Siberia as a “New Jewish Center”: A Plan to Resettle Refugees in Russia during the First World War

Abstract

In the spring and summer of 1915, during World War I, nearly half a million (and by some estimates, up to one million) Jewish civilians fled or were expelled by the Russian Army from front zones in Polish and Lithuanian territories. This article examines questions connected with the idea, proposed by the leaders of Jewish relief organizations in Petrograd, and by the economist B. D. Brutskus in particular, to resettle Jewish refugees in Siberia. The so-called “Brutskus Plan” and reactions to it shows that, first, Russian Jewish intellectuals thought within an explicitly imperial framework; second, negative reactions to the plan on the part of Siberian Jews themselves shed light on the tremendous geographic diversity and heterogeneity of the empire’s Jewish population; and third, opponents to the Siberian plan exposed internal conflicts within the Jewish national movement (chiefly between Zionists and non-Zionists) in regard to migration and settlement.