Seekers of Happiness

Seekers of Happiness is a Soviet propaganda film from 1936 trying to attract Jews for the Jewish Autonomous Oblast JAO in the far east of the USSR. Alternative names A Greater Promise, Iskateli schastya

In the beginning of the 20th century, before the October Revolution, a tense conflict between the Bund and the Iskragroup around Lenin broke out. The Bund called for the federal restructuring of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party RSDRP, and the recognition of Jews as a nation. Both claims where heavily rejected by the Iskragroup as being separatist and backward. For the Bolsheviks the Jewish people couldnt be a nation, because they lacked one fundamental component an own territory. In 1913 Stalin, who later between 19171923 held the position of the Commissariat for Nationalities Affairs, published an article on the point of view on nationhood by the social democratic party, where he defined nationhood by virtue of a common language and territory. In fact, in the context of Lenins two phase model with the goal of merging all nations into one socialist world society, the Jews already held an advanced position. The general answer to the Jewish question by Marxists, including the Menshiviks, was assimilation. However, the postrevolutionary situation required a conceptual shift. At the end of the 19th century 74 of the Jewish population, due to restrictions in the tsarist times, made livings from petty commerce, retail sales, smallscale handicraft production, and unskilled labor, while only 3.5 worked in agriculture. The social structure of the Jewish population basically reversed the overall proportions of the agricultural society they were living in. Already the slowly starting industrialization had caused much unemployment among Jewish merchants and crafts. After the Bolshevics took power in October 1917 their original believe in a selfcompleting assimilation process, was confronted with the actual mass poverty of the Russian Jews. Caused by World War I, pogroms during the Civil War 19181920, and at last the centralization of production of even small industrial businesses and the prohibition of private property which had catastrophic consequence

Source: Wikipedia