Investor Presentaiton
To Lenin, Jewish nationalism was a Bundist and Zionist myth and the only answer to the
160 He extended this view to
Jewish question would be eliminating the Jewish status as ‘other."
the other non-Russian nationalities as well, and thus he and Stalin originally saw assimilation as
the answer to the issue of nationalities. Due to the changing status of the Soviet state through the
Civil War and following years, Stalin realized the need for a new nationalities policy because, as
he points out in "The National Question and Leninism," from 1929, "nations and national
languages possess an extraordinary stability and tremendous power of resistance to the policy of
assimilation."161 Stalin explicitly clarified this ideological shift by stating in the same publication
that "the policy of assimilation is unreservedly excluded from the arsenal of Marxism-Leninism,
as an anti-popular policy, a fatal policy."162 While Lenin and Stalin would move past
assimilation to the new policy of limited national encouragement during the aforementioned
1923 XII Party Congress, unlike other nationalities, Jews, who lacked a national homeland, were
still expected to assimilate. The concept of assimilation was thus the defining trait of Soviet
policy towards the Jews in the 1920s and into the early 1930s.
As early as 1918 the government established two new organizations for encouraging
Jewish assimilation. These were the Commissariat for Jewish National Affairs within the larger
Commissariat for Nationalities (Evkom) and the Jewish Sections of the Communist Party of the
Soviet Union (Evsektsiia). 163 These two groups worked towards "the destruction of the old order,
the Bolshevization of the Jewish proletariat, and the reconstruction of Jewish national life ... and
160 Ibid, 100.
161 Stalin, Joseph, "The National Question and Leninism," (New York: International Publishers, 1929), 15.
162 Ibid.
163 Gitelman, Assimiliation, Acculturation, and National Consciousness Among Soviet Jews, 11.
42View entire presentation