The exhibition “Jews in Tsarist Russia and in the USSR” and the closure of the Jewish Modernisation Project in the Soviet Union, 1937–41

Abstract

This article analyses political and ideological aspects of the representation of Jewish life in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union at the grand exhibition “Jews in Tsarist Russia and in the USSR” that was held at the State Ethnographic Museum in Leningrad in 1939–41. The exhibition celebrated the completion of a large-scale project of Jewish agricultural colonisation in Soviet Russia, in particular, and of Sovietisation of Jewish life, in general. The project culminated in the creation of the Jewish Autonomous Region in the Birobidzhan area of the Far East of the Soviet Union, but the exhibition was opened at the moment when the Communist Party of the Soviet Union had lost interest in the project. Of particular interest is a discrepancy between the official ideological message and its perception by some of critically minded visitors to the exhibition, whose notes have been preserved in the archives of the Russian State Ethnographic Museum in St Petersburg.