The Jewish Revolution in Belorussia: Economy, Race, and Bolshevik Power, written by Andrew Sloin

Abstract

This is a very important book for both Jewish studies and the history of the early Soviet Union. As a history of the revolution, it tells the story of mobilization of ethnicity that resulted in the failure of the revolution’s universalist and anticolonial promise and in the resurgence of racial animosity. Going against the mainstream view of Soviet modernity as unequivocally prioritizing class over race, Andrew Sloin presents the transition from the Civil War to the New Economic Policy and to the Stalinist Great Break as a “slide from nationality