Yevsektsiya , the abbreviation of the phrase "Еврейская секция" (Yevreyskaya sektsiya, lit. "Hebrew Section") was the Jewish section of the Soviet Communist party

Communist Party of the Soviet Union

The Communist Party of the Soviet Union was the only legal, ruling political party in the Soviet Union and one of the largest communist organizations in the world...

. Yevsektsiya was established to popularize Marxism

Marxism

Marxism is an economic and sociopolitical worldview and method of socioeconomic inquiry that centers upon a materialist interpretation of history, a dialectical view of social change, and an analysis and critique of the development of capitalism. Marxism was pioneered in the early to mid 19th...

 and encourage loyalty to the Soviet regime among Russian Jews. The founding conference of Yevsektsiya took place on October 20, 1918.http://www.unhcr.org/cgi-bin/texis/vtx/print?tbl=RSDCOI&id=3ae6a811c For most of its existence, the Yevsektsya was headed by Semyon Dimanstein.

Yevsektsiya was entirely subordinate to leadership of the Soviet Communist party

Communist Party of the Soviet Union

The Communist Party of the Soviet Union was the only legal, ruling political party in the Soviet Union and one of the largest communist organizations in the world...

. Yevsektsiya members were people of Jewish origin, but they were hostile to traditional Jewish culture and instead sought to assimilate

Cultural assimilation

Cultural assimilation is a socio-political response to demographic multi-ethnicity that supports or promotes the assimilation of ethnic minorities into the dominant culture. The term assimilation is often used with regard to immigrants and various ethnic groups who have settled in a new land. New...

 Jews into the new Soviet society. In line with official Soviet doctrine, Yevsektsiya was deeply opposed to Bundism

Bundism

Bundism is a Jewish socialist and secular movement, which originates from the General Jewish Labour Bund founded in the Russian empire in 1897. Bundism was an important component of the social democratic movement in the Russian empire until it was violently suppressed by the Communist party after...

 and Zionism

Zionism

Zionism is a Jewish political movement that, in its broadest sense, has supported the self-determination of the Jewish people in a sovereign Jewish national homeland. Since the establishment of the State of Israel, the Zionist movement continues primarily to advocate on behalf of the Jewish state...

, labeling them forms of "bourgeois nationalism

Bourgeois nationalism

Bourgeois nationalism is a term from Marxist phraseology. It refers to the alleged practice by the ruling classes of deliberately dividing people by nationality, race, ethnicity, or religion, so as to distract them from possible class warfare...

".

The Yevsektsia was disbanded in 1929. Many leading members perished in the Great Purge

Great Purge

The Great Purge was a series of campaigns of political repression and persecution in the Soviet Union orchestrated by Joseph Stalin from 1936 to 1938...

. Dimanstein was arrested and received death sentence

Death Sentence

Death Sentence is a short story by the American science-fiction writer Isaac Asimov. It was first published in the November 1943 issue of Astounding Science Fiction and reprinted in the 1972 collection The Early Asimov.-Plot summary:...

 in 1938 and was executed. He was rehabilitated

Rehabilitation (Soviet)

Rehabilitation in the context of the former Soviet Union, and the Post-Soviet states, was the restoration of a person who was criminally prosecuted without due basis, to the state of acquittal...

 posthumously in 1955, 2 years after the death of Joseph Stalin

Joseph Stalin

Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin was the Premier of the Soviet Union from 6 May 1941 to 5 March 1953. He was among the Bolshevik revolutionaries who brought about the October Revolution and had held the position of first General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union's Central Committee...

.

See also

• History of the Jews in Russia and Soviet Union
• Communist Party of the Soviet Union
  Communist Party of the Soviet Union
  The Communist Party of the Soviet Union was the only legal, ruling political party in the Soviet Union and one of the largest communist organizations in the world...
  
  
• Bolshevik
  Bolshevik
  The Bolsheviks, originally also Bolshevists , derived from bol'shinstvo, "majority") were a faction of the Marxist Russian Social Democratic Labour Party which split apart from the Menshevik faction at the Second Party Congress in 1903....
  
  
• Birobidzhan
  Birobidzhan
  Birobidzhan is a town and the administrative center of the Jewish Autonomous Oblast, Russia. It is located on the Trans-Siberian railway, close to the border with the People's Republic of China....
  
  
• Komzet
  Komzet
  Komzet was the Committee for the Settlement of Toiling Jews on the Land in the Soviet Union. The primary goal of the Komzet was to help impoverished and persecuted Jewish population of the former Pale of Settlement to adopt agricultural labor...
  
  
• Jewish Communist Party (Poalei Zion)

Further reading

• Gitelman, Zvi Jewish Nationality and Soviet Politics: The Jewish Sections of the CPSU, Princeton, 1972.
• Dubnow, Simon History of the Jews in Russia and Poland from the earliest times until the present day in three volumes, updated by author in 1938.
• Дубнов, Семён Маркович. Новейшая история еврейского народа (1789—1914) в 3х томах. (С эпилогом 1938 г.). Иерусалим-Москва, Мосты культуры, 2002. (in Russian)
• Костырченко, Геннадий. Тайная политика Сталина. Власть и антисемитизм. Москва, 2001.
• Евреи в Советской России (1917—1967). Иерусалим, Библиотека-Алия, 1975. (in Russian)

External links

• Revolution and Emancipation, The Yevsektsii at Beyond the Pale exhibition