Editing Jewish Autonomous Oblast (section)

==== Establishment ====
Eventually, [[Birobidzhan]], in what is now the JAO, was chosen by the Soviet leadership as the site for the Jewish region.<ref name="rosen">{{Cite web |last=Arthur Rosen |date=February 2004 |title=Birobidzhan – the Almost Soviet Jewish Autonomous Region |url=https://www.jewishmag.com/75mag/birobidzhan/birobidzhan.htm}}</ref> The choice of this area was a surprise to Komzet; the area had been chosen for military and economic reasons.<ref name=siegel/> This area was often infiltrated by [[Republic of China (1912–49)|China]], while [[Empire of Japan|Japan]] also wanted Russia to lose the provinces of the [[Soviet Far East]]. At the time, there were only about 30,000 inhabitants in the area, mostly descendants of Trans-Baikal [[Cossacks]] resettled there by tsarist authorities, Koreans, Kazakhs, and the [[Tungusic peoples]].<ref name="Nora Levin 1990 283">{{Cite book |last=Nora Levin |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=1Nz0N5GBW6MC |title=The Jews in the Soviet Union Since 1917: Paradox of Survival, Volume 1 |publisher=New York University Press |year=1990 |isbn=9780814750513 |page=283}}</ref> The Soviet government wanted to increase settlement in the remote [[Russian Far East]], especially along the vulnerable border with China. General [[Pavel Sudoplatov]] writes about the government's rationale behind picking the area in the Far East: "The establishment of the Jewish Autonomous Oblast in Birobidzhan in 1928 was ordered by Stalin only as an effort to strengthen the Far Eastern border region with an outpost, not as a favour to the Jews. The area was constantly penetrated by Chinese and White Russian resistance groups, and the idea was to shield the territory by establishing a settlement whose inhabitants would be hostile to [[White émigré|white Russian émigrés]], especially the Cossacks. The status of this region was defined shrewdly as an autonomous district, not an autonomous republic, which meant that no local legislature, high court, or government post of ministerial rank was permitted. It was an autonomous area, but a bare frontier, not a political center."<ref>Pavel Sudoplatov and Anatolii Sudoplatov, with Jerrold L. Schecter and Leona P. Schecter, [[Special Tasks|Special Tasks: The Memoirs of an Unwanted Witness – A Soviet Spymaster]], Boston, MA: Little, Brown & Co., 1994, p. 289.</ref>

On 28 March 1928, the Presidium of the General Executive Committee of the USSR passed the decree "On the attaching for Komzet of free territory near the Amur River in the Russian Far East for settlement of the working Jews."<ref name=behindcommunism/> The decree meant "a possibility of establishment of a Jewish administrative territorial unit on the territory of said region".<ref name=pereltsvaig/><ref name="behindcommunism">[https://books.google.com/books?id=7QLiAwAAQBAJ&pg=PA105 Behind Communism]</ref>

The new territory was initially called the [[Birobidzhan]] Jewish National Raion.<ref name=siegel/>

Birobidzhan had a harsh geography and climate: it was mountainous, covered with virgin forests of oak, pine and cedar, and also swamplands, and any new settlers would have to build their lives from scratch. To make colonization more enticing, the Soviet government allowed private land ownership. This led to many non-Jews settling in the oblast to get a free farm.<ref name="Richard Overy 2004 567">{{Cite book |last=Richard Overy |url=https://archive.org/details/dictators00rich |title=The Dictators: Hitler's Germany, Stalin's Russia |publisher=W.W. Norton Company, Inc |year=2004 |isbn=9780393020304 |page=[https://archive.org/details/dictators00rich/page/567 567] |url-access=registration}}</ref>

In the spring of 1928, 654 Jews arrived to settle in the area; however, by October 1928, 49.7% of them had left because of the severe conditions.<ref name=siegel/> In the summer of 1928, there were torrential rains that flooded the crops and an outbreak of [[anthrax]] that killed the cattle.<ref name="wherejews">{{Cite book |last=Gessen |first=Masha |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=IfW4DAAAQBAJ |title=Where the Jews Aren't: The Sad and Absurd Story of Birobidzhan, Russia's Jewish Autonomous Region |year=2016 |isbn=9780805242461 |author-link=Masha Gessen}}</ref>

On 7 May 1934, the Presidium of the General Executive Committee accepted the decree on its transformation into the Jewish Autonomous Region within the [[Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic]].<ref name=pereltsvaig/> In 1938, with the formation of the [[Khabarovsk Krai|Khabarovsk Territory]], the Jewish Autonomous Region (JAR) was included in its structure.<ref name=behindcommunism/>