“On the Social-Economic Front”: The Polemics of Shtetl Research during the Stalin Revolution

Abstract

ArgumentThis article explores the relationship between ideology and statistical knowledge in Soviet Yiddish scholarship during the first Five-Year Plan and Cultural Revolution. Specifically, it examines the political status of Yiddish-language socioeconomic research as a tool of state building in the shtetls (small market towns) of the former Pale of Jewish Settlement. Historically, many Jewish inhabitants of the shtetl worked as economic middlemen between city and countryside, a function that became politically untenable after 1917. The Soviet regime sponsored Yiddish socioeconomic data collection in order to monitor its efforts to transform the occupational structure of shtetl Jewry. Accordingly, this data was expected to demonstrate the steady self-disintegration of the shtetl as an obsolete artifact of the old regime. In fact, these Soviet Yiddish narratives inadvertently highlighted the endurance of the shtetl in Soviet life at both the concrete and discursive levels. A close reading of these sources provides insight into how a segment of the Soviet Jewish intelligentsia attempted to align itself within the new state's scientific establishment by fusing modern Jewish social scientific knowledge with Marxist-Leninist principles. In the polemics of the “shtetl problem” we find an example of how Soviet yidishe visnshaft registered the constantly shifting perceptions of ideological orthodoxy and deviation among Jewish Communists, and provoked international debate among Jewish demographers and economists as to the political use and abuse of statistics.