The name Birobidzhan reappears in the news every few years as the result of Soviet initiatives which seem to be inspired by two very different calculations. On the one hand, Birobidzhan is called in to demonstrate that the Jewish people enjoys full equality in the USSR – for an autonomous Jewish region has existed there since 1934. And, on the other hand, it has served as a veiled threat to the Jewish people in the USSR to remind them that they can be transported to that region should the need arise. The fact that the Jewish Autonomous Region has not been abolished despite the small number of Jews residing there, and despite the fact that only vestiges of Jewish culture remain, is presumably to be explained by these same considerations.

The Stalin period

As we have seen in Chapter 1, members of the Evsektsiya and a part of the Jewish intelligentsia close to Jewish national affairs in the Soviet Union concluded quite early on that the only way that the Jewish problem could be solved within the framework of the Soviet regime was on a territorial basis. They did not, however, envisage such a territory in the Far East on the Chinese border, but rather on the shores of the Black Sea. The idea of allocating the Birobidzhan area for Jewish settlement, with the aim of establishing a national unit there, was raised for the first time in early 1927 by the heads of the RSFSR People's Commissariat of Agriculture, with the support of the Commissariat for Defence.