“We Were Building Something that was Ours”: Nation-making and Willing Propagandists in the Wall Newspapers of the Soviet Union’s Jewish Autonomous Oblast

Since 1948, there have been two officially Jewish jurisdictions in the world: the State of Israel, and the Jewish Autonomous Oblast, a small territory on Russia’s border with China. The same questions surrounding “the place of Jews,” nationhood and the role of borders that resulted in the Zionist project and its development in mandatory Palestine, also produced a small, Yiddish and Russian-speaking, autonomous region which seemingly enchanted Jewish communists around the world. This thesis presents exploratory research centered around the Russian-language editions of wall newspapers (a type of community newspaper posted on a public/factory wall rather than distributed for individual purchase) published in 1933 Birobidzhan. These bilingual, Russian and Yiddish wall newspapers were produced during a global period of competing Jewish territorial imaginations represented by the projects of Zionism, the Jewish Labor Bund’s Diasporism, and the Soviet Union’s Jewish Autonomous Oblast (among others) as the shift from the dominance of empires to nation-states took place. The two contexts of this thesis are the transnational “Jewish Question” of the early 1930s, and the rapidly evolving media landscape of the Soviet Union during the period of korenizatsiia (indigenization). While each context has extensive scholarship devoted to it on its own, there have been few attempts to place the Jewish Autonomous Oblast within the larger history of the population transfers and expanding territorial imaginations that would transform Jewish communities throughout Europe and around the world. With the goal of shedding light on a unique moment in the intersection of Russian and Jewish history as portrayed in the internal media of the Jewish Autonomous Oblast, I want to ask:

1. How (if at all) Jewish social, cultural, and political experiences, along with territorial imagination, were portrayed in these wall newspapers.
2. What these wall newspapers reveal about the motivations and agency of the people publishing them and how the Soviet Union’s creation of the JAO should be understood. 

Drawing on scholarship about the Jewish Autonomous Oblast (JAO) as it was in the 1930s and as it exists today, this thesis builds on the limited available body of knowledge about the JAO by creating translations and analysis of Russian-language articles in the wall newspapers of Birobidzhan. These new data add to the case that while elements of coercion and cynicism were not absent from propaganda efforts regarding the JAO, much of the enthusiasm among Soviet-Jewish communists for both the specific project of the JAO and the broader goals of the USSR was an ideological and rational response to political developments around Europe. These findings also support a re-reading of Jewish history in the early Soviet Union of the 1920s and early 1930s that has not been overly influenced by the retrospective conclusions of the Great Purge, Molotov–Ribbentrop pact, Russification, and anti-emigration policies that ultimately would come to define how the Jewish experience in the Soviet Union would be viewed by many. I also contend that the story of the JAO through the lens of its own primary sources remains highly relevant today as an intersection in media studies, Russian history, and Jewish history, despite the continued fragmentation of Soviet and Jewish histories.