|
''Seekers of Happiness'' is a Soviet propaganda film from 1936 trying to attract Jews for the Jewish Autonomous Oblast (JAO) in the far east of the USSR. Alternative names: A Greater Promise, Iskateli schastya (Искатели счастья) == Background == The JAO experiment arose from different tendencies and conflicts in the broader discourse on the so-called “Jewish question” in Russia of the early 20th century and shifts in the national policies of the post-revolutionary society. The puzzling question is why the Bolshevik soviet government that was originally committed to internationalism, at some point, agreed and actually pushed forward the establishment of a Jewish national project on the territory of the USSR. The phenomena of the JAO stands both in the context of the Zionist idea of Jewish Statehood and the history of the Jews in the Soviet Union, hence under consideration of the changing governmental policies on the matter and on the question of national policies in general. Before the October Revolution there were three main positions on the Jewish side on the matter of the “Jewish question”. Two within Zionism, and one outside of it. The Zionist movement was split into those who aimed to establish a Jewish State on the territory of Palestine, and the territorialists for whom Palestine was only one of several options. A third position was held by the Bund (General Jewish Labor Bund of Lithuania, Poland and Russia) who promoted the idea of a national cultural autonomy in a multi-ethnic State. This notion of nationality was not bound to the existence of a national territory, but imagined an administrative unit for cultural issues independently from the place where someone lived. The Bund, in the pre-revolutionary time, pictured the future State as a federative System of culturally independent units without territorial binding. In the beginning of the 20th century, before the October Revolution, a tense conflict between the Bund and the Iskra-group around Lenin broke out. The Bund called for the federal restructuring of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDRP), and the recognition of Jews as a nation. Both claims where heavily rejected by the Iskra-group as being separatist and backward. For the Bolsheviks the Jewish people couldn't be a nation, because they lacked one fundamental component: an own territory. In 1913 Stalin, who later between 1917-1923 held the position of the Commissariat for Nationalities Affairs, published an article on the point of view on nationhood by the social democratic party, where he defined nationhood by virtue of a common language and territory. In fact, in the context of Lenin's two phase model with the goal of merging all nations into one socialist world society, the Jews already held an advanced position. The general answer to the “Jewish question” by Marxists, including the Menshiviks, was assimilation. However, the post-revolutionary situation required a conceptual shift. At the end of the 19th century 74%〔 of the Jewish population, due to restrictions in the tsarist times, “made livings from petty commerce, retail sales, small-scale handicraft production, and unskilled labor”, while only 3.5% worked in agriculture. The social structure of the Jewish population basically reversed the overall proportions of the agricultural society they were living in. Already the slowly starting industrialization had caused much unemployment among Jewish merchants and crafts. After the Bolshevics took power in October 1917 their original believe in a self-completing assimilation process, was confronted with the actual mass poverty of the Russian Jews. Caused by World War I, pogroms during the Civil War (1918-1920), and at last the centralization of production of even small industrial businesses and the prohibition of private property which had catastrophic consequences due to their particular social structure, most Jews lived in despair. The implementation of the NEP (New Economic Policy) in 1921, which brought back a low form of capitalist production, mitigated the situation partly. But many Jews fell under the category of lišency. Lišency means: “those who are deprived of rights” and was used as a political instrument to fight bourgeois elements. It was generally applied to all who where considered to have worked in sections that fell under the category of “unproductive labor”. Hence, while the Bolshevic policy granted equal rights for Jews as Jews, their particular social structure effectively deprived about one third of them of these rights all over again. The Soviet government was conscious of this dilemma. In order to solve this problem two institutions were founded, KOMZET and OZET, and provided with the task of a “productivation” of the Jewish population, by finding a territory were Jews could be relocated and transformed into farmers, as agriculture was considered “productive work”. In contrast to the pre-revolutionary position Russian Jews were now handled in the same way as the multiple other nations living on the former tsarist territory. “National in form and socialist in content”, was Stalin's well known formula. The goal now was to establish a secular Yiddish counter-culture against a religiously or Zionist self-understanding. Most other nations, though, had their territory within or outside the USSR. In contrast to, e.g., Germans or Polish living on Russian soil, Jews were exceptional in the sense that they were an extra-territory nation without even a territory elsewhere. After a first attempt to relocate the Jewish population in the Crimea had failed due to the resistance of the local authorities and antisemitic biases and even attacks by the peasantry, the decision fell on a region in the far east with a border to China – Birobidžan. In 1934 the region around the rivers Bira and Bidžan was declared to be the Jewish autonomous oblast (JAO). The relocation project, however, already began in 1928. For this, propaganda was produced on a large scale. From literature to radio broadcasts over poems, songs and a stage play, even an airplane was named “Birobidžanec”. Also, the free train ride, and a welcome payment were extra motivations. However, the organization was disastrous. The provided shelters were quickly overcrowded, and in combination with the rough climate, heavy rainfalls in spring, hot and humid summers, and very cold winters, hunger and disease were the result. Many arrivals who could afford it, left after a very short time, leaving only the poorest behind.〔 Between 1936-1938, beginning in the same year in which “Seekers of Happiness” was released, purges in all national republics and provinces took place, wiping out the local party leaderships and administrative elites. With them the national policy shifted from a cultural integrative federal system to Russification and centralism. The murder of the JAO elites was being justified by reproaching them of secret Zionist and Trotskyst ideology and spionage. 1938 even KOMZET and OZET fell prey to the Great Purge. In effect the purge led to the destruction of the soviet Yiddish culture that had slowly developed in the short time the JAO had already existed. Only after the World War II and under the impression of the shoa a Yiddish culture on Soviet soil was shortly in bloom again. This time, however, not initiated by the government, but solely due to higher migration. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Seekers of Happiness」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
|