The Jewish Revolution in Belorussia: Economy, Race, and Bolshevik Power by Andrew Sloin (review)

Abstract

SEER, 95, 4, OCTOBER 2017 778 Sloin, Andrew. The Jewish Revolution in Belorussia: Economy, Race, and BolshevikPower.TheModernJewishExperience.IndianaUniversityPress, Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN, 2017. xi + 329 pp. Map. Appendix. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $38.00: £33.00 (paperback). In a meticulously researched book, Andrew Sloin explores how the Bolshevik experiment, premised upon principles of national liberation in a post-capitalist order, gave way to repeated outbreaks of popular ethnic resentment and racial animosity. In many respects, the story that Sloin tells is well known. Much has been written about the promises and pitfalls of Soviet nationality policies and the ways in which the Soviet state managed its multi-ethnic empire. Drawing on a wealth of previously untapped archival materials from Belorussian archives, Sloin’s excellent study nonetheless fills a major lacuna. It will stand alongside some of the best scholarship in Soviet Jewish history that has been published in recent years. Sloin’s focus is on ‘ordinary’ people — Jewish artisans, workers, local party operatives and small-scale labourers — most of whom lived in small towns in Belorussia. Moving beyond official statist agendas or top-down modernization campaigns, The Jewish Revolution in Belorussia emphasizes that, above all, local contexts mattered. The book is divided into seven well-developed chapters, with the most innovative sections dealing with the problem of race. Sloin positions himself in the larger debates on the meanings and practices of race, articulated most forcefully by Francine Hirsch and Eric Weitz, and wisely moves away from what he labels as ‘extreme measures in determining the degree to which race persisted in the Soviet context’ (p. 16). By focusing on the relationship between economy, labour and identity formation, Sloin’s study enlarges our understanding of the role that the logic of race played in everyday Jewish life. Regardless of its commitment to equality, antiracism and internationalism, Sloin demonstrates that the policies embraced by the Soviet state reproduced the conditions of race socially and shaped understandings of nationality at the grassroots level. The new economic reality of the Soviet helped produce much of the racial animosity. In fascinating detail, Sloin describes the interethnic tensions, antagonisms and anxieties that resulted from the NEP economy slidingintocrisis.ReaderslearnhowBelorussianworkersmockedandassaulted Jews on the shop floor, how the new regime of labour caused ethnic divisions, and how the state repeatedly questioned Jewish assimilability. Antisemitic incidents surged in the late 1920s, as the Stalin revolution helped fuel violence against Jews. Sloin provides a compelling, multivalent explanation of the debates on the integration and assimilability of Jews in the post-Revolutionary order. He argues that the Soviet state helped fuel antisemitism. As the Soviet Union slid into crisis, the language used to describe Jews became more absolute. REVIEWS 779 More broadly, The Jewish Revolution in Belorussia also provides a compelling argument that the global economic and political crisis of the late 1920s played no small role in shaping racialized conceptions of antisemitism. ‘Each episode of crisis,’ Sloin writes, ‘hypostasized a certain manifestation of “Jewishness” and took this manifestation to be a malignancy on the body politic’ (p. 243). Andrew Sloin’s attempt to chart how the Bolshevik movement restructured Jewish lives in Belorussia is an engaging and theoretically sophisticated study. The book makes a timely contribution to Soviet and Jewish history and modern European history, and deserves to be read widely. University of Illinois Eugene M. Avrutin Graziosi, Andrea and Sysyn, Frank (eds). Communism and Hunger: The Ukrainian, Chinese, Kazakh, and Soviet Famines in Comparative Perspective. Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies Press, Edmonton, AL and Toronto, ON, 2016. viii + 158 pp. Maps. Figures. Tables. Notes. Bibliographies. $24.95 (paperback). This book presents six of the papers from a conference on Communism and hunger held at the University of Toronto in 2014. Only a few of the papers have substantial academic value, while most of them have flaws that undermine their validity and novelty. The best contribution is the comparative study of famines in Central Asia by Niccolò Pianciola, which places the history of the Soviet Kazakh famine of 1931–33 in the context of Soviet and Chinese treatment of their spheres in Mongolia and of the effects of the Chinese Great Leap Famine [GLF] in Tibet and Central Asia in...