This slender volume deals with a minor but interesting episode in the history of Zionism, the expulsion from the Soviet Union to Palestine of more than 1,000 Zionist activists. Ziva Galili teaches Russian and Soviet history at Rutgers University, and Boris Morozov is a research fellow at the Cummings Center for Russian and East European Studies at the University of Tel Aviv.
On the eve of the Bolshevik Revolution, Russia had the largest number of Jewish citizens of any country, more than 5 million. Despite the Jews’ reputation for espousing socialism and Communism, the majority of them favored Zionism. Thus in elections held in 1917 to the All-Russian Congress, Zionist candidates won 60 percent of the votes. This book informs us that “the Zionist parties received more than two-thirds of the votes given to Jewish parties in the elections to the Constituent Assembly. In these elections, the provinces of the...