wounds and 200,000 Jewish children became orphans. Israel Zangwill wrote: It is as Bolsheviks that the Jews of South Russia have been massacred by the armies of Petlyura, though the armies of Sokolow have massacred them as partisans of Petlyura, the armies of Makhno as bourgeois capitalists, the armies of Hryhoriv as Communists, and the armies of Denikin at once as Bolsheviks, capitalists and Ukrainian nationalists. At the time of the Russian revolution, the Bund had 30,000 members in Russia, compared to 300,000 Zionist members of which about 10% were Marxist-Zionists. Joseph Stalin was the first People's Commissariat of Nationalities and in this role disbanded the Bund. Most of its members joined the Yevsektsia, a Jewish section of the Bolshevik organization created by Stalin which worked to end Jewish communal and religious life. Members of the Marxist Zionist movement, Poale Zion led by Ber Borochov, returned to Russia (from Palestine) and requested to form Jewish Brigades within the Red Army. Trotsky supported the request but opposition from the Yevsektsia led to the proposal's failure. Poale Zion continued to exist in the USSR until 1928. Future Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion was a member of the Israeli branch of the movement. In 1921, following a personal request to Stalin by the Soviet author Maxim Gorky, the Hebrew poets Bialik and Shaul Tchernichovsky were allowed to emigrate to Palestine. Bialik became the Israeli national poet. Despite opposition from the Evsektsiya, Stalin also permitted funding of a Hebrew theatre troupe in Moscow, called Habima. Konstantin Stanislavski attended the first night and the group put on a historic play called The Dybbuk, which they were allowed to take on tour in Europe. The tour terminated in Tel Aviv, and Habima never returned to Moscow, becoming instead the Israel National Theatre. The Revolution was accompanied by a brief flowering of Yiddish arts before being decimated by censorship and by 1950 a significant number of prominent Yiddish intellectuals had been sent to the Gulag. A Soviet census found that 90% of Belorussian Jews and 76% of Ukrainian Jews gave Yiddish as their mother tongue. Between 1922 and 1928, the Soviets embarked on a plan of moving Ukrainian Jews to agricultural communes, mainly in Crimea. The plan was encouraged by donations from US Jewish charities trying to protect and help Jews. A number of Zionist agricultural collectives were established in Crimea in preparation for Kibbutz life. Soviet