Speculators, swindlers and other Jews: regulating trade in revolutionary White Russia

Abstract

The Bolshevik Revolution introduced sweeping campaigns for social and economic regulation in the geographic region of the former Pale of Settlement. Focusing on the policing and rhetorical construction of the economic crime of “speculation,” this article examines the effort to reconstruct Jewish economic practices in the early Soviet period of the New Economic Policy. Based on archival material from the National Archive in Minsk, Belarus, and from the contemporaneous Yiddish Press in Minsk, the article concludes that the campaign to regulate speculation and economic practices constituted a primary front in the attempt to construct post‐revolutionary Soviet Jewish culture. At the same time, this article suggests that campaigns to regulate speculation served to reinscribe Jewish actors as socially alien elements in post‐revolutionary society.