Albert Venger, ed. Stalindorfs’kyi Raion: Dokumenty i Materialy, Kyiv: Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Charity, 2021, 340 p.

The Soviet indigenization project took various shapes during its implementation in the 1920s and early 1930s. There were two main trends in the Jewish indigenization policy. The first, exterritorial form was chosen by the leaders of Soviet Belarus. The second one was implemented in the Ukrainian SSR, as well as in the Russian SFSR.

The most important component of the second form was the creation of special, – at least on paper – semi-autonomous Jewish national districts. It could be viewed as a peculiar effort to create a real alternative to the Zionist project there and then. No surprise, that there were numerous former members of autonomist Jewish parties among the creators of such territorial entities.

Unfortunately, the history of Jewish national districts in the Soviet Ukraine has been researched much less than the history of similar entities in Crimea, which was an autonomous republic of the RSFSR in the 1920s and 1930s, or in the Russian Far East where the Birobidzhan project was in the center of several important works, for example.

This is why, the publication of the collection of documents compiled and edited by Albert Venger is more than useful for historians who research the nationality policy of the Soviet Ukraine and of the USSR, in general, in the interwar period. It is possible that such a collection of documents may be a preparatory material for a forthcoming book on this topic.

The very first part of the book is the outline of the history of the Stalindorf district. Venger, who as an editor of the collection also wrote this chapter, describes the “prehistory” of the district starting with the Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca (1774) and the liquidation of the Zaporozhian Sich (1775). These acts prepared the large-scale policy of settling and colonization of Southern Ukraine launched by the Russian Empire in the late 18th century.

However, this policy was not as successful as the administration expected, which is why a new aspect was added to this policy in the early 19th century. According to “The Statute on Jews” (1804), the first Jewish agrarian settlements were created in the Kherson province. Venger briefly describes the history of the Jewish colonies up until the early 20th century. Then, he writes about the period of the 1917–1921 Ukrainian revolution, the early Soviet years, and the conditions in which the Jewish national districts were established on territories, where the old Jewish colonies had existed.

Some of the author’s statements in this regard are questionable to a certain extent. For instance, discussing the process of settling Jewish youth in the newly created Jewish national districts, specifically in Stalindorf, and the creation of Jewish collective farms he argues: “Part of the Jews, who were captured by the flow of the indigenization, did not show a desire to leave their cities and towns. But it was almost impossible to refuse the state’s offer to relocate (p. 13).” However, the flow of settlers was too little to make such an assumption. Millions of them were able to stay in their native cities and towns in the late 1920s and early 1930s, where they were much safer than in 1919–1920. The Komsomol assignments obliged only young activists to settle in Jewish national districts.

Speaking of certain rich Jews’ resettlement to old, or newly created agrarian colonies, Venger argues that they “saw a salvation from ‘the punishing sword’ of the revolution” in agriculture (p. 14). At the same time, he does not mention a significant factor that influenced this process, by which I mean the fact that a substantial part of Jewish population in Soviet Ukraine and Belarus were disenfranchised persons — so called lishentsy. Jewish private entrepreneurs who used hired labor even prior 1917, and all the representatives of the Jewish clergy, as well as their families did not have the right to vote or to be elected;^[1] furthermore, their right to obtain a higher education was also restricted. The civic rights of those disenfranchised Jews who relocated to agrarian colonies were restored, so after the resettlement their children were able to return to the city and enroll in professional institutes or technical colleges (teknikumy).

When talking about the creation of Yiddish-language educational institutions in the Stalindorf district, Venger rightly argues: “We cannot speak about a complete satisfaction with the fact that Yiddish was the language of instruction” (p. 15). However, his explanation is not totally correct, because he claims: “a kind of a cult of a good education existed among the Jews but there were no good chances to be enrolled in a higher education institution after the national school.” In fact, it was very hard to pass the entrance examinations to a law or medical institute after a Yiddish-language school. Yet, it is noteworthy that several Yiddish-language institutions of higher education were created in the 1920s in the Ukrainian SSR. The Jewish section at the Odessa Institute of Public Education, the Novozlatopillia Institute of Agriculture, the Jewish section of the Kyiv Institute of Music and Theater, etc. had quotas for high school graduates from Jewish national districts, who were frequently enrolled without any exams. Furthermore, several technical colleges of public education and agriculture were created in Jewish national districts for the local youth. Arguably, the quality of education in the newly created Yiddish-language institutes and colleges was somewhat lower than in those institutes with Russian and Ukrainian language of instruction. As the Yiddish language schools were dissolved in the 1930s, they had not have enough time to improve the quality of teaching. Yet it is important to point out that in the 1920s and 1930s, high school graduates from the Yiddish-language schools had roughly the same chances to obtain higher education as the graduates from non-minority schools.

Despite the above-mentioned inaccuracies, the outline history of the Stalindorf district by Albert Venger is a valuable contribution to the historiography of the soviet nationality policy in the interwar period.

The collection of documents is arranged on a thematic basis. In the first chapter, which contains one document, the reader will find a general description of the economic condition of the Jewish colonies in the Kryvyi Rih county^[2] in 1923, few years prior the creation of the Stalindorf national district.

The second chapter consists several documents on the Holodomor (“murder by hunger”, or the man-made Great Famine in Soviet Ukraine in 1932–1933). Six out of nine are informative notes (informatsiini lysty) sent to the Dnipropetrovsk region committee of the Bolshevik Communist Party by the Stalindorf district committee in July, August and December, 1932. The chapter also includes a report on the tow brigade (buksyrna bryhada) sent from the Stalindorf district to the neighboring Sofiivka district in May 1932, as well as the decree “On the Grain Procurement” passed by the Stalindorf district party committee on August 6, 1932, which is a similar documents to those adopted in other districts of the republic under the pressure of the party center in Moscow;^[3] and the letter dated February 25, 1933 of the Stalindorf district party committee to the Dnipropetrovsk region committee on the famine in the district. The documents collected in this chapter clearly show that the situation in the Jewish national districts was not significantly different from other districts gripped by the famine.

The third chapter offers the reader journalistic texts published in connection with the celebration of the fifth anniversary of the district in 1935. They are interesting first of all, as an example of the soviet propaganda directed at the Russified soviet Jewry. The reader can find a short fragment of the pamphlet by Boris Kagan (Borys Kahan) and three articles published in the Tribuna journal.^[4] Unfortunately, the author did not include similar texts published in Yiddish in the collection, such as books, pamphlets, or journal articles.^[5] Yiddish publications in separate books, or in the newspaper Stalindorfer Emes had a different target audience than Russian-language books and periodicals. Yiddish authors were able to use a different tone, raise other issues, etc.

The following chapter is devoted to party purges in the Stalindorf district. The documents included in this part of the book are related to a period before the Great Terror, in the years 1935–1936. By analyzing them, the reader can trace the changes in the local party organizations’ social climate on the eve of 1937.

The next two chapters deal with the economic and cultural lives of the district. The first contains important statistical data useful for historians who study social, economic, or cultural history of the Ukrainian Jews, or Ukraine in general.

The chapter called “Occupation and the Holocaust” contains several documents issued by the German occupation administration, such as the records of the interrogations of the accused and witnesses conducted by soviet authorities after the Second World War; and a few criminal investigation documents.

The last part of the book consists of the memories of former Jewish and non-Jewish residents of the district. All but three of these testimonies were recorded by the editor of the book in 2004–2005. This selection of memoirs is very valuable and allow the reader to find out more about the social history of the region.

The book closes with an impressive collection of photographs, many of which show the everyday life of the Stalindorf district. Unfortunately, the locations of the originals of these photos are not indicated.^[6]

The publication of this appreciated collection of documents can be regarded not only as a research tool but also as a challenge for other scholars who study the history of the Ukrainian Jews. We can only hope to see similar volumes devoted to other Jewish national districts in Ukraine, as well as the second edition of this collection supplemented with translations of the Yiddish documents.