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KOMZET

The Committee for allocation of land to Jewish workers of the Presidium of the Council for Nationalities of the Central Executive Committee of the USSR. It was established by a resolution of the Presidium of the Central Executive Committee of August 24, 1924, with the aim of encouraging the Jewish population of Soviet Russia to take up productive work. As the journal "Tribuna" noted in September 1929, KOMZET was "one of the organs of the Soviet state energetically promoting national policy among the Jewish working masses." It was KOMZET which conceived the policy of resettlement in the form of a project to found Jewish agricultural colonies in the USSR. It supervised the Jewish agricultural settlements in Ukraine and the Crimea, and from 1927 in Birobidzhan. To a lesser extent KOMZET was also active in Belorussia, in Uzbekistan, in Georgia, in Dagestan, in Azerbaijan and in the Northern Caucasus (the present-day Krasnodar region). The chairman of KOMZET from 1924 to 1935 was P. Smidovich, and from 1935 to 1938 S. Chutskaev. At various times the membership of KOMZET also included such prominent public and political figures as Chemerissky, Merezhin, Strashun, Dimanshtein, Golde and Larin. In 1938, with the cessation of the Jewish agricultural colonisation project in the USSR, KOMZET was disbanded and its members perished in the Stalinist repressions.

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