Kibbutz

In the early twentieth century, a unique social phenomenon emerged in Palestine, or Eretz Israel: the kibbutz movement. Young Zionist idealists who arrived from Eastern Europe during the Second Aliyah (1904–1914) dreamed of creating a new and just society. The first kibbutz, Degania, founded in 1910, became a living embodiment of that dream, laying the foundations for collective ownership and shared labour and resources.

The heyday of the movement came in the 1920s, when a new wave of immigration brought fresh energy and ideas. During this period, the largest kibbutz federations took shape — Kibbutz Meuhad and Kibbutz Artzi — while the principles of communal dining and the collective upbringing of children became firmly established in everyday kibbutz life. Unlike Soviet collective farms, which were created by force, kibbutzim were formed entirely on a voluntary basis.

Another important distinction was that kibbutz members shared not only the means of production, but everyday life itself — from communal laundries to children’s houses, where the children of the community were raised.

The troubled 1930s, overshadowed by Arab revolt and unrest, transformed peaceful agricultural communes into strongholds of Jewish self-defence. It was then that the famous Homa u-Migdal (“Wall and Tower”) method emerged — a tactic for the rapid construction of fortified settlements in Mandatory Palestine. This was how kibbutzim such as Alonim, Nir David, Ginosar, and many others were established.

By the mid-1940s, the kibbutz movement had become a significant force. In a letter intercepted by the NKVD and sent from Tel Aviv in September 1944, a young man named Gelfand wrote to his relatives in the Soviet Union:

“I am a member of one of the main movements, called Hashomer Hatzair. It is a Zionist socialist movement whose members want to create a socialist country in Palestine...

Every member of our organisation, upon reaching the age of 19 or 20, goes to live in a ‘kibbutz,’ something similar to a collective farm in the USSR, but based on a higher stage of cooperation.”

The birth of the State of Israel in 1948 opened a new chapter in the history of the movement. In the first decade of independence, despite their small numbers — less than 10% of the population — the kibbutzim became one of the pillars of the young country, absorbing waves of new immigrants and developing industrial production.

Unlike Soviet collective farms, where the state strictly regulated production and seized most of the output, kibbutzim enjoyed economic autonomy and disposed of the results of their labour themselves.

By the late 1950s, the first warning signs had appeared: the mechanisation of agriculture and changing social attitudes among the younger generation were challenging the traditional way of kibbutz life. Yet even in the late 1970s, kibbutzim remained centres of Israeli culture and progress. A vivid testimony to this can be found in the letters of Mikhail Kishinevsky, a former researcher at the Institute of Nuclear Physics of the Siberian Branch of the USSR Academy of Sciences, written from Kibbutz Ein Harod.

“Kibbutzim are the skeleton of Israel; everything here rests on them...

Kibbutzniks are amazing people — they are the Israeli elite,” he wrote in 1979. His comparison with Soviet realities is especially telling: “People know how to work here; we work hard — this is no collective farm.” Kishinevsky also noted the high cultural level of the kibbutzniks: “Classical music concerts are often held here, and they draw larger audiences than in Akademgorodok.”

The collectivist character of Israeli kibbutzim, however, had no effect on the Soviet leadership’s attitude toward this form of social organisation — just as it had no effect on its attitude toward anything connected with Israel.

For this reason, the well-known Soviet Prisoner of Zion Felix Kochubievsky, who in the late 1970s was working to establish the Novosibirsk Association for the Promotion of Friendship between the Peoples of the Soviet Union and Israel, paid particular attention to the “communist experience” of the kibbutzim — an experience, he believed, that not only Jews but all Soviet communists had the right to know about.

In the organisation’s charter, written in 1979, Kochubievsky noted:

“The communes created in the People’s Republic of China, described in the report on Soviet-Polish negotiations as instruments of ‘barracks communism’ (Pravda, 14 March 1979), cannot be taken seriously. The regime of the Pol Pot clique, overthrown in Kampuchea, was also a bloody and tragic caricature of communism.

Today, across the entire world, only one long-term positive experience of running a communal economy on a voluntarily implemented communist principle is known. That experience is the kibbutzim in Israel.”

What specific arguments did Felix Kochubievsky make in favour of the uniqueness of the kibbutz model? What features of these agricultural communes allowed them not only to survive, but to become one of the foundations of Israel’s economy and culture? You can read about this in the charter of the Novosibirsk Association for the Promotion of Friendship between the Peoples of the Soviet Union and Israel on our website.

We would also be grateful if you shared your personal impressions of staying, studying, or working in Israeli kibbutzim. This unique experience deserves to be heard and preserved.

Freddy Rotman