Is Crimea ours?

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

The advantages were mainly enjoyed by German colonists and some others, including Jewish, immigrants. Privileges were expressed in large allotments of land, tax breaks, loans on special terms and exemption from military service. That is why these groups subsequently formed the basis of the forces striving to create an independent national state in Crimea.

In 1920, after the liberation of Crimea from Wrangel and the establishment of Soviet power, the privileged national groups of colonists lost all privileges, and their plans to create their own state became quite illusory. In order to increase their influence, they used energetic methods, creating societies and alliances. Thus, in 1921, an alliance was formed under the name "Bund-Stroy"; in 1922 the Jewish consumer cooperative "Amateur" was active.

In the early 1920s, taking advantage of the extremely difficult situation of the young Soviet Republic, a number of foreign firms entered into negotiations with the Soviet government on the provision of economic assistance, putting forward the appropriate conditions: the commissioning of a number of developments on the territory of Crimea and the creation of Jewish autonomy. It was during the famine years of 1921-22 that the peninsula first learned about the Jewish charitable organization "Joint".

In the 1920s and 1930s. in the Crimea, the Agro-Joint, which settled in the United States, was already actively operating and relied on the Crimean Jewish colonists. Since 1922, a branch of the Agro-Joint bank functioned in Simferopol, which financed the movement of new Jewish settlers, as well as the training of national personnel in educational institutions of the Crimea. The largest branch of the Agro-Joint firm settled in Dzhankoy. It was at this time that more than 150 settlements appeared in the steppe Crimea, which were inhabited exclusively by "persons of Jewish nationality."

The Joint spent $ 24.5 million, mostly on aid to Russian Jews. By agreement with the Soviet authorities (1922), medical centers, loan offices and vocational schools were opened; OZET financed the creation of Jewish agricultural settlements in Ukraine and Crimea. Since 1924, with the full support of the Soviet authorities, Agro-Joint began to represent this activity of the Joint in the USSR. Fundraising was also carried out by the American Society for Aid to Jewish Agricultural Settlements in Russia, created in 1928.

This activity soon acquired the scale of interstate relations. In 1923, in the USSR and the USA, almost simultaneously, they began to discuss the idea of creating national autonomy and resettlement of Jews from Belarus, Ukraine, Russia to lands in the Black Sea region. According to the documents found in the archival collections of Crimea, as well as other sources, it is now possible to partially restore the course of those old events.

… The resettlement of Jews to Crimea was actively discussed in the elite circles of the capital's intelligentsia. One of the leaders of the Joint, a native of Russia Rosen, arrived from America, urging the chairman of the Crimean Central Executive Committee Gaven to allocate vacant land for the resettlement of 1,000 Jewish families as an experiment in exchange for financial and technical assistance. The catastrophic situation in Crimea that developed after the famine of 1921-22, the lack of assistance from the Center did not leave the leaders of Crimea with a choice.

One of the main ideologists of the implementation of the idea was a prominent member of the Soviet government, Yuri Larin (Mikhail Lurie), a native of Simferopol, the future father-in-law of NI Bukharin. He developed a plan for the creation of a Jewish republic in Crimea and the resettlement of 280 thousand Jews on its territory. At the same time, through the close to Maria Ulyanova and Nikolai Bukharin, according to the editorial staff of the Pravda newspaper, Abram Bragin, the head of the Jewish section of the RCP (b), a propaganda noise was raised around the “Jewish Pavilion” at the 1923 All-Union Agricultural Exhibition. It was financed by the same "Joint". It is noteworthy that on his last visit to Moscow in October 1923, the semi-paralyzed Lenin toured the Jewish exposition at the All-Union Agricultural Exhibition. An analysis of the literature ordered at that time for Lenin testifies to his increased attention to the Jewish question and the Crimea.

In November 1923, Bragin prepared a draft document, according to which, by the 10th anniversary of the October Revolution, it was proposed to form an autonomous region of Jews on the territory of Northern Crimea, the southern steppe part of Ukraine and the Black Sea coast up to the borders of Abkhazia, with a total area of 10 million acres, with the aim of resettlement here of 500 thousand Jews. On its basis, Bragin, Rosen and Deputy People's Commissar Broido presented a memorandum to the Politburo through Lev Kamenev, which emphasized that the formation of a Jewish state "would prove to be politically beneficial for Soviet power." If the plan was realized, the authors of the note guaranteed the receipt of tens of millions of dollars "through Jewish, American and international organizations," as this "would arouse unprecedented interest in all economically and politically powerful organizations in America and Europe."

The Politburo discussed the project on several occasions. His active supporters were Trotsky, Kamenev, Zinoviev, Bukharin, Rykov, as well as Tsyurupa and Chicherin. In the course of the discussion, the emphasis gradually shifted to the use of Crimea, since in Ukraine there were still fresh memories of the Jewish pogroms during the civil war and the danger of a repetition of those tragic events did not disappear.

In January 1924, it was already a question of "an autonomous Jewish government, federated with Russia," a draft decree was prepared on the creation of a Jewish Autonomous SSR in the northern part of Crimea. On February 20, 1924, the Jewish Telegraph Agency (ETA) issued a corresponding message abroad.

To address the issues raised in the appeals of Larin and Bragin regarding the resettlement of Jews from the "townships" of Ukraine and Belarus, the Presidium of the Central Executive Committee of the USSR at a meeting on August 29, 1924 decided to form a Committee on the land arrangement of Jewish workers (KomZET) and a Public Committee on the land arrangement of Jewish workers (OZET). KOMZET was headed by P. G. Smidovich, OZET - by Larin.

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KomZET focused its activities on the resettlement of 500-600 thousand people. The need for this was justified by the fact that “the economic structure of the Jewish population is completely not adapted to the Soviet system, with its course towards state trade, cooperation and concentration of industry, and if urgent measures are not taken to transfer the Jewish population to industrial labor, then a significant part of it will be supplied before the prospect of extinction and degeneration ….

In May 1926, a long-term plan for the resettlement of Jews across the USSR was determined for 10 years - 100 thousand families. In June of the same year, a plan was approved for the next 3 years - 18 thousand families. In accordance with the decision of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks of July 26, 1928, the Crimean ASSR, along with Birobidzhan, became the main base for Jewish resettlement. By October-November 1928, 131,901, 24 hectares of land were allocated for these purposes in the Crimea.

In Crimea, since 1921, there was an autonomous republic, its own Constitution was in force. The consequences of the famine were gradually overcome, the “elimination of landlessness” among the Crimean Tatars by their resettlement from the mountainous Crimea to the steppe regions began. More than 200 thousand Tatar emigrants from Bulgaria and Romania received official permission to return to Crimea with the provision of privileges (the corresponding decision of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee of the RSFSR has not been canceled so far).

On April 21, 1926, a visiting meeting of the Bureau of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks in Bakhchisarai approved a promising resettlement plan for the republic, but it turned out that the resettlement of Jews to Crimea contradicted the guidelines of the local authorities regarding the land arrangement of the Tatar peasantry. Inevitably, this led to a conflict between the leadership of the Crimean state and party bodies and Moscow. In the capital, top officials got down to business. In support of the "Crimean project" and with an appeal to the West to raise funds, 49 famous writers and poets came forward. A number of delegations went to America and Europe with the aim of agitating for the creation of a Jewish republic in Crimea. In Berlin, at a meeting with representatives of the financial and political circles of Europe, People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs Chicherin assured that the government of the USSR is "very serious" about the "Crimean project" and "not the slightest difficulty is foreseen in its implementation."

The reaction of the leaders of the World Zionist Organization, which included the issue of the "Crimean Project" in the agenda of the Jewish Congress of America, held in Philadelphia, seems to be typical. 200 richest people in America addressed the participants to raise funds for the "Crimean Project". The future presidents G. Hoover and F. Roosevelt welcomed the discussion of the issue, and the wife of the latter, Eleanor, took a personal part in its work. On the eve of the congress, on behalf of the Soviet government, Smidovich once again assured that in exchange for financial assistance "the colonization of Crimea by Jews will be carried out." The Congress decided to support the "Crimean Project" and allocate 15 million dollars.

During the work of the congress, some of its influential participants came out categorically against the project, regarding it as a clever move by the Bolsheviks in order to gain access to international financial resources. However, the situation was reversed by L. Marshall, who positively characterized the situation in the USSR and the significance of the "Crimean project". Thus, despite the absence of diplomatic relations between the USSR and the USA, the Congress decided to start investments in Crimea through the Joint.

The Politburo adopted a corresponding resolution, which set the task "to keep a course on the possibility of organizing an autonomous Jewish unit with favorable results of resettlement" in Crimea. At the same time, simultaneously in the USSR and the USA - probably not without the mediation of Jewish circles - the sounding of the soil began in order to establish diplomatic relations between the countries. Thus, during negotiations with one of the leaders of the Joint, Rosenberg, Larin and the former Bundist Weinstein, on behalf of the Soviet leadership, stated that the implementation of the Crimean project “would be government, the American Jewish community must come out of neutrality and put appropriate pressure on the United States government. " Rosenberg promised to provide the necessary assistance. Warburg also negotiated about this in Moscow. Their efforts had the right impact on Roosevelt, who soon after his election as President of the United States established diplomatic relations with the USSR.

All decisions on Crimea were made in an atmosphere of increased secrecy. Even the secretary of the Crimean regional party committee, Petropavlovsky, who had been sent from Moscow, did not know about them. And Menzhinsky's deputy for the GPU Trilisser, at a meeting in the Central Committee of the RCP (b) on anti-Semitism, noted with surprise that rumors had appeared in the Jewish circles of the USSR about the creation of a Jewish republic in Crimea. The situation was unexpectedly "blown up" by the chairman of the Ukrainian CEC, Petrovsky, who leaked information about the Politburo's decision in an interview with an Izvestia correspondent.

On April 7, 1926, the All-Crimean Jewish Conference opened in Simferopol, in connection with which an unpleasant incident occurred for KomZET. In the April 11 issue of Krasniy Krym, the main provisions of the speech of the representative of the Department of Nationalities of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee IM Rashkes were published: three million Jews of the USSR ". The situation in Crimea immediately became tense: the Crimean Tatars and Germans became agitated. However, three days later, the editorial office published a letter from Rashkes, in which he retracted his words, calling it a "clearly ridiculous idea." Citing the lack of knowledge of their employees in the Hebrew language, the editorial staff apologized to the capital's comrade …

In contrast to the Jewish resettlement project, the Crimean Tatar communists came up with the idea of creating a German autonomous republic in the north of Crimea. One of the main opponents of the mass resettlement of Jews to Crimea was the chairman of the Crimean Central Executive Committee, Veli Ibraimov. When the situation on the peninsula got out of control, he published an article in the Crimean Tatar newspaper Yeni-Dunya: the government found it impossible to meet this demand. We recently raised this issue in Moscow and we hope that it will be resolved in our favor. Ibraimov was supported by the national intelligentsia, which was previously a member of the Milli-Firka party.

On September 26, 1927, Larin proposed a set of measures for the settlement of Jewish settlers in the Crimea, according to which the main specialization of their farms was to be the production of grape alcohol to supply the Crimean wineries. One of the important points was the proposal of the NKVD of the Crimean Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic "to develop … a plan for dividing the areas allotted for Jewish agriculture into village councils with the establishment of appropriate village councils as they are actually settled and with the recognition of Russian and Jewish office-work languages in them on equal terms."

The proposal met with resistance from the leaders of the Crimean Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, especially Veli Ibraimov. Concerned about the development of events, Larin sent a letter to Stalin, in which he accused Ibraimov of "stirring up the half-dark Tatar masses." Desperate telegrams were sent to Stalin and Molotov by a completely confused Petropavlovsky. In the end, Ibraimov was summoned to Moscow, where at the beginning of 1928 he was arrested and charged with criminal offenses during the Civil War. Forced under pressure to confess to organizing the murder of one of the Tatar activists and hiding the bandits, he was shot.

At the same time, the GPU prepared a closed "trial 63": this is how the bloom of the Tatar national intelligentsia was exiled to Solovki. The unrest among the Crimean Germans was brutally suppressed, but about a thousand of them managed to leave the USSR.

With the aim of freeing lands for the resettlement of Jews, the Presidium of the Central Executive Committee of the USSR approved a law recognizing the North Crimean territories as lands of all-Union significance. Moscow’s decisive action convinced the Americans to move from individual investments to a large-scale action designed for a long time. The development of a loan agreement between "Joint" and the government of the USSR began, which was signed on February 19, 1929. Under the agreement, "Joint" allocated 900 thousand dollars a year for 10 years at 5% per annum. In case of successful implementation of the project, it was supposed to pay the so-called additional amounts of up to 500 thousand dollars per year. The payment of the debt was supposed to begin in 1945 and end in 1954 (when the Crimea was transferred from Russia to Ukraine!). In the event of a violation by the Soviet side of its obligations, funding was terminated. The Joint reserved the exclusive right to reduce the loan amount from $ 9 million to $ 7 million without explanation.

The peculiarity of the project was that the government of the USSR issued bonds for the entire amount of the loan and transferred bonds to the Joint, which were distributed by subscription. Thus, the largest financial and political families of America - Rockefeller, Marshall, Warburg, Roosevelt, Hoover, and others - became the holders of land shares in Crimea.

On September 5, 1930, by the decision of the Crimean Central Executive Committee, Freidorf became the center of the Jewish national region. In 1931, the OK VKP (b) and the Crimean government stated that "the Jewish resettlement to the Crimea justified itself politically and economically." A Jewish national Freidorf region, 32 Jewish national village councils were created in the republic, and the newspaper "Lenin Veg" in Yiddish was established.

The resettlement of Jews coincided with the "dispossession" and the forced eviction of peasants from Crimea. The GPU deployed a network of camps throughout the peninsula (there were four of them only in the Simferopol region). According to the report of the employee of the Crimean OGPU Salyn, on March 26, 1930, 16 thousand people were “dispossessed” and determined to be evicted, and the total number of those evicted reached 25-30 thousand.

Regional authorities reacted differently to these events. So, in February 1931, the chairman of the Central Executive Committee of the Crimean ASSR Memet Ismail Kubaev at a party conference in the Dzhankoy region said that Moscow was pursuing a policy of great-power chauvinism, ruining the working masses of Crimea, primarily the Tatars. At the OK bureau, this speech was regarded as "counter-revolutionary", and Kubaev was immediately removed from his post.

The resettlement of Jews was sometimes met with opposition from the local population. Land, economic conflicts grew into national ones, and therefore, from July 1928, an outflow of immigrants began to be observed (for some collective farms, the turnover reached 60-70%). According to the 1926 census, out of 39,921 Jews, 4,083 people lived in rural areas. As of January 1, 1930, out of 49,100 Crimean Jews, only 10,140 lived in the village. By 1941, the number of Jews increased, according to some sources, to 70 thousand, of which only 17 thousand people lived in 86 Jewish collective farms.

After the establishment of diplomatic relations with America with the active assistance of US President Roosevelt, a decrease in activity in the colonization of Crimea began to be observed. At the same time, negative sentiments intensified, fueled by the exposure of the "enemies of the people." The refusal of the Americans to conclude a new loan agreement before the full fulfillment of the terms of the agreement led to the establishment of two Jewish regions in Crimea instead of a Jewish republic. In them, in accordance with the general principles of the national policy of the USSR, all administrative institutions, courts, educational institutions had Yiddish as their official language, and public and educational institutions were maintained at state expense.

The activities of nationalist forces in Crimea, fueled from abroad, did not stop until 1934, but in later sources it is difficult to find even a mention of it, apparently because on May 7, 1934, the Jewish Autonomous Region was formed in the Khabarovsk Territory. The "Joint" branch in the USSR was liquidated by the Decree of the Politburo of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks dated May 4, 1938. By this time D. Rosenberg had spent $ 30 million on measures to create Jewish colonies in Crimea."

No. 17 (359) dated May 7, 2013 ["Arguments of the Week", Ivan KONEV]

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