A Jewish Musical Chamber Theater with 40 singers and dancers toured foreign countries to promote migration to the area.
But it was never a success. Birobidzhan was just too remote and the climate too harsh for it to become an alternative to Palestine. The surrounding marshlands were also breeding grounds for disease and not suitable for farming. Then came Stalin’s purges, and most local community leaders were sent to labor camps in Siberia, or executed. In the late 1940s, all Jewish institutions, schools and the theatre were closed down, and the Yiddish-language newspaper ceased publication.
It also soon became clear that it was little more than just another Russian Potemkin village. The Jews were at the most 23 percent of the region’s population, and the famous Jewish theater was not Jewish at all. The singers and dancers all came from Moscow, and most of them were actually ordinary Russians. They would pay token visits to Birobidzhan once a year or so, but that was all. As for the Jewish settlers, they began trickling back to European Russia only a few years after the autonomous region was officially inaugurated. By the end of the 1980s, only 22,000 remained.
When Russia and Israel established diplomatic relations in 1991, nearly all of the Birobidzhan Jews left. Most of them emigrated to Israel, but quite a few also ended up in the US and Europe. It is uncertain how many Jews remain there now. When asked, people thought it could not be more than a handful, and a recent visitor did not manage to find a single Jew during his brief stop in Birobidzhan. According to the most generous estimates, 4,800 remain. Other sources put the figure at less than 3,000, or 5.4 percent of the region’s total population of 220,000 people. And most of these are planning to follow their forefathers to Israel.
So what are the similarities with Burma? The answer is quite simple. It is hard not to see striking similarities between Birobidzhan and the Burmese junta’s sham tolerance of ethnic diversity. For instance, take past colorful Burmese Union Day parades and now the constitution-drafting “National Convention,” where representatives of the minorities sit dressed up in fancy, elaborate costumes—and where many of them could actually be mainstream Burmese rather than real representatives of the country’s ethnic groups. A play for the galleries without any substance.
Even democratic Burma’s first 1947 constitution had drawn some inspiration from the Soviet Union. It granted the Shan and Karenni states the right to secede from the proposed Union of Burma after a 10-year period of independence, should they be dissatisfied with the new federation. The 1936 Soviet constitution had a similar right for its constituent states—but, in the Soviet Union, as in Burma, it was a right that was not actually meant to be exercised.
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