Jews Under the Hammer and Sickle

The following is the last of a series of seven articles on “Under the Hammer and Sickle,” a reappraisal of the Jewish position in the Soviet Union. The author, Dr. David Goldberg, is a well known writer and lecturer who has just returned from his third visit to Russia in recent years.

Biro-Bidjan, a territory of 15,500 square miles included between the rivers Biro and Bidjan, East Siberia, on the border of Manchuria, has been recently raised to the status of an autonomous Jewish province, which is the first step towards declaring it, as soon as the size of the population will warrant, a Jewish Soviet republic, member of the Soviet Union. A project launched several years ago and derided by most Jews outside Russia as chimerical has thus been given new impetus and direction and, conditions in world Jewry being what they are today, will no longer be dismissed with a sneer.

There is much, however, on the surface of the Biro-Bidjan project that will puzzle the uninitiated reader even now. The large territory now proclaimed an autonomous “Jewish” province is as yet practically without Jews. Of a total population of 50,000, the Jewish portion is estimated at 12,000 and more conservatively at only 8,000. If several years of planned colonization on a definite promise of Jewish autonomy have succeeded in attracting to Biro-Bidjan no more Jews than that; what will attract them now### And if the Soviet government knows of definite reasons why Jews should flock to Biro-Bidjan from now on, why shouldn’t it wait with the proclamation of autonomy at least until their numbers there become formidable###

OUTSIDE JEWS SOUGHT

The reply is that under conditions facing the Jews in Fascistridden countries, such a powerful token of good will as a pledge to autonomous rights, and civic and political protection, may itself prove of sufficient incentive to start a mass migration to Biro-Bidjan, even though for the moment there be no other incentive. For the bid implied in the proclamation is directed, though not so specifically stated, not so much to the Russian Jews, as to the Jews outside the Soviet Union. Altogether in Germany and Austria and Rumania there are three-quarters of a million Jews whose lives have become untenable in their countries, but who have nowhere to go.

And between Poland and Rumania there are at least four million Jews who are being rapidly proletarianized without having a proletarian State to protect them. Palestine, at this acute stage of universal Jewish tragedy, as even ardent Zionists are bound to admit, is not in a position to offer those harassed millions even a decent palliative, having in mind the ridiculous minimum to which immigration to Palestine has been reduced just at this time. Who can tell that Biro-Bidjan, though unhallowed in Jewish history, may not yet exercise upon the distraught Jewish masses the attraction of the ancient Cities of Refuge###

MOTIVES FOR PROJECT

The whole seemingly fantastic project of Biro-Bidjan, its rise and fall and rise again, will be better understood if viewed in the light of the motives which started it several years ago. There were then a minor and a major motive. The minor motive was political and universal-to counteract the influence of the Zionist movement which communists characterize as “bourgeois.” Not that it was ever believed that the unknown Far Eastern territory of Biro-Bidjan could ever replace Palestine in the consciousness of the nationalist Jew. The sponsors of the project never believed that for a moment. But in those days Russia still believed that a world Communist revolution was imminent, and that the Jews the world over, being preponderantly bourgeois, would be everywhere as thoroughly uprooted as they had been by the Russian Revolution and would be flocking, consequently, to a Jewish republic under the aegis of the Soviets, if it were only offered them. But as the world Communist revolution has been slow in coming, the political motive in the meantime vanished of itself.

The second motive for Biro-Bidjan, however, was not political and universal, but social-economic and local. The Soviet government, it will be remembered, had at the outset made clear its intention to deal with the declassed Jewish bourgeoisie with some consideration for the fact that the old regime had practically barred them from farm and factory. They realized the Jews were really forced into their bourgeois occupations, instead of taking to them of choice. Accordingly, the Soviets offered to facilitate the integration of these declassed Jews on the farm and in the factory.

MANY FAIL TO FALL IN LINE

However, among the several hundred thousands of declassed Jews there were several tens of thousands who proved so recalcitrant that, in the opinion of the party leaders, they were not entitled to the leniency generally accorded to the rest of their liquidated class. To put it in the polite language of the Communist dialectician, the class ideology of these people was too set and unbending ever to hope it could change in their old setting and environment.

For these people had shown on several previous occasions that they could transport themselves bodily to the kolholz (collective farm), but remain spiritually and mentally in the city. And they have also shown, during the respite known as NEP (New Economic Policy), that they were capable, at the slightest provocation, of abandoning lock, stock and barrel, so to speak, to rush back to their trading occupations. Naturally, the leaders of the Revolution felt they couldn’t be trusted to remain in their old environment.

DISTANCE ENDS ATTRACTION

The distant territory of Biro-Bidjan then loomed up as a possible way of redeeming this recalcitrant class. Because it is far away, once there the Jew could not readily fiee back. His reluctance to go so far from his homeland could be overcome only by the realization that it was his only way to salvation, and by the lure of an eventual Jewish autonomous Soviet Republic.

True enough, there was no certainty that, normally, these declassed dyed-in the-wool bourgeoisie were all nationalistically minded. Indeed, most of them weren’t so minded under the old Czarist regime. But since the Revolution had singled them out for special treatment as a class, a “declassed class” as it were, it was assumed that their condition was likely to create in them a somewhat nationalistic esprit de corps, so that the goal of a Jewish republic would lure them. In short, they would be both compelled and impelled to start life anew on virgin soil, and in the effort they would regenerate themselves.

Indeed, at the beginning it seemed as though the plan had all the earmarks of success, for tens of thousands of Jews had signed up to migrate to Biro-Bidjan, and thousands upon thousands actually did migrate there. But only about one-third “stuck it out” and remained there to the present day, while the majority returned as fast as they could.

WHY DID THEY LEAVE###

I have spoken with many of them during my first, second and third visits to Russia in an endeavor to find out why people would abandon, after two and more years of hard effort, a land which they entered with great promise. It wasn’t the hardship of plowing up virgin soil that drove them away, it wasn’t the oversized mosquitoes, and it wasn’t the fear of bordering on troublesome Manchuria. These were only contributing factors to a cause which lay far beyond them.

What happened was that, while these people had been battling with the elements of a far away territory lying on the fringe of their country, developments in Soviet Russia proper had in the meantime taken the kind of turn which destroyed, in effect, the second and major motive for the very project of Biro-Bidjan. For in the wake of the activities of the Five Year Plan, hundreds of thousands of erstwhile distranchised Jews were absorbed by the industries, and in the wake of their absorption they were integrated and reinstated. The “Declassed Class,” in other words, had found a measure of peace and hope at home, and as a natural consequence Biro-Bidjan was left without a hinterland upon which to feed itself.

“When I rearned,” one of those who returned told me, “that many of my chums who had been in the same boat with me all their lives, were holding regular jobs, and that their children were attending school like the rest, I grew violently homesick, and I knew I wasn’t going to stick it out there. One never knows the meaning of a motherland until one believes himself to be away from it forever. How could I compare Biro with the Dniepr, or Bidjan with the Volga### And the Mongol faces of my neighbors, the natives, could not take the place of the mouzhik faces I had been accustomed to all my life. Well, I am here now, and am mighty glad that I am not there.”

NOT COMPLETE FAILURE

No other reason need be given for the failure of Biro-Bidjan so far to attract itself more Russian Jews than it did until now. The project, however, was not a “failure” in the sense that the work wasn’t properly organized or done, for it was simply that the need of it had gone out of existence. Integrated in his home environment and not discriminated against either politically or economically or socially, the Russian Jew could see no reason at all why he should leave the birthplace he loves for a country he knows not even in his dreams. Nor has he any reason to do so now. It is my opinion that if Biro-Bidjan were to depend altogether upon the Russian Jew for settlement, the project as a whole would stand no chance of fulfillment whatsoever.