"At the turn of the twentieth century, more than one-third of the Jews in western and central Ukraine lived in towns and shtetlach where they formed an absolute majority. Another fifth or so lived in places where they comprised nearly half of the population. Jews constituted nearly one-third of Ukraine's urban population, putting them in close contact with the largely Russian city dwellers but also, as traders and merchants,with the overwhelmingly Ukrainian peasantry. Though Jews were generally barred from owning land in Ukraine, there were Jewish farmers in some areas, as from time to time the tsars would give Jews lands in territories they wanted to colonize.
In the aftermath of World War I and the Russian Revolution, Ukraine was divided between independent Poland and the emerging Soviet Union. A substantial number of Ukrainian Jews came under Polish rule in 1918,but a far larger group, more than 1.5 million, lived in what would become the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. The Soviet government encouraged Jewish agricultural settlement in the 1920s. Some Jewish collective farms survived in Ukraine and Crimea, as well as in Belorussia (now the Republic of Belarus), until the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941."
"In 1897 the occupational structure of the Jewish population of Ukraine was 43.3% in commerce; 32.2% in crafts and industry; 2.9% in agriculture; 3.7% in communications; 7.3% in private services (including porterage and the like); 5.8% in public services (including the liberal professions); and 4.8% of no permanent occupation. Under the Soviet regime, by 1926, it had become 20.6% in arts and crafts; 20.6% in public services (administrative work); 15.3% workers (including 6.6% industrial workers); 13.3% in commerce; 9.2% in agriculture; 1.6% in liberal professions; 8.9% unemployed; 7.3% without profession; and 3.2% miscellaneous (pensioners, invalids, etc.). The proportion of Jews in various administrative branches was 40.6% in the economic administration and 31.9% in the medical sanitary administration. After large numbers of Jews had been absorbed under the Five-Year Plan [1928-32] in heavy industry (especially the metal and automobile industries), in the artisan cooperatives (in which there were over 70,000 Jewish members-12.9% of the membership), and in agriculture (16,500 families in the cooperative farms), the proportion of Jews living in villages rose to 14% of the Jewish population."
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