Farming the Red Land: Jewish Agricultural Colonization and Local Soviet Power, 1924-1941

This is the first history of the Jewish agricultural colonies that were established in Crimea and Southern Ukraine in 1924 and that, fewer than 20 years later, ended in tragedy. Jonathan Dekel-Chen opens an extraordinary window on Soviet rural life during these turbulent years, and he documents the remarkable relations that developed among the American-Jewish sponsors of the ambitious project, the Soviet authorities, and the colonists themselves.
Drawing on extensive and largely untouched ar...