Soviet Jewish Pale’
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NAVIGATING THE PLANNED ECONOMY: ACCOMMODATION AND SURVIVAL IN MOSCOW’S POST-WAR ‘SOVIET JEWISH PALE’ Anna Kushkova A dissertation submitted to the faculty at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Anthropology in the College of Arts and Sciences. Chapel Hill 2017 Approved by: Ruth von Bernuth Jonathan Boyarin Rudolf Colloredo-Mansfeld James Peacock Michele Rivkin-Fish © 2017 Anna Kushkova ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ii ABSTRACT Anna Kushkova: Navigating the planned economy: Accommodation and survival in Moscow’s post-war ‘Soviet Jewish Pale’ (Under the direction of Michele Rivkin-Fish and Jonathan Boyarin) This dissertation presents an anthropological case study of Jewish engagement in the Soviet “planned economy,” or the “economy of shortage,” in a specific geographic setting of Moscow Jewish suburbs in the first decades after World War II. Due to a range of socio-political, economic and demographic developments Moscow’s suburban settlements with their dense pattern of Jewish residence, unparalleled in Soviet history, turned into what may be called a “Soviet Jewish pale” – a distinctive socio-cultural Jewish environment sustaining a specific configuration of Soviet Jewishness, not fully coinciding with that of the former shtetl, yet different from that characteristic of large urban settings. The study focuses on one particular sphere constitutive of the suburban Jewish collective identity, that is, the economic practices where Jewishness played a vital role in creating channels for obtaining production resources, organizing production and devising distribution strategies. It demonstrates that the prohibition of private entrepreneurship on the part of the socialist state, largely ideological rather than economic in nature, called forth a likewise not purely economic response from below – ethnic mobilization in certain spheres of the formal socialist economy. In particular, the dissertation addresses three Jewish economic “niches” – small-scale artel production, trade and the Soviet version of junk-yards, and explores the question of their “embeddedness” in Jewish economic and social traditions. As a part of a wider debate on the nature of socialist production, the dissertation provides a locally-informed understanding of the role that ethnic actors played in production and distribution at the iii intersection of the “first” and the “second” Soviet economies. As cultural anthropology, it examines the complex relationships between social tradition, belief and accommodation in the urban-rural nexus of the country’s capital. By focusing on an ethnic group subjected to open and covert discrimination that curbed its members’ professional choices, this work involves an historically grounded sociocultural analysis of inequality and socio-political adaptation. As economic anthropology, it makes the first systematic attempt at narrating Soviet Jewish economic history after World War II. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS .............................................................................................................vi LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS ............................................................................................................ix FOREWORD ...................................................................................................................................... 1 PART I INTRODUCTION ............................................................................................................................ 10 CHAPTER ONE: VARIETIES OF SOVIET JEWISHNESS ............................................................. 60 CHAPTER TWO: “FIGURED WORLD” OF THE SOVIET JEWISH ECONOMY .......................... 80 CHAPTER THREE: “THE SOVIET JEWISH PALE”: MALAKHOVKA AND SALTYKOVKA ............................................................................................................................. 107 CHAPTER FOUR: MALAKHOVKA AND SALTYKOVKA: SOVIET JEWISH RAILROAD NARRATIVE ............................................................................................................ 144 PART II CHAPTER FIVE: “IN THE SHADOW OF THE TALL FORESTS OF SOCIALISM”: POST-WAR ARTELS .................................................................................................................... 157 CHAPTER SIX: SOVIET JEWISH TRADE AND SOVIET JEWISH TRADERS .......................... 231 CHAPTER SEVEN: SUBURBAN MOSCOW “JUNK-YARD JEWS” ........................................... 285 CHAPTER EIGHT: SOVIET STATE ECONOMIC ANTI-SEMITISM .......................................... 325 CONCLUSION .............................................................................................................................. 342 BIBLIOGRAPHY ........................................................................................................................... 358 LIST OF INTERVIEWS ................................................................................................................. 395 v LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Ill. 1: Grave of Chaim and Sarah Goldovsky, Malakhovka cemetery ............................................... 110 Ill. 2: Anti-religious meeting in Cherkizovo (1929) ......................................................................... 115 Ill. 3: Solicitation to the militia department to provide the permanent police registration (1935) ...................................................................................................... 118 Ill. 4: Marc Chagall in Malakhovka Jewish orphanage (1920s) ........................................................ 125 Ill. 5: Sculpture dedicated to M. Chagall in Malakhovka .................................................................. 126 Ill. 6: An old house in Malakhovka ................................................................................................. 129 Ill. 7: Circle of Jewish settlements around Moscow (reconstruction) ................................................ 131 Ill. 8: The map of Malakhovka ........................................................................................................ 142 Ill. 9: Station Malakhovka, Moscow suburbs. Beginning of the twentieth century ............................ 147 Ill. 10: Suburban railroad connection from Moscow to Saltykovka and Malakhovka ........................ 149 Ill. 11: Suburban electric train ......................................................................................................... 150 Ill. 12: Inside a Moscow suburban train (1950) ................................................................................ 151 Ill. 13: ORT poster advertising support of Jewish artisans (1930) .................................................... 161 Ill. 14: Synagogues turned into artisanal clubs (1931) ...................................................................... 165 Ill. 15: Poster “Against all and every kind of religion” (1925/1933) ................................................. 166 Ill. 16: A page from the “Annual report” of an artel (1946) .............................................................. 173 Ill. 17: A page from the “labor book” (1950s) .................................................................................. 174 Ill. 18: Artel employees, Leningrad, ca. 1956 .................................................................................. 177 Ill. 19: L. Grol’man. In my mother’s artel ........................................................................................ 178 Ill. 20: Samples of artel production (1950s) ..................................................................................... 179 vi Ill. 21: Inside producer artels (1950s) .............................................................................................. 179 Ill. 22: Caricature about the low quality of artel production (1953) .................................................. 183 Ill. 23: Yohanan Rafalovich with his sisters Bella and Sonya, ca. 1925-1926 ................................... 207 Ill. 24: A page from the CPSU registration card (1940s) .................................................................. 209 Ill. 25: A page from the Labor book of Anna Dmitrievna Chertkova (1940s) ................................... 224 Ill. 26: “Yesterday and today” (the end of artels) (1960) .................................................................. 228 Ill. 27: Advertisement for an artel closeout sale (1960) .................................................................... 230 Ill. 28: “Empty marketplace, shut down by Soviet restrictions against private trade, Shklov, USSR, 1920s.” ..................................................................................................................... 234 Ill. 29: Semion Isaakovich Rynkovsky (behind the counter, next to the scales), head of the cooperative food store in Melitopol (Ukraine), late 1920s – early 1930s ................................ 237 Ill. 30: The banner presented to the Second Regional Conference of the Leningrad OZET (1928) .............................................................................................. 239 Ill. 31: Bronia Сhaimovna Zaretskaya working in a satellite shop in the town of Babushkin, middle of 1950s .................................................................................................................... 247 Ill. 32: Membership card of Veniamin Zalmanovich Dvorkin .........................................................