The Jewish Proletariat of the USSR in the Late 1920s — Early 1930s

Abstract

The article explores general tendencies of the Jewish proletariat formation in Ukraine in the late 1920s and early 1930s, analyzes the dynamic of this phenomenon in the USSR and the Ukrainian SSR, and concludes that their growth rates coincided. It shows main tendencies of the increasing number of Jewish workers at industrial enterprises of Odesa and Kyiv, and also the main spheres of employment of the Jewish population according to the population censuses of 1926 and 1939. Also, it identifies reasons for the entry of the Jewish population into the working class of the USSR, which include economic (unemployment, hunger) and political one (the need to demonstrate loyalty to the new Soviet power). It shows that the policy of industrialization served as the impetus for the encouragement of broad circles of the population, including national minorities and the Jewish population in particular, to work at factories and plants. The article considers the sources of the proletariat formation in the USSR and suggests that among the Jews there was a high proportion of artisans, employees, and traders who were converted to workers, while the share of peasants was insignificant given the policy of agrarian settlement of the Jewish population pursued by the Soviet authorities. The mechanism of recruiting potential workers in the USSR is revealed. The author elucidates the description of life of Jewish workers in the Soviet press. Using the example of Jewish workers of the Shcherbynskyi mine, author shows the path of vast majority of unskilled Jews to factories and plants, and their transformation into workers. The research concludes that despite numerous difficulties of various kinds, the number of Jewish workers in the Ukrainian SSR was constantly increasing, which can be interpreted as a logical consequence of the need to adjust to new living conditions under the Soviet rule.