The All-Russian Labour Organisation HeHalutz

On the J-Doc website, readers can find many materials revealing the activities of the Zionist organisation HeHalutz. It is important to note that in the Soviet Union of the 1920s there were two organisations with similar names: one legal and one underground. These Zionist organisations were hostile to one another, sharing common views neither on Soviet power nor on the building of a Jewish national home in Eretz Israel.

Today we would like to tell you about the so-called legal, or left-wing, offshoot of the Zionist settlement movement: the All-Russian Labour Organisation HeHalutz.

The All-Russian Labour Organisation HeHalutz officially existed in the Soviet Union from 22 August 1923 to 1 March 1928. The activities of the legal HeHalutz were limited to the territory of the RSFSR and included the creation of agricultural farms and workshops for training Jews who wished to move to the Middle East and begin building a “Labour Palestine” there. Among the most notable achievements of the legal HeHalutz was the establishment of two large farms in northern Crimea: Tel Hai and Maayan.

In addition, HeHalutz carried out cultural and educational work in many places, including the study of Hebrew, seminars, and the organisation of study circles. From June 1924 to 1927, the organisation published its own journal.

The Central Committee of the left-wing HeHalutz, located in Moscow on Lukov Lane, actively worked to legalise the organisation in other parts of the Soviet Union, above all in Belarus and Ukraine, interacting with high-ranking Soviet officials, including Stalin, Kalinin, and Kamenev. The organisation had complicated relations with the so-called international HeHalutz movement because of ideological disagreements and insufficient financial support.

Unlike the international HeHalutz movement, the Soviet HeHalutz supported the construction of Jewish settlements inside the USSR, regarding Soviet settlement policy as an important supplement to the building of Eretz Israel.

The membership of the legal HeHalutz in the USSR was estimated at between 5,500 and 12,000 people, reaching its peak in 1924–1925. However, the organisation faced a number of problems, including lack of funding, persecution by the authorities — especially the Yevsektsiya — and the arrests of its leaders and activists. In particular, in March 1926 several leading members of the organisation were arrested, including its general secretary, Dan Pines.

By the late 1920s, the legal HeHalutz had shifted even further to the left ideologically. The organisation began to attach special importance to Ber Borochov’s theory of proletarian Palestinism, declared Yiddish its official language, and called for a “decisive class struggle” in Palestine and cooperation with Arab workers. At a plenary session of the Central Committee in December 1927, there were calls for joint work with the left wing of Poale Zion in Palestine, as well as with the Soviet authorities.

Nevertheless, the organisation’s openly pro-Soviet position did not save it from liquidation. On 1 March 1928, the NKVD announced the dissolution of the left-wing HeHalutz and appointed a liquidation commission to confiscate the organisation’s offices and documents. This event marked the end of the legal Zionist socialist movement in the Soviet Union. From that moment on, Zionism, including its pro-Soviet wing, became entirely illegal in the USSR.

After the organisation was liquidated, some of its members left the movement, while others joined the Zionist underground.

Freddy Rotman