ABSTRACT
The Jewish autonomous region, had suffered a second round of purges and cultural repression. As a result, it was unable to provide conditions for exercising this right even to its own Jewish population, which constituted only a small fraction of Soviet Jews. Soviet doctrine excluded any forms of national-cultural autonomy that were not connected with a nationality's territorial concentration. The newspaper Birobidzhaner shtern preserved its sluggish existence as the sole relic of the past. Apart from the language, it had no specifically Jewish content and up to 1974 was not circulated nationwide. Foreign factors also played an important role in shaping Soviet policy toward Jewish culture in the Khrushchev period. Like other colleagues and writers in the new journal, Vergelis belonged to the generation of the Jewish men-of-letters who had matured as creative personalities prior to the annihilation of Soviet Jewish culture.
