. (Chapter 17 focuses in particular on how some of his relatives, having gotten well-compensated Soviet jobs, have suddenly lost interest in their relations.) But Mukhamet’s criticisms ultimately target faceless central Soviet power for its responsibility for the famine:

“Tragically, however, our leaders ere more concerned about Party delegates than they were about the deaths of working people.” (189)

He does not fault the Kazakh leadership – “it was not their fault that they did not have the [resources…] everything was in the hands of the Soviet government.” (188) Nor does he fault the lower rungs of authority: eating with an acquaintance, the vice-chairman of an aul council, he observes how materially well-off the chairman’s family is compared to those stricken by famine around him. But he begs the question by simply commenting that “the food had surely been sent by God.” (189)

To sum up, Leah observed last class that Mukhamet seemed to be pulling his punches. Although it’s telling that Mukhamet is choosing at all to tell us about the precarious life that Soviet power forced him into, it’s also telling that, to understand Mukhamet’s attitudes, we’ve had to do a little indirect reading to understand what he makes of Soviet power.

Here’s a final thought: perhaps the life he’s leading right now is a temporary one, a Stalinist parenthesis – that would explain why Mukhamet isn’t stopping and taking stock of what’s changed. Or maybe he’s taking this new Sovietised life as a new normal: he speaks, in a sentimentalising tone, about “simple, honest, rank-and-file collective farmers” (169) in contrast with well-off Soviet officials. Given how new collectivisation was, though, would these identities – “kulak”, “collective farmer”, “aul chairman” – have made sense to Kazakhs of the period? I think not: I think they would’ve seen themselves as nomads lost in an alien world.

Sorry for the late post y’all

What I noticed most while reading The Silent Steppe was Shayakhmetov’s portrayals of the Soviet Authorities. From the end of the first chapter, Shayakhmetov describes the Soviet authorities as destroyers of the nomadic way of life (Shayakhmetov, 10), only a few pages later Shayakhmetov writes about the Soviet government’s exploitation of the people of Kazakhstan in the form of “expressly exorbitant and unrealisable” taxes (Shayakhmetov, 13). These both give a clear view of how Soviet authorities were received by at least some people in Kazakhstan, however I think the most important characterization comes a bit later in the book, when Shayakhmetov writes of the activists in Kazakhstan “They behaved arrogantly towards simple people, just like the officials of statist times.” (Shayakhmetov, 27)

The continuity that Shayakhmetov sees between the tsarist authorities and the Soviet authorities seems to be important. The first characterization he provides of the Soviet authorities as the destroyers of nomadic lifestyles is an echo of the attempts by tsarist authorities to settle Kazakhs (Shayakhmetov, viii). The impossible to pay taxes seem to just be a different way of extorting the people of Kazakhstan, taking grain which they didn’t have rather than claiming that anything they owned in reality belonged to the Tsar (Shayakhmetov, ix), even if it was theoretically done only to bring an end to the kulaks as a class. The seemingly non-existent definition of kulak is one of the major ways Soviet authorities exploited people, Shayakhmetov writes that lists of kulaks were constantly changing based off of personal grudges and relationships (Shayakhmetov, 51). Based on this characterization Soviet authorities were arbitrary, much like Tsarist authorities and could do just about anything they wanted. Shayakhmetov also stresses arbitrary enforcement when discussing his father’s dispossession after being labelled a kulak, despite the fact that his flock was of average size (Shayakhmetov, 52)

While Shayakhmetov writes at length about the evils of the Soviet authorities, he also does write about a few changes Soviets made that he believes were beneficial. The beneficial changes were mostly in the schools that Soviets built (Shayakhmetov, 46) and in the (closer to) equal rights that Soviets provided for women, no longer allowing polygamy, the forced marriage of widows to a relative of her deceased husband, or the paying of “bride money” (Shayakhmetov, 27).

So I guess the question that I want to put to the class is how does Shayakhmetov view the Soviets? I want use to consider this in light of his comments that people “who experienced the joys and freedoms of the wandering way of life tend to remember none of the hardships involved, but only the good things” (Shayakhmetov, 31). Shayakhmetov seems to have a complicated relationship with Soviet authorities, they clearly had a negative impact on his life, especially in childhood, but he also feels the need to address the nostalgia that many settled Kazakhs felt for the nomadic way of life and ways he feels he benefitted from Soviet rule, including his love of school (Shayakhmetov, 54). It seems important at this point to mention, even though we haven’t quite gotten their in the reading, that Shayakhmetov later went on to rise through the education system in the Soviet Union and “become the head of one of Kazakhstan’s largest regions” (Shayakhmetov, back inside cover). I want to be clear at this point that I am not in any way trying to excuse the actions of the Soviet government in Kazakhstan, or anywhere else for that matter, but only trying to figure out how Shayakhmetov viewed the Soviet government.

Apologies again for the late post:

So, I found it to be quite interesting how the role of religion was instrumental for how families in the steppe responded to soviet policies. For example, when Muksiin, the fellow fugitive of Mukhamet’s Uncle Toimbai-ata, dies from his sickness before he and his holy yurt can be transported, Mukhamet states that, “It was not, however, the Soviet Government itself, but the belsendi who were principally blamed for the tragedy. After all, it was argued any authority is God-given…” (24). Here, he highlights how these local soviet activists were condemned, as they lacked pity and “were wreckers” (25). And, rather consistently, Mukhamet describes mostly contentious relationships between the activists and his fellow people over soviet policies, even though the soviet government was ostensibly to blame. In this way, the muslim faith seemed to me to serve as a de facto shield for the true soviet authority, thus altering how Soviet rule was resisted.

Once such example of this resistance was for Kazakh families to flee to China. Mukhamet asserts only a single instance in which a soviet official was killed by a refugee. This incident with the Kazakh Zhakitzhan and official Isabekov, described on pages 43-44, to me serves as another another interesting indication of religion playing a huge role in the relationship between The Kazakhs and authority. Here, many locals avoid the hero’s funeral for Isabekov for killing Zhakitzhan, fearing blasphemous activity will be conducted during said funeral as opposed to avoiding the funeral out of protest of the policies that eventually led to Zhakitzhan being in a standoff. This was after locals had instructed Isabekov on the proper approach for winning the standoff.

Taken all together, I wonder if we think that the role of religion for Kazakhs during the period of forced collectivization enabled more of their subservience to soviet rule, or served more as an impediment towards their “modernization.” That is to say: I think in some respects, the faith described here by Mukhanmet encouraged what I interpreted as tolerance at times for their terrible circumstances. Another example I can think of are the responses given to Mukhamet’s sister when she is distraught over having to leave their family when marrying in secret due to the new soviet marriage policies. She is reassured that she must persist, with no blame being allowed be placed on soviet authority. Decidedly, I feel that religion here, at times, served as a significant barrier for Kazakhs to directly resist or protest soviet rule, as it in fact legitimized it, causing them to channel their blame elsewhere, and be more accepting of their circumstances than they might otherwise be.

Matt Payne and Viktor Turin both provide context on the creation of the Turksib railway. Payne’s piece exists in conversation with many of the forces we have been discussing recently in Central Asian modernization efforts by the Soviet state. Much of what he describes sound similar to what we have been discussing with the unveiling campaign, from the collaborative role of Kazakh intellectual elite to resistance on the part of the less privileged (Payne 225, 232). A significant element his narrative adds to our understanding of a modernizing Turkestan is “the rage of the European coworkers.” (230) I found his analysis of “pull mechanisms” and “push mechanisms” compelling as a way to think about the mixed results of the campaign. (238)

With regards to the film, Payne’s chapter is also complementary. He has a point that seems especially applicable: “Nativization was core policy if an ambitious, complex, and prolonged effort by the Soviet state to build ethnically based nations within the context of a politically and economically unitary state.” (224) The film repeatedly emphasizes the importance of political and economic unity, especially in light of the biodiversity of the state. Even in Kazakhstan, the water from the mountains crucially supports the harvest of cotton and grain in the dryer valley below. Lagging production causes “a problem for Turkestan — for Siberia — for the Soviet Union,” so what is problematic for one region is problematic for everyone. The film also draws a visual metaphor between the procession of camels in the snow in Turkestan and the line of horses working in the snow in Siberia, uniting their projects while also allowing for national and cultural differences. Crucially, the film frames the enemy not as Central Asian society, but the natural forces of the region. Only through the deployment of modern Soviet railroads can the people overcome the harsh living conditions foisted upon them by the desert. The people happily welcome the Soviet surveyors to their village, and are integrated into the workforce for its construction and the project of harvesting natural resources. Even at the end, a camel happily nuzzles the tracks, showing the harmonious and productive coexistence of traditional Kazakh methods with modernity. The film corroborates Payne’s account of a religiously-motivated fear of modernization; while he mentions one worker calling the train a “Satan cart,” the film shows someone calling a locomotive the “devil’s chariot.” (Payne 236). Ultimately, the film frames modernization as a necessary and benevolent force for Central Asia. It claims that “1445 km of steel will weld Turkestan,” presumably into a culturally coherent and productive nation for the Soviets’ purposes. As the map depicts the progression of the construction, the Kazakh landscape becomes more legible to the audience, with the names of towns and visual landmarks appearing. In this way, the Turksib line legitimates the existence of  Kazakhstan.

I know about film almost exclusively from a US perspective, where during this period even light hearted comedies often had specific ideological agendas, so I have many questions concerning the production and reception histories of Turksib. From where did Turin get funding? When was the music for the film composed (is it contemporaneous or composed for a later release)? Who would have seen this film and in what context/s? Do you think this film effectively argues for the existence of the Turksib railway? How would you put it in dialogue with Portrait of Lenin, which also purports to meld the best of Central Asian tradition with Bolshevik ideology? Do its methods support or undercut the prevailing Soviet line we’ve seen in the region from Payne and others?

Because my “questions” are a little ambiguous, I’ve underlined what topics I think discussion in class could address.

Khalid

This reading did a fantastic job of demonstrating the complex interrelated and competing ideas before and after revolution that shaped Central Asian mentalities toward modernity, nationality, and liberation. Some of such ideas, which it may be helpful to tease out their meanings and changing relationships to one another, are ‘patriotism,’ ‘nationalism,’ (those appear to be different, especially see 157) anti-colonialism, love, modernism, pan-Islamism, pan-Turkism and of course, Bolshevism. There are probably more!

I found it interesting how Bolshevism and intellectual thought and mentality in many ways agreed or overlapped throughout the reading. For example, they held some version of “a vision of the world divided into nations that could be objectively denned and demarcated” (159), or they “sought to define an identity for the people of Central Asia rooted in ethnicity, as well as in history” (158). Toward the beginning, they both conflated Islam, revolution, and anti-colonialism (154) and their alliance was ‘natural’. Once it became more and more apparent that the Soviet Union was going to work in an imperial manner, I wonder if the Islamic intellectuals realized it and called the Bolsheviks out publically, or if due to repression all of the forms of resistance had to happen in the subaltern ways described in Veiled Empire. (The january 1920 resolutions for an autonomous Turkestan is one place to look, pg 155-6.)

I remember Hirsch’s of turning people into nations necessarily involved the violence of unifying and homogenizing, as she gave the example with France, and argued the Soviet Union was late in its efforts of doing so, which led to a lot of its issues. Khalid here gives examples of an indigenously originating nationalization (at least calls for it) and you can see instances where, even though it comes from people of their own agency rather than from orders from an empirical power, you see the same sort of actions and viewpoints. For example, by 1917, Jadidism had evolved to claim that “all inhabitants of Central Asia were “really” Turks; if they did not speak Turkic, it was because they had forgotten it” just like in the Kresy some people were “really” Polonized Ukrainians or vice-versa (157). In this case, cultural elites are deciding what nationality is for their own region instead of foreigners, but does the fact that this nation formation is indigenous make the process any more moral or less arbitrary?

Kamp

The amount that Saodat was moved around for jobs by the Soviet Union reminded me of Brown’s argument that one of the aspects of a modern individual in the Soviet Union was that they became uprooted from a spiritual space and constantly moved around so that movement demonstrated modernity.

In her interviews and explorations of otins’ private social and religious positions, Kamp offers an illustration of Central Asian women’s agency that adds a lot of important information for the understanding of veiling as an issue, as well as how agency can demonstrate itself under intense societal restrictions and pressures. I think that it would be worthy to explore how East Asian women’s freedoms were affected (both positively and negatively) by the modernization of the schooling system and by the Hujum. Girls’ education under an Otin was mainly seen as an intrinsic benefit that made women more prepared and valued for marriage, but the position of otin allowed for a woman in a highly patriarchal society to gain social and religious status. On the other hand, ‘modern’ education allowed women to gain economic independence (as Saodat’s story tells, by her ability to leave her husband and hold jobs that support her family), appropriated or shunned the otin, and came with coercion to unveil. I found it interesting that Kamp claims unveiling in Egypt and Iran was an actual display of agency and will, because unveiling was not state-sponsored. The Hujum forced women to be pressured either to remain veiled or unveil, displaying state or religious power over them.

“Obidova”

Firstly, I wanted to say that the reading really did a good job of making me admire Jahon Obidova. The reading argues that “she became reality because the Communist Party of the Soviet Union engineered a social revolution in Central Asia” (315). I appreciate how this reading complicated the issue of unveiling and Soviet imperialism by demonstrating a case study of someone who greatly benefited from Bolshevik reforms, while not neglecting to mention that Obidova “had been at the forefront of political actions that brought change, turmoil, and anguish to many” (315). This reading demonstrated a clear example of Kamp’s claim that women who did not have the the social and ideological environment that would enforce veiling would be more likely and able to follow and live up to Bolshevik ideologue.

When I read Obidova’s quote at the beginning of the chapter, I was skeptical of how genuine her words were. They fit nicely in Soviet propaganda, claiming Russian women and the idea of the Party lead Uzbek women’s liberation. Being how Obidova’s life was shaped by the party, it makes sense that she’d believe in the Party’s message. It’s interesting to me how she and her serves Soviet Propaganda so well, and how it seems the policy and specific actions of hiring, promoting, giving her power, etc. are all actions that could be construed serve propaganda purposes. (That’s not to say that she did not wield real power in her many positions, nor that her work for the Cheka didn’t prove her to be a real badass.) The many writers and politicians can portray her story as emblematic of Soviet success when such life-stories seem so far to really only apply on the margins of Uzbek society. This issue of framing her into a propagandistically convenient story, when she defied Uzbek and even Soviet gender roles explains the “ambivalence” toward her. Perhaps y’all can help me figure out what’s happening here, as I have some feeling that there’s still an issue with the propaganda appeal of her life conflicting with understandings of her agency.

Hope y’all didn’t find this way too long.

Something I’ve been thinking about a lot in this course (particularly during the unit on ethnographers), but also more concretely with respect to tonight’s reading, is the Soviet relationship to facts. While it makes sense that the local party leaders might want to paint a rosier picture than actually exists in order to curry favor with the national party, it seems like the national party would have a vested interest in actually knowing what was going on on the ground. This seems particularly apparent in the Chust affair situation where the leaders were caught off guard when they likely wouldn’t have been, at least not to the same degree, had they had a basic understanding of the reality in the area. And yet, it seems like they weren’t even that interested in facts; Northrop notes that a party activist reported that in the town of 14,000 people, 9,000 of them were women and 10,000 of the women had unveiled – a mathematical and logical impossibility and a biological improbability that was only noted as “strange” without any mention of a follow-up (141). The secret police seem to have done a slightly better job with facts but Northrop mentions that that report is incomplete as well (145). What benefit could the Soviet leaders have gained through an inaccurate portrayal of the Uzbeks specifically and the USSR population more generally? Northrop makes a strong argument for why reports of the affair were played down in retellings, even in internal reports, but never really addresses the inaccuracies that led up to the affair.

On an unrelated note, I thought the discussion about the practical effects of changing conceptual ownership in the region was really interesting. We talked some on Tuesday about how veiling wasn’t actually an exclusively religious thing and the idea that association with Soviet power made unveiling less attractive for many Uzbeks then when they associated it with the jidads speaks to the real cultural relevance that veiling had. It seems like unveiling was a discussion people were willing to have when it was coming from the native population, but as soon as it became representative of Soviet influence and invasion it became a lot less palatable. Is there a way the Soviets could have used this kind of motivation-based malleability to their advantage in the region? Or was the association with Sovietness as important, if not more important, than the act of unveiling in itself?

A final, fairly incomplete thought: it isn’t clear to me what role women really played in the rejection of the hujum. Though some of it had a really, obviously patriarchal element like the woman who was kicked out of her house for unveiling or the field workers who were threatened with rape, there also seemed to be some women, like those who laughed at unveiled women, who were at the forefront of discouraging unveiling. Northrop explores this a bit more and comes to basically the same conclusion: some women were forced to veil and some women were in the business of forcing others to veil. This sentence struck me as particularly interesting, “The wives of Communists and factory workers sometimes led this mockery and indeed allegedly observed codes of female seclusion more strictly than other women.” (179) I don’t really have a specific question tied to this, but I’m curious what other people think about this or whether anyone has any idea why this might have been.

Northrop’s reading portrays a failure of the Bolshevik indigenization and sovietization politics in Uzbekistan in 1920s. It gives us a quite clear idea that onе of the most crucial reasons of this failure was the inconsistency of the Soviet government in regard to the Uzbek national determination. This national determination was mostly defined through Uzbekistan’s distinctive patterns of gender relations and customs of female seclusion. The Uzbek women, their clothes and customs, “embodied” Uzbek national identity, but at the same time Bolsheviks acknowledged these women as “dark” and backward. Hujum manifests this dual policy: the veil, which after 1917 was used for identifying Uzbek nation, in 1927 becomes the emblem of dirt, debauchery and primitivism and has to be taken from people who were supposed to be Soviet, modern, and equal. Would this Bolshevik policy have been more productive had they chosen another, more neutral and common, less “backward” thing to identify the Uzbek nation with? Would such a policy be effective, given the conditions that existed in Uzbekistan at that time?

In the first chapter, Northrop mentions that the wide appearance of paranji and chachvon was partly a response to the Russian colonial conquest in the middle of XIX century. In this way, removal of the veil seemed to be an act of colonial politics as well. Apparently, the Bolshevik’s claimed their unique colonial power to control and change the traditions and customs of the Uzbek people. For this reason, when Central Asian competing interests (such as jadids) advocated for unveiling, the Soviet government saw their advocacy as a threat. The implementation of non-Bolshevik reforms could lead to the loss of revolutionary initiative — initiative which was expected to originate from women who were portrayed by Soviet propaganda as oppressed and miserable subjects who were finally emancipated by the Bolsheviks. As Northrop suggests, this revolutionary rhetoric seems to be “more colonialist than emancipatory” [p.66].

«Working at the intersection of anthropology and biomedicine, Soviet scientific “experts” set out to define precisely what made a woman Uzbek» [p. 52]. The part of the text in which Northrop writes about the detailed studies of the Uzbek woman’s body seems to me terrifying. What motivated the Bolsheviks to study the bodies of Uzbek women? In response to this question, Northrop mentions common diseases, unsanitary conditions, and the Bolsheviks’ intention to improve the health situation amongst Uzbek women. Still, I think the question – why did the Bolsheviks ask “What made a woman Uzbek?”- remains. Why did the Bolsheviks, who did not support a biomedical approach in the case of national determination in census politics, find the same approach relevant here? Were similar studies of the body conducted in the case of Uzbek men? Was the biomedical approach pursued for other Central Asian national identities? Otherwise, such studies indeed seem to be “a clear exercise” [p.55] of colonial, scientific and patriarchal power.

In this reading O’Keeffe centers a history of Romani people in the Soviet Union in the 1930s largely on the concepts of performance and ethnography.

The concluding chapter does a great job of summing up these concepts with a focus on Roma-descended writer Aleksander Germano. Though born to a Romani mother and not at all raised by his Czech father, Germano grew up in a family of industrial laborers and did not have a nomadic upbringing, nor one that involved much Roma culture. As a young adult, Germano pursued a writing career and wound up in the “All-Russian Gypsy Union” where he learned Romani language and came to identify with Romani culture and nationality. He became a “gypsy poet” but still maintained an outsider and “a Russian civilizer and ethnographer of Roma(242).”

Germano identifies himself as an ethnographer because he believes he is bringing order to Romani life with his work in the Gypsy Union. From what I gather, the role of the ethnographer in the 1930s was that of a “civilizer” who comes to understand a ‘less developed’ culture in order to know how to ‘develop’ (read: “westernize”) it. I see performance come in as he grapples with the question of being Romani. Germano talks around his heritage when identifying with the Roma does not suit him, but when he goes to work with the Gypsy Union, he claims Gypsy nationality boldly(246).

I guess I’m raising the question of whether wanting to be a full-fledged Soviet citizen is compatible with claiming Romani or Gypsy identity. And also, how authentic is Germano’s reclamation of his heritage in the eyes of the Soviet government, the public that consumed his work, and the Romani people he worked with?

I find the comparison between Germano’s life and self-presentation with the actors of Theatre Romen compelling. While Germano is presenting really only himself, the players are performing themselves and their culture.

Romani people were marginalized by the Soviet government at least as far as representation within the Soviet state went. An example of this is how Romani cultural artifacts were glaringly excluded from the Ethnographic Department’s museum. To make up this short coming, the Romani people came to be represented live, through theatre as living exhibits(208). After tsyganshchina fell out of favor with the Soviet government,  exaggerated, rather inaccurate, and Russianized representations of Romani people, dress, and music were recognized as appropriate. The Romani actors in this theatre were a bourgeoisie of sorts, though their inclusion of nomadic Romani actors was often applauded as a great asset to authenticity.

I may be getting too anthro with this but I’m wondering what it means to one’s authenticity if you must perform a parody of yourself and your culture to be recognized as belonging to your culture.

Also, how does this attention to the absence of physical Romani cultural artifacts in the museum interact with the idea that Romani culture exists only in music, especially if that music is “dead”(198)?

And, bonus thought, I’m really interested in the feminization of Romani culture and the hypersexualization of Romani women and culture, especially as a supposed corrupter of the Soviet man. I’m seeing exotification in this dynamic which is even more interesting considering the Russifying of Romani cultural productions. Like, what does it mean to mark something as foreign but still integrate into the ‘native’ culture?

I saw three main reasons, according to Weinberg, that Soviet leaders planned the settlement of the Jewish Autonomous Region. First, they hoped it would produce a non-religious Jewish cultural identity rooted in the Yiddish language and in socialism; second, they aimed for economic transformation of Jews from petit bourgeoisie to “productive Soviet citizens” engaged in agricultural labor; third, they thought that it would address geopolitical problems such as peasant unrest in Ukraine and Belarus and anxieties about Chinese and Japanese expansionism in the east. I want to focus on the first reason: the cultural aims and impacts of the planned Jewish resettlement in Birobidzhan.

Weinberg notes that Lenin and Stalin staunchly opposed the classification of Jews as a national minority group. Jews in Russia and in the Pale of Settlement were perceived as not having ties to any particular land and as often engaged in less-than-honest economic activity. There seems to be some continuity in perceptions and solutions here as tsarists, who predated the J.A.R. project, and zionists, who opposed it, all felt as the Bolsheviks did that agricultural resettlement would alter Jewish culture so as to end the “Jewish problem” (18-19). Of course, planned Jewish settlement in the far east was unique to the Bolsheviks, and this plan seems to have provided Soviet Jews unprecedented freedom of movement. How else can we relate or distinguish the J.A.R project to tsarist or zionist schemes to resettle Jews?

In his introduction, Weinberg is quick to note that the J.A.R. was ultimately a failed project. “The Jews of Birobidzhan have lived the fiction that they inhabited the national homeland of Soviet Jewry,” he writes (13). And it is easy to see the evidence of this failure when he quotes, for example, a Soviet journalist who wrote, “‘The colonization of Birobidzhan was begun and executed without preparation, planning and study. All the misfortunes are due to the hasty manner’ in which the Birobidzhan project was implemented.” The number of migrants who eventually left the J.A.R. or gave up on farming bolster this judgment. But I think it will also be important to investigate what could perhaps be called the cultural successes of the J.A.R. between 1928 and the mid-1930s.

The Stalinist strategy for promoting appropriate national culture seems to have consisted of similar combinations of vernacular theater, schools, and newspapers, all with a healthy dose of propaganda. But not every observer of the J.A.R. project reacted cynically to its cultural project. Weinberg writes, “Well ­known Yiddish writers and Jewish intellectuals visited the J.A.R. in the 1930s and affirmed the official line that the Birobidzhan project embodied the national and cultural aspirations of Soviet Jewry… It must be remembered, however, that the political climate in the 1930s required writers to tailor their work to fit the uniform ideological mold established by the regime” (61-62).  In the final section of the reading we see some evidence of how cultural production was attempted in the J.A.R., as well as how it was portrayed to the outside world (posters on pp. 35-39, 44-50). In what ways, if any, can these sections be construed as evidence for successful cultural construction? How does Soviet officials’ partial failure to suppress religious observation fit into this schema (65)? And why was the idea of Jewish resettlement in Soviet East Asia briefly able to gain some traction among Jews around the world?

One last quote for consideration: “In contrast to the stultifying religious environment and grinding poverty of the shtetl, the J.A.R. signaled the dawn of a new age for Jews, an age in which Soviet Jews would express contempt for Jewish tradition, free themselves of the burdens, limitations, and prejudices of the past, and glorify Soviet power as they became integral members of the socialist society under construction” (63).

The Weinberg reading speaks to the economic situation of Jews before the 1917 Revolution, stating that — excluded from owning land, most Jews of the Russian Empire were resigned to the petty trades, or to abject poverty. This pre-revolutionary status of the Jews made the Jewish section of the Communist Party question whether the Jews should be considered members of the self-employed bourgeois, or members of the proletariat. The final answer was that Jews were in fact proletarian, and that therefore, “They [The Evsektsii] promoted cooperatives so that kustars [artisans] would move from capitalist self-employment to socialist collectivism.” (Pg. 7)

The reading goes on to state the the Evseksii eventually lost control of the economic situation of Russia’s Jewish population, as the First Five Year Plan hegemonized the movement towards  industrialized socialism. What is surprising is that in the context of the J.A.R., the push was not to turn the Jewish population into industrial workers, but to turn them into agricultural laborers. This leads to my question: Why would the USSR attempt to turn a population which already possess mechanical skills into agricultural laborers, when the general push is to turn the economy away from agriculture towards industry?      

One answer to this question may lie in the geographic location of the J.A.R.. Since the J.A.R. was situated in the Far East, it may have been difficult for the Soviet government to ship industrial equipment to the region, and to build all the infrastructure needed to support an industrial economy. But, as the Weinberg reading points out, the Soviet government was not even prepared to establish the J.A.R. as an agricultural settlement: “In many instances, Jewish pioneers found they were given land unsuitable for cultivation because it had not been drained and surveyed. In other cases, the fledgling collective and state farms, chronically mismanaged and poorly organized, often lacked basic necessities such as potable water, barns, livestock, tools, and equipment.” (Pg. 24)

Not only was the land in many cases not suitable for agriculture, and the administrative apparatus not present, but as the the reading points out, both psychologically and in terms of skillset, most Jews who migrated to the J.A.R. were completely unprepared to work on the soil: “The overwhelming majority of the Jews who came to the J.A.R. in its early years had little or no first-hand experience knowledge of farming, and many were unprepared psychologically and physically for the rigorous demands of pioneer life.” (28)    

Another reason for why the Soviet government chose to turn Jewish migrants to the J.A.R. into agricultural labourers could have been in order to compete more effectively with Zionism, which also supported the Jewish return to the land. As the introduction points out, “Those who devised the scheme for an autonomous Jewish region in the Soviet Union were consciously competing with Zionism.” (Pg. 5) The introduction goes on to state that agricultural work offered the Jews “economic rehabilitation” and “social respectability”.

Is this assertion true? Is it that agricultural work actually gave Jews respectability, or was the state rather aiming towards replacing the mobile skills that most Jews had for a skillset that would link the Jewish population with a specific piece of land, and therefore limit their movement, thus further empowering the state?