“It is Strange to Call an Uzbek, a Jew, or a Latvian, Russian”: Stalin’s Nationalities Policy and the Question of Jewish Assimilation Revisited

The traditional Sovietological paradigm of Stalin’s nationalities policy—presented as an anti-national policy geared toward the assimilation of non-Russian ethnic groups in the supernational entity of the “Soviet people” and its Russian culture—has, in recent decades, given way to a more complex approach that has identified strong tendencies in the ideology and practice of Stalinist Bolshevism to foster “primordial” ethnic identities. Most of the historiography on Soviet Jews, however, has found it hard to break free of Cold-War Sovietological assumptions and continues to view the policies of the Stalinist regime toward the Jews as seeking their assimilation and eventual disappearance. The present article attempts to re-examine this view and point to the ambivalent and even negative attitude of Stalin and his acolytes to the issue of Jewish assimilation—this based on a closer reading of Stalin’s relevant writings and archival sources pertaining to the Birobidzhan project and the period of anti-Jewish persecution, some of which have never been studied before, and on the critical insights of recent studies on the subject of Stalin’s nationalities policy.