A lot of people point to Birobidzhan as proof of the Soviet Union not being antisemitic after all. But the fact of the matter is, while Birobidzhan was partially the brain child of a hopeful Jewish population, it was in fact a place they were allowed simply because it meant fewer Jews in the more populated areas of the Soviet Union.
Also don't get me wrong, Birobidzhan is not a ghost town. A bunch of Jews still live there (though honestly only 1% of the population now is actually Jewish). But it is a dying town. As Israel became a much more viable option for 'Soviet' Jews, the more Jews left for it. Or to the United States or Canada or wherever else. Birobidzhan's highest population numbers hit 80k in 1989, just before the Wall fell. It now hosts approximately 75k people, 1% of them Jewish. But there are also Gentile Koreans, Chinese, Ukrainians, Cossacks, Mongolians, etc.,
Birobidzhan was considered to some a compromise over going to Israel. The problem of course is that Birobidzhan was still in the USSR. However, you would not get blacklisted just by whispering its name like you would when talking of Israel. Because if Jews weren't dying in pogroms or giving up their 'Jewishness', having them leave the Soviet Union to instead be citizens of Israel was unacceptable. How DARE these Jews claim to not be Soviets? How DARE they leave behind the glorious Soviet Union? Even if we treat them like crap how DARE they leave!!
The area they were given for this new 'Jewish Autonomous Zone' was pretty much a desert. Jews were essentially being sent to wander the fucking desert again. Nothing really grew in Birobidzhan that could sustain such a population increase in the 1930s and anything that started to manage it often died off. Through a lot of hard work, they have greenery going on but not necessarily food. To say nothing of the infrastructure already there and just how isolated it really was. At least half of the Jews who arrived at Birobidzhan returned to whence they came because of just how difficult it was to live there.
By the way, did I mention that Birobidzhan was a place already occupied and the original population were told to pack up and get out if they didn't want to be around *gasp horror* jews?
While many Jews left for Birobidzhan of their own free will, many more fled there after being the target of pogroms and other antisemitic attacks in the rest of the USSR. It became a place that the powers that be (in a system that was supposed to give power to the people but didn't) knew they could find Jews to either exploit or kill anytime they fucking felt like it. Think Kristallnacht but many nights and many whims. You know, pogroms against people who had just fucking fled pogroms.
In this once upon a time in so called Jew Utopia, it was illegal to not only study the Torah (and the Talmud and everything else) it was also illegal to learn Hebrew or Yiddish (frequent visitors to my blog or just ppl who know will be aware this was true of basically every language that wasn't Russian which says a lot but i digress. But that does not mean everyone ONLY knew Russian because of course people will take the risk to learn a new language if they feel they must). Birobidzhan became a place eventually where they had a newspaper written in Yiddish (Birobidzhaner Shtern, meaning Birobidzhan Star in Yiddish appropriately enough) for a population that probably didn't even have it as a third language much less 2nd or 1st. It did however get the distinction of being the largest Yiddish language newspaper in the entire Soviet Union but as mentioned earlier that doesn't say much when the people of Biro barely got away with having Birobidzhaner Shtern in the first place.
It continues to publish to the present day so it can be considered one of the longest running Yiddish newspapers in the Eastern world (though not uninterrupted. There were many interruptions). It was also written in Russian, for all those Jews who never learned Yiddish (Not just because it was illegal. It sometimes wasn't viewed as necessary to know. Hebrew was used for worship and Yiddish for a long time was considered a lesser language when you already had German, Polish, Russian, etc., but many did still use it for everyday discussion. I have seen some people even now make fun of Yiddish which is... not cool. There is a difference between making jokes and making fun.)
Essentially, having any kind of proud Jewish soul was next to impossible in the Soviet Union. Worship was illegal, the language of our ancestors was illegal, our books were illegal. Yes, many still did all that stuff anyway but that doesn't erase it being illegal. If you were caught you could be executed for it same as many were executed for speaking or learning Ukrainian in the same time frame. Again, doing all this in Birobidzhan was basically living on borrowed time. At any moment the powers that be could decide they also could not stand having Jews in the ass end of nowhere being Jews.
Those living in Birobidzhan from the 1930s onward (remember, it was already settled when the Jews got there after a very trying journey) were all too aware that they weren't hidden. The powers that be knew exactly where Birobidzhan was, many Jews had actually been sent there from places like Ukraine and Belarus for being annoying about Russian settlement in their lands but not enough to send them to gulag. So they still lived in fear of the pogroms following them. They were also on the border with China and thus served as a low key deterrent for Chinese expansion. The Soviet Union even called the mass settlement operation the Birobidzhan Experiment.
In 1948, Stalin enacted a 'campaign against rootless cosmopolitans'. Cosmopolitan was almost always an antisemitic dogwhistle. 1948 is also when Birobidzhan was nearly bulldozed entirely. It had outlived its usefulness but managed to survive just barely.
Following this, 4 years later, in August 1952 came the Night (isn't it always for tragedies affecting Jews?) of the Murdered Poets. ALL 13 victims were poets who were Jewish and wrote predominantly in Yiddish. Some had a connection to Birobidzhan. Including a man who had the strongest connection to Birobidzhan, David Bergelson who came from a Ukrainian stetl before settling in Birobidzhan. Mere months later that same year, in November, St*lin erased all doubt about whether Jews were welcome anymore (and had never really been anyway): they weren't. He used the term Jewish Nationalist (basically any Jew that didn't consider themselves only Soviet) as well as a recorded use of the phrase "eat the rich" (again an antisemitic dogwhistle in that time frame; not saying it is now. it was also used against Ukrainian 'kulaks/kurkuls' to justify the Holodomor) in a speech to the Politburo.
It also continued his campaign for the Doctors' Plot, as that same speech had him railing about his belief that many doctors were 'Jewish nationalists'. From 1951 to 1953, any doctor was suspect even if they weren't at all Jewish (this was a belief shared by many nazis as well). With all of this going on, everything Jewish culture was closed down in Birobidzhan, just as in the rest of the Soviet Union. The mask had finally fully fallen approximately 30 years before the Iron Curtain fell and only 20 years after Birobidzhan was founded as a Jewish Autonomous Zone. Birobidzhan was never a true safe haven, nor had been the Soviet Union as a whole. The Soviet Union had always had the power to shut it down, it barely tolerated such a concentration of Jews simply because it was in fact so far away from 'civilization'.
Things only got marginally better for Jews in the Soviet Union when the Purim Miracle of 1953 happened: the death of St*lin. He had been ready to give the green light on a far reaching campaign that could have seen more than 75% of the remaining 'Soviet' Jewish population eradicated but, as the mention of Perum implies, this was stopped in its tracks with the death of St*lin. Even without St*lin, however, any Jew that so much as whispered about going to Israel was, again, blacklisted (which meant losing their jobs and homes) and given the title of the very thing Soviets hated: leeches aka people who relied on welfare (because remember they didn't practice what they preached about everyone deserving to have a life worth living no matter their ability or who they were).
Birobidzhan, while still populated, stands as a cautionary tale and proof positive that the Soviet Union lied for its entire existence about Jewish treatment and that russia has inherited this tendency. If it sounds too good to be true (especially for Jews), then it probably is.
TL; DR: there has never been a fucking Jewish utopia in the Soviet Union and anyone saying as such is a liar who has gaslit themselves into believing otherwise. With often the 'but there were SO MANY Soviet Jews' line being proof while forgetting (conveniently) that the USSR was a HUGE place to begin with that swallowed many countries that already had a well established Jewish population (Ukraine, for instance). And no points are given for pointing out 'marx was a Jew'. He was self-hating (and his entire family had converted away anyway) and led the charge in insisting Jews give up their Jewishness for the sake of communism. And Marxist Jews are deluding themselves.
