Territorial Autonomy and the Problem of Jewish Urbanization

When Ukrainization picked up its pace in the mid-1920s, it raised concerns about the situation of the national minorities living in Ukraine. The Ukrainization program pursued by the government in Kharkiv, the capital of Soviet Ukraine until 1934, envisaged two main goals: raising the share of ethnic Ukrainians and adopting the Ukrainian language in public institutions and organizations, including in the Party-state apparatus. Proficiency in Ukrainian became mandatory for state employees, Ukrainian schools and print blossomed, and the number of ethnic Ukrainians at universities, in trade unions, in the Communist Party, and in various administrative and elected positions surged within a few years (Kommunisticheskaia akademiia 1930, 138, 177, 208–209, 230–233, 288–293; Panchuk Reference Panchuk1994, 106–109; Martin Reference Martin2001, 84–87). These accomplishments repeatedly drew criticism from Soviet politicians in Moscow and representatives of national minorities in Ukraine, partially nurtured by a deep suspicion of Ukrainian nationalism, partially motivated by genuine concern for minority rights (Liber Reference Liber1992, 153–156; Martin Reference Martin2001, 36–39). Of a population of 29 million, approximately 5.8 million citizens of Soviet Ukraine were not ethnic Ukrainians. The largest minorities were Russians and Jews, followed by Poles and Germans (TsSU SSSR 1929a, 8–11). In principle, the Ukrainian leadership and its critics agreed that all citizens should be allowed to use their native languages in communication with Soviet authorities and send their children to native-language schools. Kharkiv repeatedly reaffirmed its commitment to protecting these rights of the national minorities. In practice, however, this issue often boiled down to a matter of priorities and was frequently decided by local authorities with limited resources at their disposal.

The Ukrainian government responded to criticism of its Ukrainization policy by establishing national districts, settlement, and village councils in places where a particular nationality constituted a local majority. These national territories were supposed to soften the impact of Ukrainization on national minorities as local authorities were to use the respective national language and to be staffed with titular nationals. As a result, many members of national minorities indeed came to identify the autonomous territories created for them as their own (Martin Reference Martin1999). The Ukrainian government lowered the numerical thresholds for national districts and village councils from 25,000 to 10,000 and from 1,000 to 500, respectively, in August 1924. Over the following years, the government’s Central Commission for the National Minorities (TsKNM) set up hundreds of national territories scattered all over the republic (Martin Reference Martin2001, 33–38; Brown Reference Brown2004, 31; Iakubova Reference Iakubova2006, 202–207). By 1929, 26 national districts, 109 national settlement councils, and 1088 national village councils had been established.Footnote ² As a result, the term national minority became increasingly subjective and depended on the level of reference: for example, an ethnic Ukrainian living in the territory of a German village council was a minority at the local level, a majority at the republican level, and a minority again at the Union level. Effectively, the Ukrainian state ultimately sought to ensure that every citizen lived in a territory of their respective nationality (Martin Reference Martin2001, 47).

While this pyramid model of national territories was presented as the solution to the National Question and soon adopted in other republics, it had its obvious limitations. Specifically, it could not be applied to urban areas. Most cities in Ukraine had only a small Ukrainian population share and were predominantly Russian-speaking, but the Bolsheviks expected that peasant immigration would produce a Ukrainian urban working class and intelligentsia: “You cannot go against history,” Stalin had famously declared at the 10^th Party Congress in 1921. “It is clear that even though the Russian element is still dominant in Ukrainian cities, over time these cities will inevitably become Ukrainianized” (Institut Marksa-Engel’sa 1933, 217). Interference with this natural process was feared to disrupt the connection between city and village, between the Party and the peasantry. For this reason, the cities had to remain free from national councils working in languages other than Ukrainian (TsKNM 1927, 9–10, 13–14, 163–164). Even the establishment of national sections at city councils for the purpose of serving minorities was controversial (VUTsIK 1925, 91; TsKNM 1927, 167). As a result of this fundamental problem, the Ukrainian government effectively resorted to a tacit form of extraterritorial autonomy and set up numerous minority-language schools, newspapers, theaters, and even courts in the cities. Without the protection provided by territorial autonomy, however, it was a constant struggle for resources and influence to establish and maintain these institutions.

The Jewish population of Soviet Ukraine was particularly affected by the fact that national territorial autonomy was unattainable in cities. More than any other national group in the republic, Ukrainian Jews were predominantly urban: in 1926, almost 80% lived in cities; across all nationalities, this figure barely reached 20% on average. Three out of four Jews were native speakers of Yiddish, whereas the share of Jewish native speakers of Ukrainian was lower than 1% (TsSU SSSR 1929a, 8–15). To serve the Jewish population in their native language, more than 150 Jewish national councils were established by the end of the decade, 68 of them in settlements, the others in villages.Footnote ³ At least in theory, these councils did their paperwork in Yiddish. The settlement councils (Russian poselkovye sovety, Ukrainian selyshchni rady) seem to have been a concession to Ukrainian Jews in particular to account for predominantly Jewish Shtetlach, as no other minority was given settlement councils before 1928 (Iakubova Reference Iakubova2006, 215).Footnote ⁴ Despite these efforts, however, the proportion of Ukrainian Jews living in the jurisdiction of Jewish national councils remained significantly lower than that of all other national minorities of comparable size. In 1926, the Ukrainian government calculated that only one out of four Ukrainian Jews living in the countryside was served by a Jewish national council (VUTsIK 1926, 193). For the entire Jewish population, this figure was as low as 13% (TsKNM 1927, 28).

A large majority of Ukrainian Jews thus lived outside of Jewish national territories and was, therefore, exposed to the consequences of Ukrainization. Their right to be served by Yiddish-language institutions was often disregarded. In Kyiv, for example, local authorities downplayed the demand for Yiddish schools by basing their calculations on the Jewish population share in the entire Kyiv governorate instead of in the city only: in Kyiv proper, Jews and Ukrainians each accounted for approximately 30% of the population at that time, whereas in the governorate, the number of Ukrainians was almost eight times as high as that of the Jewish population (S”ezd sovetov 1925, 279–280; TsSU USRR 1925, 119–120, 124–125; TsSU SSSR 1929b, 25–26). In Zinov’ïvs’k, the 1926 census questionnaires had not been provided in Yiddish: as a result, the number of Jews requiring Yiddish schools had been understated. In Pros’kuriv, only two Yiddish schools existed by 1927, although several local conferences had asked for more because half of the city’s population was Jewish (TsKNM 1927, 63, 65). Yiddish schools also reported pressure from the People’s Commissariat of Education to conduct their paperwork in Ukrainian or to use only teachers proficient in Ukrainian (TsKNM 1927, 71).Footnote ⁵ Sometimes even bilingualism was not tolerated: a Yiddish kindergarten in Kyiv was fined by authorities because its signboards included both Ukrainian and Yiddish rather than Ukrainian only.Footnote ⁶

In practice, Jewish citizens often had to use languages other than Yiddish to communicate with Soviet authorities. The Uman’ office of the Central Commission of the National Minorities received around 400 complaints in Yiddish in a year, the overwhelming majority of which had nothing to do with national issues: the problem was simply that whenever Jews tried to address the appropriate authorities in Yiddish, they were told to write their submissions in an “understandable language”, that is in Russian or Ukrainian (TsKNM 1927, 41, 52). By the end of the decade, 70,000 Jews were living in Dnipropetrovs’k, but all state institutions had signs asking visitors to address employees in Ukrainian only, and there were no literacy schools (likpunkty in Russian) offering Yiddish courses. Both the Jewish militia and the Jewish court that were supposed to work in Yiddish existed on paper only (TsKNM 1930, 42, 50). Although almost 100,000 Jews lived in Kharkiv by 1930, the city council refused to provide election mailers in languages other than Ukrainian and Russian (TsKNM 1930, 48). Again in Kyïv, the city council worked in Ukrainian only—instead of Russian, Yiddish, and Ukrainian—which forced the Russian and Jewish population to adapt. This was particularly absurd in neighbourhoods like the Podil quarter, which was geographically separated from the upper city and almost exclusively inhabited by Jews (Larin Reference Larin1927, 66–67).

The city of Odesa appears to have been a particularly stark case of excessive Ukrainization, the practice of compelling non-Ukrainians to use the Ukrainian language in schools and official paperwork. Approximately 153,000 Jews lived here in 1926, along with 162,000 Russians and 73,000 Ukrainians, up from 12,000 or 3% of the population six years earlier (TsSU USSR 1923, 40–41; TsSU SSSR 1929c, 27–28). As late as 1927, the local Party apparatus wrote Ukrainian but spoke Russian; even in the countryside of the Odesa region, where the Ukrainian population share was higher than in the city, more than one-third of the teachers at Ukrainian schools did not know Ukrainian.Footnote ⁷ At the same time, complaints about Ukrainization abounded. In one case, an entire school was shifted to Ukrainian-language instruction, although only 3 out of 410 students were ethnic Ukrainians. A factory trade union committee with 90% Jewish members shifted its paperwork to Ukrainian and prohibited the use of Yiddish. Urban legends about excesses began to spread, for example about cleaning staff who, under threat of dismissal, were forced to prove their Ukrainian proficiency by writing an essay about the 1905 revolution.Footnote ⁸ At a public lecture in January 1926, a local official received the following angry note from the audience:

Local misgivings about excessive Ukrainization like this eventually reached central Ukrainian authorities. As a result, Kharkiv repeatedly reprimanded the Odesa city council for ignoring the needs of the national minorities, for example by issuing announcements in Ukrainian only. In early 1927, the Odesa Party committee admitted that local officials had initially tried to force Jewish workers to learn Ukrainian (VUTsIK 1925, 15).Footnote ⁹

In addition to the violation of minority language rights, the Ukrainization policy also aggravated the economic problems of Ukraine’s Jewish population. During the Civil War, many Ukrainian Jews had sought refuge from murderous pogroms in larger cities. Once violence abated, another wave of immigration followed, this time mostly consisting of ethnic Ukrainian peasants looking for employment (Veidlinger Reference Veidlinger2013, 38). Almost all cities saw a rapid increase in the Ukrainian population share: a marginal group at the beginning of the decade, Ukrainians constituted majorities in many cities by 1926 (see Table 1). To the Jewish population, the immigration of Ukrainian peasants constituted additional competition for jobs. Before virtually disappearing in the wake of the 1930s industrialization, unemployment was a serious social problem in the Soviet Union, especially in those parts of the country disproportionally affected by wartime destruction. All else being equal, Jews should have had good prospects on the job market, as they had a higher literacy rate than all other national groups (TsSU SSSR 1929a, 8–15). Under the conditions of Ukrainization, however, Ukrainians had better chances; in fact, the 1926 census data suggest that the steep increase in Ukrainians was partially at the expense of people who previously identified with a different nationality, which implies that a Ukrainian identity was increasingly considered advantageous. The laws on language appear to have offered a pretext not to hire Jews. Factories recruited their workers from among Ukrainian peasants, not Jewish artisans (Veidlinger Reference Veidlinger2013, 66). While unemployment among urban Ukrainians amounted to 4.7% and was thus disproportionally low, more than 11% of Jews living in cities were unemployed, which was the highest rate of all nationalities. In effect, almost one in three unemployed was Jewish (Gosplan SSSR Reference Gosplan1930, 3–9).

Table 1. Ukrainian and Jewish Population in Select Cities, 1920–1926

Source: Compiled on the basis of TsSU USSR 1923, 34–45; TsSU USRR 1925, 112–131; TsSU SSSR 1929b, 17, 27–28, 289–290, 310–311; TsSU SSSR 1929c, 13–14, 27–28, 248–249.

In the Jewish Shtetlach, the situation was even more difficult. Many Jewish township communities had been devastated by pogrom violence and war communism (Kalinin and Smidovich, Reference Kalinin and Smidovich1927, 27, 40; Pinkus Reference Pinkus1988, 84–85, 92). Without national autonomy, the misery of the Shtetlach received little attention: the Ukrainian state apparatus was preoccupied with drawing ethnic Ukrainian peasants into Soviet society. In 1925, an internal report of the Ukrainian Central Committee warned that the campaign ‘Face Towards the Village’ (litsom k selu) had “in most cases led […] to an even greater deterioration of the already unhealthy attitude of local Party and state authorities toward the Shtetl.”Footnote ¹⁰ At the other end, Jewish Party officials reported that the Shtetl population turned away from the Soviet government in disappointment.Footnote ¹¹ Especially in the regions closest to the western border, poverty was staggering. Reports from these Shtetlach cited employment numbers among Jewish adolescents to illustrate the “catastrophic and hopeless” situation: 29% in Rashkov, 28% in Valehatsulovo, 37% in Dobosary, 40% in Romanov, 19% in Pulin, 32% in Vynohrad (Larin Reference Larin1929, 157; Kiper Reference Kiper1930, 61–62). Other Party officials dispatched to the western border regions sent back desperate requests for a Jewish national council in every Shtetl to alleviate the situation.Footnote ¹² According to Iakubova (Reference Iakubova2006, 216), the creation of Jewish national councils was indeed the most effective measure to tackle the economic problems of the Shtetlach.

When Soviet authorities in Kharkiv attempted to address this issue systematically, their efforts were met with passivity and inertia in lower branches of the administration. In the spring of 1926, the Ukrainian Politburo, the Council of People’s Commissars, and the All-Ukrainian Central Executive Committee all called for greater efforts to integrate the Shtetl population into the economy (Kiper Reference Kiper1930, 94–96).Footnote ¹³ One year later, the Orgburo reminded all regional Party committees of these resolutions.Footnote ¹⁴ In reality, however, little changed. In June 1928, a Central Committee conference about the situation of Ukraine’s Jewish population came to the conclusion that these calls had been all but ignored.Footnote ¹⁵ The regional Party committees of Artemivs’k and Dnipropetrovs’k argued that their regions already had too many unemployed adolescents and, therefore, could not take up additional unemployed youth. The Staline committee categorically asked the government to quit attempts to resettle unemployed Jews. The committees of Kharkiv and Poltava responded in a similar manner.Footnote ¹⁶ When the Ukrainian Komsomol inquired into the outcome of a similar resolution of the Ukrainian Economic Council to integrate 1,000 Jewish youth into heavy industry, it found that a total of 27 teenagers had been employed in the Staline and Kharkiv districts. Again, the critical situation on the local job market was cited as an excuse.Footnote ¹⁷ Jewish Party officials dismissed these reasons as pretexts and accused the respective authorities of giving in to popular antisemitism.Footnote ¹⁸

In addition to staggering unemployment, there is evidence that the Shtetl population was financially exploited by local authorities. Despite repeated complaints by the Communist Party’s Jewish section (the Evsektsiia), Jewish Shtetl artisans had to pay higher taxes than their Ukrainian counterparts in the villages. What is more, there was evidence that local financial authorities systematically robbed the Shtetlach: officials confiscated goods that were vital for subsistence, wrongly assessed property, and imposed financial penalties on a whim. When the Ukrainian Central Control Commission (TsKK) looked into some of these complaints in the fall of 1925, it found that local branches of the People’s Commissariat of Finance were partly financed by these semi-legal informal earnings.Footnote ¹⁹ According to the head of the Ukrainian Evsektsiia, incidents like these ceased when the local administration was turned into a Jewish national council (Kiper Reference Kiper1930, 67–72).

Ukrainian Jews were also disproportionately disenfranchised as lishentsy (Gitelman Reference Gitelman2001, 92–93; Pinkus Reference Pinkus1988, 93). This was a broad category of people considered potentially opposed to the Soviet regime, including clergymen, former private merchants, anybody who had hired labor for their personal profit, and people without regular employment. Being a lishenets meant losing voting rights, claims to certain benefits, as well as eligibility for Party membership and positions in the state administration. In other words, it meant being a second-class citizen (Kuchenbecker Reference Kuchenbecker2000, 61; Estraikh Reference Estraikh2004, 200). During the election campaign of 1925/26, more than two thirds of all lishentsy in Ukrainian cities and more than 80% in small towns were Jewish (TsSU USRR 1926, 2–3, 16–17). Numbers seem to have fluctuated and vary depending on the source, but evidence suggests that the situation somewhat improved toward the end of the decade. Still, somewhere between one fourth and one third of the Jewish working population remained disenfranchised, a figure that surpassed the average across all nationalities by an order of magnitude (TsKNM 1930, 30; Kiper Reference Kiper1930, 73; Kantor Reference Kantor1934, 36–37; Kagedan Reference Kagedan1994, 75). To some extent, this was a reflection of the socioeconomic situation of the Jewish population, but it was exacerbated by the common association of economic crime with Jews in the early Soviet period. This was partially a product of old stereotypes, but also engineered by Bolshevik propaganda designed to construct a new, socially acceptable Jewish identity (Sloin Reference Sloin2010, 104–106, 112; Veidlinger Reference Veidlinger2013, 43). Indeed, Jewish Party officials were well aware of the antisemitic undertones of this policy. In early 1924, the Ukrainian Evsektsiia leadership complained that “to this day, both Party and state officials in most cases did not change their attitude that the Jewish population is predominantly petty bourgeois and [consists of] speculators.”Footnote ²⁰ At a meeting hosted by the Ukrainian Central Committee in June 1928, All-Union Evsektsiia chairman Aleksandr Chemerisskii condemned the excessive disenfranchisement of Jews in Ukraine, calling it “the most disgusting agitation for antisemitism.”Footnote ²¹

Both Jews and Ukrainians interpreted the ongoing displacement of Jews by Ukrainians in many spheres of society, individually and as a group, through the experience of antisemitism. More than 100,000 Ukrainian Jews had been murdered in a wave of pogroms sweeping war-ridden Ukraine in 1919–1921.Footnote ²² These recent events could not but influence Jewish-Ukrainian relations in the early Soviet period and shape the perception of Ukrainization on both sides. When Jewish officials complained to Kharkiv about local violations of Jewish national rights, they often accused the lower Party and state apparatus in the province of outright antisemitsm.Footnote ²³ The head of the Ukrainian Evsektsiia went as far as to suggest that Ukrainization “plays a significant role in the current surge of antisemitism” because it seemed like a “systematic displacement [mekhanicheskoe vytesnenie] of Jews.”Footnote ²⁴ Ukrainian officials protested against interpretations like these: “even the tiniest insensitivity [malesen’ka nechulist’] is now considered antisemitism,” a Party delegate complained in 1928.Footnote ²⁵ But Ukrainians, too, seemed to associate Ukrainization with anti-Jewish violence. When Jewish workers were dismissed under a pretext and replaced by Ukrainians, the latter gloated over this “Jewish pogrom”.Footnote ²⁶ Even Volodymyr Zaton’skyi, one of the main architects of Ukrainization, quipped about the wartime excesses in one of his reports to the Ukrainian Central Committee plenum:

It seems doubtful that Zatons’kyi’s Jewish comrades got the joke. Indeed, in the mid-1920s, local dispatches from Shtetlach warned that Zionist groups successfully capitalized on the growing frustration with Ukrainization, denouncing the policy as “a special way to displace Jews from the state apparatus.”Footnote ²⁸ Their leaflets sharply criticized the lack of Jewish national autonomy in Ukraine, the use of Russian and Ukrainian instead of Yiddish in organizations frequented by Jews, and the high unemployment among Jews.Footnote ²⁹ On the face of it, many Zionist demands seemed to be principally in line with the Soviet nationalities policy and were, therefore, particularly stinging:

Another leaflet simply concluded that “the nationalities policy of the Communist Party, having partially liberated the oppressed nationalities of the former Russia, completely bypassed the Jews.”Footnote ³¹ Statements like these underscored how many Ukrainian Jews felt about Ukrainization and the relative lack of national autonomy they enjoyed, especially when comparing their situation to that of other national minorities.

The Failure of Agricultural Resettlement

The apparent obstacles to the creation of autonomous territories for Ukraine’s Jewish population echoed earlier Jewish reservations about territorial autonomy. In contrast to this concept, ideas of extraterritorial, cultural autonomy had become increasingly widespread among Jewish intellectuals and political organizations in the final decades of Tsarist Russia (Rabinovitch Reference Rabinovitch2014). But if the problem with territorial autonomy for Ukrainian Jews in the early Soviet Union was their predominantly urban character, why not move the Jewish population to the countryside? In the early 1920s, this idea indeed became popular with many Jewish activists. By resettling impoverished, unemployed Jews from the Shtetlach in agricultural colonies along the Black Sea littoral, Jewish Party officials and Soviet authorities hoped to turn them into productive members of the new Soviet society and possibly create the preconditions for large-scale Jewish territorial autonomy (Bragin and Kol’tsov Reference Bragin and Kol’tsov1924; Gol’de Reference Gol’de1925). With financial aid from Western charitable organizations, such as the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, organized resettlement to southern Ukraine and northern Crimea began in 1924. In November 1926, Soviet head of state Mikhail Kalinin appeared to endorse Jewish settlement and territorial autonomy as a way to prevent assimilation and preserve the Jewish nation, which generated additional enthusiasm (Gitelman Reference Gitelman1972, 405–425). Indeed, in March 1927, the first Jewish national district was established in the Kherson region. Named Kalinindorf in honor of Kalinin, the district had a population of 18,000, 15,000 of whom were Jewish (Merezhin Reference Merezhin1927, 3–24). “These people are actual peasants,” a European visitor marveled at the settlers. “If they did not speak Yiddish, you would not guess that they are Jews” (Heller [1931] Reference Heller1933, 293). Two more Jewish districts were set up in Ukraine in 1929 and 1930 and another two were established in Crimea over the following years (Kuchenbecker Reference Kuchenbecker2000, 94; Dekel-Chen Reference Dekel-Chen2005, 64).

Despite this ostensible success, the Jewish resettlement campaign never reached its intended scale and involved only a fraction of Ukraine’s Jewish population. From its inception, the project faced strong political opposition in Ukraine and Crimea. When the Politburo in Moscow prepared the institutional framework and goals in early 1924, it dropped the idea of a Jewish autonomous republic in Ukraine over fears of antisemitic reactions. Over the following years, Ukrainian and Crimean government authorities tried to stall the resettlement process by delaying the allocation of land and hampering the work of the involved organizations (Mintz Reference Mintz1995a, 144–145, Reference Mintz1995b; Dekel-Chen Reference Dekel-Chen2005, 46). In the summer of 1927, the Ukrainian government adopted drastic restrictions on Jewish settlement and refused to allocate additional land for new settlers, publicly arguing that the preferential treatment of Jewish settlers as well as their continued “speculation” and use of hired labor had aroused envy among the Ukrainian population (Shlikhter Reference Shlikhter1927). This coincided with and accelerated preparations in Moscow to shift Jewish settlement to Birobidzhan, a small frontier strip in the Far East bordering China, against the will of most settlement activists. Soviet propaganda adopted Zionist slogans to praise Birobidzhan as a Soviet Jewish national homeland—“if you will it, it shall be no legend” (Gitelman Reference Gitelman1972, 433)—but its remoteness and inhospitable conditions, as well as the simultaneous onset of Stalin’s rapid industrialization program, resulted in a failure to attract significant numbers of Jewish settlers. When Birobidzhan was declared a Jewish autonomous region in 1934, it had a population of around 50,000, only 15% of which were Jewish (Gitelman Reference Gitelman1972, 431–439; Abramsky Reference Abramsky and Kochan1978; Pinkus Reference Pinkus1988, 73–76; Weinberg Reference Weinberg and Ro’i1995; Kuchenbecker Reference Kuchenbecker2000, 125). In southern Ukraine, the number of Jewish settlers peaked at around 45,000 in 1928 and declined over the following years.Footnote ³² Overall, Jewish agricultural resettlement never got the necessary traction to solve the “Jewish Question” through territorial autonomy in the Soviet Union.

The Dilemmas of Soviet Yiddishization

With territorial autonomy proving by and large unattainable, extraterritorial solutions to serve Ukraine’s Jewish population in their native language were as urgent as ever. The need for Yiddish institutions was further exacerbated by the fact that the designated national language was seen as the greatest common denominator of the Soviet Jewish nation: after all, what else could be taken for truly Jewish? Obviously, the Jewish religion itself was out of the question (Gitelman Reference Gitelman1972, 327, 338–339; Shneer Reference Shneer2003, 386–387).Footnote ³³ To build a Soviet Jewish nation, then, was to create a Yiddish-speaking world. Recent research has highlighted the dynamism of the nascent Soviet Jewish intelligentsia and demonstrated the widespread appeal of the new Soviet Jewish identity created in the interwar period (Shneer Reference Shneer2004; Kuzmany Reference Kuzmany2005; Shternshis Reference Shternshis2006; Bemporad Reference Bemporad2013). Indeed, the achievements of the Soviet Yiddishization campaign in Ukraine read impressive on paper: By 1930, there existed four Ukrainian Yiddish newspapers and another six journals, more than 50 higher education institutions with tuition in Yiddish, including 33 professional schools and two technical colleges, 520 Yiddish primary and secondary schools with 82,000 pupils, 12 Yiddish theaters, 46 Yiddish courts, and a State Jewish Museum in Odesa (TsKNM Reference Gosplan1930, 60, 70; Derzhplan USRR Reference Derzhplan1930a, 7–9; Derzhplan USRR Reference Derzhplan1931, 42–43; Kantor Reference Kantor1934, 180–181; Gitelman Reference Gitelman1972, 364–365).Footnote ³⁴ To some extent, these ostensible successes compensated the Jewish population of Ukraine for the socioeconomic and political detriments brought about by Ukrainization (Altshuler [1983] Reference Altshuler, Aster and Potichnyj2010, 298–299).

However, not all Ukrainian Jews were happy to send their children to Yiddish schools, subscribe to the Central Committee’s Yiddish daily Der shtern, or attend Yiddish-language vocational training in the evening. After the revolutions of 1917 abolished legal discriminations against Jews, the interwar period witnessed an increasing integration of the Jewish population into their non-Jewish, predominantly Russian-speaking, urban environment. In search of social advancement, Jews were continuously migrating from Shtetlach to regional cities and from these provincial centers to the large industrial areas of Kyiv, Kharkiv, the Donbas region, and, ultimately, Moscow and Leningrad. From 1926 to 1939, the number of Jews living in the Russian republic (RSFSR) increased from 23% to approximately one-third of all Soviet Jews; Moscow’s Jewish population alone skyrocketed from 28,000 in 1920 to 130,000 in 1926 and 400,000 in 1939. Increasing levels of Jewish integration also manifested itself in a rise in intermarriages: while in the mid-1920s around 5% of Ukrainian and Belorussian Jews (and more than 20% of the Jews in the RSFSR) married non-Jews, their overall number increased to approximately one-third in the 1930s (Larin Reference Larin1929, 60; Kommunisticheskaia akademiia 1930, 41; Simon Reference Simon1986, 80–81, 140; Pinkus Reference Pinkus1988, 91; Gitelman Reference Gitelman2001, 109–111).

Perhaps inevitably, the Jewish quest for social mobility was often accompanied by a turn to the Russian language. For many Jews, Yiddish stood for the economic hardship and oppression of the Shtetlach that they wanted to leave behind (Gitelman Reference Gitelman2001, 89, 93). Between 1926 and 1939, the share of Soviet Jews who considered Russian their first language increased from one quarter to 55% (Gitelman Reference Gitelman2001, 109). In Ukrainian cities, 70% of the Jewish population indicated that they were native speakers of Yiddish in 1926 (TsSU SSSR 1929a, 11–15). However, even Jews who were more fluent in Yiddish than in Russian preferred literacy courses in Russian (Shternshis Reference Shternshis2006, 48). Moreover, the share of Yiddish native speakers varied significantly across the republic: generally speaking, adoption of Russian as a first language was particularly strong in the large cities and industrial centers, while numbers of Yiddish native speakers were highest in places such as Zhytomir, Berdychiv, or Vinnytsia in Right-Bank Ukraine, the old areas of Jewish settlement and poorest part of the republic, as Table 2 shows. The table reveals two more points about Ukraine’s Jewish population that illustrate the relationship between social mobility and language. First, the higher the share of Russian native speakers, the higher the share of the literate population. Second, of those literate, more people could in general read and write in Russian than in Yiddish: specifically, the higher the share of the literate population, the higher the share of those who were literate in Russian and the lower the share of those who were literate in Yiddish.

Table 2. Native Language and Literacy of the Jewish Population in Select Cities, 1926

Source: Compiled on the basis of TsSU SSSR 1929a 77, 89, 92; TsSU 1929b, 17, 20–21, 27, 45–46, 52, 54, 310–311, 316, 320; TsSU SSSR 1929c, 27–28, 43, 46, 248, 257–259, 350, 354–356.

However, linguistic assimilation posed an ideological and practical problem to the Communist Party in the 1920s (Martin Reference Martin2001, 32). In deliberate opposition to the previous Tsarist regime, early Soviet nationalities policy was based on the tacit premise that assimilation was forced, never voluntary, and that it was a symptom of insufficient attention to national needs. In addition, the indigenization policy produced bureaucratic structures that were interested in preserving the national constituencies they represented. Stalin had famously argued in 1913 that language makes a nation: would the nation disappear, then, if it were to stop speaking its language? (Stalin Reference Stalin1946, 296; Connor Reference Connor1984, 275–277) By the mid-1920s, this was a nightmare to many communists, Jewish and non-Jewish alike. The TsKNM chairman even cautioned against Jews moving from Shtetlach to larger cities lest they succumb to linguistic assimilation.Footnote ³⁵ People who “did not know their native language” were regularly labeled “backward” by Soviet officials (TsKNM 1927, 68; Slezkine Reference Slezkine1994, 428). In Odesa, for example, Jewish Komsomol members were reprimanded by a local newspaper for their poor command of Yiddish:

In practice, the question of which language Ukraine’s Jewish population should use was negotiated primarily through the language politics of primary education. Throughout the 1920s, the share of Jewish pupils who were taught in Yiddish-language schools remained lower than that of almost all other national minorities enrolled at their respective national-language school (TsKNM 1927, 38).Footnote ³⁶ Within the Jewish student body, a comparison of different school types yields a pronounced urban-rural gap that further underscores the socioeconomic trend away from the Yiddish language. While four-year schools predominated in the countryside and in smaller townships, where formal education was more difficult to provide, seven-year schools were more common in larger cities. In January 1927, 65% of Jewish pupils at four-year schools were taught in Yiddish, but only 30% of those at seven-year schools. At Russian-language seven-year schools, a quarter of the students was Jewish (TsSU USRR 1928, 33). Among Jewish fifth- through seventh-graders alone, only 25% received instruction in Yiddish, compared with 38% enrolled at Russian-language schools and 36% taught in Ukrainian (Derzhplan USRR Reference Derzhplan1930b, 200).

Even Jewish parents who considered Yiddish their native language and spoke Yiddish at home preferred to send their children to Russian- or Ukrainian-language schools. This was in part due to the fierce anti-religious propaganda taught at schools: some parents feared that their children would be directed against Jewish religious traditions in particular at Yiddish schools, whereas at other schools, education was at least opposed to religion in general. Moreover, Yiddish schools often turned out to be worse-equipped with facilities and materials than other schools; their teachers were also said to be not as well prepared. Although the Jewish communities in the hinterland of Right-Bank Ukraine were strongholds of the Yiddish language, Soviet Yiddish schools often failed to take roots there because they were rejected by local elites experienced in organizing alternative means of education that bypassed the state (Batsman Reference Batsman2019, 63–72). However, the primary cause of Jewish parents refusing to send their children to Yiddish schools remained the fact that proficiency in Russian and to a lesser extent in Ukrainian was considered necessary to find employment and to obtain further professional training (Gitelman Reference Gitelman1972, 335–350; Pinkus Reference Pinkus1988, 108; Veidlinger Reference Veidlinger2013, 87–91). According to a critic, Ukrainian Jews understood

The desires of these parents often clashed with government policy as Soviet authorities principally sought to ensure that all children were taught in their native language. While Jewish Party activists debated whether parental preferences should be taken into account, some parents prohibited their children from speaking Yiddish in public lest they be sent to Yiddish schools. In many places, special commissions were established to examine the language proficiency of Jewish children upon school enrolment, and stories about their attempts to trick children into speaking Yiddish or admitting that they spoke Yiddish at home abounded. According to one of these narratives, for example, the commission would interview children entirely in Russian or even Ukrainian to lull them into a false sense of security, only to eventually dismiss them in Yiddish and see how they reacted.Footnote ³⁸ During the period of school enrolment in 1925, the Ukrainian government received many complaints from Jewish parents whose children were forced to attend a Yiddish school or whose school had been turned into a Yiddish school. Once the term started, a Yiddish school in Kyiv had to send away 15 children who turned out not to speak Yiddish at all.Footnote ³⁹ Much to the astonishment of Soviet officials dealing with this matter, there were cases where Jewish parents indeed preferred not only Russian, but even Ukrainian to Yiddish schools (TsKNM 1927, 78–79, 101).

In fact, the trend toward assimilation among Soviet Jews was also reflected in their trajectories within the Communist Party. Most Jewish ‘Old Bolsheviks’ and the majority of the new generation of members did not identify as Jews. When they joined the Party, they did so to leave their old world behind (Pinkus Reference Pinkus1988, 57; Slezkine Reference Slezkine2004, 152, 169). As a result, the Bolsheviks struggled to find Jewish communists who were willing to work on the Jewish street among their fellow Jews, which in turn hampered the Bolshevik outreach to the Jewish population. Throughout the 1920s, the Evsektsiia counted no more than 1,500 activists, a rather small number for 2.6 million Soviet Jews (Kuzmany Reference Kuzmany2005, 253). “Most Jewish communists try to evade Jewish work,” a report complained, “they don’t read the Jewish communist press, they have a negative attitude toward attending political education courses [politgramota] in Yiddish and so on.”Footnote ⁴⁰ Compared with other nationalities, the Soviet apparatus was much longer forced to draw on Jewish activists who had been socialized in other parties: the Evsektsiia leadership consisted almost entirely of former members of the Jewish Labor Bund, or Bundists (Gitelman Reference Gitelman1972, 390; Abramsky Reference Abramsky and Kochan1978, 66; Pinkus Reference Pinkus1988, 77; Smith Reference Smith1999, 115–116). There were, so to speak, two different types of Jewish Party members:

In Ukraine, Lazar Kaganovich was probably the most prominent example of a communist in an executive position who was a Jew “by origin only.” One of Stalin’s closest aides in his later career, he was appointed First Secretary of the Communist Party’s Ukrainian branch in April 1925 to keep Ukraine in line in the succession struggle following Lenin’s death (Rees Reference Rees2012, 61–63). Had he committed his life to Jewish Party work, he would never have made it to the topmost echelons of Bolshevik power. For evrei-kommunisty, advancement within the Party was limited: even the Evsektsiia was technically just a subsection of the Communist Party’s departments for agitation and propaganda.

However, Kaganovich’s tenure in Ukraine illustrates not only the prospects of Jewish assimilation, but also its limits set by the process of Ukrainization. Kaganovich was an ardent supporter of the Soviet indigenization policy, and his arrival in Kharkiv marked the beginning of its most comprehensive and thorough phase (Mace Reference Mace1983, 95; Liber Reference Liber1992, 109; Martin Reference Martin2001, 84–87; Borisenok Reference Borisenok2021, 259). Despite his commitment to Ukrainization, however, Kaganovich faced strong resistance from some Ukrainian communists (Rees Reference Rees2012, 62, 78).Footnote ⁴¹ The fact that he was not Ukrainian made him vulnerable to attacks: during the so-called Shumsky Affair, an intense debate on the proper pace of Ukrainization, government members accused him of not having an “organic relationship” to Ukraine (Martin Reference Martin2001, 217, 220).Footnote ⁴² Ironically, Kaganovich had been born in the former Kiev Governorate; after his return to Ukraine as First Secretary, he made it a point to learn Ukrainian so as to set a good example (Mace Reference Mace1983, 95). None of this helped. Kaganovich was eventually called back to Moscow in 1928, the bridges between him and his Ukrainian colleagues being burnt (Rees Reference Rees2012, 78–80; Borisenok Reference Borisenok2021, 223–226). With the Soviet program of territorial autonomy reaching its apogee, even complete assimilation would not free Ukraine’s Jews from their Jewish origins.