A remote republic within Russia provides a lesson to Burma on how not to federate along ethnic lines
Of the many oddities that Russia inherited from the erstwhile Soviet Union, this must be the most peculiar: the Jewish Autonomous Region of Birobidzhan. Located in a remote corner of the Russian Far East, it’s as far from the Land of Canaan as one could possibly get, but there it is, wedged between the Chinese border and the mountains of Khabarovsky Territory. And strange as it may seem, there may be a distant parallel with Burma’s ethnic minority situation.
Birobidzhan’s railway station carries the name of the town in huge, neon-lit Cyrillic letters as well as Yiddish using the Hebrew script. A street is named after the Jewish writer Sholom Aleichem, on which there stands a Jewish Cultural Center.
The idea of a homeland for the Jews of the Ukraine and Russia was first conceived in the mid-1920s, partly to counter Zionist nationalism which, at the time, was spreading into the Soviet Union. In 1928, the swampy valley where the Bira and the Bidzhan converge was opened to Jewish settlers, and a town was built, named after the two rivers. In 1934, it was elevated to the status of an autonomous region and, encompassing 36,000 square km, it was larger than Palestine.
According to English travel writer Colin Thubron, it was hoped that Birobidzhan would “attract Jewish finance from the West, while populating the Soviet East against Japanese expansion. Above all, it would instate the jobless or unskilled Jews of European Russia as farmers in a conventional Soviet cast, insulated from their Orthodox elders, building the Socialist future.”
During the first decade after 1928, 43,000 Jewish settlers arrived. Most of them came from Russia and the Ukraine, but also from Western Europe, North America, Argentina and even Palestine. Jewish schools were established, Yiddish newspapers were published, and textile factories grew up in and around the town.
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