러시아ㆍ유라시아

This paper probes the crossroads between the realities of life and the ambitions of the early Soviet regime in one corner of its vast countryside. As a test case, I explore the meeting of organized agrarianization of Jews from the former Pale of Settlement with the mechanisms of Soviet power in the geographical and national peripheries of what was seen until recently as a monolithic, centralized state. Barring the last four years before Operation Barbarossa, a non-governmental, non-denominational American-Jewish philanthropy (the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee [Joint or Agro-Joint]) funded and administered much of this resettlement project in southern Ukraine and Crimea. As shall be seen, the arrival of an effective foreign organization not only shaped the lives of its client-colonists, but the very character of Soviet rural authority through the emergence of hybrid models of governance in the countryside.