Dekel Chen

Farmers, Philanthropists, and Soviet Authority: Rural Crimea
and Southern Ukraine, 1923-1941
L Dekel-Chen
Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, Volume 4,

Number 4, Fall 2003 (New Series), pp. 849-885 (Article)
Published by Slavica Publishers

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/kri.2003.0056
For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/48796
For content related to this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/related_content?type=article&id=48796
“Articles
Farmers, Philanthropists, and

Soviet Authority
Rural Crimea and Southern Ukraine, 1923–41
JONATHAN DEKEL-CHEN
The organized colonization of Jews from the former Pale of Settlement be-
tween the world wars in Crimea and southern Ukraine provides an extraordi-
nary, and unexplored, window onto center-periphery relations in the early
Soviet Union. If Lenin and his heirs manufactured a monolithic image in and
around the major cities, their voice became progressively fainter as one traveled
further afield. In the new Jewish colonies scattered over the steppes of southern
Russia, it was often hardly more than a whisper. As other authors have sug-
gested, the Soviet state inherited from the Romanovs neither the resources nor
an effective model to administer the vast, multi-ethnic empire effectively. 1
Hence, the new Soviet state lacked the requisite tools for systematic control in
the periphery during the first two decades of rule.2
Research for this article was made possible through the generosity of the Research Scholar Pro-
gram of the American Councils for International Education (ACTR–ACCELS), a Short-Term
Fellowship from the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies of the Woodrow Wilson
Center, the John Fischer Scholarship from the Tauber Institute for the Study of European
Jewry, the Lowenstein-Wiener Fellowship from the Jacob Rader Marcus Center, YIVO’s Visit-
ing Research Fellowship at the Max Weinreich Center, and the Sachar Fund for Academic Aid
at Brandeis University. The Lady Davis Fellowship Trust supported postdoctoral work at the
Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
1
For example, in 1900 Moscow had 8,546 poorly trained rural police officers to control 90
million peasants. While the secret police force multiplied rapidly thereafter, its focus remained
urban. As early as the 1960s, Western scholarship addressed the chronic deficiency in the public
services of the USSR; see Gur Ofer, The Service Sector in Soviet Economic Growth (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1973), 5, 141, 147, 157, 162.
2
Lynne Viola (“The Role of the OGPU in Dekulakization, Mass Deportations, and Special
Resettlement in 1930,” Carl Beck Papers 1406 [January 2000], 37) shows that even the secret
police was an incompetent, understaffed body, at least until the early 1930s. See also Moshe
Lewin, Russian Peasants and Soviet Power (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968);
Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 4, 4 (Fall 2003): 849–85.

850 JONATHAN DEKEL-CHEN
Tensions involving ethnic minorities did not mark the end of the troubles
that plagued the young Bolshevik state. Despite the policy of indigenization
(korenizatsiia) and the creation of nominally autonomous territories, many of
the national minority groups were not satisfied with mere cultural autonomy;
some longed for independence.3 Seven years of nearly continuous warfare had
devastated large parts of European Russia, alienated much of the population,
and left Moscow without the means to administer the empire effectively. Fur-
thermore, the Bolsheviks were international outcasts, beset by lingering fears of
renewed foreign intervention. How could they establish order in the country-
side without the active support of the peasantry?
This paper employs archival material to explore when and how Moscow
applied its power in the periphery. Specifically, it addresses the impact of the
organized agricultural colonization of Jews from the impoverished former Pale
on the exercise of central political power in the northern half of the Crimean
peninsula, and to a lesser degree, in southern Ukraine from 1923 to 1941. 4
Barring the last four years of this period, a nongovernmental, nondenomina-
tional American-Jewish philanthropy (the American Jewish Joint Distribution
Committee [Joint or JDC]) funded this resettlement of Jews in the Black Sea
littoral. To execute this work, the JDC created a local administrative network.5
As shall be seen, the arrival of an effective, coherent, foreign philanthropy
shaped not only the lives of its client-colonists but the character of Soviet rural
authority.
Lewin, The Making of the Soviet System (New York: Pantheon, 1985); Sheila Fitzpatrick, Stalin’s
Peasants: Resistance and Survival in the Russian Village after Collectivization (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1994); and Neil Weissman, “Policing the NEP Countryside,” in Russia in the
Era of NEP, ed. Sheila Fitzpatrick et al. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991),
174–91.
3
Gerhard Simon, Nationalism and Policy toward the Nationalities in the Soviet Union: From To-
talitarian Dictatorship to Post-Stalinist Society (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1991), 147; Robert
J. Kaiser, The Geography of Nationalism in Russia and the USSR (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1994), 146–47; and Benjamin Pinkus, “The Extra-Territorial National Minorities in the
Soviet Union, 1917–39: Jews, Germans and Poles,” Studies in Contemporary Jewry 3, ed.
Jonathan Frankel (1987): 76. While korenizatsiia promoted the development of native elites,
languages, and cultures, long-term Soviet policy promoted integration and fusion through edu-
cation, the professions, and even intermarriage. See Anatolii Vasil′evich Lunacharskii, Ob an-
tisemitizme (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel′stvo, 1929), 46.
4
For a full study of the project, see Jonathan Dekel-Chen, “Shopkeepers and Peddlers into So-
viet Farmers: Jewish Agricultural Colonization in Crimea and Southern Ukraine, 1924–1941”
(Ph.D. diss., Brandeis University, 2001).
5
The JDC, based in Manhattan, was created during World War I for the relief of Jewish refu-
gees in Eastern Europe. It has been, and remains, the largest Jewish philanthropic organization
in the world.
FARMERS, PHILANTHROPISTS, AND SOVIET AUTHORITY 851
Starting in 1924, the JDC’s settlement agency— the Joint Agricultural

Corporation (Agro-Joint)—entered into a series of contracts with the Kremlin
that institutionalized and expanded colonization beyond a small, but impor-
tant, spontaneous movement of Jews from their traditional towns in the for-
mer Pale (shtetls) to vacant lands in the south during the previous two years.6
These contracts gave the Agro-Joint authority to resettle Jews from the former
Pale in most of northern Crimea as well as the Kherson and the Krivoi Rog
regions of southern Ukraine. At its peak, the Agro-Joint employed over 1,000
workers in offices from Moscow to Crimea. Driven by contributions in excess
of $16 million (nearly $200 million at present values), the Agro-Joint
constructed approximately 200 state-of-the-art colonies on hundreds of
thousands of acres, assisted another 40 colonies established before its arrival,
operated several tractor teams, and provided technical guidance, modern
implements, and low-interest loans to the settlers.7 By the turn of the decade,
these colonies reached and usually surpassed the productive levels of their non-
Jewish neighbors. As models of modern agriculture, they also became the focus
of interest for the regime. In total, the Agro-Joint had resettled or assisted ap-
proximately 200,000 Jewish farmers by the time it signed a liquidation agree-
ment with the government and left Soviet Russia in 1937. 8 From 1923 until at
least the last years of the decade, Jewish recruits were “pulled” to the land by
their status as lishentsy, or people disenfranchised as former “exploiters” by the
1918 Bolshevik Constitution; agricultural (and other “productive”) work al-
lowed lishentsy to regain their civil rights.
Soviet inputs to the resettlement project were substantial. First and fore-
most, they provided free land, transportation, and tax exemptions for the
colonists as well as fuel and other logistical support for Agro-Joint operations.
In 1924 and 1925, the regime established two agencies dedicated entirely to
the colonization project— the Komzet and Ozet. Originally chaired by Petr
Smidovich, the Komzet (the Commission for the Settlement of Jewish Labor-
ers on the Land under the Council of Soviet Nationalities for the VTsIK) was
meant to oversee the resettlement enterprise and its foreign benefactors. Be-
cause the total number of Soviet-Jewish farmers never exceeded 9 percent of
the Jewish population of the USSR, Komzet carried (until its liquidation in
6
The Joint renegotiated the 1924 contract in 1928 and 1932.
7
The loans financed the construction of high-quality homes and the purchase of farm
implements. In addition to the new and spontaneous colonies, the Agro-Joint also provided
assistance to neighboring non-Jewish villages and several Jewish colonies in the Kherson region
that had been settled in the early 19th century.
8
The Agro-Joint also provided vocational training in the colonies and for tens of thousands of
Jews in the former Pale.
1938) greater symbolic than practical importance for most Soviet Jews. 9
Nominally active until 1938, Ozet (the Society for the Settlement of Jewish
Toilers on the Land) was responsible for the popularization of Jewish
colonization in the shtetls and among the general population. The character of
the leadership and the scale of the membership in this semi-independent
committee changed over time. Created by Jewish political and communal
luminaries committed to the colonization project, Ozet gradually sovietized
and lost most of its original roles. Under this makeshift partnership of Soviet
and foreign benefactors, the Jewish colonies survived and thrived under the
Soviet system only to succumb to occupation by the Wehrmacht in the
autumn of 1941.
An array of sources makes the Agro-Joint episode an extraordinarily in-
formative case study for the evolution of rural authority. If much of the Soviet
countryside remained hidden from the outside world in this period, these Jew-
ish colonies became the object of scrutiny for many: Agro-Joint personnel, visi-
tors from America, representatives from other foreign philanthropies in
Russia, 10 Communist Party workers,11 officials of the Komzet, state
functionaries, workers’ delegations organized by Ozet, journalists, and the
GPU. Dozens of these visitors, inspectors, and delegations left accounts of the
colonies, the neighboring non-Jewish villages, and the roles assumed by the
Agro-Joint in the absence of state administration.
The Blind Speaking to the Deaf: Center-Periphery Relations

during the NEP
The readiness of the young Soviet state to cooperate with a “bourgeois”
philanthropy must be understood in the context of the political and economic
chaos of the mid-1920s. After the revolution, the Bolsheviks had redistributed
former gentry lands to the peasantry, but the mood and output of the village
had not improved. In terms of control, the mir remained a world unto itself in
the 1920s; the regime made only intermittent, largely ineffectual attempts to
regulate it through a thin network of Soviet organs — comprised of village
9
In lieu of a more effective political body to represent Jewish interests, Soviet Jews in the cities
and traditional areas of the former Pale came to regard Komzet as their unofficial representative
in Moscow. The Jewish sections of the Communist Party (Evsektsiia)—created in 1918—soon
alienated themselves from the Jewish community and, in any case, were liquidated in 1930.
10
The Organization for Rehabilitation of Jews through Training (ORT) and the Jewish Coloni-
zation Association (ICA) also supported Jewish colonies. ORT had two branches at this time:
one sovietized while the other was comprised of recent Russian-Jewish émigrés to Berlin (ORT-
Farband). Both branches assisted Jewish colonization.
11
Until 1930, these were mainly members of the Evsektsiia.
soviets, party and Komsomol cells, and secret police. 12 Of equal importance in
their future relations with the Agro-Joint, the Bolsheviks had thus far failed to
modernize rural Russia. Rather, the same distance from government supervi-
sion that allowed free trade under the NEP also preserved rural
backwardness— the Soviet state invested little or nothing in agriculture. In-
stead, the technological gap widened between Russia and the West while rela-
tions between Moscow and the village deteriorated.13
With only tenuous control over the region and economic recovery no-
where in sight, one could expect the party to grant significant authority in this
enterprise to its most loyal arm in the Jewish community—the Jewish Sections
of the Communist Party (the Evsektsiia). In practice, however, the conscious
marginalization of the Evsektsiia in favor of the Komzet demonstrated the
Kremlin’s resolve to isolate ideology from the daily supervision of colonization.
From the party’s perspective, the Jewish Sections not only lacked a functional
apparatus but also projected the ideological extremism that could antagonize
the valued foreign sponsors. Even more indicative, the Soviets knew that the
Evsektsiia drew antagonism from the Jewish street —its involvement in coloni-
zation could only be counterproductive. Therefore, the Komzet, and not the
Evsektsiia, was given operative responsibilities. We shall see to what degree the
former exercised this authority. Charged solely with observation and reportage
on the colonies, the Evsektsiia found even this difficult due to chronic man-
power constraints.14
12
Archive of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research (hereafter “YIVO”), Record Group (hereaf-
ter “RG”) 358/104, 4 (Komzet to Sovnarkom, 1925); Alec Nove, An Economic History of the
USSR, 1917–1991 (Harmondsworth, Eng.: Penguin, 1982), 102, 106–8; and R. W. Davies,
The Socialist Offensive: The Collectivization of Soviet Agriculture, 1929–1930 (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1980), 4–31, 53–55. For a contradictory assessment of land distribu-
tion in Crimea, see David Marples and David Duke, “Ukraine, Russia, and the Question of
Crimea,” Nationalities Papers 23, 2 (1995): 265. See also H. Alttrichter, “Insoluble Conflicts:
Village Life between Revolution and Collectivization,” in Russia in the Era of NEP, ed.
Fitzpatrick, 192–210; and Vladlen Semenovich Izmozik, “Politicheskii kontrol ′ v Sovetskoi
Rossii, 1918–1928 gg.,” Voprosy istorii, no. 7 (1997): 32–53. Less than one official manned an
average NEP-era village soviet of approximately 350 families; one militiaman generally patrolled
five village soviets.
13
Gelii Ivanovich Shmelev, Agrarnaia politika i agrarnye otnosheniia v Rossii v XX v. (Moscow:
Nauka, 2000), 117–29; Lewin, Russian Peasants, 25, 98–101; and Davies, Socialist Offensive, 5,
9, 13. Much as in the tsarist era, rural backwardness was most acute in the non-Slavic regions.
14
YIVO, RG 358/227, 92 (conference at Sde Menucha, December 1925); Hersh Smolar,
Tochelet ve-shivra: Zichronot shel “evsek” le-she-avar (Tel Aviv: Institute for Diaspora Research,
1979), 303–4; Mordechai Altshuler, Ha-evsektsia be-Brit ha-Moatsot, 1918–1930 (Tel Aviv:
Sifriat poalim, 1980), 364.
In dealing with the colonies, the central authorities usually acted only
when incited or energized from below. The fate of the Hehalutz Zionist pio-
neer movement and its three small agricultural communes in Crimea illustrates
this point.15 At the top, the Kremlin recognized that neither the large dispro-
portion of Jews in the early Soviet leadership nor the promises of future im-
provements compensated for most Jews’ prolonged suffering in the former
Pale. Under such conditions, the successful Hehalutz communes amplified the
threat that Zionism might become an alternate source of allegiance for Soviet
Jews, especially among new colonists in Crimea. For its part, however, the
Kremlin did not initiate action against Hehalutz. Instead, this came from the
Evsektsiia, which for years had labeled Hehalutz a chauvinistic organization
that obstructed the assimilation of Jews into Soviet society. Moreover, Moscow
heard from Evsektsiia officials in Crimea that the Hehalutz communes were a
natural magnet for the surrounding colonists, “stronger than Komsomol
cells.”16 Driven by its internationalist ideology, the Evsektsiia therefore helped
unleash the power of the state once it gauged that these “nationalist” commu-
nards could not be cowed.17 In response to this campaign, the Kremlin made
an opportunistic adjustment to its general policy of Jewish colonization with
the decision to liquidate Hehalutz in 1928.18
Like the destruction of Hehalutz, the choice of Crimea and southern
Ukraine as the site for large-scale Jewish colonization shows the force of initia-
tives from below during the early 1920s. With Hehalutz, the venom came
from secondary Jewish communists. In the case of colonization, grass-roots
pressure dictated the geographic focus for mass resettlement. Specifically, the
15
The Hehalutz first settled these communes in 1922. They received some support from the
JDC starting in 1923. The communes were organized as training sites for Hehalutz members en
route to the new Jewish farming communities in Mandatory Palestine. Established in Odessa in
1905 as a socialist Zionist youth organization, Hehalutz grew rapidly after 1917— its Left
branches even received official sanction in 1923. At the height of its activity in Soviet Russia in
1925, Hehalutz could claim 14,000 members.
16
Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv pri Sovete Ministrov Avtonomnoi Respubliki Krym (GAARK)
(formerly Tsentral ′nyi gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Kryma [TsGAK]) f. p–1, op. 1, d. 83 , l. 13
(obkom Evsektsiia materials, March 1928).
17
GAARK f. p–121, op. 1, d. 26, l. 30 (report of the Dzhankoi Evsektsiia, late 1925); and
Yehezkiel Keren, Ha-hityashvut ha-haklait ha-yehudit be-hetsi ha-i Krim (Jerusalem: Zak, 1973),
41, 48.
18
Starting in 1926, the Hehalutz communes came under increasing pressure from the GPU and,
in 1928, were liquidated by troikas composed of Evsektsiia and district officials. In hindsight, it
seems that the Evsektsiia proved effective mainly in destructive roles. See Hélène Carrère
d’Encausse, The Great Challenge: Nationalities and the Bolshevik State, 1917–1930, trans. Nancy
Festinger (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1992), 148–51.
colonization contract signed between the JDC and the Sovnarkom in 1924
simply institutionalized the physical parameters and the pragmatic goals of a
spontaneous settlement movement of hundreds of Jewish families from the
former Pale that had been in motion since 1922.
The recruitment of candidates for colonization revealed important facets
of center-periphery relations. Here, stern reprimands from Komzet (the re-
sponsible Soviet commission) did not deter local authorities from the abuse of
regulations governing the recruitment and dispatch of new colonists from the
shtetls of Belorussia and Ukraine to Crimea. For example, the presidium of the
Belo-Tserkov raikom repeatedly sent “cripples” and families without working
members to the colonies.19 This exemplified a troubling, but rational, tactic
adopted by local authorities throughout the former Pale of Settlement: this
government-sponsored campaign offered a superb opportunity to divest their
communities of social-welfare cases or of recent, unwanted arrivals, among
them, many single mothers.20
Moscow and the Tatar Communists

Although it was not a premeditated goal of the project, Jewish colonization
shaped and reflected the transfer of power from Simferopol and Kiev
(Kharkov) to Moscow. This process, however, carried risks for the Soviets; as
in other new national autonomous oblasts and republics, the leaders in Crimea
and Ukraine guarded the status of their titular ethnic majorities. Therefore, the
resettlement of Jews there could ignite local resistance and destabilize Soviet
nationality policy in the region.
Moscow’s enthusiasm for Jewish colonization around the Black Sea was
tied, in great part, to its alienation from the periphery. In theory, the state
could offset institutional weakness in the republics by placing ethnic Slavs or
sympathetic indigenous leaders in key positions in the regional capitals. In re-
ality, the party usually possessed neither in the 1920s. Instead, the percentage
19
GAARK f. r–515, op. 1, d. 300, l. 37 (Kesel ′man to Presidium, February 1932).
20
YIVO, RG 358/87, 4 (Levintan’s report, 2 June 1926); GAARK f. p–1, op. 1, d. 990, l. 40
(Narkomzem, observations of Jewish farmers, late 1930). Memoirs and oral histories are
particularly instructive on this point. See B. B. Berezhanskaia, “Evreiskie kolkhozy v Krymu,” in
Evrei Kryma, ed. Ella Isaakovna Solomnik (Simferopol: Mosty, 1997), 83–85; R. A. Vul′f
(interview J. Dekel-Chen and N. Vysotskaia, tape recording, Simferopol, Ukraine, 21
September 2000); and G. I. Borochovna Mikhlin (interview M. Tiagly and J. Dekel-Chen, tape
recording, Simferopol, Ukraine, 25 September 2000). Tape-recorded oral history interviews
conducted by Mikhail Tiagly, Natalia Vysotskaia, and Aleksandr Stesin for the Hesed Shimon
Society in Simferopol, Ukraine, 1999–2000 (hereafter, HSOHI). B. A. Kublanovskaia, M. A.
Gendina, I. I. Al′tman; American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee Archive, Agro-Joint
Archive, collection AR 21/32 (hereafter, JDC) 509, 18 (Smolar interview, 22 June 1977).
of indigenous party membership fluctuated with the distance from the center,
dropping to single digits in some areas. Crimea fared particularly poorly in this
respect: Tatars accounted for only 10 percent of the republic’s party member-
ship in 1922. Even after intense rural recruitment campaigns during the NEP,
their proportion rose only to 10.7 percent.21
Given these unpleasant facts, Jewish colonization probably was all the
more attractive to the Soviets. It allowed them to balance hostile, “backward”
populations on the borderlands with more loyal and “modern” Jews.22 Mos-
cow had a solid statistical basis for this approach. In 1922, Jewish membership
in the Communist Party was 250 percent greater than their share in the popu-
lation. In Belorussia and Ukraine (the primary recruiting grounds for coloniza-
tion), Jews constituted particularly large proportions of party membership. It
behooved the Soviets to redistribute them in areas with a weaker party pres-
ence. Although the ratio of Jews in the CPSU later declined, it still compared
favorably to other ethnic groups in the periphery, especially to Tatars and
Germans in Crimea.23
As it did with other ethnic minorities throughout the country, the regime
created five Jewish autonomous districts (raiony) from March 1927 to March
1935 in response to the large influx of Jewish agricultural settlers in northern
Crimea and southern Ukraine.24 These five districts then subdivided into 126
Jewish village soviets, which contained clear Jewish majorities.25 By 1941, Jews
constituted slender demographic majorities or large pluralities in three of their
five national districts; they accounted for approximately 30 percent of the
21
T. H. Rigby, Communist Party Membership in the USSR (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1968), 178, 369, 491.
22
In the case of Jewish colonization, a foreign philanthropic organization was the unknowing
facilitator of this policy goal. For general observations on this aspect of Soviet nationality policy,
see Lee Schwartz, “Regional Population Redistribution and National Homelands,” in Soviet
Nationality Policies: Ruling Ethnic Groups in the USSR, ed. Henry R. Huttenbach (London:
Mansell, 1990), 129–34.
23
For details, see Zeev Katz et al., eds., Handbook of Major Soviet Nationalities (New York: Free
Press, 1975), 368; G. B. Kas′ianov, et al., Krymskaia ASSR: 20-e— 30-e gody (preprint no. 8,
Kiev: Akademia Nauk UkrSSR Institut Istorii, 1989), 4; and Benjamin Pinkus, The Jews of the
Soviet Union: The History of a National Minority (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1988), 78–80.
24
Kalinindorf (1927), Novo Zlatopol (1929), and Stalindorf (1930) in Ukraine; Fraidorf
(1931) and Larindorf (1935) in Crimea.
25
For details, see Benjamin Pinkus, “The Development of the Idea of Jewish National
Autonomy and Its Application in the Soviet Union from Lenin to Gorbachev,” Shvut 17–18
(1995): 104; and Fitzpatrick, Stalin’s Peasants, 174–75.
population in the other two.26 In the intervening years, important partitions

occurred within and adjacent to the five official Jewish districts: groups of
Jewish settlements crystallized into distinct (but informal) blocs, ranging in
size from hundreds to thousands of colonists. 27 For example, such blocs could
be found around the towns of Kolai (today called Azovskoe), Kurman-
Kemel ′chi (today called Krasnogvardeiskoe), and Biiuk-Onlar (today called
Oktiabr′skoe).
These compact Jewish settlement blocs became the paramount, albeit un-
official, political result of colonization for the settlers and the regions they in-
habited. No one imposed these blocs from above. Rather, they emerged as the
government allocated, and the Agro-Joint developed, new regions from 1924
to 1929. The strength of these compact settlement blocs sprang from the op-
portunities made available by physical transplantation to an underpopulated,
understaffed region and Agro-Joint’s training of a Jewish professional and
administrative cadre. Within the blocs, colonists remained relatively
impervious to Soviet indoctrination and successfully assumed many party and
government posts: these included kolkhoz and village soviet chairmanships,
jobs in the raion infrastructure, and posts in the local Komzet, Komsomol, and
NKVD.28
The blocs point to the importance of local arrangements over official pol-
icy. From all indications, they were considerably sounder than the five formal
Jewish autonomous districts, which, according to Benjamin Pinkus, had many
shortcomings.29 If Jews constituted only slim demographic majorities in three
of the five districts, they heavily outnumbered other ethnic groups in the com-
pact settlement blocs. From 1929 to 1941, one could travel dozens of miles
inside such blocs, even if they did not necessarily conform to the borders of the
26
The first Jewish village soviet in Crimea was founded in February 1926. By 1932, there were
32. This remained unchanged through 1937; see Yaacov Levavi, “Haklaim yehudim b’aravot
Krim: perek be-toldot ha-yehadut ha-sovietit, 1918–1948” (unpublished manuscript, Hebrew
University of Jerusalem, 1984), chap. 20, 1, and Table 30. I thank Prof. Mordechai Altshuler of
the Hebrew University of Jerusalem for permission to examine this manuscript. See also Aryeh
Munitz, “Ha-napot ha-leumiot shel ha-yehudim be-Ukraina,” Shvut 12 (1987): 47–50;
Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii (GARF) f. r-7541, op. 1, d. 626 (Shapiro’s report
on Fraidorf region, 2 May 1934); GAARK f. p–140, op. 1, d. 22, ll. 2–5 (report on Larindorf
region, 1 August 1939); and Vladimir Mikhailovich Broshevan, “Natsional ′nye raiony v Krymu
v 20–30 gg. XX v.,” Evreiskoe naselenie Iuga Ukrainy: Ezhegodnik (1998): 121, 127.
27
Significant pockets also formed in many of the non-Jewish districts of northern Crimea.
28
Sovetskomu Krymu dvadtsat ′ let, 1920–1940 (Simferopol: Krymgosizdat, 1940), 279–83;
Broshevan, “Natsional′nye raiony,” 123; Aleksandr Germanovich Gertsen, Evrei v Krymu
(Simferopol: Tavriia-Plius, 1999), 38; HSOHI.
29
Pinkus, “Development of the Idea of Jewish National Autonomy,” 104.
raiony.30 Hence these tight clusters of settlements described the parameters and
routines of daily life no less than the official districts.
Under normal circumstances, such a large influx of “outsiders” would pre-
sent challenges to local control. In the case of Crimea, Jewish colonization ex-
acerbated the fragile political arrangements that prevailed between Simferopol
and Moscow. Shortly after the Red Army conquered the peninsula during the
Civil War, the Bolsheviks co-opted and installed the leading Tatar nationalist
party (Milli Firka) as the titular head of the new ASSR. Although this was
never more than a marriage of convenience for Moscow, geographic isolation
and technical impediments gave these Tatar nationalists considerable latitude
to correct perceived injustices perpetrated by the tsars and commissars. 31 The
Crimean Tatar ASSR— now led by the head of Milli Firka, Veli Ibrahimov
[Ibragimov]— thereby exercised significant, albeit incomplete, autonomy and
oversaw a renaissance of Tatar culture in the mid-1920s.32 In most respects,
the national units in Crimea and southern Ukraine thus conformed to the
general structure of the Soviet Union in the 1920s — the apportionment of
some political power to indigenous ethnic groups.33
Multi-ethnicity in the peninsula appreciably offset the status granted to
Ibrahimov’s regime (known collectively as Tatar communists). Sizable emigra-
tion to the Ottoman Empire after the Crimean War and savage fighting dur-
ing the Civil War had heavily depleted their presence (particularly in the
countryside), reducing the Tatars to one-quarter of Crimea’s population in
1921. The remaining Tatars were usually devout Muslims, socially conserva-
tive and resistant to Bolshevik ideology. 34 Thus, a Muslim Tatar minority pre-
sided over a mix of Orthodox Ukrainians and Russians (51 percent of the
general population of 720,000), Mennonite Germans and Swiss (6 percent),
30
Yaacov Levavi reached a similar conclusion; see “Atudat ha-karka le-tsorkhei ha-hityashvut ha-
haklait ha-yehudit be-Krim,” Shvut 9 (1982): 66.
31
Alan Fisher, The Crimean Tatars (Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 1978), 135–36.
138–40.
32
Brian G. Williams, “A Community Reimagined. The Role of ‘Homeland’ in the Forging of
National Identity: The Case of the Crimean Tatars,” Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs 17, 2
(1997): 230–33; and Marples and Duke, “Ukraine, Russia, and the Question of Crimea,” 265.
Unlike the Tatar ASSR in the Volga region, the title “Crimean ASSR” did not include an ethnic
reference. Ibrahimov served as both chairman of the Crimean Narkomzem and the Crimean
TsIK.
33
Elsewhere, large internal migrations or Moscow’s deliberate incitement of hostility between
ethnic groups limited the power of majority nationalities. See Simon, Nationalism and Policy,
passim.
34
Kas′ianov, Krymskaia ASSR, 1–4.
Lutheran Estonians, and urban Jews.35 Few of these groups had a natural af-
finity for urban, Russian communism.
In any discussion of Crimea, it is important to remember that the penin-
sula had ignited and survived political storms before and after the revolution.
Associated for generations with leisure and aristocratic privilege, it carried a
special significance for Russians, though few had partaken of Crimea’s rare
treats. Notwithstanding the devastation of civil war, contemporaries warmly
recalled the peninsula’s rich agricultural history; it was, and remained, a valued
prize.36 No matter who ruled, Crimea did not lend itself to easy control. One
railroad line passed through a land area approximately the size of Belgium;
passable roads, radios, newspapers, and telephones were rare, at least until the
1930s. Moreover, low literacy in rural Crimea, like elsewhere in the country,
impeded indoctrination.37 Indeed, the peninsula fit the mold of under-
government in the Soviet periphery; even among themselves, deeply rooted
tensions and prejudices divided southerners from the Tartars of the northern
steppes.38 Furthermore, because many of the non-Tatars who inhabited north-
ern Crimea resented the Tatarization mandated by korenizatsiia, Ibrahimov
probably elicited the loyalty of little more than the peninsula’s Tatar
35
P.A. Nikol′skii, Krym: naselenie (Simferopol: Krymgosizdat, 1929), 15; and Arcadius Kahan,
Essays in Jewish Social and Economic History, ed. R. Weiss (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1986), 48–49. The war years reduced the urban Jewish population of Crimea from 60,000 to
30,000, or approximately 7 percent of the peninsula’s population.
36
N. N. Klepinin, Sel′skoe khoziaistvo Kryma (Simferopol: Krymgosizdat, 1929), 4–5; and
Sovetskomu Krymu dvadtsat′ let, 134. Overall depopulation in rural Crimea reached 40 percent;
see YIVO, RG 358/104, 4 (Komzet to Sovnarkom, 1925).
37
Even in the late 1920s, half the Soviet peasantry was still illiterate. By contrast, the Germans
in Crimea had extraordinarily high literacy rates (71 percent), while that of the Crimean Tatars
ranged from 58 to 30 percent.
38
Simon claimed (Nationalism and Policy, 79) that the Tatar communists achieved significant
control over Crimea through education and administration, but this view holds only for the
urban and southern coastal regions. The two ethnic branches of Tatars in Crimea— steppe
Tatars in the northern plains, and lowland Tatars along the coast—consider themselves distinct
groups. Neither should be confused with Volga Tatars. The author thanks Roza Ayrychinskaia,
from the State Archive of Crimea, for this information. As other studies have shown, regional
leaders throughout the Soviet Union wielded only limited control into the mid–1930s. Many
rural administrations were unreliable and disinclined to combat massive peasant evasion of
orders from the Kremlin. See Nellie H. Ohr, “Collective Farms and Russian Peasant Society,
1933–37” (Ph.D. diss., Stanford University, 1990), 4; James R. Harris, “The Purging of Local
Cliques in the Urals, 1936–37” in Stalinism: New Directions, ed. Sheila Fitzpatrick (London:
Routledge, 2000), 262–64; and Andrea Graziosi, The Great Soviet Peasant War: Bolsheviks and
Peasants, 1917–1923 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), 58.
population.39 Consequently, his reach stopped a few kilometers to the north of

Simferopol.
In rural Crimea, colonization by non-Tatars preceded the Jewish influx
and set important precedents in the countryside. At the invitation of the tsars,
German colonists had settled in the peninsula starting in 1804; they
prospered, proliferated, and eventually came to dominate the rural landscape.40
Although contributing much to the rural economy, these Germans had few
social ties with indigenous Tatars or other national groups. The “otherness” of
these Europeans probably sensitized the Tatars in general, and the Tatar
communist leaders of the early 1920s in particular, to the potential benefits
and dangers of colonization by “outsiders.”
From the mid-1920s, the state gradually reasserted its authority over local
nationalists throughout the Soviet Union, beginning with the removal of
Mirza Sultan-Galiev (Ibrahimov’s political patron) from official posts.41
Among all the non-Slavic republics, ethnic and religious differences added to
the growing mistrust; Crimea was no exception. At bottom, Soviet leaders saw
Crimea as a foreign land and people, bred by class, culture, and religion to be
39
Williams, “A Homeland Lost: Migration, the Diaspora Experience, and the Forging of
Crimean Tatar Identity” (Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin–Madison, 1999), 4, 547, 554.
Non-Tatars dominated the northern half of the peninsula. According to Fisher (Crimean Tatars,
139), Crimea was “one of the few Muslim territories of Soviet Russia where the political
importance of the native element was greater than its numerical importance.”
40
In 1917, there were 314 German colonies in Crimea, containing almost 31,000 colonists. See
Urs Rauber, “Zurichtal —A Swiss Village in the Crimea,” Heritage Review 11, 2 (1981): 32–33;
Adam Giesinger, trans., “Villages in Which Our Forefathers Lived,” Journal of the American
Historical Society of Germans from Russia 1, 1 (1978): 50–53; T. Eisenbraun, “The German
Settlements in the Crimea,” Journal of the American Historical Society of Germans from Russia 9, 2
(1986): 22–23; and L. P. Kravtsova, ed., Nemetskoe naselenie Tavricheskoi gubernii:
Annotirovannyi tematicheskii perechen′ del, 1 (Odessa: Astroprint, 2000), ix–xxv. For a study of
the German colonists in southern Ukraine, see Meir Buchsweiler, Ha-germanim ha-etnim
b’ukraina likrat milhemet ha-olam ha-shneyah (Tel Aviv: Diaspora Research Institute, 1980).
41
Galiev was the highest-ranking Muslim in the Communist Party hierarchy, a member of the
Tatar ASSR TsIK and a close associate of Stalin. In 1924, he was the first prominent party
functionary to be arrested under suspicion for conspiracy with Ibrahimov (and other prominent
Muslim leaders in other republics) to create a sovereign pan-Islamic state. Galiev never emerged
from prison. Moscow may have significantly overestimated this threat; see Kaiser, Geography of
Nationalism, 110.
anti-communist.42 Tatars, as non-Slavs with a troublesome recent history, were

suspect in Moscow, decades before their deportation in 1944.43
Shopkeepers and Peddlers in the Breach of the Center-Periphery Conflict
The Tatar communists and the first generation of republican leaders in
Ukraine never shared Moscow’s enthusiasm for Jewish colonization. On the
contrary, Jewish settlement contributed to the local leaders’ terminal clashes
with the center. The establishment of official and informal Jewish territorial
blocs seemed to encroach on the ethnic identity of the host national autono-
mous entities, reduced their available land area, and deepened their worry over
dwindling resources.44 Even if the Soviet authorities prioritized Jewish reset-
tlement, the Tatar communists still believed that the lands allotted by the gov-
ernment for colonization should be committed to the resettlement of their
brethren purportedly about to return from Romania or for the relief of impov-
erished mountain Tatars. Making matters worse in the eyes of the Tatar and
Ukrainian leaders, the Jewish units came under external administrative and
service umbrellas (the foreign philanthropies and Komzet). This heightened
wariness in Simferopol and Kiev about the intentions of Moscow and the
colonizing organizations.
For local leaders, already uncomfortable with a pattern of decrees from the
center, the Jewish colonies were an outright provocation. In their view, the
colonists—even if unwittingly— served as agents for the expansion of central-
ized (or “foreign”) rule. Tatar communists genuinely believed in the legitimacy
of their local autonomy and bridled against this obvious violation of their po-
litical space. 45 In response to this perceived threat, the Crimean and Ukrainian
42
GARF f. r–1235, op. 140, d. 219, l. 71 (TsIK information, November 1920–April 1925).
Even Tatar communist leaders lamented the clericalism still rampant among their people. See
GAARK f. p–1, op. 1, d. 463, l. 79 (protocol of obkom bureau, 27 August 1927).
43
Williams, “A Community Reimagined,” 233–34; and Mattityahu Mintz (conversation with
the author, Tel Aviv University, 21 November 1999). Ethnic mistrust replicated itself within
Crimea; obkom reports, authored by ethnic Russians and Tatars, attacked local Germans; see
GAARK f. p–1, op. 1, d. 462, l. 162 (report of the obkom meeting, 29 June 1926)
44
GAARK f. p–1, op. 1, d. 378, l. 13 (protocol no. 11 of obkom secretariat, 14 February 1925);
d. 376, ll. 35–36 (protocol no. 22 of obkom presidium, 4 June 1925), ll. 45–49 (protocol no.
26 of obkom presidium, 16 June 1925); and d. 463, ll. 77–78 (protocol of obkom bureau, 27
August 1926). From this final protocol (l. 45), it appears that some members of the obkom
feared Soviet retribution but still favored limited resistance. For more on Tatar resistance, see
Yaacov Levavi, “‘Ha-Ibrahimovshchina’ ve-ha-hityashvut ha-yehudit be-Krim,” Shvut 3 (1975):
35–40; Levavi, Haklaim yehudim b’aravot Krim, 5 and chap. 3.
45
GAARK f. p–1, op. 1, d. 699, ll. 104–11 (protocol no. 10a: closed meeting of the obkom
bureau, 17 March 1927). This was a trait common to Soviet national autonomous entities; see
Kaiser, Geography of Nationalism, 384.
governments tried to eliminate, or at least reduce, the resettlement quotas and

land allotments. Bad timing worsened matters for the Tatar communists: Sim-
feropol’s attempt to flex its political muscles coincided with the center’s cam-
paign against local nationalists (which had just begun with the demotion of
Sultan-Galiev). Beginning in late 1924, Ibrahimov and others triggered a
forceful response from the center by blatant obstruction of Sovnarkom direc-
tives on colonization.46 Contrary to the image presented in contemporary So-
viet pamphlets, Tatar resistance to Jewish colonization derived neither from
the personal caprice of Veli Ibrahimov nor from a narrow cabal of extremists. 47
Rather, Moscow’s unilateral orders to allocate land to Jewish colonists had
kindled antagonism throughout the Crimean government.
Colonization proved a decisive weapon as the Soviet regime, with help
from loyalists in Simferopol, broke the Tatar communist leadership. The
Agro-Joint and its colonists had inadvertently given the center a pretext to as-
sert its authority over local, “chauvinistic,” leaders. Caught in a conflict larger
than the colonization enterprise, and desperate to ensure its rights to govern-
ment lands, the Agro-Joint informally allied with the Kremlin against the Ta-
tar communists. 48 Enthusiasm, a sense of urgency, and fortuitous timing
propelled Samuil Efimovich Liubarskii [Samuel Lubarsky] (the future assistant
director of Agro-Joint) into a quasi-government function, as Komzet ap-
pointed him its plenipotentiary to the Crimean government in 1925.49 His
subsequent report on Tatar communist resistance to Soviet authority proved
46
An emissary from Moscow (Iulii Gol′de) was sent to Simferopol to discuss the allotments but
was shunned by the Tatar communists upon his arrival; see GARF f. r–7541, op. 1, d. 19, l. 14
(Gol′de’s report, 8 November–4 December 1924).
47
S. Ragatskin, “Sotsialisticheskoe sel′skoe khoziaistvo” in Sovetskomu Krymu dvadtsat′ let,
135–37; I. M. Bregman, “Puti evreiskim koloniiam,” in Protiv antisemitizma, ed. Gleb
Vasil′evich Alekseev (Moscow: Zhizn ′ i znanie, 1930), 201; and Giorgii Reitanovskii, N a
kolkhoznoi zemle (Simferopol: Krymgosizdat, 1933), 21. The interpretation of
“counterrevolutionary” cabal infected sources as far away as the U.S. ambassador to the USSR;
see National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), RG 59, Decimal File, 1930–39,
861.00/11774, 66 (Davies to the Secretary of State, 17 March 1938).
48
JDC leaders were aware of this aspect of colonization almost from its inception; see JDC 508,
2 (Rosen to board of trustees, 31 December 1924). Earlier, Rosen mistakenly predicted that the
Crimean government would welcome colonization. Meetings with low-level Ukrainian officials
convinced him that a desire to improve rural conditions outweighed any resistance; see JDC
508, 10–11 (minutes of the Committee of Seven, 17 June 1924).
49
As the responsible government agency, Komzet represented the state on all domestic matters
connected to Jewish colonization. The All-Union Sovnarkom determined the overall size of the
land allocations, whereas the Komzet was responsible for implementing these directives.
disastrous for Ibrahimov. 50 He told Komzet of the “lack of concern for state
interests in the position of the Crimean Narkomzem,” not simply their resis-
tance to colonization.51 The director of the Agro-Joint (Dr. Joseph Rosen)
followed Liubarskii’s report with an impassioned appeal to Komzet for action.
Despite forceful demands, Tatar communist leaders refused to fulfill Komzet’s
quotas for land allotments for Jewish colonization.52 An ominous sign of what
lay ahead came in the autumn of 1925, with a scathing report from the secre-
tary of the obkom (Petropavlovskii), a pivotal Moscow loyalist; he recom-
mended to Stalin that the Tatar “right-nationalist” class enemies, kulaks, bour-
geois, and intelligentsia be removed from the obkom.53
Letters from individual colonies further fueled the anger in Moscow to-
ward Simferopol. Here, the authors emphasized the national ramifications of
Tatar communist resistance to directives from Komzet and Sovnarkom on
land allocations for Jewish colonization. For example, an open letter from the
Pobeda artel to the national Yiddish-language newspaper (Emes) implored the
VTsIK to force compliance among the Tatar communists; after all, Jewish
colonization had already achieved “colossal global political significance.”54
Such appeals alluded to the implications of Jewish colonization manifest in the
involvement of foreign philanthropic organizations, the potential of the
project to solve the traditional “Jewish question,” and in the possible creation
of a Soviet-Jewish homeland. These calls reinforced the Kremlin’s centrist
agenda and primed it for stern action against such seemingly wanton resistance
in Simferopol.
Moscow— wary, and still in the midst of the succession struggle— moved
incrementally from legalistic and administrative finesse to brute force in order
to break local resistance to Jewish colonization. Komzet at first outmaneuvered
Simferopol’s attempt to invoke the Soviet Land Codex in 1925.55 Two years
50
Komzet sent Liubarskii to conclude land allotments following the debacle with Gol′de; see
GARF f. r–7541, op. 1, d. 19 (Liubarskii’s travel mandate, January 1925). Komzet’s policy
recommendation to Sovnarkom of the RSFSR drew heavily from Liubarskii’s report. See YIVO,
RG 358/104, 1–9 (Komzet to Sovnarkom, 1925).
51
YIVO, RG 358/195, 19 (Liubarskii’s report on Crimea, 17–31 January 1925).
52
GARF f. r–7541, op. 1, d. 19, l. 108 (Rosen to Merezhin, 10 March 1925), ll. 103–4
(Merezhin and Bragin to Komzet, 19 March 1925).
53
Rossiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv sotsial′no-politicheskoi istorii (RGASPI) f. 17, op. 84, d.
722, ll. 128, 132, 135 (Petropavlovskii to Stalin, 15 October 1925).
54
GARF f. r–7541, op. 1, d. 74, ll. 94–95 (Gorelik to Fridman, 1 December 1925).
55
Tatar communists eventually appropriated land after losing an appeal to the Economic
Council of the USSR. See YIVO, RG 358/104, 6 (Komzet to Sovnarkom, 1925); GARF f.
r–7541, op. 1, d. 131, ll. 1–2 (protocol no. 1 of the TsIK presidium, 16 February 1927), ll. 3–4
(protocol no. 2 of the TsIK presidium, 17 February 1927); and Keren, Ha-hityashvut, 75–76.
later, the regime still tended more to cajole than to coerce the Tatar commu-
nists; Moscow’s loyalists in Simferopol invoked the socialist duty of the Tatar
communists to support Jewish resettlement and went no further than implied
threats.56 Concurrently, an influential proponent of colonization in Moscow
(Iurii Larin) vilified the Tatar communist leadership.57 In a scathing condem-
nation of Ibrahimov to the VTsIK, Larin invoked the center-periphery issue,
not just colonization. 58 Removal of the Tatar communists began shortly there-
after, culminating in the execution of Ibrahimov in May 1928.59 With the po-
litical situation apparently under control, Moscow delayed cultural
russification in Crimea until the mid-1930s.60
Colonization had a lesser but significant impact on the conflict between
center and periphery in Ukraine. Armed with greater leverage than Simferopol
(and not troubled by the ethnic and religious friction that vexed relations be-
tween the Tatar communists and the Kremlin), political maneuvers by the
Ukrainian Narkomzem and Central Committee were able to impede coloniza-
tion.61 This success can also be attributed, in part, to better concealment of
56
During a meeting of the obkom bureau, the Moscow loyalists coaxed the heretofore resistant
chairman of the Crimean Sovnarkom (Shugu) to participate in the party’s propaganda campaign
on behalf of Jewish settlement. While somewhat sympathetic to his anti-colonization position,
they left no doubt that his socialist duty required compliance with the campaign. See GAARK f.
p–1, op. 1, d. 699, ll. 108–11 (protocol no. 10a: restricted meeting of the obkom bureau, 17
March 1927).
57
Larin was the first chairman of Ozet and a member of the executive board of Komzet.
Although he never held a high post in the CPSU, he was influential among the country’s
economic elites until his death in 1932. Among other attributes, he was the father-in-law of
Nikolai Ivanovich Bukharin.
58
GARF f. r–5546, op. 55, d. 1030, ll. 5–14 (Larin to VTsIK, late 1926). Larin criticized even
Petropavlovskii for lack of sufficient vigilance against the Tatar communists.
59
GARF f. r–5546, op. 55, d. 1744 (protocol of Ibrahimov’s interrogation, 9 February 1928).
60
Williams, “Homeland Lost,” 555–56; Marples and Duke, “Ukraine, Russia, and the Question
of Crimea,” 266; “Kak Rossiia poteriala Krym,” Delovaia zhizn′, no. 10 (1998): 29. In the
aftermath of Ibrahimov’s arrest, the GPU executed or exiled up to 3,500 Crimean Tatar leaders
and intelligentsia (“the flower of Tatar intelligentsia”). Most of the victims had connections to
Milli Firka. The sources do not concur on the charges brought by the GPU against Ibrahimov
and others; they range from kidnapping, murder, and embezzlement to conspiracy with a
foreign power.
61
RGASPI f. 151, op. 1, d. 43, ll. 26–31 (Vol′f to Iaroslavskii, December 1924); Boris Zinger
and Lilia Belenkaia, “Stages in the Formation of Policy on the Jewish Question in the CPSU,
1917–28,” Shvut 19 (1996): 144..
their resistance from the outside world.62 Their effectiveness should not be
overestimated, however.63 In the end, the Ukrainians slowed but did not halt
colonization. Komzet enlisted higher authorities to overcome these and other
attempts to deflect colonization from southern Ukraine to Crimea or “the
East.”64 The outcome of Ukrainian resistance to Moscow’s directives on colo-
nization differed fundamentally from the Crimean version in another
respect— its actors (men like Vlas Chubar ′) survived the episode only to fall
victim to purges in the 1930s.65 In sum, the conflict between republican
authorities and Moscow over Jewish colonization must be measured mainly
within an ongoing tug-of-war between center and periphery, not simply as an
outgrowth of official antisemitism.66 As shall be seen shortly, antisemitism to-
ward Jewish newcomers materialized from below no less than from above.
The arrival of colonists altered the local environment in several ways. Be-
cause the lands allotted to the Komzet (and by extension, to the Jewish settlers)
did not lack claimants among the indigenous peoples, colonization sparked
62
The American Jewish Yearbook 27 (1925), 61. This installment noted that “while the
government of Ukraine has shown its interest in the colonization of Jews, the Crimean
authorities, according to press reports, appear to be unfavorably inclined toward the project.”
63
Mattityahu Mintz suggested that the resistance of authorities in Kuban, Ukraine, and Crimea
forced the Soviet state to seek solutions for the Jewish problem elsewhere; see “Problems of
Agricultural Resettlement and Territorialization of the Jews in Soviet Russia during the 1920s,”
Shvut 17–18 (1995): 144–45. In fact, the Soviet shift to Birobidzhan (1928–34) came after
removal of the Tatar communist leadership and suppression of the Ukrainian tactics. The
Kuban plan disintegrated because the Dutch company hired for swamp drainage reneged; see
Akiva Etinger, Im haklaim yehudim be-tefutsot (Merhavia: Ha-kibuts ha-artsi, 1942), 229; Allan
Kagedan similarly overstated the effect of Ukrainian resistance that “led Soviet government
officials to shift the program’s focus to the Crimea.” See Soviet Zion: The Quest for a Russian
Jewish Homeland (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994), 78–79.
64
GARF f. r–5546, op. 55, d. 856, l. 9 (Smidovich to Stalin, 26 May 1925), d. 1516, ll.
132–34 (Smidovich and Merezhin to Politburo, 28 November 1927). Moscow eliminated
Ukraine’s role in colonization during the early 1930s; it, not Kiev, negotiated Agro-Joint’s
temporary withdrawal and return to southern Ukraine (in late 1930 and January 1933).
According to an Agro-Joint source, Moscow wanted the Ukrainian republic to fund Jewish
colonization, thereby maximalizing Agro-Joint’s impact in Crimea; see JDC 457a, 1 (discussion
with Grower, 20 January 1932).
65
Chubar′’s fate matched that of other Ukrainian nationalists more inclined toward Jewish
colonization (Mykola Skrypnik and Khristian Rakovskii).
66
The Ukrainian Narkomzem chairman clearly defined resistance to colonization in terms of
center and periphery; see YIVO, RG 358/88 (Aleksandr Grigor ′evich Shlikhter, “Pravda o
evreiskom pereselenii,” Bolshevik Ukrainy, no. 9 [September 1927]). Allan Kagedan has argued
that the Soviets compromised with the Ukrainians by granting Jews autonomous districts
(raiony) instead of an ASSR or SSR; see “Jewish Territorial Units and Ukrainian–Jewish
Relations,” Harvard Ukrainian Studies 9, no. 112 (1985): 126–27, 129, 131.
quick, grass-roots reactions against the perceived injustice of the government’s

affirmative action on behalf of the Jewish newcomers.67 Most markedly, immi-
gration (by Jews and, to a lesser extent, other ethnic groups) soaked up much
of the government land that had been staples of previous rental arrangements,
most often from Germans. 68 Fearful of possible eviction from these and other
parcels, German colonists frequently lashed out against their new neighbors,
sure that they had conspired with a seemingly Jewish-controlled regime in
Moscow.69 As “proof” of this discrimination, many embittered local Germans
pointed out that the state did not give them equipment equal to that provided
by the Agro-Joint to the Jewish newcomers. 70
The abuse heaped on the Jewish colonists by the indigenous population
thus represented an attack on the center over the violations of existing land
tenure arrangements, added to frustration with the widening gaps between the
general rural squalor and the emerging prosperity in Jewish settlements.71
Neighboring peasants asked, “why did these alien people come, why did ‘some
kind of American’ appear?” Quite soon, however, hostility gave way to
amazement that Jews were capable of manual labor.72 Other attacks conformed
67
GARF f. r–7541, op. 1, d. 74, ll. 94–95 (Gorelik to Fridman, 1 December 1925). German
colonists had leased and purchased land for generations outside of their original household
parcels. See Ingeborg Fleischhauer and Benjamin Pinkus, The Soviet Germans, Past and Present
(London: Hurst, 1986), 3; Rauber, “Zurichtal”; Giesinger, “Villages in Which Our Forefathers
Lived”; Eisenbraun, “German Settlements in the Crimea.”
68
GAARK f. r–515, op. 1, d. 14, l. 23 (Martens to Gashek, 17 October 1927); YIVO, RG
358/224, 3 (statistical report on Jewish collectives in Crimea, 1 January 1926).
69
NARA, RG 59, Decimal file, 1910–29, 861.5017, Living Conditions/109, 2, 5 (Coleman to
the State Department, 13 November 1929); GAARK f. p–1, op. 1, d. 917, l. 2 (Evsektsiia
agitpropotdel report on antisemitism, 1929).
70
GAARK f. p–1, op. 1, d. 477, l. 58 (Loit to Petropavlovskii, 31 May 1926), d. 830, l. 6
(Gurevich to Takser, 1 January 1928).
71
F. Fal′ko, “V gostiakh u evreev-krest′ian,” Tribuna 8 (1927): 10–11. While new, spacious
homes sprouted in Jewish colonies, most indigenous villagers could construct, at best, one-room
huts; see NARA, RG 59, Decimal File 1910–29, 861.52/92, 9 (Carlson to the Secretary of
State, October 1928). By partially insulating Jewish farmers from famines in 1927–28 and
1932–33, Agro-Joint’s modernization programs exacerbated tensions at moments of crisis; see
Aryeh Munitz, “Haklaim yehudim be-Ukraina be-tekufat ha-ra’av ha-gadol, 1932–34,” Shvut
11 (1985): 69. See also JDC 62a, 15 (Billikopf’s statements at press conference, 30 August
1926). Lewin found (Russian Peasants, 30) that 2.1 of the 5.3 million peasant households in
Ukraine in 1929 owned neither a horse nor an ox. Such cases were rare among Jewish colonists
after one or two years on the land.
72
GARF f. r–7746, op. 1, d. 278, l. 24 (visit of the Timiriazev Institute, 1929). For other
examples of adjustment to Jews, see GAARK f. p–1, op. 1, d. 557, l. 8 (Lobovokii’s report, 1
October 1926); JDC 530, 16 (Hyman’s impressions, 8 December 1928); and, Peretz
to trends of rural hooliganism— something hardly unique to this period or to

the area.73 If threats to “slaughter all the zhidy” accompanied some assaults on
colonists,74 enmity toward these seeming interlopers — regardless of their
ethnicity—was still the dominant dynamic.
Informal alliances of colonists, the Agro-Joint, and the central authorities
in the second half of the 1920s reduced local resistance and, at the same time,
increased the state’s penetration in the countryside. Some colonies took small-
scale, proactive measures as a first line of defense. Such tactics included the sta-
tioning of barking dogs around the perimeter of a colony, fieldwork only at
night to avoid confrontations with non-Jewish neighbors, and a formal request
for handguns.75 Most colonies, however, appealed to local police and village
soviets for protection. If dissatisfied, settlers then petitioned the Crimean
obkom or courts. When all else failed, they wrote to the authorities in
Moscow, who “intervened where local officials closed their eyes to antisemi-
tism.” 76 Beyond the deterrent effect of Soviet legal muscle, a conscious policy
among the foreign philanthropies probably encouraged local harmony. For its
part, the Agro-Joint befriended the neighboring non-Jews by the establishment
of cooperative business ventures, the drilling of wells, the distribution of high-
quality seeds, and other programs.77
Hirschbein, Shvartzbruk: Tsen hodashim mit di yidishe aibervanderer in Ratnfarband; Agai, Krim,
1928–1929 (Vilna: Klatskin, 1930), 112. According to a U.S. State Department report, some of
the surrounding villagers expected Jewish settlements to fail once the regime withdrew special
privileges—a development the neighbors believed imminent; see NARA, RG 59, Decimal File
1910–29, 861.52/92, 9 (Carlson to the Secretary of State, October 1928).
73
Some agronomists immediately recognized the attacks as hooliganism; see YIVO, RG
358/249, 26 (Zaichik’s report on Kherson region, 1925–28). For general assessment of rural
hooliganism, see Alexis Berelowitch and V. Danilov, eds., Sovetskaia derevnia glazami OGPU,
1923–1929, 2 (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2000), 414–15; Fitzpatrick, ed., Russia in the Era of NEP,
186–88, 198; and Fitzpatrick, Stalin’s Peasants, 235–36.
74
GAARK f. r–515, op. 1, d. 78, l. 61 (Grinshtein to Fridman, 21 May 1928). Zhid is a
Russian pejorative for “Jew.”
75
The Haklai colony also “took a series of measures, of a repressive character, against malicious
attackers.” See GARF f. r–7746, op. 3, d. 46, ll. 22–23 (questionnaire on relations with
neighboring farmers, 1928). See also GAARK f. r–515, op. 1, d. 78, l. 65 (Fridman to GPU, 28
September 1928); GAARK f. p–1, op. 1, d. 990, l. 144 (GPU report, 27 December 1930);
Viktor Grigor′evich Fink, Evrei na zemle (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel′stvo, 1929), 56;
and HSOHI, Kabakova interview.
76
V. Sotnichenko, “Evreiskaia sel ′skokhoziaistvennaiia kolonizatsiia na Ukraine v seredine 20-kh
godov XX veka,” Vestnik Evreiskogo Universiteta v Moskve, no. 3 (1997): 54, 58.
77
For further details of such projects, see JDC 541, 1 (Rosenberg to Warburg, Baerwald, 29
October 1931); and Abram Naumovich Merezhin, O sploshnoi kollektivizatsii i likvidatsii
kulachestva u evreiskikh pereselentsev (Moscow: Ozet, 1930), 42.
Jewish colonization was just one component of inter-ethnic relations in

the region. True, the settlers were especially alien to the southern steppes of
Soviet Russia: they usually knew nothing about agriculture, looked odd, and
spoke a “foreign” language (Yiddish). But conflicts also erupted among other
peoples. Compared to the struggles against the center, Jewish colonists were a
minor annoyance for most ethnic minorities. Therefore, when the leaders of
the national groups pondered their Jewish neighbors, it was in a broader con-
text of ethnic relations and power equations vis-à-vis the government.78
Agro-Joint: The Changing Face of Surrogacy, 1924–37
Due to the administrative gridlock common to the NEP, the Agro-Joint
played an otherwise unlikely role in the economic and political life of the
countryside. For example, land surveys by JDC and Komzet teams from 1923
onward revealed to the center salient points about contemporary Crimea and
guided much of the subsequent colonization policy, most markedly the unifi-
cation of tracts and the importance of establishing a reliable source of potable
water.79 The unique position attained by the Agro-Joint allowed it to negotiate
as an equal with a weak but ambitious government. In October 1924, its
director (Joseph Rosen) wielded sufficient clout with the Soviets to dictate
many terms of the first formal contract between the Joint and the Soviet
government. This included absolute independence for the dispensation and
the management of Agro-Joint’s resources and the insistence that Sovnarkom,
not just Komzet, ratify the agreement.80 Perhaps most surprising, the Agro-
Joint received veto power over the appointment of local Komzet officials.
Therefore, Dr. Rosen could contentedly report to the headquarters of the Joint
Distribution Committee in New York that the Komzet chairmen in Kherson,
Crimea, and Moscow were “men of our own selection. The representative in
Kherson, Mr. Strachum, is a good personal friend of mine of 25 years.” 81
Exhibiting considerable political common sense, its relative strengths did not
lead the leaders of the JDC in New York to press Moscow on issues where they
78
When Jewish communists from the Iungevald and Akhdut colonies distributed Soviet
propaganda in German villages of Crimea, this did not endear colonization to the neighbors
who were already uneasy about Moscow’s policies. See GAARK f. p–1, op. 1, d. 830, l. 7
(Gurevich to Takser, 1 January 1928).
79
Most tracts had no or, at best, broken wells.
80
JDC 508 (Rosen to Agro-Joint, 22 October 1924); JDC 508, 5 (Kahn to Rosenberg, 25 May
1925); JDC 508, 1 (Rosen to Agro-Joint, 31 December 1924). In Rosen’s opinion,
Sovnarkom’s ratification ensured nationwide acceptance of the agreement, whereas Komzet’s
signature did not have such clout.
81
JDC 508 (Rosen to Agro-Joint, 22 October 1924); JDC 508, 2 (Rosen to Rosenberg, 27
March 1925).
seemed to have no leverage, most notably on the official policy toward

organized religion.
The agreements signed with the Soviets, together with the implicit value
of its American sponsors (the JDC), invested the Agro-Joint with prestige and
influence far beyond its material importance. Empowered with this political
asset, the directors of the Agro-Joint in Russia then persuaded both their own
employees and Soviet counterparts by invoking the “will” of the American
benefactors. This found immediate expression in overcoming local resistance
to expanded land allotments in late 1924. On learning that “the JDC con-
sidered [this] as a practical experiment, on the basis of which the Americans will
decide [sic]” the Ukrainian government relented to Komzet’s demands; the
specter of losing American dollars evidently overpowered their nationalist pri-
orities.82 In the winter of 1927–28, the negotiations for renewal of the 1924
contract illustrated similar power configurations. Sensing turmoil in the Soviet
government following the defeat of the Left Opposition, Joint officials in New
York pressured Rosen to seek additional concessions for colonization.
Settlers and Agro-Joint agronomists faced comparable challenges in the
vacuum of state administrative authority. Each explored its position and
maneuvering room while Moscow and the regional capitals dealt in high
politics. Reinstatement of voting rights to the former lishentsy, exemptions
from tax and military service, and favorable loans encouraged the recruitment
of new colonists in the shtetls, but murky legal issues with the state impeded
progress on the ground.83 For instance, confusion over the new legal terms of
landownership in the first years of organized settlement slowed introduction of
vineyards—a particularly profitable farm branch. Unsure of their future rights
for a crop that demanded a multiyear commitment, settlers delayed planting. 84
Colonists hedged against these types of uncertainties by staking de facto claims
82
Although the Ukrainians yielded on allocation of land, they resisted resettlement of Jews from
outside Ukraine. See RGASPI f. f–151, op. 1, d. 42, l. 27 (Vol′f to Iaroslavskii, December
1924); Arthur Ruppin, Ha-hityashvut ha-haklait shel ha-yehudim be-Rusya (Tel Aviv: Ha-poel
ha-tsair, 1928), 12. This pattern was reversed in the Belorussian case; local authorities lost the
battle with Moscow to develop local Jewish colonies. Instead, Ozet actively recruited Belorussian
Jews for settlement elsewhere; see Chone Shmeruk, “Ha-kibuts ha-yehudi veha-hityashvut ha-
haklait be-Belorusya ha-sovietit, 1918–32,” (Ph.D. diss., Hebrew University of Jerusalem,
1961), 65, 72, 74, 94.
83
For details of colonists’ rights, see Iuli V. Gol′de, Evrei —zemledel′tsy v Krymu (Moscow:
Komzet, 1931), 28–31.
84
YIVO, RG 358/104, 8 (Komzet to Sovnarkom, 1925). Vineyards yield fruit three to five years
after planting.
to fields; they intentionally ploughed surplus land to maximize occupancy.85 A

lesser predicament concerned the extension of voting rights to settlers whose
families remained in the shtetls of the former Pale. Around the time of a
renewed national crackdown against lishentsy in 1928, Komzet began to
disenfranchise colonists who received outside income— usually generated by
businesses or property left to relatives and friends in the shtetls.86 Even after
Agro-Joint helped mediate these issues, new legal problems between the settlers
and local authorities invariably arose and had to be resolved.
Owing to the weakness of the state during the 1920s, Agro-Joint agrono-
mists were, by default, the only authority figures and service providers new
colonists saw in the first three years of settlement. In practice, the agronomists
managed small administrative fiefdoms; each dealt with housing, credit, farm,
supply, cultural, and transportation issues for six to eight new settlements, and
then they cleared fields for future tracts.87 Although some faltered in their
duties,88 the agronomists bestowed far more guidance on the colonies than on
any other farming sector in the USSR—a factor essential to the success of the
compact settlement blocs. 89 The fate of Jewish colonies outside the Agro-
Joint’s protective shield showed the risks of rural disorder. In such cases,
envious local authorities preyed with ease upon the assets of unaffiliated Jewish
collectives. 90
85
YIVO, RG 358/161, 1 (Bizer’s analysis of the Mil′man farm, 1929). On its face, this behavior
might seem counterintuitive. In the context of the time, however, it was rational. Occupancy
was a key factor in legal cases on land tenure in Soviet courts during the NEP.
86
GARF f. r–7541, op. 1, d. 257 (correspondence from the Crimean Komzet, May 1928). It
appears that this was a very limited phenomenon. From the Soviet perspective, voting rights
symbolized full citizenship, though this had only limited utility for settlers. A Politburo decision
of January 1927 extended voting rights to settlers in Crimea and Birobidzhan; see Gol ′de,
Evrei —zemledel′tsy v Krymu, 30.
87
YIVO 358/151, 1 (Surdutovich’s account, 30 October 1926); YIVO, RG 358/151, 1
(Dashkovskii to Crimean Agro-Joint, 1 December 1926).
88
GARF f. r–7746, op. 5, d. 16, l. 4 (Ezerskii’s report, 5–23 April 1926); GARF f. r–7746, op.
3, d. 5, l. 3 (protocol of Komzet meeting with Agro-Joint, 10 March 1925); GAARK f. r–515,
op. 1, d. 152, ll. 96–97 (Gelman to Temkin, May 1930); Abram Naumovich Merezhin, Pervaia
vesna sploshnoi kollektivizatsii u evreiskikh pereselentsev (Moscow: Ozet, 1931), 14–15.
89
GARF f. r–7746, op. 1, d. 278, l. 19 (visit of Timiriazev Academy, 1929); YIVO, RG
358/158, 34 (meeting of Agro-Joint staff).
90
The Sevastopol city council victimized a Jewish collective that Agro-Joint had previously
disavowed for legal reasons. See GAARK f. r–515, op. 1 d. 123, ll. 158–59 (Novyi Byt′ to
Komzet, August 1929), ll. 146–47 (report on Novyi Byt ′, autumn 1929), l. 153 (Sevastopol city
council resolutions, 12 October 1929), ll. 150–51 (Novyi Byt ′ to Komzet, 18 October 1929),
and ll. 137–38 (Turkov to Komzet, 8 November 1929).
In light of the multiple sources of administrative authority in the country-

side, fluid alliances formed among the Agro-Joint, Komzet, and settlers. Ini-
tially, colonists allied with Komzet (a state organ) against Agro-Joint (then
perceived as the preeminent local power) to achieve particular goals.91 Indeed,
as the surrogate authority in the colonies, the Agro-Joint (a foreign
philanthropy), not the state, bore the brunt of the settlers’ complaints. At the
same time, its agronomists brokered no-win conflicts between the boards of
colonies and obstinate settlers. The Agro-Joint staff also insulated the colonists
from the state by absorbing complaints that might otherwise have gone up the
government’s bureaucratic ladder. Although this may have undermined their
credibility with some settlers, the Agro-Joint agronomists thereby sheltered
colonists from the probable intervention of the state, had such altercations
come to the attention of Komzet.92 Indeed, Agro-Joint agronomists continued
to obscure colonists’ improprieties, even as the state (via Komzet) became
more intrusive in the late 1920s. 93 For example, Iakov M. Surdutovich knew
of multiple, illegal land rentals but withheld the information until confronted
by the chairman of the Crimean Komzet. 94 This type of behavior, however,
did not preclude cooperative efforts of the Agro-Joint and Komzet to
discipline particularly troublesome colonists.95 But overall, the state
(represented by Komzet) usually intervened aggressively in the settlers’ lives
only in the wake of direct appeals (for, among other things, a better cow) or in
response to spasmodic pressures from above.96
As the surrogate authority, the experiences of Agro-Joint paralleled certain
trends normally associated with the state. Just as Russian peasants assumed
that “if Moscow only knew,” it would correct local suffering, Jewish colonists
91
Debates frequently arose between settlers and the service organizations over the style and size
of homes. See YIVO, RG 358/198 (Friedman’s report on Agro-Joint, 1 January–1 October
1926).
92
YIVO, RG 358/119, 7 (Raskin’s report to Agro-Joint Moscow, mid-1927).
93
YIVO, RG 358/227, 92–96 (conference at Sde Menucha); YIVO, RG 358/119, 7 (Raskin’s
report).
94
GARF f. r–7541, op. 1, d. 211, l. 39 (Fridman to Komzet Moscow, 4 April 1928).
95
Agro-Joint officials also unilaterally disciplined “reckless” colonists; see JDC 530, 7, 12
(Hyman’s impressions, 8 December 1928). For more on disciplinary actions against colonists,
see below.
96
GAARK f. r–515, op. 1, d. 416, ll. 113–17 (Mandel′shtam to Emes, May 1934), (Trotskii to
Mandel′shtam, 17 May 1934); d. 488, l. 43 (Gel ′man to Komzet Moscow, October 1935), l. 42
(Trotskii to Crimean Komzet, 16 October 1935); and d. 14, ll. 181–82 (Dubovskii,
Finkel′shtein, Plagov to Crimean Komzet, 1926)
idolized Agro-Joint’s directors.97 Specifically, colonists often focused their rage

on local agronomists but apparently venerated Joseph Rosen and Samuil
Liubarskii (the director and assistant director of the Agro-Joint) as benevolent,
if distant, figures. 98 More important to the majority of colonists, heavy debts
made them wary of the Agro-Joint. Because the Agro-Joint was the largest sin-
gle creditor for most colonists, it often appeared to them more burdensome
than the government and became a primary target for their barbs.99
The transfer of colonies in the Evpatoriia district of Crimea from the su-
pervision of Ozet (the Soviet committee created to support Jewish coloniza-
tion) in 1929–30 further illustrated how an informal alliance between
colonists and the Agro-Joint could override government policy. The 1924
contract between the Sovnarkom and the Agro-Joint had made Ozet
responsible for Jewish colonization in the Evpatoriia district. This semi-official
party organ, however, had proven utterly inept as a settlement organization.
Pushed by appeals from settlers in the district, the Agro-Joint petitioned the
central government (through the local offices of Komzet) for the transfer.
Initially disinclined, Moscow eventually yielded to the pressure and reassigned
authority to the Agro-Joint.100
Conscious of the center’s inadequacy during the early years of settlement,
most local officials looked benignly on the Agro-Joint. As a visitor from the
Ukrainian Narkomzem confessed: “If the situation of Jewish settlers is not so
great, at least this situation is no worse than the rest of Ukraine, where there is
neither Soviet authority nor Agro-Joint.”101 Whereas pragmatic authorities ini-
tially had accepted the Agro-Joint’s local power, their discomfort increased in
concert with the greater political ambitions that rained down from above.
Nevertheless, Agro-Joint was a dominant factor in rural life throughout the
97
For discussions of peasants’ appeals to the center, see Lynne Viola, Peasant Rebels under Stalin
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 231; Fitzpatrick, Stalin’s Peasants, 44; and Lewin,
Russian Peasants, 35–36.
98
Abe Cahan, “Jewish Colonization in Soviet Russia a Success,” Forward, 6 November 1927, E
2, and HSOHI, Shmugliakova interview.
99
YIVO, RG 358/227, 92–96 (protocol of conference at Sde Menucha, December 1925).
Household debt averaged from 1,050 to 1,900 rubles for homes, equipment, and livestock.
These were sizable sums, considering that the average monthly income hovered around 50
rubles. See GARF f. r–7746, op. 1, d. 119, l. 1 (register of debts of Rosenvald’s members, 1
October 1926).
100
GARF f. r–7541, op. 1, d. 331, ll. 2–10 (Zaichik’s report, 28 November 1929), ll. 11–12
(Komzet Evpatoriia to Komzet Moscow, 4 January 1930). These colonies never fully recovered
from the years of Ozet’s incompetence.
101
YIVO, RG 358/246, 3 (Zaichik to Liubarskii, 26 July 1926).
regions of Jewish colonization and funneled information upward well into the
1930s.
The state tolerated Agro-Joint for over a decade because it needed order in
the countryside. On the one hand, chronic failure by organizations more
closely identified with the regime—namely, Ozet and the sovietized branch of
the Organization for Rehabilitation of Jews through Training (ORT)— had
shown that not everyone could manage the colonization project and bring
economic progress to the region. On the other hand, the state had faltered in
attempts to manage northern Crimea and southern Ukraine without the Joint.
Despite its attempts to gather hard data about the colonies up to 1930,
Komzet (hence, the government) knew little beyond what it was told by the
Agro-Joint and seldom acted without the latter’s cooperation.102 Gradual su-
percession of the Agro-Joint in some administrative roles, shakeups of Komzet
personnel,103 and the transfer of equipment to state-operated Machine Tractor
Stations (MTS) during total (sploshnoi) collectivization did not wholly remedy
the situation; the Crimean obkom still could not obtain reliable information
and MTS service often failed, at least into the mid-1930s.104
The heightened state activism embodied by total collectivization did not
result in the summary displacement of surrogate authority. The Agro-Joint
could still withhold resources, openly criticize the state’s inadequacies among
102
When drafting a supportive article for colonization (“Response to Comrade Ovchinnikov”)
in Krest′ianskaia gazeta (and reissued in Izvestiia a week later), Kalinin relied on material from an
internal Agro-Joint memo. This was indicative of the information available to the Kremlin and
the degree of intimacy with Agro-Joint. See RGASPI f. f–78, op. 1, d. 217 (Belov-Shcheglov’s
report, 4 September 1926). The Crimean obkom complained that Komzet reports relied wholly
on Agro-Joint material. See GAARK f. p–1, op. 1, d. 990, ll. 7–8, 24 (material for obkom, late
1930). Komzet coordinated action with Agro-Joint to evict particularly “demoralizing” settlers.
See GARF f. r–7746, op. 1, d. 256, ll. 1–8 (instructions for checking the status of settlers,
1929); GAARK f. r–515, op. 1, d. 121, ll. 8–9 (Temkin to Komzet, 5 September 1929), and d.
133, ll. 41–42 (protocol of Evpatoriia Komzet, 12–22 September 1929). See also GAARK f.
p–1, op. 1, d. 1034, ll. 5–7 (protocol of the Evsektsiia obkom bureau, 18 January 1930);
GAARK f. r–515, op. 1, d. 108, l. 20 (Dashkovskii to Agro-Joint, 3 September 1929), l. 19
(Aizenberg to Komzet, 5 September 1929), and l. 18 (Temkin to Komzet, 5 October 1929).
103
Most significant was replacement of the Komzet chairman (A. Merezhin) in 1931.
104
GAARK f. r–515, op. 1, d. 414, l. 68 (Mandel′shtam to Zaichik, 16 May 1934), l. 67
(Zaichik to Mandel ′shtam, 22 May 1934); GAARK f. p–1, op. 1, d. 1208, l. 203 (Levin’s
report, late 1933); GAARK f. p–1, op. 1, d. 1397, l. 229 (protocol no. 62 of the obkom bureau,
5 August 1935); JDC 531, 1 (Smolar’s report); American Jewish Archive (AJA), Felix Warburg
Papers (WP), Box 265/1 (Rosen to Agro-Joint, 27 May 1930); “K otvetu: vinovnikov sryva seva
v Kalinindorfskom raione,” Tribuna, no. 12 (1932): 14; and Reitanovskii, Na kolkhoznoi zemle,
54–59.
the settlers and Komzet personnel,105 participate as a legitimate partner in the

local debate about the preferred form of collectivization, haggle with govern-
ment agencies over the proper distribution of agronomists, and bargain with
Moscow on behalf of imprisoned Hehalutz members.106 This power brought
many in the state’s regional administration to call for the restriction of the
Agro-Joint’s local authority and the sovietization— but not elimination—of
colonization.107 Notwithstanding these pressures, Agro-Joint’s logistic support
to the settlements in 1936–38 bridged a period of Soviet administrative chaos
by alleviating chronic fiascoes in the state supply system and (together with
ORT-Farband) through the investment in winter workshops, electrification,
irrigation, and high-profit crops.108
Colonization and the State’s Velvet Fist
Educational and cultural activities, or the lack thereof, were a sign of the be-
lated entry of the state into daily rural life. Colonies, mostly with their own
105
GAARK f. r–515, op. 1, d. 123, l. 15 (Reznichenko and Tyshkovokii to Komzet chairman,
31 March 1929), d. 133, l. 41 (protocol of Evpatoriia Komzet, 21–22 September 1929), d. 990,
l. 148 (GPU report, 27 December 1930), d. 414, l. 67 (Zaichik to Mandel ′shtam, 22 May
1934); and GARF f. r–7541, op. 1, d. 331, ll. 11–12 (Komzet Evpatoriia to Komzet Moscow, 4
January 1930).
106
According to a report from the Evsektsiia, representatives from the Agro-Joint and Komzet
worked together to develop the farm plan for the Jewish settlements in Ukraine for 1930; see
GAARK f. p–1, op. 1, d. 1034, ll. 5–7 (protocol of the Evsektsiia obkom, 18 January 1930). In
another case, the director of Agro-Joint operations in Crimea protested to Komzet that recent
graduates of the Chebotarsk Agricultural Training Institute had been assigned improper tasks
and therefore could not apply their recently acquired professional skills in the kolkhozes; see
GAARK f. r–515, op. 1, d. 414, l. 23 (Redkin to Komzet, 9 October 1934). Evidently, Agro-
Joint personnel were also influential in the adoption of the TOZ and SOZ models of
collectivization among the Jewish colonies, in contrast to the more demanding “artel” form
favored by many state officials. For example, see Merezhin, Pervaia vesna, 5. See also Z. Malchov
and Sh. Meizlin interviews (Institute of Contemporary Jewry, Hebrew University of Jerusalem,
Oral History Department [ICJ], 58/42), 30, 23.
107
GAARK f. p–1, op. 1, d. 990, l. 119 (Sologub to obkom, 20 December 1930), ll. 81–82
(Rabinovich to Voronin, 3 December 1930), l. 93 (Voronin to Veger, 4 December 1930), ll.
159–60 (Veger to VTsIK, late 1930), l. 147 (GPU report, 27 December 1930), ll. 161–62
(protocol of the TsIK commission, 28 January 1931), ll. 27–30 (material for the obkom, late
1930), ll. 58–59 (Komzet and its apparatus, circa 1930), l. 106 (Kantor to obkom, 6 December
1930), l. 120 (Sologub to obkom, 20 December 1930); and Merezhin, Pervaia vesna, 6, 14, 31.
108
GARF f. r–7746, op. 2, d. 77, ll. 98–121 (Grower, 1923–37), d. 157, ll. 93–137 (Liubarskii,
1927–38); JDC 516, 4 (verbatim minutes, 25 January 1937); GAARK f. r–2094, op. 1, d. 19,
ll. 4–5 (ORT to Komzet, 27 December 1936), ll. 178–82 (results and future plans of ORT);
GARF f. r–7746, op. 4, d. 29, l. 8 (short report on Agro-Joint activity in Ukraine, 1935); AJA,
WP, Box 342/8 (Agro-Joint, 19 January 1937); and Aryeh Munitz, “A Letter Concerning the
ORT in Soviet Russia before Its Liquidation,” Michael, no. 6 (1980): 209.
meager resources, set up small, religious primary schools (heders) in lieu of

secular institutions during the first years of settlement. 109 Therefore, religious
interests temporarily gained ground in the void of alternatives. By early 1928,
when the construction of secular schools by the Agro-Joint approached de-
mand, the heders closed. 110 Thereafter, four-year primary schools opened in
almost every colony, while settlement blocs founded seven-year schools. Simul-
taneously, the Agro-Joint worked with the government in the late 1920s to
establish regional high schools as well as pedagogical and vocational institu-
tions. 111 To keep the colonists happy, the Agro-Joint next initiated a program
for stopgap, adult education.112 Yet by most accounts, the combined efforts of
the service organizations achieved only episodic successes among the adult
population during the 1920s.113 Even so, the voice of the state in education
was still a distant echo. The sea change came only in 1937, with the national
decree on the russification of all schools.
Showing an awareness (bred from proximity) that Moscow’s bark was
fiercer than its bite, Agro-Joint officials in Russia proved more assertive on re-
ligious issues than their superiors in New York. If the latter exercised caution,
Bernhard Kahn (the director of the Joint’s Berlin-based office of European op-
erations) and Joseph Rosen confronted or circumvented Soviet institutions on
religious matters, confident that the distance between Soviet policy and its ap-
plication afforded them some maneuvering room, at least until April 1929.
From the Agro-Joint office in Moscow, Rosen pressed the reluctant JDC in
1928 to preempt a Soviet campaign to convert synagogues into social halls in
the shtetls.114 But in New York, Cyrus Adler (chairman of the JDC’s Cultural
Committee and a renowned Judaic scholar) set his colleagues against Rosen’s
and Kahn’s plan to test the goodwill of the People’s Commissar of Enlighten-
109
Until the late 1920s, school construction was low on government priorities; service
organizations were unable to keep up with demand.
110
For detailed description of this process, see GAARK f. p–1, op. 1, d. 830, l. 7 (Gurevich to
Takser, 1 January 1928). The Evsektsiia identified the Frankfurt rabbinate and Agro-Joint as the
sources of funds for the heders.
111
The agricultural school at Chebotarsk (Crimea) was typical of higher education facilitated by
the Agro-Joint. After construction, it was a state-operated school, but Agro-Joint provided most
of the instructors and the stipends.
112
GARF f. r–7746, op. 1, d. 201, l. 29 (report of the Pioneer delegation, 22 June 1928); JDC
530, 10 (Hyman’s impressions, 8 December 1928). Old colonies had libraries, clubs, and
primary schools, but new settlements were cultural vacuums. Neighboring villages fared no
better.
113
YIVO, RG 358/159 (Volson’s report on film screening, October–November 1928); and M.
Mikhailov, “Tri nedeli po evreiskim poliam: putevye zametki,” Tribuna 9 (1927): 6.
114
JDC 475 (Hyman’s memorandum, 13 October 1928).
ment (Anatolii Vasil′evich Lunacharskii) toward instruction of Hebrew in Rus-

sia’s cities. 115 Whether it was within the Joint’s power to alter Stalin’s religious
policy is immaterial. Rather, it is noteworthy that caution toward the central
institutions in Russia usually came from New York, not from Agro-Joint per-
sonnel more familiar with the limits of Soviet power.
Closer to the ground, it appears that much of the virulent anti-religious
mood dissipated en route from Moscow to the periphery in the latter part of
the 1930s. Persecution in the Soviet cities notwithstanding, the authorities
monitored but did not halt private piety in the colonies. To be sure, religious
freedom existed for no one under Stalin’s reign, but among the colonists who
sought it, the practice of religion was feasible (albeit with certain adaptations),
at least until the organized evacuation of the kolkhozes from Crimea to Cen-
tral Asia in the autumn of 1941.116
Moscow’s limitations, even after total collectivization, were manifest in
other ways. The archives suggest that the state could not set unilateral grain
procurement quotas in the Jewish collective farms. Instead, it negotiated these
levels with kolkhoz chairmen. Although such discussions were never a dialogue
of equals, higher officials had to strike a compromise with local realities and
sensitivities.117 In addition, a rare report of overt religious repression (expulsion
of the colonist Lazar Kabakov in 1933 or 1934 for agitating against work on
the Sabbath) showed that punishments in the countryside might be more
moderate than in the cities. Kabakov lived, in fact, to a ripe old age, a re-
spected member of the Voroshilov colony and postwar kolkhoz.118 Overall, as
the compact settlement blocs grew outward in the second half of the 1920s,
they gained internal continuity, and thereby nurtured cultural coherence de-
spite the government’s attempts to atomize national groups in the 1930s.
The state’s faint shadow, combined with a modicum of protection pro-
vided by the Agro-Joint’s umbrella, left open avenues of partial political ex-
pression even in turbulent times. Because elements of the popular, anti-state
tropes of the mid-1930s had trickled down, the settlers could sense the issues
115
JDC 475 (Hyman to Adler, 20 July 1928), (Adler to Hyman, 22 July 1928), (Morrissey to
Warburg, 23 July 1928), and 475, 2, 4 (Zeitlin to Adler, 14 August 1928). The JDC sent funds
for religious activity until the mid-1930s.
116
Dekel-Chen, “Shopkeepers and Peddlers,” 300–2, 367–69.
117
GAARK f. r–1520, op. 1, d. 27, l. 237 (Raitsin-Romanovskii to kolkhoz chairmen, October
1937).
118
The report on expulsion appeared in American Jewish Yearbook 36 (1934), 235. Kabakov
received honorable mention in print and in oral histories. See I. Katsnel′son, “V kolkhozakh
Kryma,” Tribuna 24 (1936): 29; A. B. Superfin (interview J. Dekel-Chen, Y. Babusev, tape
recording, Krasnogvardeisk, Crimea, 5 September 2000).
and distress that gripped Russia’s political center despite the physical distance
from the controversy. Hence, colonists voiced the same doubts as others about
the murder of Kirov. They told the secretary of the Saki raikom that the Len-
ingrad Party boss “was not killed by us— the lishentsy— rather by you, the
communists.”119 Such statements triggered alarmist reports to higher authori-
ties but did not elicit much reaction. Local officials dutifully filed reports but
meted out no blanket punishment; at most, they removed individual “class
enemies” from the ranks of Jewish kolkhoz chairmen.120 In effect, it appears
that the rank-and-file Jewish colonists enjoyed considerable immunity after
such public remarks even if the Agro-Joint’s surrogacy had waned.
The growing centralization of power in the second half of the 1930s trig-
gered a reevaluation of the original colonization organizations. Moreover,
painful memories of Agro-Joint’s surrogacy from 1925 through the early
1930s, together with the regime’s growing xenophobia, drove Moscow toward
vindictiveness in the last days of the organization’s life in 1937–38.121 Next,
Komzet came under sharp criticism as a helpless victim or accomplice in the
Agro-Joint’s surrogacy; the Kremlin swiftly eliminated it in late 1937, purged
most of its personnel (who were, according to the purgers, irreparably tainted
by contact with foreigners), and reapportioned Komzet’s functions. 122 Within
weeks, the NKVD swept away much of Agro-Joint’s staff in Moscow and some
of its employees in the regional offices.123 The purge of Ozet followed shortly
thereafter. In their place came the settlement departments of Narkomzem and
the NKVD, two unambiguous state agencies.
119
GAARK f. p–116, op. 1, d. 4, l. 2 (Razin to Leikin, circa 1935). The murder of Sergei Kirov
in December 1934 signaled a momentous change in the pre-purge politics. For the most recent
account, see Amy Knight, Who Killed Kirov? The Kremlin’s Greatest Mystery (New York: Hill and
Wang, 1999), 200–70.
120
GAARK f. p–140, op. 1, d. 7, l. 9 (Beliavskii to the obkom Agricultural Department, 24
October 1935).
121
As acts of petty retribution, the Soviets refused Rosen’s requests for severance pay, pensions,
or other compensation to the former staff of Agro-Joint; see YIVO, RG 358/97, 2–3 (Rosen to
Molotov, mid-1938). This penny-pinching behavior may also have been a product of the fiscal
pressures common to the Second and Third Five-Year-Plans. The Soviet regime unilaterally
liquidated the operations of ORT-Farband in the summer of 1938. Agro-Joint continued much
more limited projects outside the Soviet Union after 1937 and existed nominally until 1952.
122
It first bypassed Komzet on settlement issues, later stripping it of all authority. The
commission was dissolved in April 1938. See GARF f. r–5446, op. 22a, d. 1491, l. 99
(Chutskaev to Molotov, 3 April 938); and GARF f. r–7541, op. 1, d. 972, ll. 2–5, 25.
123
Under the liquidation agreement with Agro-Joint, Ozet received formal authority over the
colonies in January 1938. The state liquidated Ozet and transferred its functions to Narkomzem
and the NKVD in May of that year.
If during the 1920s the compact Jewish settlement blocs had coexisted
with German or Tatar national entities in Crimea and southern Ukraine, the
former survived the 1930s while the non-Jewish autonomies were decimated
by dekulakization, the denouement of korenizatsiia, and the purges.124 Even if
the Jewish districts withered as administrative units in 1938 (owing to the
withdrawal of the Agro-Joint and the sovietization of the settlement infrastruc-
ture under the Narkomzem and NKVD),125 the settlement blocs maintained a
relatively high degree of Jewish cultural life until the autumn of 1941.126
A number of factors explain the continued cultural and administrative co-
herence in the Jewish settlement blocs compared to the government’s assault
on the comparable autonomous units of other national minorities.127 First, the
Soviets saw no need to liquidate the formal Jewish districts or compact blocs
because Jews could not be accused of conspicuous loyalty to another coun-
try. 128 Second, and no less important, a Soviet propaganda campaign in the
Russian language had already trumpeted the cultural autonomy, modernity,
and collectivity in the Jewish colonies.129 In an age of rapidly expanding liter-
acy, such propaganda placed some constraints on Soviet decision making; a
reversal of policy bore political costs because the regime had to account for
images it manufactured. Finally, as shall be seen, although colonists may not
have identified with the Soviet regime, they did not provoke repression.130
124
The Polish and German national districts in the Ukraine disappeared in the mid-1930s,
whereas the five Jewish national districts in Crimea and southern Ukraine survived (at least
nominally) until the summer of 1941. Evidently, dekulakization occurred only among Jewish
colonists in the old Kherson colonies; see NARA, 861.5017, Living Conditions/294, 5
(Coleman, 10 July 1931).
125
Pinkus, Jews of the Soviet Union, 67–68; Broshevan, Natsional′nye raiony v Krymu, 128.
126
It should be remembered that assimilation proceeded far more rapidly in the Autonomous
Jewish Oblast ′ of Birobidzhan, despite the official status given to Jewish nationality; see Yaacov
Levavi, Ha-hityashvut ha-yehudit be-Birobidzhan (Jerusalem: Israeli Historical Society, 1965),
250, 252, 344.
127
Buchsweiler, “Ha-germanin,” 210–11; Pinkus, “Extra-Territorial Minorities,” 73–91.
128
Munitz, Ha-napot ha-leumiot, 53.
129
For an analysis of this campaign, see Dekel-Chen, “Shopkeepers and Peddlers,” 202–6,
278–83. For examples, see Nikolai Aleksandrovich Semashko, Kto i pochemu travit evreev
(Leningrad: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel′stvo, 1926); and Mikhail Ivanovich Kalinin and Petr
Germochenovich Smidovich, O zemel′nom ustroistve trudiashchikhsia evreev v SSSR (Moscow:
Komzet, 1927).
130
For the state’s reactions to peasant resistance, see Graziosi, Great Soviet Peasant War, 46–70;
and Colin Neufeldt, The Fate of Mennonites in Soviet Ukraine and the Crimea during the Soviet
Collectivization and the Famine, 1928–33 (n.p., 1989), 81–82.
State Management of Jewish Kolkhozes, 1937–41

A clear contrast emerged between the xenophobic discourse in the center and
the character of direct Soviet management in the colonies after 1937. The state
viewed the colonies as, first and foremost, valuable agricultural assets.
Therefore, Narkomzem and the NKVD did not overhaul the economic struc-
ture of the colonies after the departure of the Agro-Joint. Instead, they acted as
supervisory agencies for the Jewish kolkhozes from 1938 until 1941. The ar-
chives show that Narkomzem and the NKVD reacted to the needs of new-
comers and veterans, lobbied other state agencies on behalf of their new
clients, faithfully distributed the funds left from the liquidation of the Agro-
Joint, and followed Dr. Rosen’s pattern of investment.131
Intentions aside, the state was an incomplete, imperfect replacement for
the foreign service organizations. Although highly edited reports from below
boasted otherwise, the state often stumbled as it displaced Agro-Joint’s func-
tions. The latter, in fact, still mediated the relationship between the state and
the colonists in 1938 and acted as the shadow management of the tractor re-
pair shop in Dzhankoi (the crown jewel of the Agro-Joint’s assets) for a few
months after ownership passed to Ozet. 132 The fate of the repair shop demon-
strated that the mere transfer of authority did not professionalize the inheri-
tors. Without the daily oversight of the Agro-Joint staff, the shop quickly sank
into debt because its clients—all funded by the state and evidently conscious of
its limitations— refused to pay the new management for the full costs of serv-
ices.133 In addition to its other difficulties, the state also could not shoulder the
timely supply of construction materials for new families in the Jewish and non-
Jewish kolkhozes of Crimea.134
State supervision of the Jewish colonies exposed challenges facing the cen-
tral government in the immediate prewar period. Having identified a labor
shortage in the Crimean colonies, Narkomzem tried to recruit new settlers but
was unable to reach its own modest targets for 1937 and 1938 —a shortage of
housing in the kolkhozes and defiant officials in the former Pale undercut its
131
GAARK f. r–2094, op. 1, d. 24, ll. 27–30 (decision no. 328 of the Sovnarkom economic
council, 17 May 1938), l. 7 (TsIK and Sovnarkom decision, 1 June 1938); GAARK f. r–30, op.
6, d. 8, l. 32 (Rabinovich to Orlova, 10 July 1938), l. 12 (Klempert to Rabinovich, 19
December 1938); d. 16, ll. 40, 44 (Rabinovich and Klempert report, 31 December 1938).
132
Most important, Agro-Joint orchestrated the timely supply of materials that otherwise would
have been delayed for months in the unresponsive command economy; see GAARK f. r–2094,
op. 1, d. 18, l. 37 (Redkin to Narkomzem, 19 October 1937). See also GARF f. r–9498, op. 1,
d. 497, ll. 15–16 (Agro-Joint to Dzhankoi Shop, 26 March 1938).
133
GARF f. r–7541, op. 1, d. 931, l. 43 (Khoine to Ozet, December 1937).
134
GAARK f. r–30, op. 6, d. 16, l. 28 (Klempert’s report, 22 April 1939).
efforts.135 Why such resistance? By the late 1930s, industrialization in Russia

and Ukraine had absorbed excess labor, thereby eliminating the local incentive
to jettison unemployed people—a key to the recruitment drives in the 1920s.
In the same way that Narkomzem and the NKVD could not impose recruit-
ment quotas on local authorities in the late 1930s, they could not reverse the
excessive rural flight begun earlier in the decade.136 State management of the
Jewish settlements did suggest, however, that these agencies achieved a degree
of efficiency that contrasted the norms of incompetence endemic to the central
bureaucracy since the October Revolution.
Russification altered the face of local administrations and the language of
power but had a negligible effect on the character and ethnic composition of
the colonies. While it is true that manpower shortages led to an increase of
non-Jewish newcomers after 1936,137 even the most extreme (and unsubstanti-
ated) estimate of “internationalization” suggests that 20 percent of the mem-
bers of Crimean kolkhozes were non-Jews in 1941. 138 For their part,
Narkomzem and the NKVD remained committed to the recruitment of Jew-
ish settlers. 139 Furthermore, other than the substitution of Russian for Yiddish
as the official language of instruction in the schools and rural administration in
1937, russification had little discernible effect on the Crimean colonies.
An unmistakable distinction emerges here between the fate of suspect in-
stitutions and the behavior of the state toward individuals in the countryside.
Near the top, the Agro-Joint had stirred anger in the regional capitals. As key
Ukrainian leaders told Viacheslav Mikhailovich Molotov in mid-1938: “All
the agreements concluded with the Agro-Joint have been exclusively imposed
on us and directed against the interests of the USSR. The unfavorableness of
the agreements was intensified even more in the absence of Komzet inspection
of the work of Agro-Joint and the granting by Komzet to Agro-Joint of a series
135
GAARK f. r–30, op. 6, d. 3, l. 89 (Klempert to Belobrodov, 2 August 1938). Narkomzem
planned recruitment of 170 new families for the spring of 1939. See GAARK f. r–30, op. 6, d.
2, ll. 180–82 (instructions on resettlement in Birobidzhan and Crimea, 1 August 1938).
136
Just as elsewhere in the Soviet Union, the imposition of internal passports in December 1932
decreased but did not eliminate uncontrolled movement from the Jewish kolkhozes.
137
GARF f. r–7746, op. 4, d. 29, l. 5 (report on Agro-Joint work, 1936). There does not appear
to be any link between the departure of Agro-Joint and the influx of Gentile members.
138
Yaacov Levavi, “Ha-mityashvim ha-haklaim ha-yehudim be-Krim be-misparim, 1922–41,”
Shvut 10 (1984): 60. Levavi’s only archival source was the Rosen Papers at YIVO, which is
strong only for the NEP era.
139
GAARK f. r–2094, op. 1, d. 24, l. 28 (decision no. 328, Sovnarkom economic council, 17
May 1938).
of privileges detrimental to the interests of the USSR.”140 Yet the liquidation of

the Agro-Joint and the other settlement organizations, together with the arrest
and execution of their top officials from late 1937 through early 1938, had no
ripple effect in the colonies. 141 On the contrary, as seen above, the regime
worked to strengthen colonization.142 Finally, in contrast to economic
slowdown elsewhere in the country following the purges, archival and other
sources indicate a steady rise in the living standards of the colonies from 1938
to 1941.143
Confronting the “Good American Uncle” and the Soviet Stepfather

During the seventeen years of organized Jewish colonization, the settlers had to
deal first with agronomists sent by a foreign philanthropy and then with the
officials of an increasingly intrusive state. How did this transition affect the
colonists’ maneuvering room? At first glance, Agro-Joint administrators
wielded enormous power. After all, familiarity with the colonists, enhanced by
control of credit, gave agronomists unmatched local strength.144 Seemingly in-
vested with the authority of the government and the American sponsors, an
agronomist could seem indomitable. The archives show, however, that just as
Joseph Rosen leveraged Soviet authorities, the colonists manipulated the Agro-
Joint by applying pressure on sincere but inexperienced sector agronomists.
140
GARF f. r–5446, op. 22a, d. 1491, l. 81 (Chubar′ and Belen ′kii to Molotov, 23 May 1938).
Such suspicion and anger toward Agro-Joint and the JDC was resurrected during the last years
of Stalin. From 1948 to 1952, it used the memory of Jewish colonization in the Black Sea
littoral to fabricate accusations against the leaders of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee. See
Shimon Redlich, War, Holocaust, and Stalinism: A Documented Study of the Jewish Anti-Fascist
Committee in the USSR (Luxembourg: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1995); and Joshua
Rubinstein, Stalin’s Secret Pogrom: The Postwar Inquisition of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001).
141
Whereas many important Agro-Joint officials and most Komzet workers in Moscow
disappeared during the purges, no clear victimology emerged among their local staffs in Ukraine
and Crimea. See JDC 52a (Rosen to Rosenberg and Baerwald); HSOHI; William Bein
interview (New York Times Oral History Program, ICJ, Part 2, World War II, no. 30), 9–10;
Shimshon Liverant, “ ‘Gezerd’ be-Dnepropetrovsk,” Shvut 5 (1977): 117–18; author’s
forthcoming article in Vestnik evreiskogo universiteta.
142
GARF f. r–5446, op. 22a, d. 1491, l. 99 (Chutskaev to Molotov, 3 April 1938); and GARF
f. r–5446, op. 22a, d. 1491, ll. 81–82 (Chubar′ and Belen′kii to Molotov, 23 May 1938).
143
Dekel-Chen, “Shopkeepers and Peddlers,” 337–38, 361–63.
144
YIVO, RG 358/158, 35 (report of the meeting of Agro-Joint personnel, January–February
1927).
Unsure of their authority, burdened with a daunting task, isolated Agro-Joint

officials often succumbed to exaggerated pleas or threats.145
Tactics employed by Jewish colonists against the settlement organizations
often mirrored or surpassed those used by non-Jewish peasants against the
state. If the opportunity arose, settlers showered visiting dignitaries with direct
appeals or catcalls against local agronomists. 146 They also sent occasional letters
of complaint to Soviet periodicals, but the efficacy of these was unclear.147
More daring colonists with scores to settle filed class-based accusations against
Agro-Joint and Komzet officials. Vigilant GPU representatives unfailingly in-
vestigated such charges.148 Such inquiries likely discouraged Agro-Joint and
Komzet personnel from future confrontations with their client-colonists. If all
else failed, Jewish settlers (like their non-Jewish counterparts) wrote to Mikhail
Ivanovich Kalinin, the All-Union peasant elder.149 Colonists also tried to capi-
talize on rifts they sensed between Komzet and Agro-Joint. By the late 1920s,
Komzet and Agro-Joint adjusted to colonists’ defense mechanisms by revoking
the land use rights of settlers who did not sow or who openly resisted the in-
structions of agronomists.150
Most important for the survival of the enterprise, the colonists evidently
understood the boundaries of permissible resistance in the Soviet system. True,
the settlers occasionally acted with audacity toward Komzet in the first decade
145
Colonists most often sought more credits. See GARF f. r–7541, op. 1, d. 211, ll. 93–94
(Fridman to Komzet, 26 May 1928); YIVO, RG 358/151, 3 (Dashkovskii to Agro-Joint, 1
December 1926).
146
YIVO, RG 358/119, 5 (Raskin to Agro-Joint, mid-1927); GARF f. r–7746, op. 1, d. 201, ll.
6–7 (report of the Pioneer delegation, 22 June 1928). Horace Kallen wrote that colonists
showered him with complaints until they learned that he was merely a tourist and thereafter
ignored him (Horace M. Kallen, Frontiers of Hope [New York: Horace Liveright, 1929], 430).
147
“Trudiashchiesia evrei na zemle,” Maiak kommuny, 27 April 1929; and, GARF f. r–7541, op.
1, d. 74, l. 95 (letter to the editor of Emes, November 1925).
148
GAARK f. r–515, op. 1, d. 78, l. 12 (Magid to Komzet, 11 November 1927). The Evpatoriia
GPU “invited” this local Komzet man to discuss anti-Soviet accusations raised by a local
troublemaker. For a similar case, see YIVO, RG 358/119 (Agro-Joint to Komzet, 15 June
1927). A derivative tactic was the denunciation of leaders of the colonies as stooges of the Agro-
Joint; see GAARK f. r–515, op. 1, d. 108, l. 15 (Dashkovskii to Agro-Joint, September 1929).
149
GAARK f. r–515, op. 1, d. 78, l. 254 (Malkov to Kalinin, 20 February 1928). Written
appeals to Kalinin were common among Soviet peasants. See Viola, Peasant Rebels, 236; and
Fitzpatrick, Stalin’s Peasants, 299.
150
GARF f. r–7541, op. 1, d. 211, l. 10 (Fridman to Komzet, 13 March 1928), l. 39 (Fridman
to Komzet, 4 April 1928); GAARK f. r–515, op. 1, d. 78, l. 49 (Dashkovskii to Agro-Joint, 18
July 1928); d. 108, l. 168 (Temkin to Evpatoriia RKI, 23 April 1929); d. 108, l. 20
(Dashkovskii to Agro-Joint, 3 September 1929), l. 19 (Aizenberg to Komzet, 5 September
1929), l. 18 (Temkin to Komzet, 5 October 1929), and ll. 12–14, 20, 49, 99.
of colonization. But on the whole, they exercised caution. Hence, they never
openly resisted the obkom, raikoms, and village soviets. Whether a result of
timidity, gratitude, or grass-roots Realpolitik, this restraint remained
consistent, even if fellow Jews often manned the agencies of the state at the
village and district level.151 The spread of central power throughout the
periphery in the late 1930s necessitated even greater caution; flouting the
NKVD or Narkomzem carried consequences far beyond the reproof of the
Agro-Joint or Komzet. Even if some political expression was still possible in
rural Crimea in the wake of the purges, the colonists became less vocal against
figures of authority with the passage of time.
Prudence did not, however, rule out calculated attempts to circumvent the
state. The Narkomzem generally recognized the colonists’ practices for what
they were — evasion, not resistance. According to the Commissariat’s reports,
the method of choice was fictitious flight and resettlement as a means of
collecting multiple grants and other benefits. Also, when pushed by the state in
lean harvest years, the kolkhozes often responded with under-fulfillment of
quotas, despite increased observation from above.152 In both these scenarios,
the state responded with administrative penalties, not brute force.153
Why did the purges pass over the seemingly vulnerable colonists in the late
1930s, now without their “good American uncle”? Above all, a large-scale rural
purge needed collaborators. But the colonies lacked an important precondi-
tion: severe social stratification that encouraged the denunciation of “class
enemies.” Second, the regime balanced the ideological venom attached to the
“foreign bourgeois” Agro-Joint with pragmatism. Because these hyper-
productive units were an asset in a backward country preparing for war, the
demonization of the Agro-Joint was not used to trigger a repression of the or-
ganization’s clients. On another level, the Agro-Joint had “taught” the settlers
how to avoid, not confront, the state. This included legal gerrymandering of
government regulations for collectivization that at once circumvented trouble
151
Even before the start of grain procurements, colonies tried to oblige government requests for
grain at sub-market prices. The Ikor colony freely sold part of its crop to the government below
market value because, “they may again need the assistance of the government.” See JDC 528, 2
(notes by Frank Horowitz, 1928). The colonists generally did not resist grain procurements,
which commenced in 1928; see GAARK f. p–1, op. 1, d. 990, l. 21 (material for the Crimean
obkom, late 1930). Evidently, there was little overlap between employees of the Agro-Joint and
Komzet with the village soviets and district committees.
152
GAARK f. p–1, op. 1, d. 1397, l. 229 (protocol no. 62 of the obkom bureau, 5 August
1935).
153
GAARK f. r–30, op. 6, d. 3, l. 96 (Rabinovich and Klempert to raispolkoms, 31 May 1938),
l. 5 (Rabinovich to Raispolkom, April 1939).
spots and increased productivity. 154 In these ways, it appears that the Jewish
colonies stayed off the center’s radar screen— a crucial survival skill in the
Soviet Union that the Tatar communists, the Hehalutz, and many other cor-
porate entities did not learn in time.
Conclusion
Judging from this colonization episode, the Stalinist regime did not—however
much it may have wanted to—exercise “totalitarian” control over daily life in
the countryside of northern Crimea and southern Ukraine during the 1920s
and the 1930s. For most of the period, the state could do little more than
monitor events. The usual instruments of state penetration —the Komsomol,
the Evsektsiia, MOPR (the International Organization for Support of
Revolutionaries), and even the GPU—showed only limited utility in the Jewish
colonies. The regime needed the help of others to supervise and develop the
region.
The readiness of the Joint to support Jewish colonization served four func-
tions for the Soviet state. It brought a novel western model of administration
to the periphery while it injected, at almost no cost, unique technical expertise
in Russia’s backward hinterland and brought international prestige to an oth-
erwise ostracized regime. Perhaps most valuable to Moscow, the arrival of
Agro-Joint and its clients in Crimea gave the Kremlin an added, if unintended,
tool in its preexisting political contest with Milli Firka. In this sense, the
measures taken against Tatar communists illustrated the shifting power
calculus in the center-periphery conflict and foreshadowed events in other
republics.
Moscow’s behavior toward the Jewish colonists reflected a dominant fea-
ture of its interwar rural policy —neglect, not repression. If the state was lethal
toward anyone perceived as a potential threat in the cities, this article suggests
that elsewhere (particularly in the countryside) there could be islands of rela-
tive safety and prosperity. The settlers, in fact, experienced a more benign side
of Soviet rule than most Jewish communities closer to the center. Whatever
the cause, the experience in the colonies— with the marked exception of the
154
Most important, the Agro-Joint had reconstituted multiple SOZs or TOZs in the colonies as
single artels to satisfy the requirements of total collectivization. See GARF f. r–7746, op. 1, d.
248, ll. 7–14 (Crimean Agro-Joint to Moscow Agro-Joint, 27 December 1929); GARF f.
r–7541, op. 1, d. 411, ll. 1–6 (plan of collectivization, 15 January 1930); GAARK f. p–1, op. 1,
d. 1034, l. 9 (Redkin to Evpatoriia Credit Association, 10 January 1930), l. 8 (Temkin’s report,
31 January 1930); d. 990, l. 118 (Sologub to obkom, 20 December 1930); and Merezhin, O
sploshnoi kollektivizatsii, 43.
Hehalutz communes—suggests that vociferous rhetoric in Moscow did not al-

ways translate into ground-level implementation in the periphery.
As dictatorial rule grew in the population centers, the state did not imme-
diately displace the Agro-Joint. Officials in Moscow and Simferopol might
complain, but they left its surrogate authority and the coherence of its colonies
intact for over a decade. Once the state had accumulated enough political
muscle (or at least political nerve), the “bourgeois” Agro-Joint became more a
nuisance than an asset. But even when the colonies were most
vulnerable— after the withdrawal of the Agro-Joint in 1937— they enjoyed
banner economic years, and very few lay members suffered from the purges.
Thus the repression of the central Agro-Joint officials in 1937–38 did not
reflect the entire enterprise, rather the different levels of terror applied in the
center and periphery.
In hindsight, Agro-Joint’s extraordinary local position from 1924 to 1937
resulted from a simple formula: it was strongest where the state was
weakest—technological progress in the geographic periphery. Whatever its suc-
cess in this regard, Agro-Joint’s local weight never translated to the national
stage and should not be exaggerated. Instead, a veritable power vacuum in the
periphery from the civil war until the early 1930s meant that Agro-Joint (and
perhaps others) did not need to displace the state.
Institute of Contemporary Jewry

Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Mount Scopus
Jerusalem 91905 Israel
dekelchen@mscc.huji.ac.il

Dekel Chen

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Farmers, Philanthropists, and Soviet Authority: Rural Crimea

and Southern Ukraine, 1923-1941

Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, Volume 4,

Published by Slavica Publishers

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For content related to this article

Farmers, Philanthropists, and

Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 4, 4 (Fall 2003): 849–85.

Starting in 1924, the JDC’s settlement agency— the Joint Agricultural

The Blind Speaking to the Deaf: Center-Periphery Relations

Moscow and the Tatar Communists

population in the other two.26 In the intervening years, important partitions

population.39 Consequently, his reach stopped a few kilometers to the north of

anti-communist.42 Tatars, as non-Slavs with a troublesome recent history, were

governments tried to eliminate, or at least reduce, the resettlement quotas and

quick, grass-roots reactions against the perceived injustice of the government’s

to trends of rural hooliganism— something hardly unique to this period or to

Jewish colonization was just one component of inter-ethnic relations in

seemed to have no leverage, most notably on the official policy toward

to fields; they intentionally ploughed surplus land to maximize occupancy.85 A

In light of the multiple sources of administrative authority in the country-

idolized Agro-Joint’s directors.97 Specifically, colonists often focused their rage

the settlers and Komzet personnel,105 participate as a legitimate partner in the

meager resources, set up small, religious primary schools (heders) in lieu of

ment (Anatolii Vasil′evich Lunacharskii) toward instruction of Hebrew in Rus-

State Management of Jewish Kolkhozes, 1937–41

efforts.135 Why such resistance? By the late 1930s, industrialization in Russia

of privileges detrimental to the interests of the USSR.”140 Yet the liquidation of

Confronting the “Good American Uncle” and the Soviet Stepfather

Unsure of their authority, burdened with a daunting task, isolated Agro-Joint

Hehalutz communes—suggests that vociferous rhetoric in Moscow did not al-

Institute of Contemporary Jewry

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