The Soviet Union selects Birobidzhan (also called Birobidjan), in the basin of the middle Amur River in far eastern Russia, to become a national home for the Jews and as a buffer zone against China.
Most of its 14,200 square miles are uninhabitable due to floods.
On March 28, 1928, the Presidium of the General Executive Committee of the USSR passes the decree "On the attaching for Komzet of free territory near the Amur River in the Far East for settlement of the working Jews."
The decree means that there is "a possibility of establishment of a Jewish administrative territorial unit on the territory of the called region".
According to Joseph Stalin's national policy, each of the national groups that form the Soviet Union are to receive a territory in which to pursue cultural autonomy in a socialist framework.
In this sense, the decree is also a response to two supposed threats to the Soviet state: Judaism, which runs counter to official state policy of atheism; and Zionism, the creation of the modern State of Israel, which counters Soviet views of nationalism.
The idea is to create a new "Soviet Zion", where a proletarian Jewish culture could be developed.
Yiddish, rather than Hebrew, would be the national language, and a new socialist literature and arts would replace religion as the primary expression of culture.
Stalin's theory on the National Question holds that a group could only be a nation if they had a territory, and since there is no Jewish territory, per se, the Jews are not a nation and do not have national rights.
Jewish Communists argue that the way to solve this ideological dilemma is by creating a Jewish territory, hence the ideological motivation for the Jewish Autonomous Oblast.
Politically, it is also considered desirable to create a Soviet Jewish homeland as an ideological alternative to Zionism and the theory put forward by Socialist Zionists such as Ber Borochov that the Jewish Question could be resolved by creating a Jewish territory in Palestine.
Thus Birobidzhan is important for propaganda purposes as an argument against Zionism, which is a rival ideology to Marxism among left-wing Jews.
Another important goal of the Birobidzhan project is to increase settlement in the remote Soviet Far East, especially along the vulnerable border with China.
In 1928, there is virtually no settlement in the area, while Jews have deep roots in the western half of the Soviet Union, in Ukraine, Belarus and Russia proper.
There had initially been proposals to create a Jewish Soviet Republic in the Crimea or in part of Ukraine but these had been rejected because of fears of antagonizing non-Jews in those regions.
