Zeev Levin's work on the early Soviet policies towards the Jews in Central Asia is an important study on a relatively poorly-researched subject. It elucidates aspects of early Soviet state building through the prism of this Central Asian religious minority, but also the group's select strategies for cultural and economic persistence. It explicates the connection between Soviet nationalities policies and the Soviet state's new organization of the economy, set in the context of administrative relationships and struggles between Moscow's state and Party branches, their peripheral representatives and individual leaders. The book deals mostly with the short but defining period between 1926 and 1932 and is based on official correspondence, adding insights from biographical interviews.

The first chapter deals with the history of the Jewish population in Central Asia. It explains the differences between “local/eastern” Bukharan Jews (a modern designation to be traced back to the Russian colonial period) and east European Ashkenazi Jews who migrated individually to Central Asia under Russian imperial and later Soviet rule. Both groups constituted just about a half percent of Uzbekistan's population in 1926, each numbering, according to Levin's calculations, between 20,000 and 30,000 individuals. The two groups differed culturally and linguistically, and in their strategies and choices to integrate into Soviet society. While Bukharan Jews, as the following chapters show, generally continued practicing their faith and leading a “traditional” way of life in the 1920s and 1930s, it was more often Ashkenazi Jews who staffed Soviet institutions (also responsible for Jewish affairs) that, consequently, led the anti-religious propaganda in, for example, the Jewish theater and press.

Soviet nationalities policy in the early 1920s identified all Jews, Bukharan and Ashkenazi, as a previously oppressed and discriminated group that was historically deprived of the opportunity to work in agriculture. The Communist Party tasked itself with correcting this historical injustice and discussed plans to organize compact Jewish agricultural settlements (for Jews from Ukraine and Belarus mostly) in the Azov area and Crimea, and later in the Far East. Two organizations, Komzet (Committee for Arranging Land for Jewish Laborers) and Ozet (Society for Arranging Land for Jewish Laborers) were established to assist in financing and carrying out these plans. Chapter 3 deals mostly with the organization of Komzet and Ozet in Uzbekistan and their separate plans for transferring Bukharan Jews to the land. The author shows that Moscow's Komzet and Ozet were hardly interested in dealing with Bukharan Jewish settlements, even proposing to resettle 5,000 families in the steppe along the hardly habitable Turksib railway or similarly distant and hazardous parts of southern Tajikistan. Local Samarkandi Komzet and Ozet leaders successfully resisted both plans, which were mostly drawn by Ashkenazi Jews who staffed these organizations (either in Moscow or Tashkent) for the local Bukharan Jews. The latter, however, understood themselves as the indigenous population of (what in 1924 became) Uzbekistan and did not wish to leave their homeland whatsoever. Finally, a decision was made to organize Jewish kolkhozes and artel΄s in the district of Mirzo Chul (Hungry Steppe) in Uzbekistan, which was at the time a disputed area between Uzbek, Tajik, and Kazakh republics. The resettlement of 2,543 Jewish families on 25,000 acres of land was initially planned by 1933. Although less violent and dramatic than in other parts of the Soviet Union, and despite the fact that Jewish agricultural artel΄s received more funding and land allotments than other groups, the construction of kolkhozes and agricultural artel΄s in the Mirzo Chul suffered from administrative mismanagement, slow transfer of funds, irrigation problems, and other issues. As a result, Levin shows, the experiment was fulfilled only partially. Jewish kolkhozes consisted almost entirely of men who left their wives and children in towns. Rather than a new type of social microcosm with a new kind of cooperative production, agricultural artel΄s and kolkhozes became an additional source of income, a way to evade disenfranchisement and, to a certain extent, a space to preserve religious traditions. From around 1932 most Jewish kolkhozes and artel΄s were merged with other kolkhozes, following “internationalization” policies of the Soviet state, and became part of the general kolkhoz population in Uzbekistan. By 1934, the question of Central Asian Jewish “settlements” was declared as officially “solved.” A similar trajectory could be observed in the case of urban industrial artel΄s, which were mostly staffed by women, and since the mid-1930s disappeared as a separate category.

Levin portrays a complicated picture and effectively presents the dilemma that Bukharan and Ashkenazi Jews faced in the early Soviet period: on the one hand, they had to preserve the group's distinctiveness, upon which it received special treatment. On the other hand, under the threat of repressions for “national separatism” but also the economic dysfunctionality of artel΄s, Levin traces increased pressure in the 1930s to integrate and assimilate within the Soviet (Russian, Uzbek, or Tajik) culture, economy, and state apparatus.