The Jacob Robinson Institute for the History of Individual and Collective Rights

This article analyzes debates over the national question and non-territorial autonomy in Estonian settlement communities in Siberia from 1917 to 1920. The article demonstrates that similarly to many Siberian communities, Estonian refugees and political activists incorporated demands for non-territorial autonomy into their political agendas and established proto-institutions of non-territorial autonomy. Amid political instability during the Civil War, however, the national mobilization of the broader masses in politically relatively inactive agrarian settlements was not particularly successful. Public debates over non-territorial autonomy ended in January 1920 when Siberian political life was confined to the framework of the Russian Communist (Bolshevik) Party.

This article tries to diversify the understanding of the Jewish experience in interwar Europe by analysing the work of Jewish Cultural Self-Government in interwar Estonia. Estonia's Jews were granted self-government in 1926, and the institution worked until the summer of 1940 when the Soviet Union occupied Estonia. The institution created a public law forum for the Estonian Jewish community where they could independently manage cultural and educational affairs. The authoritarian turn in spring 1934 meant increasing control over minority autonomies, but the institution survived until summer 1940 without any significant restrictions. Finally, by focussing on some members of the Jewish Cultural Council, the article discusses the possibility of using prosopographic methods to study the history of Jews of Estonia.