К истории закрытия государственных еврейских театров в СССР: дело Биробиджанского ГОСЕТ им. Л.М. Кагановича в 1949-1951 гг

In 1948-early 1950 the Soviet authorities closed all the Yiddish theaters in the USSR, which was part of the campaign to suppress Jewish culture in the country. The closing of the Birobidzhan theater was prolonged. The local authorities commenced a struggle with the authorities in the Khabarovsk region, to which they were subordinated, for preservation of the theater. The attitude of Moscow was ambivalent, presumably because the Party Central Committee could not take a decision on the fate of the Jewish Autonomous Region as such. In November 1949 the government decided to close the Birobidzhan theater under the pretext of its "non-profitability" - at a time when all the theaters in the Khabarovsk region were non-profitable but were not closed. The newly appointed First Party Secretary of the Jewish Authonomy, Pavel Simonov, a non-Jew, negotiated with Moscow in an attempt to reestablish the theater as a mixed Russian-Jewish one; he was inspired in this by the fact that Moscow did not close down the newspaper "Birobidzhaner Shtern", the last Yiddish-language paper in the USSR. However, Simonov was dismissed from his position and the theater was not reestablished.