ABSTRACT
In the context of soviet nationalities policy as formulated by Vladimir Lenin and Stalin, the Jews were an anomaly since they lacked a territorial homeland. The government also hoped that territorialization would resolve a variety of problems besetting those Jews who continued to live in the area of traditional Jewish habitation, the former Pale of Settlement. The basic outlines of government policies toward the Jews had been contradictory in nature, since they combined attempts to integrate Jews into Russian society with efforts to keep them segregated from the mainstream. The 1928 decision to designate the Biro-Bidzhanskii Raion, commonly known as Birobidzhan and which became the JAR six years later, as the official territory for Jewish land colonization should be seen in the context of this commitment of both tsarist and communist officials to alter the occupational make-up of the Jews.
