«INDUSTRIAL BIROBIDZHAN IS GROWING»: TWO EXHIBITIONS IN MOSCOW AND LENINGRAD DEDICATED TO JEWISH ECONOMIC AND CULTURAL CONSTRUCTION IN THE USSR IN 1930S

Аннотация

The author of the article considers two exhibitions dedicated to the Soviet propaganda project for the radical reconstruction of the Russian Jewry socio-economic structure. The first one – «Birobidzhan» – was held in 1933 in a pavilion of the Maxim Gorky Central Park of Culture and Rest in Moscow. Another exhibition –«Jews in Tsarist Russia and in the USSR», organized by the Jewish section of the State Museum of Ethnography (now – the Russian Ethnographic Museum) was working in Leningrad for the period from 1939 to 1941. Based on the documents stored in the Scientific Archive of the Russian Ethnographic Museum, the author shows how the Soviet propaganda machine used the demonstration material of museums in 1930s. The entire arsenal of exhibition was used to demonstrate «the achievements of the Leninist-Stalinist national policy among the Jews of the USSR», a creation of the Jewish Autonomous Region in the Soviet Far East being a major one.