It's not correct to say that "Jews were deported." It was most definitely a choice for most of the Jews that went there (my grandfather's family was among them

It's not correct to say that "Jews were deported." It was most definitely a choice for most of the Jews that went there (my grandfather's family was among them,) and the government incentivized migration there with a stipend of several thousand rubles to those that decided to stay (most families didn't and the huge influx of population in the 1920s, again in the late 30s and early 50s was balanced out by an enormous population decline that continues today as the population leaves for America and Israel.) Those that did not want to stay (and who would? the government organs in Moscow didn't coordinate with ones in the Far East. As a result, housing was rationed in an extremely inefficient way: land was parceled out without first having been surveyed so that some plots didn't have running water and weren't ready for settlers) could ultimately go back to the cities they came from. The reason Stalin didn't want to settle the Jews within the Pale of Settlement is because that experiment had already been tried with Jewish communal farms in the 1920s in Crimea[1], and the Soviet government had found that the people there weren't huge fans of Jews, so Birobidzhan was established to ease tensions there, "solve the Jewish problem," and to secure the Sino-Soviet border. It's true, however, that many American Jewish groups in the late 1930s and again in the early 1950s were fed stories about how amazing life was in the Autonomous Jewish Region, complete with shining pictures of hearty, hale pioneers smiling near their plots of land. Ambijan (American Committee for Birobidzhan) [2] was an especially popular one that had celebrity spokespeople, starting with Einstein. [1] http://www.yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/Crimea http://www.yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/Crimea [2]http://www.swarthmore.edu/Home/News/biro/html/panel30.html http://www.swarthmore.edu/Home/News/biro/html/panel30.html