SUMMARY:

This article presents and explains the roots and conditions of Zionism in Soviet Russia of the 1920s and the powerful influence of various elements of the “Soviet context” on members of the Zionist organizations of that time, especially the socialists among them. Ziva Galili argues that there was never a simple process of transplantation. Ideas and practices developed in Russia (themselves frequently an adaptation of ideologies born in the Russian context to the peculiarly Jewish situation) were refracted and modified by the reality of Palestine. Soviet Russia in the 1920s was the scene of intensive Zionist activity. Some three thousand members of these Zionist organizations arrived in Palestine between 1924 and 1931, all of them young people whose formative years were passed in NEP-time Russia. At the heart of the article are the varied ways in which young members of Zionist organizations responded to the conditions of Jewish life and Zionist work in Soviet Russia and to other features of its evolving society and polity. Galili’s interest here is not only in articulated attitudes toward the Soviet system, but in learned habits of work, political and cultural practices, perceptions of the proper interplay between the social and the personal. In conclusion Ziva Galili explains her personal roots and public issues informing this work. For it represents not only a historical investigation into the usual archival and published sources (many of which had been closed in Soviet archives until recent years), but a revisiting by the author of family stories, childhood memories, and the foundational values inculcated in her generation.