EXILED TO PALESTINE: THE EMIGRATION OF ZIONIST CONVICTS FROM THE SOVIET UNION, 1924-1934

This book tells the largely unknown story of how Zionists imprisoned by the Soviet authorities in the 1920s and 1930s were permitted to opt for a sentence of permanent exile to Palestine. There, they made a significant contribution to building a Jewish polity - forming the backbone of influential left-wing parties and the powerful trade union movement.

Utilizing fresh documents from archives opened after the collapse of the Soviet Union, as well as British and Zionist sources, the authors examine the means by which internal power struggles and personal interventions in the uppermost echelons of the Soviet leadership enabled the Zionists to disseminate their message and recruit thousands of members before the massive arrests of the mid-1920s. They further reveal the extent to which personal contacts between Zionists and Soviet officials were vital in initiating and sustaining the phenomenon of exile to Palestine and assess the crucial role of Anglo-Soviet cooperation in facilitating the immigration of Zionist convicts.

A selection of twenty-two translated and annotated documents from Israeli and Russian archival collections is included. This volume will be of great interest to all students of Jewish and Israeli history, Russian and Soviet studies and the history of British rule in Palestine.

Ziva Galili is Professor of Russian and Soviet History and Chair of the History

Department at Rutgers University in New Jersey. She is an authority on the Menshevik Party and is currently at work on a study of Zionism in Soviet Russia in the 1920s.

Boris Morozov is a Research Fellow at the Cummings Center for Russian and East

European Studies. From 1978 until 1984 he worked at the Institute for Documental Research and Archives of the Central Soviet Archives (Glavarkhiv SSSR) in Moscow. He specializes in the methodology of archival research and is the author of Documents on

Soviet Jewish Emigration (1999).