two thousand Jews decided to move to the purported Soviet Zion during in the 1930s.
Despite efforts to encourage Jews to resettle in the region during the first decade of its existence and again for a few years after the end of World War II, the Birobidzhan experiment failed dismally. Not only did the region fail to attract many Jews because of its remoteness from the center of Jewish population, but the harsh conditions kept significant numbers of Jews from migrating. By 1939 just less than 18,000 of the region’s approximately 109,000 inhabitants were Jews. Soviet Jews were more inclined to move to one of the major cities of the western Soviet Union, such as Minsk, Leningrad, Kiev, Moscow, or Odessa, than to uproot themselves to the marshes of Birobidzhan,
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where there were limited educational and job opportunities. Moreover, the Kremlin’s attitude toward Jews turned hostile by the time of the Great Purges of 1936-1938, when the regime clamped down on Jewish settlement. The government closed almost all the Yiddish schools in the region, dismantled agencies dealing with Jewish resettlement, shut down many cultural and social Jewish institutions, and promoted the cultural assimilation of Jews. While retaining Yiddish as an official language and maintaining the fiction that Birobidzhan embodied the national and cultural aspirations of Soviet Jewry, the regime nonetheless stifled the emergence of Jewish culture and society.
In the wake of World War II, the Kremlin revived in 1946 and 1947 Jewish migration to Birobidzhan and resuscitated Yiddish culture. But the emergence of government-sponsored anti-Semitism during the last years of Josef Stalin’s life destroyed any hope that Birobidzhan would develop into the center of Soviet Jewish life. Still, Yiddish remains one of the official languages of the region to this day, and since the early 1930s a Yiddish newspaper, one of the few of its kind, has been published continuously, except when World War II disrupted publication for several years. Indeed, in the early 1990s the offices of the KGB displayed plaques in both Russian and Yiddish, as did all other government buildings, despite the fact that Jews numbered no more than several thousand out of a total population of more than 200,000. Even fewer Jewish inhabitants knew Yiddish, and even fewer know it today. Nevertheless, Birobidzhan’s continued existence is a curious legacy of Soviet nationality policy. See also: JEWS; NATIONALITIES POLICIES, SOVIET
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Abramsky, Chimen. (1978). “The Biro-Bidzhan Project, 1927-1959.” In The Jews in the Soviet Union since 1917, 3rd ed., ed. Lional Kochan. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kagedan, Allan Laine. (1994). Soviet Zion: The Quest for a Russian Jewish Homeland. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Mintz, Mattityahu. (1995). “The Birobidzhan Idea: When Was It First Proposed?” Jews in Eastern Europe 1(26):5-10. Schwarz, Solomon. (1969). “Birobidzhan. An Experiment in Jewish Colonization.” In Russian Jewry, 1917-1967, ed. Jacob Frumkin et al. London: Thomas Yoseloff. Weinberg, Robert. (1998). Stalin’s Forgotten Zion: Birobidzhan and the Making of a Soviet Jewish Homeland, an Illustrated History, 1928-1996. Berkeley: University of California Press.
(1690-1772), count, duke of Courland, regent of Russia, imperial favorite, alleged kingpin of the dark era of foreign dominance, or Bironovshchina, a term invented long afterwards.
Of Baltic German origins, Ernst Johann Biron (von B?hren or Bieren) rose through court service to Anna Ivanovna in her capacity as the widowed duchess of Courland after 1711 and then as empress of Russia (1730- 1740). One of three sons and five daughters, Biron gained status by marriage (c. 1723) to Benigna Gotlib Trott von Treyden (1703-1782) and by court service at Mitau. The couple had two sons, Peter (1724-1800) and Karl (1728- 1801), and one daughter, Hedvig (1727-1796). Upon Anna Ivanovna’s accession in 1730, Biron became grand chamberlain and count of the Holy Roman Empire, his wife became lady-in-waiting, and his brothers Karl (1684- 1746) and Gustav (1700-1746) entered the Russian army. Although elected Duke of Courland in 1737, Biron rarely visited it, instead supervising the court stables and a training school in St. Petersburg. He was reputed to address people like horses, and horses like people. He also patronized visiting theatrical troupes.
Biron allegedly dominated Empress Anna emotionally. She took up horseback riding to spend more time with him, whereas he supposedly tried to marry a son into the ruling family. When the empress collapsed on October 16, 1740, and died twelve days later, Biron reluctantly became regent for infant Ivan VI. As regent he tried to conciliate the Brunswick heirs (Anna Leopoldovna and her family) with an annual allowance of 200,000 rubles and an additional 50,000 to Princess Yeliza-veta Petrovna. On the night of October 18/19, 1740, Biron and his wife were roughly arrested by troops under Field Marshal Burkhard von M?nnich and imprisoned for interrogation. The accusations against Biron included insulting the Brunswick family, defrauding the treasury, and offending officials. Eventually he admitted insulting the Brunswick family but denied threatening to bring Peter of Holstein, another Romanov heir, to Russia. Sentenced on April 25, 1741, with explicit parallel to the usurper Boris Godunov, Biron avoided
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death by quartering, and the entire family was exiled to Siberia. They all arrived at Pelym in November, but were partially pardoned in 1742 by Empress Elizabeth, who allowed their transfer to Yaroslavl. Peter III permitted Biron’s return to court, and Catherine II restored him in Courland, visiting him at Mitau in 1764. Aged and ill, Biron ceded the duchy to his son Peter in 1769; he died on December 18, 1772. Biron’s career exemplifies some vagaries behind the rise and fall of aristocratic families enmeshed in the dynastic politics of early modern Russia. He is now seen as more victim than victimizer. See also: ANNA IVANOVNA
Alexander, John T. (1990). “Favourites, Favouritism, and Female Rule in Russia, 1725-1796.” In Russia in the Age of the Enlightenment, ed. Roger Bartlett and Janet M. Hartley. London: Macmillan. Curtiss, Mina. (1974). A Forgotten Empress: Anna Ivanovna and Her Era, 1730-1740. New York: Frederick Un-gar.
ten possesses nodules of calcium carbonate, which during frequent droughts rises to the A-horizon through capillary action. Windblown silts known as loess further enrich chernozems by imparting a loamy soil texture.
Chernozems form in areas of cold winters and hot summers that are conducive to rapid evaporation. The resultant imbalance encourages the capillary rise of soluble nutrients from the B- to the A-horizon. Grasses thrive in these conditions, but their matted root systems create a sod that could not be breached by early wooden plows. Accordingly, until the invention of the steel-tipped plow in the 1800s, settlers considered grasslands useless. Requiring irrigation, the black earths now make up the great commercial grain belts. See also: AGRICULTURE; CLIMATE; GEOGRAPHY
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Strahler, Arthur N. (1969). Physical Geography, 3rd ed. New York: Wiley.
The black earths, or mollisols (Seventh Approximation), are the richest soils on the planet. Known as chernozems in the Russian language (chernaya, meaning “black,” and zemlya, meaning “earth”), they are found in semiarid grasslands, or steppes, which are wedged between arid deserts and humid forests. In the Soviet successor states, black earths stretch west to east from Moldavia and Volyno-Podolia in western Ukraine to the Russian North Caucasus and deep into Siberia as a steadily narrowing wedge to Irkutsk near Lake Baikal. Transitional between areas with a soil moisture surplus (forests) and areas with a conspicuous soil moisture deficit (deserts), grassland soils are only slightly leached during sporadic thunderstorms. The relative lack of precipitation ensures that solubles like calcium (Ca), sodium (Na), potassium (K), and magnesium (Mg) are accessible to the uppermost humus layer (horizon) of the soil. The A-horizon consists of grass litter and extensive root systems that draw on a thick black to chestnut-brown humus zone that is rich in ionized colloids and natural fertility. The underlying B-horizon ofBLACK HUNDRED The Black Hundred was a far-right monarchist movement that emerged during the 1905 Revolution in an effort to defend the autocracy against increasing civil unrest. Some Black Hundred groups were composed of
