Authors

Diego Repenning¹;  ¹ Pontificia Universidad Católica, Chile

Discussion

This article is part of a broader research project exploring the geographical images attached to Siberia during the second half of the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries. This project analyses the ways in which this region of the Russian empire and the Soviet Union was imagined from different perspectives as a land of the future in discussions about the region and portrayals of it from varying locations: from governmental planning to local institutions, from scholarly projects to migrants’ perception of Siberia. As one the case studies of this project, this paper delves into the creation of the Jewish Autonomous Region (JAR) and the city of Birobidzhan between the 1920s and 1950s. Analysing the writings of Jewish immigrants coming from other regions of the Soviet Union and Yiddish migrants from abroad, maps of the period and different cultural objects that were created in this context, this article explores the ways in which Siberia was construed as a land that could become the long awaited answer to Jewish territoriality, a Soviet promised land. As an example, a Jewish author of the of the period, David Bergel’son (1884 – 1952), understood Birobidzhan in the Far East of Soviet Russia as the land that would break the cycle of continual Jewish migrations that characterised their existence. It would be the place where the assimilation that Jews had to endure in every territory they got to would be reverted. Analysing the creation of JAR during this period allows me to understand how the vast landmass of Siberia was the canvas upon which religious, cultural, social, geographical and political imaginations intersected and materialised in the construction of Birobidzhan. Analysing the creation of Birobidzhan and the JAR becomes relevant during a period in which European imperial powers were already promoting the Palestinian solution for a Jewish homeland, constructing Birobidzhan as a Soviet counterproject devoid of the failures of capitalist societies. At the same time, the creation of JAR develops during a period of great changes in the USSR that affected the way the project unfolded and came to fruition, determining its attraction to Jewish population from within and outside the USSR.