The Soviet Shtetl: Ideology, Scholarship, Memory

During the interwar period, Soviet Jewish scholar-activists engaged in a state-subsidized attempt to quantitatively and qualitatively document the former Jewish market town (Yiddish: shtetl; Russian: evreiskoe mestechko) as a historically unique form of community destined for radical transformation. Concentrated in the provinces of the Ukrainian and Belorussian Soviet Socialist Republics, the shtetl was viewed by Bolshevik critics as a socioeconomic relic of the old regime, a hybrid urban-rural site of unregulated commercial trade. The Jewish labor force of the shtetl, it was assumed, would merge spontaneously into the new agricultural and industrial sectors. When this failed to happen within the anticipated time fame, a cadre of statisticians, ethnographers, economists and political activists – most of them ethnic Jews – embarked on a quest to study the “shtetl problem” as a practical and theoretical dilemma. This project situates the Marxist-Leninist critique of the shtetl in the broader context of Bolshevik nationality policy and state-building, and considers how the complexities of Jewish extraterritoriality in the early formative years of the Soviet state continue to subtly influence post-Soviet conceptions of Jews and their perceived influence on public life.

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Deborah H. Yalen, of Colorado State University, Fort Collins, was a 2010-11 Individual Advanced Research Opportunities (IARO) fellow.