Farming the Red Land

Jewish Agricultural Colonization and Local Soviet Power, 1924-1941By Jonathan L. Dekel-Chen

Yale University Press

Copyright © 2005 Jonathan L. Dekel-Chen
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-300-10331-1

Contents

Acknowledgments............................................................................................ixList of Abbreviations, Transliterated Terms, and Translation Equivalents...................................xiiiNote on Transliteration....................................................................................xviiIntroduction...............................................................................................I1 From Shtetl to Colony, 1917-1924.........................................................................II2 Building a Colonization Movement: Theory to Practice.....................................................343 Colonization and Diaspora Politics.......................................................................694 Soviet Power and Life in the Colonies, 1925-1929.........................................................965 Collectivization and Its Limits, 1929-1934...............................................................1316 Soviet-Jewish Farmers, 1935-1941.........................................................................168Conclusion.................................................................................................199Appendixes.................................................................................................2091. The Western USSR during the Interwar Period.............................................................2092. Areas of Jewish Agricultural Colonization in Crimea and Southern Ukraine, 1923-1941.....................2103. Chronology..............................................................................................211Notes......................................................................................................215Bibliography...............................................................................................325Index......................................................................................................353

Chapter One

From Shtetl to Colony, 1917-1924

Destitute and desperate, Russia's Jews (and the Soviet regime itself) needed help in 1921. For most Jews, however, experience with the Russian state and the previous seven years of turmoil had taught caution toward political change and deep suspicion toward the central authority. In any case, the unstable, penniless Soviet state was in no position to revitalize Russian Jewry. To achieve significant improvement for themselves, the Jews of the shtetls needed some other patron. The entry of the JDC into the Black Sea littoral-with no mandate for operations in Russia-was motivated by a philanthropic urge to assist fellow Jews. But at the same time, the hobbled Soviet regime had left the gate open for the Joint and other philanthropic organizations.

The Joint's representative, Joseph Rosen, talented as he was, could not single-handedly launch a colonization enterprise of this magnitude. His role was preceded, in fact, by a series of calamitous events in Russia and a passionate debate throughout the Jewish world over where and how to achieve its own rebirth. Such a background, joined with the nearly unbearable life in the shtetl, and international conditions that blocked all obvious escape routes for Jews at risk, placed this newest experiment in Jewish colonization at a historical intersection.

THE STATE AND COUNTRYSIDE IN THE AFTERMATH OF WAR

The Bolsheviks' willingness to enter a long-term commitment with foreign capitalists on behalf of Jewish colonization has to be understood in the light of the grim state of affairs in the Soviet Union in the early 1920s. Russia's new rulers knew that their country was in ruins and lacked a responsive infrastructure. At the end of the civil war in 1921, national agricultural output stood at 54 percent of its 1913 level; the prospects in industry and foreign trade were even bleaker because the meager industrial base begun during the last decades of the Romanov monarchy stood abandoned or wrecked, and moreover, the Western nations had cut diplomatic relations. Tight control over economic policy during the civil war (called "war communism") had efficiently confiscated output but did not reenergize the national economy. A famine during 1920-1921 had added to the suffering, and popular unrest spread throughout the country. Given its international isolation, Russia's hopes for foreign investment also eroded and fears grew of a renewed capitalist military intervention.

Soviet Russia's rural economy showed few encouraging signs in the early 1920s. On the positive side, the state had kept its revolutionary promise to the peasants for a redistribution of land, by far the most explosive issue from 1905 to 1917. This policy helped to restart production but did not increase productivity and sales of grain. Instead, both the poor and newfound "middle" peasants continued the traditional practice of consuming rather than marketing output. The war years had been particularly destructive; massive urban depopulation coincided with widespread abandonment of farmland in the battle zones. Their aggressive vision of economic modernization aside, the Bolsheviks presided over an agrarian nation accustomed to subsistence farming-Russia's peasants could hardly feed themselves, let alone finance the reconstruction of industry.

Even as the Bolsheviks consolidated a one-party dictatorship at the center, the village and the geographic periphery remained a world unto itself. Although Lenin had established a modicum of authority in the periphery during the civil war, in practice, Moscow's grip over the village government (mir) and peasant culture was more myth than reality in the early 1920s. Soviet authority was bound to generate conflict with village life in other ways as well. If in the cities, the radical Bolshevik policy on marriage and the family caused considerable instability with the widespread dissolution of traditional household units, in the more conservative villages and periphery, it was received with even less understanding. Moreover, because the Bolsheviks suspected the worst of religious villagers and their priests, the Soviet antireligious activists (bezbozhniki) targeted the villages in their campaign to do away with Orthodox Christianity. Yet, for the most part, these activities proved counterproductive for the Soviets during the 1920s-they actually served to mobilize the rural clergy and antagonize large segments of the peasantry instead of excising religion from the countryside. Therefore, until they devised a way to effectively rule the peasantry and extract its produce to finance industrialization, Lenin and his colleagues had to proceed cautiously.

Recovery and Change

Faced with economic stagnation and social chaos, Russia's leaders opened themselves to innovative, if ideologically questionable, solutions. On the economic front, the party responded in the early 1920s by invoking the New Economic Policy (NEP). This series of short-term tactics sought a stable basis for the development of state industry and a modus vivendi with peasants, seemingly on the verge of revolt. The policy, however, failed to deliver steady supplies of grain and produced seemingly "dangerous" outcomes; among them, severe socioeconomic stratification caused by the newly permissible free rural market economy, and...