OZET
OZET ( romanised: Obshchestvo Zemleustroystva Yevreyskikh Trudyashchikhsya, Yiddish: געזעלשאפט פאר איינארדענען ארבעטנדיקע יידן אויף ערד אין פ.ס.ס.ר romanised: Gezelshaft far aynordnen oyf Erd arbetnidke Yidin in F.S.S.R) was the public Society for Settling Toiling Jews on the Land in the Soviet Union in the period from 1925 to 1938. Some English sources use the word "Working" instead of "Toiling". Background The principal sources of livelihood of the Jews in the Russian Empire were trade and small crafts. After the October Revolution, the Russian Civil War and instability and devastation that followed, these traditional occupations withered. Dictatorship of proletariat, War Communism and command economy were accompanied by persecution of those deemed class enemies or exploiters. As a result, in the early 1920s more than a third of the Jewish population of the USSR were officially counted as lishenets, disenfranchised people. A significant part of the population of shtetls (a small town with a large Jewish population in Central and Eastern Europe until the Holocaust), in former Pale of Settlement moved to big cities. Tasks and leadership In order to resolve socio-economic difficulties of the Russian Jews and promote agricultural labour among them, on January 17, 1925, the CPSU formally created a