Background
Dimanstein was born in the Belorussian town of Vitebsk to a devoutly religious family.
Dimanstein was born in the Belorussian town of Vitebsk to a devoutly religious family.
He studied in a Hasidic yeshiva (Talmudic academy) and received ordination from Rabbi Haim Ozer Grodzensky, a leading Talmudist of the day. At the same time he studied Russian and became active in the revolutionary movement.
In 1904 he joined the Bolsheviks of Vilna, but was soon arrested for distributing propaganda to Jewish workers. He managed to escape, first to Minsk and then to Riga, but was arrested again in 1908 and sentenced to six years’ hard labor in Siberia. He escaped again in 1913 and made his way to France, where he spent several years in exile.
Returning to Russia following the 1917 revolution, Dimanstein was appointed minister of labor in Lithuania.
During the civil war, Dimanstein, an expert on minority nationalities, held various positions in different provinces; he was labor commissar for Lithuania and headed the regional government in Belorussia. In Turkestan he was commissar of education, while in the Ukraine he headed the political education department. Although the positions were often nominally minor, in the turmoil sweeping the country at the time, Dimanstein’s status was far greater than his titles suggested, and on several occasions he found himself the acting head of the region.
Following Lenin’s victory, he was appointed director of the Institute for National Minorities. Dimanstein believed that the situation of the Jews in Russia would improve following the revolution. He attempted to bring the message of communism to the Jewish masses by translating Lenin into Yiddish. Rabidly anti-Zionist, he sup^ ported a territorial solution for the Jewish problem and was a founder of Birobidzhan, the semiautonomous Jewish republic on the Sino-Russian border, seeing it as protection against outside intervention in Soviet affairs in the Far East.
As an expert on minority issues, Dimanstein cooperated closely with Stalin in the early days of the revolution, even serving as his assistant. Following Stalin’s rise to power, however, his influence decreased. He dropped from sight during the great purge of 1936 and is believed to have been executed in 1937.