Birobidjan: The Story of the First Jewish State

The world's largest menorah is not in Jerusalem, Lakewood or even in Crown Heights; it can be found in the town square of  Birobidjan, the capital city of the eponymous Jewish Autonomous Oblast of the Soviet Union. The menorah is 21 meters high, uses nine 500 W lamps and is visible from a great distance away from the town. (Chabad) The Jewish Autonomous Oblast is a far Eastern, landlocked Russian province on the border with China. It is approximately the shape and about half the size of West Virginia (Some time after 1951, Birobidjan's northern finger was ceded to other provinces so the resemblance to West Virginia is less apparent¹) and in 2002 held approximately 191 thousand residents, of which 2.3 thousand were Jews. The economy is based on mining, logging and the manufacture of furniture, clothing and machinery. (J.A.R)

Birobidjan is bound on three sides by the mighty Amur River and her tributaries, which are navigatable from the Pacific Ocean to fairly deep into the continent. This feature was very important to the Russian Empire as it allowed the transport of goods fairly far into Siberia, which would facilitate settlement to the region which, while remote and rugged, contained a vast mineral wealth. Most importantly, it gave Russia access to an additional port. Russia, though possessing a vast coastline, had very few ports that were not frozen for most of the year. The near utter lack of non-frozen ports was of cardinal importance to the Russians and was one of the primary reasons for the Crimean War. There are three main port areas: The Black Sea, from where all ships must pass through the Ottoman controlled Bosporus Strait, Baltic Sea, for which Russia fought a 21 year war with Sweden, and the Pacific Ocean which at the time was thousands of miles away from significant Russian population centers and industry.

Czar Nicholas I wanted to develop and consolidate this third coast and appointed soldier and diplomat Nikolai Nikolaevich Muravyev governor of  Eastern Siberia. Muravyev was personally instructed by the Czar to exploit the chaos in China brought about by the Opium Wars for as much Russian benefit in the region as possible.

Muravyev was an anachronistically socially progressive man; one of his first acts as governor was to stamp out the normative rampant corruption and embezzlement in the mostly unsupervised Siberia and in an earlier gubernatorial position, Muravyev was the first to petition the Czar to abolish serfdom. In an effort to better control the population of Siberia, he built churches but also supported the native shamanists and Buddhists. (Brockhaus) Muravyev saw the importance of regaining² access to warm waters in the Pacific Ocean and establish a string of settlements, outposts and stations along the Amur River on territory that was only weakly held by China. (Kerner)

Thanks to the bases Muravyev established there, Russia was able to slowly annex the Amur River;annexation was consolidated in a section of the Treaty of Peking in 1860. Because of his near single-handed acquisition of “Outer Manchuria”, Muravyev was made a count and the appellation “Amursky”, of Amur, was appended to his name. (Kerner)  A statue of him was erected on the bank of the Amur and its image appears on the back of the 5000 rouble note.

Now a semi-important trade route, settlements sprang up along the Amur River and, though most of the development did not stray far Westward from the mouth, a few cities were founded on Birobidjan's Southern border. The two tributaries of the Amur River, rivers Biro and Bidjan gave the oblast its name, which, as a result, is sometimes written with a hyphen. (Time) In 1916, Russia completed a section of the Trans-Siberian railroad across the Northern side of Birobidjan and several towns grew out of the regularly spaced train stations along the route. (Britanica) The region did not see great natural growth as the Amur turned out to be less useful than was supposed. (McCannon)

The period around the first world war was known for nationalistic feelings. Eastern Europe was full of many small nations: Albanians, Moldovans, Croats, Slovenes, Czechs, Slovaks, Poles, Azerbis, Letts, Lapps, Georgians, Armenians et cetera. All of these peoples were clamoring for political freedom from the single-nation ruled Russian, Austrian or Ottoman empires. It was a Serb's nationalistic clamoring that single-handedly toppled the Austro-Hungarian empire.

After the revolution, The Soviet Union found herself with a large assortment of clamoring nations and was not about to make the same mistake as the Czars. The Czar, the chief Russian, ruled over many non-Russians and expected them to respect him based on his greatness as a Russian. A Yupic, a Siberian Eskimo, living in his qasgiq, eating salmon while discussing throat singing with the shaman would have little in common with the Czar in the Kremlin, admiring his Faberge eggs and sipping Vodka while he reads War and Peace and other Russian classics to the bejeweled Czarina.

The problem of basing the government around a single nationality is that it is unrealistic to expect subjects to idealize the rulers' way of life when there there are very few commonalities between the ways of life of the subjects and ruler. The Soviets used a different synergistic approach. Instead of uniting people through a non-common nationality, they united everyone through a common class. Not everyone is a Russian or a Yupic, but everyone has to work. The poster ideal of the Soviet Union was a vast spectrum of nations side by side at work in a manner not dissimilar to the “It's A Small World” ride at Disneyland. Showcasing³, rather than oppressing  minorities has a mollifying effect on revolutionary nationalistic tendencies Being showcased was a precarious situation; as long as the nation complied with the Soviet ideals, no harm would come to them, but several nations, most prominently the Jews could not fully comply: many were not willing to suddenly give up their religious practices in favor of Soviet atheism. The tenants of Zionism- the need to establish a society on the grounds of a non-universal trait- were a threat to the Soviet synergistic approach. These Jewish traits remind the Jew that he is not like the other Soviet workers and will regard the Soviet ways as the Yupic regards the Russian ways: alien. Appealing to workers only influences those who see themselves as workers. If the Jews do not see themselves as workers, the worker propaganda will not have the impact it should.