200 years together 200-300

is called—an order: Bne‐Moshe837 (“The sons of Moses”), whose status “resembled strongly those of the Masonic lodges; the applicant made the solemn promise of strictly executing all the demands of order; the new members were initiated by a master, the “big brother”; the neophyte undertook to serve without reserve the ideal of national rebirth, even if there was little hope that this ideal would be realised any time soon.”838 It was stipulated in the manifesto of order that “national consciousness takes precedence over religious consciousness, personal interests are subject to national interests,” and it was recommended that a feeling of unreserved love for Judaism, placed above all other objectives of the movement. Thus was prepared “the ground for the reception of political Zionism” of Herzl839… of which Ahad Haam absolutely did not want. He made several trips to Palestine: in 1891, 1893, and 1900. Regarding colonisation, he denounced an anarchic character and an insufficient rootedness in tradition.840 He “severely criticised the dictatorial conduct of Baron Rothschild’s emissaries.”841 This is how Zionism was born in Europe, a decade behind Russia. The first leader of Zionism, Theodor Herzl, had been, until the age of thirty‐six (he only lived to forty‐four), a writer, a playwright, a journalist. He had never been interested in Jewish history or, a fortiori, in the Hebrew language, and, characteristically, as a good Austrian liberal, he considered the aspirations of the various “ethnic minorities” of the Austro‐Hungarian Empire to selfdetermination and national existence to be reactionary, and found it normal to stifle them.842 As Stefan Zweig writes, Herzl cherished the dream of seeing the Jews of Vienna enter the cathedral in order to be baptised and seeing the Jewish question resolved once and for all by the fusion of Judaism and Christianity. But anti‐Jewish sentiments developed in Austria‐Hungary in parallel with the rise of Pan‐Germanism, while in Paris, where Herzl resided at the time, the Dreyfus affair broke out. Herzl had the opportunity to witness the “public degradation of Captain Dreyfus”; convinced of his innocence, he was deeply shaken and changed his course. “If separation is inevitable,” he said, “well, let it be radical! … If we suffer from being without a country, let us build ourselves a homeland!”843 Herzl then had a revelation: it was necessary to create a Jewish state! “As if struck by lightning, Herzl was enlightened by this new idea: antiSemitism is not a fortuitous phenomenon subject to particular conditions, it is a permanent evil, it is the eternal companion of the eternal errant,” and “‘the only
837Association founded by Ahad Haam in Odessa. 838Ibidem, t. 4, pp. 683 684. ‒ 839Svet, op. cit., pp. 250 251. ‒ 840JE, t. 3, p. 481. 841SJE, t. 1, pp. 248 249. ‒ 842JE, t. 6, pp. 407 409. ‒ 843Stefan Zweig, Vtchrachnii mir. Vospominaniia evropeitsa (The world of yesterday: Memories of a European), in “22”, 1994, No. 92, pp. 215 216. ‒
possible solution to the Jewish question’, is a sovereign Jewish state.”844 (To conceive such a project after nearly two thousand years of diaspora, what imaginative power one needed, what exceptional audacity!) However, according to S. Zweig, Herzl’s pamphlet entitled A Jewish State received from the Viennese bourgeoisie a welcome “perplexed and irritated… What’s gotten into this writer, so intelligent, so cultivated and spiritual? Our language is German and not Hebrew, our homeland—beautiful Austria”, Herzl, “does he not give our worst enemies arguments against us: he wants to isolate us?” Consequently, “Vienna… abandoned him and laughed at him. But the answer came to him from elsewhere; it burst forth like a thunderbolt, so sudden, charged with such a weight of passion and such ecstasy that he was almost frightened to have awakened, around the world, a movement with his dozens of pages, a movement so powerful and through which he found himself overwhelmed. His answer did not come to him, it is true, from the Jews of the West… but from the formidable masses of the East. Herzl, with his pamphlet, had inflamed this nucleus of Judaism, which was smouldering under the ashes of the stranger.”845 Henceforth, Herzl gives himself body and soul to his new idea. He “breaks off with those closest to him, he only frequents the Jewish people… He who, even recently, despised politics, now founds a political movement; he introduces to it a spirit and a party discipline, forms the framework of a future army and transforms the [Zionist] congresses into a true parliament of the Jewish people.” At the first Congress of Basel in 1897 he produced a very strong impression “on the Jews who were meeting for the first time in a parliamentary role,” and “during his very first speech, he was unanimously and enthusiastically proclaimed… leader and chief of the Zionist movement.” He shows “a consummate art to find the formulas of conciliation”, and, conversely, “the one who criticises his objective… or merely blames certain measures taken by him…, that one is the enemy not only of Zionism, but of the entire Jewish people.”846 The energetic writer Max Nordau (Suedfeld) supported him by expressing the idea that emancipation is fallacious, since it has introduced seeds of discord into the Jewish world: the emancipated Jew believes that he really has found a homeland, when “all that is living and vital in Judaism, which represents the Jewish ideal, the courage and the ability to advance, all this is none other than Zionism.”847 At this 1st Congress, the delegates of Russian Zionism “constituted one third of the participants… 66 out of 197.” In the eyes of some, their presence could be regarded as a gesture of opposition to the Russian government. To Zionism had adhered all of the Russian Khovevei‐Tsion, “thus contributing to the establishment of global Zionism.”848 Thus “Zionism drew its strength from 844JE, t. 6, p. 409. 845Zweig, in “22”, op. cil., pp. 216 217. ‒ 846JE, t. 6, pp. 410 411. ‒ 847JE, 1.11, pp. 788 792. ‒ 848SJE, t. 7, p. 940.
the communities of oppressed Jews in the East, having found only limited support among the Jews of Western Europe.”849 But it also followed that the Russian Zionists represented for Herzl a most serious opposition. Ahad Haam waged a fierce struggle against Herzl’s political Zionism (alongside the majority of the palestinophiles), strongly criticising the pragmatism of Herzl and Nordau, and denouncing what he called “their indifference to the spiritual values of Judaic culture and tradition.”850 He found chimeric the hope of political Zionism to found an autonomous Jewish state in the near future; he regarded all this movement as extremely detrimental to the cause of the spiritual rebirth of the nation… “They do not care about the salvation of Judaism in perdition because they care nothing about spiritual and cultural heritage; they aspire not to the rebirth of the ancient nation, but to the creation of a new people from the dispersed particles of ancient matter.”851 (If he uses and even emphasises the word “Judaism,” it is almost evident that it is not in the sense of the Judaic religion, but in the sense of the spiritual system inherited from ancestors. The Jewish Encyclopædia tells us about Ahad Haam that in the 70s, “he was more and more imbued with rationalism and deviated from religion.”852 If the only vocation for Palestine is to “become the spiritual centre that could unite, by national and spiritual ties, the dispersed nations,”853 a centre which “would pour out its ‘light’ on the Jews of the whole world”, would create “a new spiritual bond between the scattered members of the people”, it would be less a “State of the Jews” than “an elite spiritual community.”854 Discussions agitated the Zionists. Ahad Haam strongly criticised Herzl whom Nordau supported by accusing Ahad Haam of “covert Zionist”. World Zionist congresses were held every year; in 1902 took place the one of the Russian Zionists in Minsk, and the discussions resumed. This is where Ahad Haam read his famous exposition: A spiritual rebirth.855 Zionism no longer met with amenity from the outside. Herzl expected this: as soon as the program of the Zionists would take a concrete form and as soon as the real departure to Palestine began, anti‐Semitism everywhere would end. But long before this result was reached, “stronger than others, the voice of those who… feared that the taking of a public position in the nationalist sense of an assimilated Jew would give antisemites the opportunity to say that every assimilated Jew hides under his mask an authentic Jew… incapable of blending into the local population.”856 And as soon as an independent state was created, the Jews went everywhere to be suspected and accused of civic disloyalty,
849J. Parks, Evrei sredi narodov: Obzor pritchin anti‐semitima (The Jews among Peoples: An Overview of the Causes of Anti‐Semitism), Paris, YMCA Press, 1932, p. 45. 850SJE, t. 1, p. 249. 851JE, t. 3, p. 482. 852SJE, I. 1, p. 248. 853JE, 1.12, p. 262. 854Wartburg, in “22”, 1987, no. 56, pp. 116 117. ‒ 855JE, t. 3, p. 482. 856Ibidem, t. 6, p. 409.
ideological isolationism—which their enemies had always suspected and accused them of. In reply, at the Second Zionist Congress (1898), Nordau declared: “We reject with disdain the name of ‘party’; the Zionists are not a party, they are the Jewish people themselves… Those who, on the contrary, are at ease in servitude and contempt, they keep themselves carefully apart, unless they fight us fiercely.”857 As one English historian observes: Yes, “Zionism has done a great service to the Jews by restoring them a sense of dignity,” and yet “it leaves unresolved the question of their attitude towards the countries in which they live.”858 In Austria, a compatriot of Herzl, Otto Weininger, argued with him: “Zionism and Judaism are incompatible with the fact that Zionism intends to force the Jews to take upon themselves the responsibility of a state of their own, which contradicts the very essence of every Jew.”859 And he predicted the failure of Zionism. In Russia in 1899, I. M. Biekerman argued strongly against Zionism, as an idea deemed “quacky, inspired by anti‐Semitism, of reactionary inspiration and harmful by nature”; it is necessary “to reject the illusions of the Zionists and, without in any way renouncing the spiritual particularism of the Jews, struggle hand in hand with the cultural and progressive forces of Russia in the name of the regeneration of the common fatherland.”860 At the beginning of the century, the poet N. Minsky had issued this criticism: Zionism marks the loss of the notion of universal man, it lowers the cosmopolitan dimensions, the universal vocation of Judaism to the level of an ordinary nationalism. “The Zionists, speaking tirelessly of nationalism, turn away from the genuinely national face of Judaism and in fact seek only to be like everyone else, not worse than others.”861 It is interesting to compare these sentences with the remark made before the revolution by the orthodox thinker S. Bulgakov: “The biggest difficulty for Zionism is that it is not able to recover the lost faith of the fathers, and it is obliged to rely on a principle that is either national, cultural or ethnic, a principle on which no genuine great nation can rely exclusively.”862 But the first Russian Zionists—now, “it is from Russia that most of the founders of the State of Israel and the pioneers of the State of Israel came out,”863 and it was in Russian that “were written the best pages of Zionist 857Ibidem*, t. 11, p. 792. 858Parks, p. 186. 859N. Goulina, Kto boilsa Otto Veiningcra? (Who’s afraid of Otto Weininger?). In “22”*, 1983, No. 31, p. 206. 860JE, t. 4, p. 556. 861N. Minsky, Natsionalnyi lik i patriotism (The National Face and Patriotism), Slovo, Saint Petersburg, 1909, 28 March (10 April), p. 2. 862Prou S. Bulgakov, Khristianstvo i evreiskij vopros (Christianity and the Jewish Question), Paris. YMCA Press, 1991, p. 11. 863F. Kolker, Novyj plan pomoschi sovietskomou cvrcistvou (A new plan for aid to the Jews of Russia), in “22”, 1983, No. 31, p. 149.
journalism”864—were filled with an irrepressible enthusiasm for the idea of returning to their people the lost homeland, the ancient land of the Bible and their ancestors, to create a State of unparalleled quality and to have men of exceptional quality grow there. And this impulse, this call addressed to all to turn to physical work, the work of the earth!—Does not this appeal echo the exhortations of a Tolstoy, the doctrine of asceticism?865 All streams lead to the sea.
But, in the final analysis, how can a Zionist behave towards the country in which he resides for the time being? For the Russian Zionists who devoted all their strength to the Palestinian dream, it was necessary to exclude themselves from the affairs that agitated Russia as such. Their statutes stipulated: “Do not engage in politics, neither internal nor external.” They could only weakly, without conviction, take part in the struggle for equal rights in Russia. As for participating in the national liberation movement?—but that would be pulling the chestnuts out of the fire for the others!866 Such tactics drew Jabotinsky’s fiery reproaches: “Even passing travellers have an interest in the inn being clean and tidy.”867 And then, in what language should the Zionists display their propaganda? They did not know Hebrew, and, anyway, who would have understood it? Consequently: either in Russian or in Yiddish. And this brought closer once more the radicals of Russia868 and the Jewish revolutionaries. Evidently, the Jewish revolutionary youth jousted with the Zionists: no and no! The solution of the Jewish question does not lie in the departure out of Russia, it is in the political fight for equal rights here! Instead of going to settle far beyond the seas, we must make use of the possibility of affirming ourselves here in this country. And their arguments could not avoid shaking more than one by their clarity. In the Bolshevik circles, the Zionists were denounced as “reactionary”; they were treated as “the party of the darkest, most desperate pessimism.”869 864N. Goulina, V poiskakh outratchennoi samoidenlilikatsii (In Search of the Lost SelfIdentity), in “22”, 1983, No. 29, p. 216. 865Amos Oz, Spischaia krasaviisa: griozy i pruboujdeniia (Sleeping Beauty: dreams and awakening), in “22”, 1985, No. 42. p. 117 866G. J. laronson, V borbe za granjdanskiie i nalsionalnyie prava: Obschestvennyie tetcheniia v rousskom evreistve (In the fight for civil and national rights: the social currents among the Jews of Russia), BJWR-1, pp. 218 219. ‒ 867Ibidem*, p. 219. 868Ibidem pp. 219 220. ‒ 869S. Dimanstein. Revolioulsionnyie dvijeniia sredi evreiev (The revolution among the Jews), Sb. 1905: Istoriia revolioutsionnogo dvijeniia v otdclnykh otcherkakh (Collection 1905: History of the revolutionary movement in separate essays), directed by N. Pokrovsky, vol. 3,
Inevitably, intermediate currents were to emerge. Thus the Zionist party of the left Poalei‐Tsion (“Workers of Zion”). It was in Russia that it was founded in 1899; it combined “socialist ideology with political Zionism.” It was an attempt to find a median line between those concerned exclusively with class problems and those concerned only with national problems. “Profound disagreements existed within Poalei‐Tsion on the question of participation in revolutionary action in Russia.”870 (And the revolutionaries themselves were divided, some leaning towards the Social‐Democrats, others towards the Social Revolutionaries.) “Other Tseirei‐Tsion groups, ideologically close to non‐Marxist socialist Zionism, began to form from 1905 onwards.”871 In 1904, a split within PoaleiTsion gave birth to a new party, the “Socialist Zionists”, breaking with the ideal of Palestine: the extension of Yiddish as a spoken language to all Jewish masses, that is quite sufficient, and we scorn the idea of national autonomy! Zionism begins to take on a bourgeois and reactionary tint. What is needed is to create from it a socialist movement, to awaken revolutionary political instincts in the Jewish masses. The party “strongly supported” the “social and economic content” of Zionism, but denied the need to “revive the land of Judea, culture, Hebrew traditions.” Granted, Jewish emigration is too chaotic, it must be oriented towards a specific territory, but “there is no essential link between Zionism and Palestine.” The Hebrew state must be based on socialist and noncapitalist foundations. Such an emigration is a long‐term historical process; the bulk of the Jewish masses will remain well into the future in their current places of residence. “The party has approved the participation of the Jews in the political struggle in Russia”872—that is to say, in the struggle for their rights in this country. As for Judaism and faith, they despised them. All this mishmash had to generate a “socialist Jewish” group called “Renaissance”, which “believed that the national factor is progressive by nature”, and in 1906 the members of this group who had broken with the Zionists Socialist Party constituted the Soviet Socialist Workers’ Party, the SERP. (They were called serpoviys or seymovtsy, for they demanded the election of a Jewish national Sejm—Seim—intended to be the “supreme organ of Jewish national self‐government.”873) For them, Russian and Hebrew were, in their capacity of languages of use, equal. And by advocating “autonomism” within the Russian state, the SERP, socialist, was distinguished from the Bund, also socialist.874 In spite of the disagreements that divided the Zionists among themselves, a general shift of Zionism towards socialism took place in Russia, which attracted the attention of the Russian government. Until then, it had not interfered with book 1, M.L., 1927, pp. 107, 116. 870SJE, t. 6, p. 551. 871Ibidem, t. 7, p. 941. 872Ibidem*, pp. 1021 1022. ‒ 873Aronson, SJE-1, pp. 226 229. ‒ 874SJE, 1.1, p. 705, t. 7, p. 1021.
Zionist propaganda, but in 1903 Interior Minister Plehve addressed the governors of the provinces and to the mayors of the big cities a bulletin stating that the Zionists had relegated to the background the idea of leaving Palestine and had concentrated on the organisation of Jewish life in their places of residence, that such direction could not be tolerated and that consequently any public propaganda in favour of Zionism would now be prohibited, as well as meetings, conferences, etc.875 Made aware of this, Herzl (who had already solicited an audience with Nicholas II in 1899) went immediately to Saint Petersburg to ask to be received by Plehve. (It was just after the Kichinev pogrom, which occurred in the spring, of which Plehve had been strongly accused—and which had therefore attracted him the blame and invectives of the Russian Zionists…) Plehve made Herzl understand (according to the latter’s notes) that the Jewish question for Russia is grave, if not vital, and “we endeavour to solve it correctly… the Russian State wishes to have a homogeneous population”, and it demands a patriotic attitude from all… “We want to assimilate [the Jews], but assimilation… is slow… I am not the enemy of the Jews. I know them well, I spent my youth in Warsaw and, as a child, I always played with Jewish children. I would very much like to do something for them. I do not want to deny that the situation of the Jews of Russia is not a happy one. If I were a Jew, I, too, would probably be an opponent of the government.” “The formation of a Jewish State [accommodating] several million immigrants would be extremely desirable for us. That does not mean, however, that we want to lose all our Jewish citizens. Educated and wealthy people, we would gladly keep them. The destitute without education, we would gladly let them go. We had nothing against Zionism as long as it preached emigration, but now “we note great changes”876 in its goals. The Russian government sees with a kindly eye the immigration of Zionists to Palestine, and if the Zionists return to their initial plans, they are ready to support them in the face of the Ottoman Empire. But it cannot tolerate the propagation of Zionism, which advocates a separatism of national inspiration within Russia itself877: this would entail the formation of a group of citizens to whom patriotism, which is the very foundation of the State, would be foreign. (According to N. D. Lyubimov, who was then director of the minister’s cabinet, Plehve told him that Herzl, during the interview, had recognised that Western bankers were helping the revolutionary parties of Russia. Sliosberg, however, thinks this is unlikely.878) Plehve made his report to the Emperor, the report was approved, and Herzl received a letter of confirmation in the same vein. He felt that his visit to Plehve had been a success. 875S. Ginzburg, Poezdka Teodora Gertzla v Petersburg (Theodor Herzl’s trip to Saint Petersburg), JW, New York, Union of Russian Jews in New York, 1944, p. 199. 876Ibidem*, pp. 202 203. ‒ 877SJE, t. 6, p. 533. 878G. B. Sliosberg, Dela minouvehikh dnei: Zapiski ruskogo evreia (Notes of a Jew of Russia) in 3 vols., Paris, 1933 1934, t. 2, p. 301 ‒
Neither of them suspected that they had only eleven months left to live… Turkey had no intention of making any concessions to the Zionists, and the British Government, in that same year of 1905, proposed that not Palestine, but Uganda, be colonised. In August 1903, at the Sixth Congress of the Zionists in Basel, Herzl was the spokesperson for this variant “which, of course, is not Zion”, but which could be accepted on a provisional basis, in order for a Jewish state to be created as quickly as possible.879 This project provoked stormy debates. It seems that it met with some support, in the Yishuv, for new immigrants, discouraged by the harsh living conditions in Palestine. The Russian Zionists—who claimed to have more than all the need to quickly find a refuge—fiercely opposed the project. Headed by M. M. Oussychkine (founder of the Biluim group and, later, the right‐hand man of Ahad Haam in the Bne‐Moshe League), they recalled that Zionism was inseparable from Zion and that nothing could replace it!880 Congress nevertheless constituted a commission to travel to Uganda to study the land.881 The Seventh Congress, in 1905, heard its report, and the Ugandan variant was rejected.882 Overcome by all these obstacles, Herzl succumbed to a heart attack before he knew the final decision.883 But this new dilemma provoked a new rupture in Zionism: they split the socalled “territorialists”, led by Israel Zangwill, to which joined the English delegates. They established their International Council; the latter held its meetings, receiving subsidies from Jacob Schiffe and Baron Rothschild. They had given up demanding “Palestine and nothing else”. Yes, it was necessary to carry out a mass colonisation by the Jews, but wherever it was. Year after year, in their research, they reviewed a dozen countries. They almost selected Angola, but “Portugal is too weak, it will not be able to defend the Jews”, and therefore “the Jews risk becoming the victims of the neighbouring tribes.”884 They were even ready to accept territory within Russia even if they could create an autonomous entity with an independent administration. This argument: a strong country must be able to defend immigrants on the premises of their new residence, reinforced those who insisted on the need to quickly establish an independent state capable of hosting mass immigration. This was suggested—and would suggest later—Max Nordau when he said that he was not afraid of the “economic unpreparedness of the country [that is, of Palestine] for the reception of newcomers.”885 However, for this, it was necessary to be get the better of Turkey, and also find a solution to the Arab problem. The adherents of this program understood that, in order to implement
879JE*, t. 6, p. 412. 880Ibidem, t. 15, p. 135. 881Ibidem, t. 3, p. 679. 882Ibidem, pp. 680 681. ‒ 883JE, t. 6, p. 407. 884Ibidem, t. 14, pp. 827 829. ‒ 885SJE, t. 7, pp. 861 892. ‒
it, it was necessary to have recourse to the assistance of powerful allies. Now this assistance, no country, for the moment, proposed it. To arrive at the creation of the State of Israel, we must go through two more world wars.
Chapter 8. At the Turn of the 20th Century
It appears that after six years of reflection and hesitation, the Tsar Alexander III irrevocably chose, as of 1887, to contain the Jews of Russia by restrictions of a civil and political nature, and he held this position until his death. The reasons were probably, on the one hand, the evident part played by the Jews in the revolutionary movement, on the other, the no less evident fact that many Jewish youths shunned military service: “only three quarters of those who should have been enrolled served in the army.”886 One noticed “the everincreasing number of Jews who did not respond to the appeal”, as well as the increasing amount of unpaid fines related to these absences: only 3 million rubles out of 30 million were returned annually to the funds of the State. (In fact, the government still had no accurate statistics on the Jewish population, its birth rate, its mortality rate before the age of 21. Let us remind that in 1876 [see Chapter 4], because of this absenteeism, there had been a restriction of the “favour accorded to certain persons by virtue of their family situation”—which meant that the only sons of Jewish families were now subjected, like the others, to general conscription, and as a result the proportion of Jewish conscripts had become greater than that of non‐Jews. This situation was not corrected until the early 1900s under Nicolas II.887) As far as public education was concerned, the tsar’s wish, which he had formulated in 1885, was that the number of Jews admitted to institutions outside the Pale of Settlement was in the same ratio as the number of Jews in the total population. But the authorities pursued two aims simultaneously: not only to slow down the growing flow of Jews towards education, but also to fight against the revolution, to make the school, as it was called, “not a pool of revolutionaries, but a breeding ground for science.”888 In the chancelleries, they were preparing a more radical measure which consisted of prohibiting access to education to elements likely to serve the revolution—a measure contrary to the spirit of Lomonosov889 and profoundly vicious, prejudicial to the State itself: it 886J. Larine, Evrei i antisemitizm v SSSR (The Jews and anti‐Semitism in the USSR), M.L., 1929, p. 140. 887G.V. Sliosberg, Diela minouvchikh dniei: Zapiski ruskogo evreia (Notes of a Jew of Russia), 3 vols., Paris, 1933 1934, vol. 2, pp. 206 209. ‒ ‒ 888Hessen, t. 2, p. 231. 889Mikhail Vasilyevich Lomonosov (1711 1765): great scholar and Russian poet, ‒ representative of the Enlightenment in Russia. Of modest origin, he is the prototype of the genius born into the people. The University of Moscow bears his name.
was to deny the children of disadvantaged strata of the general population (the “sons of cooks”) admission to colleges. The formulation, falsely reasonable, falsely decent, was: “Leave the school principals free to accept only children who are in the care of persons who can guarantee them good supervision at home and provide them with all that is necessary for the pursuit of their studies”—furthermore, in higher education establishments, it was planned to increase the right of access to classes.890 This measure provoked a strong outrage in liberal circles, but less violent and less lasting than the one that was instigated in 1887 by a new measure: the reduction of the number of Jews admitted to high schools and universities. It was originally planned to publish these two provisions within the framework of the same law. But the Council of Ministers opposed it, arguing that “the publication of a general decision accompanied by restrictions for the Jews could be misinterpreted.” In June 1887, therefore, only a part was promulgated, the one that concerned non‐Jews: “Measures aiming to regulate the contingent of pupils in secondary and higher education”—measures directed in fact against the common people… As for the reduction of the quota of the Jews, it was entrusted to the Minister of Education, Delianov, who implemented it in July 1887 by a bulletin addressed to the rectors of school boards. He fixed for the secondary and higher schools the numerus clausus of the Jews at 10% for the Pale of Settlement, 5% outside it, and 3% in the two capitals. “Following the example of the Ministry of Public Instruction”, other organisations began to introduce “quotas of admission into their institutions, and some were closed down to the Jews.” (Such as the Higher School of Electricity, the Saint Petersburg School of Communication, and, most strikingly, the Academy of Military Medicine which temporarily prohibited, but “for many years”, its access to Jews.891) This numerus clausus law, which had not been established during the ninety‐three years of massive presence of Jews in Russia and which was to continue for twenty‐nine years (practically until 1916) struck the Jewish society of Russia all the more painfully because in the years 1870 1880 there had been ‒ a “remarkable impulse of the Jews to enter schools and colleges”, a phenomenon which Sliosberg in particular explains is “not due to the realisation of the masses of the necessity of education… but rather due to the fact that, for a Jew without capital, figuring out how to deploy one’s forces in the economic field was very difficult, and due to the fact that conscription became compulsory for all, but that there were dispensations for the students.” Thus, if only well‐todo Jewish youth had studied before, a “Jewish student proletariat” was now being created; if among the Russians, now as in the past, it was the favoured social classes that received higher education, among the Jews, in addition to the wealthy, young people from the underprivileged classes began to study.892
890JE*, t. 13, p. 52. 891Ibidem, t. 13, pp. 52 53. ‒ 892Sliosberg, t. 1, p. 92; t. 2, p. 89.
We would like to add that in those years there had been a turning‐point in the whole world and in all fields of culture, towards a no longer elitist but generalised education—and the Jews, particularly intuitive and receptive, had been the first to feel it, at least instinctively. But how can we find a way to satisfy, without causing friction, without clashes, the constant and increasing aspiration of the Jews to education? In view of the fact that the indigenous population, in its mass, remained fairly asleep and backward, how to avoid prejudice to the development of either side? Of course, the objective of the Russian government was the struggle against the revolution, for among the student youth many Jews had been noticed by their activism and their total rejection of the regime in place. However, when we know the enormous influence exerted by Pobedonostsev893 during the reign of Alexander III, it must be admitted that the aim was also to defend the Russian nation against the imbalance that was to occur in the field of education. This is what testifies the Baron Morits von Hirsch, a big Jewish banker who visited Russia and to whom Pobedonostsev expressed his point of view: the policy of the government is inspired not by the idea that the Jews are a “threat”, but by the fact that, rich in their multi‐millennial culture, they are more spiritually and intellectually powerful than the still ignorant and unpolished Russian people— that is why measures had to be taken to balance the “low capacity of the local population to resist.” (And Pobedonostsev asked Hirsch, known for his philanthropy, to promote the education of the Russian people in order to realise the equal rights of the Jews of Russia. According to Sliosberg, Baron Hirsch allocated one million rubles to private schools.894) Like any historical phenomenon, this measure can be viewed from various angles, particularly from the two different angles that follow. For a young Jewish student, the most elementary fairness seemed flouted: he had shown capacities, application, he had to be admitted… But he was not! Obviously, for these gifted and dynamic young people, to encounter such a barrier was more than mortifying; the brutality of such a measure made them indignant. Those who had hitherto been confined to the trades of commerce and handicrafts were now prevented from accessing ardently desired studies that would lead to a better life. Conversely, the “native population” did not see in these quotas a breach of the principle of equality, on the contrary, even. The institutions in question were financed by the public treasury, and therefore by the whole population, and if the Jews were more numerous, it meant that it was at the expense of all; and it was known that, later on, educated people would enjoy a privileged position in society. And the other ethnic groups, did they also have to have a proportional representation within the “educated layer”? Unlike all the other peoples of the
893Konstantin Petrovich Pobedonostsev (1827 1907) Statesman, member of the Council of the ‒ Empire since 1872, attorney general of the Holy Synod, preceptor of Nicholas II. Exercised great influence over Alexander III. 894Ibidem, t. 2, p. 33.
empire, the Jews now aspired almost exclusively to education, and in some places this could mean that the Jewish contingent in schools exceeded 50%. The numerus clausus was unquestionably instituted to protect the interests of Russians and ethnic minorities, certainly not to bully the Jews. (In the 20s of the twentieth century, a similar approach was sought in the United States to limit the Jewish contingent in universities, and immigration quotas were also established—but we shall come back to this. Moreover, the matter of quotas, put today in terms of “no less than”895, has become a burning issue in America.) In practice, there have been many exceptions to the application of the numerus clausus in Russia. The first to avoid it were girls’ high schools: “In most high schools for young girls, the quotas were not current, nor in several public higher education establishments: the conservatories of Saint Petersburg and Moscow, the School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture of Moscow, the Kiev School of Commerce, etc.”896 A fortiori quotas were not applied in any private establishment; and these were numerous and of high quality.897 (For example, at the Kirpitchnikova High School, one of the best high schools in Moscow, a quarter of the students were Jewish.898 They were numerous at the famous Polivanovskaya high school in Moscow, and the Androyeva girls’ school in Rostov, where my mother was a pupil, there were in her class more than half of Jewish girls.) Business schools (under the Ministry of Finance), to which Jewish children were eager to register, were initially opened to them without any restrictions, and those which took place after 1895 were relatively light (for example: in commercial schools in the Pale of Settlement, financed out of private funds, the number of Jews admitted depended on the amount of money allocated by Jewish merchants for the maintenance of these schools, and in many of them the percentage of Jewish students was 50% or more). If the official standard was strictly observed at the time of admission to the secondary classes, it was often largely overstepped in the larger classes. Sliosberg explains this notably by the fact that the Jewish children who entered high school pursued it to the end, whereas the non‐Jews often gave up their studies before completion. This is why, in large classes, there were often much more than 10% Jewish pupils.899 He confirmed that they were numerous, for example, at the Poltava high school. Out of 80 boys, eight were Jewish.900 In the boys ‘schools of Mariupol, at the time when there was already a local Duma, about 14 to 15% of the pupils were Jewish, and in girls’ high schools, the
895An allusion to the affirmative action setting minimum allowances for the admission of ethnic minorities to the United States. 896SJE, t. 6, p. 854. 897I. M. Troitsky, Evrei v rousskoi chkole (The Jews in the Russian School), BJWR-1, p. 359. 898P. D. Ilinsky, Vospominaniya (Memoires), Biblioteka‐fund “Ruskie Zarubejnie” (Library and Archives), “Russian Emigration” (BFER), collection 1, A-90, p. 2. 899Sliosberg, t. 2, p. 90. 900N. V. Volkov‐Mouromtsev, Iounost. Ot Viazmy do Feodosii (Youth, From Viazma to Feodosiia), 2nd ed., M., Rousski Pout, Graal, 1997, p. 101.
proportion was even higher.901 In Odessa, where Jews constituted one‐third of the population,902 they were in 1894, 14% in the prestigious Richelieu high school, more than 10% in the gymnasium No. 2, 37% in gymnasium No. 3; in girls’ high schools the proportion was of 40%; in business schools, 72%, and in university, 19%.903 To the extent that financial means permitted it, no obstacle prevented this thirst for education. “In a number of secondary schools in the central Russian provinces there were few Jewish pupils at that time, and parents took the opportunity to send their children there… The wealthiest parents had their children home schooled: they prepared for examinations to enter the next grade and thus reached this way the senior year.”904 In the period between 1887 and 1909, Jewish children were free to pass the school‐leaving examinations, and “they graduated as equals those who had followed the curriculum.”905 The majority of “external” pupils were Jewish. A family like that of Jacob Marchak (a jeweller with no great fortune, the father of the poet906), whose five children had a higher education, was not uncommon before the revolution. Moreover, “private establishments were opened everywhere, whether mixed for the Jews and Christians, or for the Jews only… Some of these establishments enjoyed the same rights as public establishments; the others were authorised to issue certificates entitling them to enrol in higher educational establishments.”907 “A network of private Jewish settlements was established, which formed the basis of a national‐type education,”908 “The Jews were also oriented towards higher education establishments abroad: a large part of them, on their return to Russia, passed examinations before the State Commissions.”909 Sliosberg himself observed that in the 80s, at the University of Heidelberg that “the majority of Russian listeners were Jews” and that some, among them, did not have their bachelor’s degree.910 One can rightly wonder whether the restrictions, dictated by fear in front of the revolutionary moods of the students, did not contribute to feeding said moods. If these were not aggravated by indignation at the numerus clausus, and by contacts maintained abroad with political emigrants. What happened in Russian universities after the publication of the bulletin? There was no sharp fall, but the number of Jews decreased almost every year, from 13.8% in 1893 to 7% in 1902. The proportion of Jews studying at the
901I. E. Temirov, Vospominaniia (Memoires). BFER, collection 1, A-29, p. 24. 902JE, t. 12, p. 58. 903A. Lvov, Novaia gazeta, New York, 5 11 Sept. 1981, No. 70, p. 26. ‒ 904JE, t. 13, pp. 54 55. ‒ 905Ibidem, t. 16, p. 205. 906Samufi Yakovlevich Marchak (1887 1964) Russian man of letters of the Soviet era. ‒ 907Ibidem, t. 13, p. 55. 908SJE, t. 6, p. 854. 909JE, t. 13, p. 55. 910Sliosberg, t. 1, p. 161.
universities of Saint Petersburg and Moscow remained no less than the imposed 3% norm throughout the period of validity of the said standard.911 Minister Delianov acceded more than once to the requests submitted to him, and authorised admission to university beyond the numerus clausus.912 This was how “hundreds of students” were admitted. (Delianov’s flexibility will succeed later the rigidity of Minister Bogolepov—and it is not excluded that this may have contributed to making him the target of terrorists913.914) Sliosberg gives this overview: the percentage in the superior courts of medicine for women outweighed that of the Academy of Military Medicine and that of the university, and “all the Jewish girls of the empire poured in.” Several hundred Jews were enrolled at the School of Psycho‐neuropathology in Saint Petersburg, where they could enter without a baccalaureate, and so they were thousands over the years. It was called the School of Neuropathology, but it also housed a faculty of law. The Imperial Conservatory of Saint Petersburg was “filled with Jewish students of both sexes.” In 1911, a private mining school opened in Ekaterinoslav.915 Admission to specialised schools, such as that of health officers, was done with great freedom. J. Teitel says that at the Saratov school of nurses (of high quality, very well equipped) Jews from the Pale of Settlement were admitted without any limitation—and without prior authorisation issued by the police for the displacement. Those who were admitted thus received full rights. This practice was confirmed by the governor of Saratov at that time, Stolypin. Thus the proportion of Jewish students could rise to 70%. In the other technical colleges of Saratov, Jews from the Pale of Settlement were admitted without any norm, and many of them continued their studies in higher education… From the Pale of Settlement also came “a mass of external pupils that did not find their place in university, and for whom the Jewish community of the city struggled to find work.”916 To all this it should be added that the number of establishments where the teaching was delivered in Hebrew was not limited. In the last quarter of the nineteenth century there were 25,000 primary schools (Heder) with 363,000 pupils in the Pale of Settlement (64% of all Jewish children).917 It is true that in 1883 the old “Jewish establishments of the State” were closed due to having no
911S. V. Pozner, Evrei v obschei chkole K istorii zakonodatelstva i pravitelstvennoi politiki v oblasti evreiskogo voprosa (The Jews in the Common School. For the History of the Legislation and State Policy in the Field of the Jewish Question), Saint Petersburg, Razum, 1914, pp. 54 55. ‒ 912Cf. Sliosberg, t. 2, p. 93. 913Nikolai Pavlovich Bogolepov (1847 1901) lawyer, Minister of National Education. ‒ Mortally wounded in the attack perpetrated by P. Karpovitch. 914A. Goldenweiser, Pravovoie polojeniie evreiev v rossii (The legal situation of Jews in Russia), LMJR-1, p. 149. 915Sliosberg, t. 1, pp. 127 128; t. 3, pp. 290 292, 301. ‒ ‒ 916J. L. Teitel, lz moiei jizni za 40 let (Stories of my life over forty years), Paris, J. Povolotsky and Co, 1925, pp. 170 176. ‒ 917J. M. Troitsky, Evrei v rousskoi chkole (The Jews in the Russian School), op. cit., p. 358.
use: no one went there any more. (But note: the opening of these institutions was once interpreted by the Jewish publicists as an act and a ruse of the “adverse reaction”, and today their closure was also the “act of adverse reaction”!) In summary: the admission quotas did not hinder the Jews’ aspiration to education. Nor did they contribute to raising the educational level of the nonJewish peoples of the empire; they only aroused bitterness and rage among the Jewish youth. But this, in spite of the prohibitions, was going to constitute an intelligentsia of vanguard. It was the immigrants from Russia who formed the nucleus of the first intellectual elite of the future State of Israel. (How many times do we read in the Russian Jewish Encyclopædia the notices “son of small craftsman”, “son of small trader”, “son of merchant”, and, further on, “completed university”?) The university diploma initially conferred the right to reside throughout the empire and to serve in the administration (later, access to education in academies, universities and public schools was once again limited). Graduates of the Faculty of Medicine—doctors and pharmacists—were allowed to “reside anywhere, whether they practised their profession or not,” and like all those who had completed a higher degree, they could even “devote themselves to commerce or other trades”, “be members of the merchant corps without having previously spent five years in the first guild in the Pale of Settlement” as was required of other merchants. “The Jews holding the title of Doctor of Medicine” could practice their profession in any district of the empire, hire a medical secretary and two aides among their co‐religionists by bringing them from the Pale of Settlement. The right to reside in any place, as well as the right to trade, was attributed to all those who practised paramedical professions without having completed a higher education—dentists, nurses, midwives. As from 1903, a requirement was added: that these persons should mandatorily practise their field of specialisation.918
Restrictions also affected the bar, the independent body of lawyers set up in 1864. This profession paved the way for a successful career, both financially and personally, and to convey one’s ideas: advocacy by lawyers in court were not subject to any censorship, they were published in the press, so that the speakers enjoyed greater freedom of expression than the newspapers themselves. They exploited it widely for social criticism and for the “edification” of society. The class of solicitors had transformed themselves in a quarter of a century into a powerful force of opposition: one should remember the triumphal acquittal of Vera Zasulich in 1878.919 (The moral laxity of the
918JE, t. 10, pp. 780 781. ‒ 919Vera Ivanovna Zasulich (1849 1919): revolutionary populist linked to Netchayev. Shot at ‒ the commander of the Saint Petersburg plaza (1873). Acquitted. Having become a Marxist,
lawyers’ argumentation at the time strongly worried Dostoevsky: he explained it in his writings.920) Within this influential brotherhood, the Jews quickly occupied a preponderant place, revealing themselves to be the most gifted of all. When, in 1889, the Council of the Sworn Attorneys of Saint Petersburg published “for the first time in its report the data concerning the number of Jews in this trade,” the great Saint Petersburg lawyer A. J. Passover “renounced the title of member of the Council and was no longer a candidate for election.”921 In the same year 1889, the Minister of Justice, Manasseine, presented a report to Tsar Alexander III; it was stated that “the bar is invaded by the Jews, who supplant the Russians; they apply their own methods and violate the code of ethics to which sworn‐in attorneys must obey.” (The document does not provide any clarification.922) In November 1889, on the orders of the tsar, a provision was made, supposedly provisionally (and consequently able to escape the legal procedure), requiring that “the admission to the numbers of those avowed and delegated authorities of non‐Christian confession… will be henceforth, and until promulgation of a special law on the subject, possible only with the authorisation of the Minister of Justice.”923 But as apparently neither the Moslems nor the Buddhists availed themselves in large numbers of the title of lawyer, this provision proved to be de facto directed against the Jews. From that year onwards, and for another fifteen years, practically no unbaptised Jew received this authorisation from the minister, not even such brilliant personalities—and future great advocates—as M. M. Winaver924 or O. O. Gruzenberg: they remained confined for a decade and a half in the role of “law clerks”. (Winaver even pleaded more than once in the Senate, and was very much listened to.) The “clerks” in fact pleaded with the same freedom and success as the attorneys themselves: here, there were no restrictions.925 In 1894, the new Minister of Justice, N. V. Muraviev, wanted to give this temporary prohibition the value of permanent law. His argument was as follows: “The real danger is not the presence in the body of lawyers of a certain number of people of Jewish faith who have rejected to a large extent the notions contrary to the Christian norms which pertain to their nation, but it is in the fact that the number of such persons becomes so great that they are likely to acquire a preponderant importance and to exert an adverse influence on the general level of morality and on the activities of that corporation.”926 In the bill, it was advocated that the proportion of non‐Christian solicitors be limited in each she was one of the leaders of the Menshevik party. 920In the Journal of a writer for the month of February 1876. 921JE, t. 6, p. 118. 922S. L. Kutcherov, Evrei v rousskoi advokatoure (The Jews in the Russian Bar), BJWR-1, p. 402. 923JE*, t. 1, pp. 469 470. ‒ 924Maxime Moiseyevich Winaver (1862 1926): a lawyer born in Warsaw, one of the founders ‒ of the Constitutional‐Democratic Party, of the Cadet party (1905), deputy in the Duma (1906). Immigrated to France in 1919. 925Goldenweizer, BJWR-1, p. 131. 926Kurcherov, BJWR-1*, p. 404.
jurisdiction to 10%. The tsar’s government rejected this project—but, as Mr. Krohl said, “this idea… did not meet the condemnation it deserved in the Russian public opinion”, and within the Society of Jurists of Saint Petersburg, “only a few people protested vigorously…; the rest, the vast majority, were clearly in favour of the draft at the time of its discussion.”927 This gives an unexpected insight into the state of mind of the capital’s intelligentsia in the mid-90s. (In the Saint Petersburg jurisdiction, 13.5% of the attorneys were Jews, while in Moscow, less than 5%.928) The prohibition for the clerks of solicitors to become themselves avowed was felt all the more painfully because it followed limitations in the scientific careers and the service of the State.929 It would not be lifted before 1904. In the 80s, a limitation on the number of Jewish jurors was introduced in the provinces of the Pale of Settlement, so that they did not have a majority within the juries. It was also from the 80s that the hiring of Jews in the judicial administration ceased. There were, however, exceptions to this: thus J. Teitel, who had been appointed shortly after his university studies, remained there twenty‐five years. He finished his career ennobled with the civil rank of general. (It must be added that, later, Cheglovitov930 forced him to retire “of his own free will.”) In the exercise of his duties, he often had, he, the Israelite, to administer oaths to Orthodox witnesses, and he never met any objection from the clergy. J. M. Halpern, also an official in the judicial administration, had acceded to the high‐ranking position of Deputy Director of the Ministry of Justice and to the rank of Secret Advisor.931 Halpern sat on the Pahlen Commission in the capacity of expert. (Before that, the first prosecutor of the Senate had been G. I. Trahtenberg, and his deputy G. B. Sliosberg had initiated himself to defend the rights of the Jews.) He was also first prosecutor of the Senate S. J. Outine—but he was baptised and consequently, was not taken into account. The religious criterion has never been a false pretence for the tsarist government, but has always been a real motive. It was because of this that the old believers932, ethnically Russian, were ferociously persecuted for two and a half centuries, as well as, later, the Dukhobors933 and the Molokanes934, also Russians.
927JE, t. 1, pp. 471 472. ‒ 928Kurcherov, Ibidem, p. 405. 929Ibidem. 930Ivan Grigorievich Cheglovitov (1861 1918) Minister of Justice in 1906 1915, President of ‒ ‒ the Council of the Empire. Shot without judgement by the Bolsheviks in retaliation for the failed assassination of Fanny Kaplan against Lenin. 931JE, t. 6, p. 118. 932Old believers are adepts of the “old faith”, the one before the reforms imposed by the Patriarch Nikon in the seventeenth century. They were persecuted. 933Doukhobors are “spirit fighters”, a religious sect dating back to the seventeenth century, which denies the Church as an institution, the state, and professes a kind of rationalistic spiritualism. 934See supra (p. 245).
The baptised Jews were numerous in the service of the Russian State; we will not discuss it in this book. Let us quote under Nicholas I, the Count K. Nesselrod, who had a long career at the head of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs; Ludwig Chtiglits, who received the barony in Russia935; Maximilian Heine, brother of the poet and military doctor, who ended his career with the rank of state councillor; Governor General Bezak, General of the suite of His Majesty Adelbert, the Colonel of the Horse Guard Meves, the Hirs diplomats, one of whom was Minister under Alexander III. Later, there was the Secretary of State Perets (grandson of the tax‐collector Abram Perets936), Generals KaufmanTurkestansky and Khrulyov; The squire Salomon, director of the Alexandrovsky high school; Senators Gredinger, Posen; in the Police Department, Gurovich, Vissarionov, among many others. Was the conversion to Christianity, especially to Lutheranism, in the eyes of some considered as easy? Are all the tracks open to you at once? Sliosberg observed at one point an “almost massive denial” on the part of young people.937 But, of course, seen from the Jewish side, this appeared to be a grave betrayal, “a bonus to the abjuration of his faith… When we think of the number of Jews who resist the temptation to be baptised, one gains a great respect for this unhappy people.”938 Formerly, it was with candour: we divided people into two categories, “ours” and “others,” according to the criterion of faith alone. This state of mind, the Russian State, still reflected it in its dispositions. But, at the dawn of the twentieth century, could it not have thought a little and wondered whether such a procedure was morally permissible and practically effective? Could we continue to offer the Jews material welfare at the cost of denying their faith? And then what advantage could be derived from Christianity? Many of these conversions were for pure convenience. (Some justified themselves by luring themselves: “I can thus be much more useful to my people.”939) For those who had obtained equal rights in the service of the State, “there no longer existed any restriction of any kind whatsoever which prevented them from gaining access to hereditary nobility” and to receive the highest rewards. “The Jews were commonly enrolled without difficulty in genealogical records.”940 And even, as we see from the census of 1897, 196 members of the hereditary nobility counted Hebrew as their mother tongue (amongst the nobility in their personal capacities and the civil servants, they were 3,371 in the same
935JE, t. 16, p. 116. 936Ibidem, t. 12, pp. 394 395. ‒ 937Sliosberg, t. 2, p. 94. 938V. Posse, Evreiskoi zassiliie (The Jewish Violence), Slovo, Saint Petersburg, 1909, 14 (27) March, p. 2. 939Sliosberg, t. 1, p. 198. 940JE, t. 7, p.34.
case941). There even was, among the Brodsky, a family of modest artisans, Marshals of the nobility of the province of Ekaterinoslav. But from the 70s of the nineteenth century onwards, Jews who sought positions in the administration of the State began to encounter obstacles (and this became worse from 1896 onwards); it must be said that few were those who aspired to this kind of routine and poorly paid activity. Moreover, from the 90s, the obstacles also affected the elective functions. In 1890 a new Zemstvo Ordinance was issued, according to which the Jews were excluded from the self‐management of the Zemstvo—in other words, outside the urban areas of the provinces and districts. It was planned to “not allow [the Jews] to participate in the electoral meetings and assemblies of the Zemstvos”942 (these did not yet exist in the western provinces). The motivation was that “Jews, who usually pursue their particular interests, do not meet the demand for a real, living and social connection with local life.”943 At the same time, to work in the Zemstvo as an independent contractor, to the title of what was called the “outsider element” (element that would introduce into the Zemstvo, several years in advance, the explosive charge of radicalism), was not forbidden to Jews—and there they were many. The restrictions in the Zemstvos did not affect the Jews of the central Russian provinces because the great majority of them resided in the cities and were more interested in urban administration. But in 1892 there appeared this time a new provision for cities: the Jews lost the right to elect and to be elected delegates to the Dumas and to the municipal offices, as well as to hold any office of responsibility, or conduct there economic and administrative services. This represented a more than sensible limitation. As delegates, Jews were admitted only in cities of the Pale of Settlement, but here too, subject to a restriction: no more than one‐tenth of the number of the municipal duma, and again “on assignment” for the local administration that selected Jewish candidates—an annoying procedure, to say the least. (Particularly for bourgeois family men, as Sliosberg rightly points out: what a humiliation for them in relation to their children… how, after that, can they remain loyal to such a government?944) “There has been no harder time in the history of Russian Jews in Russia. They were expelled from all positions they had conquered.”945 In another passage, the same author speaks without ambiguity of the bribes received by the officials of the Ministry of the Interior to act in favour of the Jews.946 (That was to soften somewhat the rigour of the times.)
941Obschii svod po Imperii rezoultatov razrabotki dannykh pervoi vseobschei perepisi naseleniia, proizvedionnoi 28 ianvaria 1897 g. (General corpus of results for the empire of the data of the first general census of the population carried out on January 28, 1897), t. 2, Saint Petersburg, 1905, pp. 374 386. ‒ 942JE*, t. 7, p. 763. 943Ibidem*, t. 1, p. 836. 944Sliosberg, t. 3, p. 220. 945Ibidem, t. 1, p. 259. 946Ibidem, t. 2, pp. 177 178. ‒
Yes, the Jews of Russia were undoubtedly bullied, victims of inequality in civil rights. But this is what reminds us of the eminent Cadet V. A. Maklakov, who found himself in the emigration after the revolution: “The ‘inequality in rights’ of the Jews naturally lost its acuteness in a state where the enormous mass of the population (82%), that on which the prosperity of the country depended, the peasantry—dull, mute, submissive—was also excluded from common law, the same for all”947—and it stayed in the same situation after the abolition of serfdom; for it also, military service was inescapable, secondary and higher education inaccessible, and it did not obtain that self‐administration, that rural Zemstvo which it much need. Another emigrant, D. O. Linsky, a Jew, even bitterly concluded that, in comparison with the levelling up of the soviets, when the entire population of Russia was deprived of all rights, “the inequality in the rights of the Jewish population before the revolution appears like an inaccessible ideal.”948 We have gotten used of saying: the persecution of the Jews in Russia. But the word is not fair. It was not a persecution, strictly speaking. It was a whole series of restrictions, of bullying. Vexing, admittedly, painful, even scandalous.
However, the Pale of Settlement, over the years, was becoming more and more permeable. According to the census of 1897, 315,000 Jews were already residing outside its boundaries, that is to say, in sixteen years, a nine‐fold increase (and this represented 9% of the total Jewish population of Russia apart from the kingdom of Poland.949 Let us compare: there were 115,000 Jews in France, and 200,000 in Great Britain950). Let us consider also that the census gave undervalued figures, in view of the fact that in many cities of Russia many craftsmen, many servants serving “authorised” Jews did not have an official existence, being shielded from registration. Neither the top of the finance nor the educated elite were subject to the restrictions of the “Pale”, and both were established freely in the central provinces and in the capitals. It is well known that 14% of the Jewish population practised “liberal professions”951—not necessarily the intellectual type. One thing, however, is certain: in pre‐revolutionary Russia, the Jews “occupied a prominent place in these intellectual occupations. The famous Pale
947V. A. Maklakov (1905 1906), Sb. M. M. Winaver i rousskaia obschestvennost natchala XX ‒ veka (Collection M. M. Winaver and Russian civil society in the early twentieth century), Paris, 1937, p. 63. 948D. O. Linsky, O natsionalnom samosoznanii ruskogo evreia—Rossia i evrei (About the national consciousness of the Jew of Russia), in RaJ, p. 145. 949Hessen, t. 2, p. 210; JE, t. 11, pp. 537 538. ‒ 950SJE, t. 2, pp. 313 314. ‒ 951Larine, p. 71.
of Settlement itself did not in any way prevent a large fraction of the Jews from penetrating more and more into the provinces of central Russia.”952 The so‐called “artisanal” trades where the Jews were the most numerous were the dentists, the tailors, the nurses, the apothecaries, and a few others, trades of great utility everywhere, where they were always welcome. “In 1905, in Russia, more than 1,300,000 Jews were engaged in artisanal activities,”953 which meant that they could live outside the “Pale”. And it must not be forgotten either that “nowhere in the laws it was stipulated, for example, that the craftsman who exercises a trade has no right to engage in commerce at the same time”; moreover, “the notion of ‘doing business’ is not defined by law”: for example, “deposit‐selling” with commission, is it trade? Thus, in order to exercise any form of trade (even large‐scale trading), to engage in the purchase of real estate, in the development of factories, one had to pass as “artisan” (or “dentist”!) For example, the “artisan” Neimark possessed a factory of sixty workers; typos thus opened their own printing press.954 And there existed yet another way: several people regroup, and only one pays the fee of the first guild, the others pretending to be his “clerks”. Or even, to be “adopted” in a central province by retired Jewish soldiers (the “adopted” father received a pension in return955). In Riga, thousands of Jewish families lived on the timber trade until they were expelled due to false attestations.956 At the dawn of the twentieth century, Jewish settlements were found in all Russian cities of some importance. J. Teitel testified that “the construction of the Samara‐Orenburg railway line resulted in the influx of a large number of Jews to Samara. The supervisors of this railway were Jews—Varchavsky, Gorvitch. For a long time they were also the owners. They occupied the control stations as well as a large number of subordinate jobs. They brought their families from the Pale of Settlement, and thus a very numerous Jewish colony was formed. They also took the export of wheat from the rich province of Samara to foreign countries. It should be noted that they were the first to export eggs from Russia to Western Europe. All these activities were carried out by so‐called ‘artisans’.” And Teitel enumerates three successive governors of the province of Samara as well as a chief of police (who, previously, in 1863, had been “excluded from the University of Saint Petersburg for having participated in student disorders” who “closed their eyes to these so‐called artisans.” Thus, around 1889, there lived in Samara “more than 300 Jewish families, without a residence permit”957,—which means that in Samara, in addition to the official figures, there were in fact around 2,000 Jews. Stories come to us from another end of Russia: at Viazma, “the three pharmacists, the six dentists, a number of doctors, notaries, many shopkeepers,
952V. S. Mandel, Konservativnyie i razrouchitelnyie elementy v evreistve (Conservative elements and destructive elements among Jews), RaJ, p. 202. 953Goldenweiser, RaJ, p. 148. 954Sliosberg, t. 2, pp. 51, 197, 188, 193, 195. 955Ibidem, pp. 22 24. ‒ 956Ibidem, pp. 183 185. ‒ 957Teirel, pp. 36 37, 47. ‒
almost all hairdressers, tailors, shoemakers were Jewish. All those who appeared as such were not dentists or tailors, many traded and no one prevented them from doing so. Of its 35,000 inhabitants, Viazma also had about two thousand Jews.958 In the region of the Army of the Don, where severe restrictions were imposed on Jews in 1880 and where they were forbidden to reside in Cossack villages and suburbs of the cities, there were nevertheless 25,000 keepers of inns and buffets, barbers, watchmakers, tailors. And any delivery of a quantity of goods, no matter the size, depended on them. The system of restrictions on the rights of the Jews, with the whole range of corrections, reservations and amendments thereto, had been built up stratum after stratum over the years. The provisions aimed at the Jews were scattered in the various collections of laws promulgated at different times, badly harmonised among themselves, badly amalgamated with the common laws of the empire. The governors complained of it.959 We must try to penetrate the mysteries of the innumerable derogations, special cases, exceptions of exceptions, which swarmed the legislation on the Jews, to understand what journey of the combatant this represented for the ordinary Jew, and what puzzle for the administration. Such complexity could only engender formalism, with its succession of cruelties; thus, when a head of a family domiciled in a central Russian province lost his right of residence (after his death or as a result of a change of profession), his whole family lost it with him. Families were thus expelled after the death of the head of the family (with the exception of single persons over 70 years of age). However, complexity did not always play in disfavour of the Jews; it sometimes played to their advantage. Authors write that “it was the police commissioners and their deputies who were responsible for settling the endless wavering in the application of the restrictive measures,” which resulted in the use of bribes and to the circumvention of the law960—always favourable to the Jews. There were also perfectly workable legal channels. “The contradictory nature of the innumerable laws and provisions on Jews offers the Senate a broad spectrum of interpretations of legislation… In the 90s, most of the provisions appealed by the Jews were annulled” by the Senate.961 The highest dignitaries often closed their eyes to non‐compliance with anti‐Jewish restrictions—as G. Sliosberg testified, for example: “Ultimately, Jewish affairs depended on the head of the police department, Pyotr Nikolayevich Dumovo… The latter was always open to the complainants’ arguments and I must say, to be honest, that if the application of any restrictive regulation were contrary to human charity, [Dournovo] would look into the matter and resolve it favourably.”962 958Volkov‐Mouromrsev, pp. 98, 101. 959S. Dimanstein, Revolioutsionnoie dvijeniie sredi evreiev (The Revolutionary Movement Among the Jews), op. cit., p. 108. 960Goldenweiser, BJWR-1, p. 114. 961JE, t. 14, p. 157. 962Sliosberg, t. 2, pp. 175 176. ‒
“Rather than the new laws, it was the provisions tending to a harder application of the old laws which were felt most painfully by the broad sections of the Jewish population.”963 The process, discreet but irreversible, by which the Jews gradually penetrated into the provinces of central Russia was sometimes stopped by the administration, and some duly orchestrated episodes went down in history. This was the case in Moscow after the retirement of the all‐powerful and almost irremovable Governor General V. A. Dolgorukov, who had regarded with great kindness the arrival of the Jews in the city and their economic activity. (The key to this attitude obviously resides in the person of the great banker Lazar Solomonovich Poliakov, “with whom Prince Dolgorukov had friendly ties and who, evil tongues affirmed, had opened to him in his bank an unlimited line of credit. That the prince had need of money, there was no doubt about it,” for he had yielded all his fortune to his son‐in‐law, while he himself “loved to live it up, and also had great spendings.” Consequently, L. Poliakov “was covered year after year with honours and distinctions.” Thanks to this, the Jews of Moscow felt a firm ground beneath their feet: “Every Jew could receive the right of residence in the capital” without actually putting himself “at the service of one of his coreligionists, a merchant of the first Guild.”964) G. Sliosberg informs us that “Dolgorukov was accused of yielding too much to the influence of Poliakov.” And he explains: Poliakov was the owner of the Moscow mortgage lending, so neither in the province of Moscow nor in any neighbouring province could any other mortgage bank operate (i.e. granting advances on property mortgage‐funds). Now, “there was no nobleman possessing land that did not hypothecate his possessions.” (Such was the defeat of the Russian nobility at the end of the nineteenth century: and, after that, of what use could it still be for Russia?…) These noblemen found themselves “in a certain dependence on banks”; to obtain large loans, all sought the favours of Lazar Poliakov.965 Under the magistracy of Dolgorukov, around the 90s, “there were many recruitments of Jews in the body of merchants of the first guild. This was explained by the reluctance of Muscovite merchants of Christian denomination to pay the high entrance fees of this first guild. Before the arrival of the Jews, the Muscovite industry worked only for the eastern part of the country, for Siberia, and its goods did not run westward. It was the Jewish merchants and industrialists who provided the link between Moscow and the markets of the western part of the country. (Teitel confirms that the Jews of Moscow were considered the richest and most influential in Russia.) Threatened by the competition, German merchants became indignant and accused Dolgorukov of favouritism towards the Jews.966 963Hessen, t. 2, p. 232. 964Prince B. A. Chetinine, Khoziaine Moskvy (The Master of Moscow), Istoritcheski vestnik (The Historical Messenger), 1917, t. 148, p. 459. 965Sliosberg, t. 2, pp. 44 45. ‒ 966Ibidem, pp. 43 44. ‒
But the situation changed dramatically in 1891. The new Governor‐General of Moscow, the Grand Duke Sergey Alexandrovich967, an almighty man due to his position and dependent on no one due to his fortune, took the decision to expel all the Jewish craftsmen from Moscow, without any preliminary inquiry as to who was truly a craftsman and who pretended to be a craftsman. Whole neighbourhoods—Zariadie, Marina Roscha—were emptied of their inhabitants. It is estimated that as many as 20,000 Jews were expelled. They were allowed a maximum of six months to liquidate their property and organise their departure, and those who declared that they did not have the means to ensure their displacement were shipped in prison vans. (At the height of the expulsions and to control how they were executed, an American government commission— Colonel Weber, Dr. Kamster—went to Russia. The astonishing thing is that Sliosberg brought them to Moscow, where they investigated what was happening, how measures were applied to stem the “influx of Jews”, where they even visited the Butyrka prison incognito, where they were offered a few pairs of handcuffs, where they were given the photographs of people who had been sent in the vans… and the Russian police did not notice anything! (These were the “Krylov mores”968!) They visited again, for many more weeks, other Russian cities. The report of this commission was published in 1892 in the documents of the American Congress… to the greatest shame of Russia and to the liveliest relief of Jewish immigration to the United States.969 It is because of this harassment that Jewish financial circles, Baron de Rothschild in the lead, refused in 1892 to support Russian borrowing abroad.970 There had already been attempts in Europe in 1891 to stop the expulsion of the Jews from Moscow. The American‐Jewish banker Seligman, for example, went to the Vatican to ask the Pope to intercede with Alexander III and exhort him to more moderation.971 In 1891, “a part of the expelled Jews settled without permission in the suburbs of Moscow.” But in the fall of 1892, following the measures taken, an order was made to “expel from Moscow former soldiers of the retired contingent and members of their families not registered in the communities.”972 (It should be noted that in 1893 the large Russian commercial and industrial enterprises intervened to soften these measures.) Then, from 1899, there was almost no new registration of Jews in the first guild of Moscow merchants.973 In 1893 a new aggravation of the fate of the Jews arose: the Senate first noticed the existence of a bulletin issued by the Ministry of the Interior, in force
967Sergey Alexandrovich: grand‐duke, brother of Alexander III, governor‐general of Moscow. Assassinated in February 1905. 968Ivan Andreyevich Krylov (1769 1844): famous Russian publicist and fabulist who ‒ denounces in his writings the defects of society and the negligence of the rulers. 969Ibidem, pp. 31, 42 50, 60 63. ‒ ‒ 970Ibidem, pp. 7, 174. 971Doneseniie ruskogo posla lzvolskogo iz Vatikana (Report of the Russian Ambassador to the Vatican, Lzvolski), 7 (19) April 1892, Izvestia, 1930, 23 May, p. 2. 972SJE, t. 5, p. 474. 973JE, t. 11, pp. 336 338. ‒
since 1880 (the “Charter of Jewish Freedom”) which allowed Jews who had already established themselves outside the Pale of Settlement, illegally however, to remain where they were. This bulletin was repealed (except in Courland and Livonia where it was retained). The number of families who had settled over the last twelve years amounted to 70,000! Fortunately, thanks to Dournovo, “lifesaving articles were enacted which, in the end, prevented the immense catastrophe that threatened.”974 In 1893, “certain categories of Jews” were expelled in turn from Yalta, for the summer residence of the Imperial family was not far away, and they were forbidden any new settlement there: “The always increasing influx in the number of Jews in the city of Yalta, the appetite for real estate, threatens this holiday resort of becoming, purely and simply, a Jewish city.”975 (here could have been at play, after all the terrorist attacks in Russia, the security of the Imperial family in its residence in Livadia. Alexander III had every reason to believe—he was only one year away from his death—that he was cordially hated by the Jews. It is not possible to exclude as motive the idea of avenging the persecution of the Jews, as can be deduced by the choice of terrorist targets —Sipiagin, Plehve, Grand Duke Serge.) This did not prevent many Jews from remaining in the Yalta region—judging from what the inhabitants of Alushta wrote in 1909, complaining that the Jews, buyers of vineyards and orchards, “exploit ‘to foster their development’ the work of the local population,” taking advantage of the precarious situation of said population and granting loans “at exorbitant rates” which ruin the Tatars, inhabitants of the site.976 But there was also another thing in the favour of the tireless struggle against smuggling, the right of residence of the Jews in the Western frontier zone was limited. There was in fact no further expulsion—with the exception of individuals caught in the act of smuggling. (According to memorialists, this smuggling, which consisted in passing the frontier to revolutionaries and their printed works, continued until the First World War.) In 1903 1904, a debate ‒ ensued: the Senate provides that the Provisional Regulations of 1882 shall not apply to the frontier zone and that accordingly Jews residing in that area may “freely settle in the rural areas. The Council of the Province of Bessarabia then issued a protest, informing the Senate that ‘the entire Jewish population’” in the border area, including those where Jews had illegally settled there, was now seeking to gain access to the countryside where there were already ‘more Jews than needed’,” and that the border area “now risked becoming for the Jews the ‘Promised Area’.” The protest passed before the Council of State, which, taking into account the particular case of rural localities, squarely abolished the special regime of the border area, bringing it back to the general regime of the Pale of Settlement.977
974Sliosberg, t. 2, pp. 180 182. ‒ 975JE*, t. 7, p. 594. 976Novoie Vremia, 1909, 9 (22) Dec., p. 6. 977JE, t. 12, pp. 601 602. ‒
This softening, however, did not find significant echo in the press or in society. No more than the lifting, in 1887, of the prohibition of the Jews to hire Christian servants. Nor did the 1891 Act introducing into the Penal Code a new article on “responsibility in the event of an open attack on part of the population by another”, an article that the circumstances of life in Russia had never required, but which had been sorely lacking during the pogroms of 1881. For greater caution it was now introduced.
And again, let us repeat: the limitations on the rights of the Jews never assumed a racial character in Russia. They applied neither to the Karaites978, nor to the Jews of the mountains, nor to the Jews of Central Asia, who, scattered and merged with the local population, had always freely chosen their type of activity. The most diverse authors explain to us, each one more than the other, that the root causes of the restrictions suffered by Jews in Russia are of an economic nature. The Englishman J. Parks, the great defender of these restrictions, nevertheless expresses this reservation: “Before the war [of 14 18], some Jews ‒ had concentrated considerable wealth in their hands… This had led to fear that abolishing these limitations would allow the Jews to become masters of the country.”979 Professor V. Leontovitch, a perfectly consistent liberal, notes: “Until recently, we seemed to be unaware that the restrictive measures imposed on Jews came much more from anti‐capitalist tendencies than from racial discrimination. The concept of race was of no interest to Russia in those years, except for specialists in ethnology… It is the fear of the strengthening of the capitalist elements, which could aggravate the exploitation of peasants and of all the workers, which was decisive. Many sources prove this.”980 Let us not forget that the Russian peasantry had just undergone the shock of a sudden mutation: from the transition of feudal relations to market relations, a passage to which it was not at all prepared and which would throw it into an economic maelstrom sometimes more pitiless than serfdom itself. V. Choulguine writes in this regard as follows: “The limitation of the rights of the Jews in Russia was underpinned by a ‘humanistic thought’… It was assumed that the Russian people, taken globally (or at least some of their social strata) was, in a way, immature, effeminate…, that it allowed itself to be easily
978The Karaites or Karaïmes (word meaning “attached” to the letter): a Jewish sect that rejects the orthodox doctrine of the rabbis, admits only the Old Testament and some oral traditions. The Karaites survive in small settlements in Crimea, Odessa, Southern Russia, as well as in Poland and Lithuania. 979J. Parks, Evrei sredi narodov Obzor pritchin antisemitima (The Jews among Peoples: An Overview of the Causes of Anti‐Semitism), Paris, YMCA Press, 1932, p. 182. 980V. V. Leontovitch, Istoriia liberalizma v Rossii 1762 1914 (History of liberalism in Russia: ‒ 1762 1914), transl. of the German, 2nd ed., M., Rousski Pout, 1995, pp. 251 252. French ‒ ‒ translation to Fayard Ed., Paris, 1987.
exploited…, that for this reason it had to be protected by state measures against foreign elements stronger than itself. Northern Russia began to look at the Jews with the eyes of Southern Russia. The Little‐Russians had always seen the Jews, whom they knew well in the days of their coexistence with Poland, under the guise of the ‘pawnbrokers’ who suck the blood of the unfortunate Russian.”981 The restrictions were designed by the government to combat the massive economic pressure that put the foundations of the state at risk. Parks also detects in this vision of things a part of truth; he observes “the disastrous effect which the faculty of exploiting one’s neighbour may have,” and “the excessive role of innkeepers and usurers in the rural areas of Eastern Europe”, even if he perceives the reasons for such a state of affairs “in the peasant’s nature more than in the Jews themselves.” In his opinion, the vodka trade, as the “main activity of the Jews” in Eastern Europe, gave rise to hatred, and among the peasants even more than among the others. It was he who fed more than one pogrom, leaving a deep and broad scar in the consciousness of the Ukrainian and Belarusian peoples, as well as in the memory of the Jewish people.982 We read in many authors that the Jewish innkeepers lived very hard, without a penny, that they were almost reduced to begging. But was the alcohol market as narrow as that? Many people grew fat with the intemperance of the Russian people—and the landowners of Western Russia, and the distillers, and the drinking‐house keepers… and the government! The amount of revenue can be estimated from the time it was entered as national revenue. After the introduction of a state monopoly on spirits in Russia in 1896, with the abolition of all private debits and the sale of beverages by excise duty, the Treasury collected 285 million rubles in the following year—to report to the 98 millions of the direct tax levied on the population. This confirms that not only was the manufacture of spirits “a major source of indirect contributions”, but also that the spirits industry’s revenues, which until 1896 only paid “4 kopecks of excise duty per degree of alcohol produced,” were much higher than the direct revenues of the empire.983 But what was at that time the Jewish participation in this sector? In 1886, during the works of the Pahlen Commission, statistics were published on the subject. According to these figures, Jews held 27% (the decimals do not appear here: the numbers have been rounded up everywhere) of all distilleries in European Russia, 53% in the Pale of Settlement (notably 83% in the province of Podolsk, 76% in that of Grodno, 72% in that of Kherson). They held 41% of breweries in European Russia, 71% in the Pale of Settlement (94% in the province of Minsk, 91% in the province of Vilnius, 85% in the province of Grodno). The proportion of manufacturing and sales points in Jewish commerce 981V. V. Choulguine, “Chto nam v nikh ne nravitsa”: Ob anti‐Semiticism v Rossii (“What we do not like about them”: On anti‐Semitism in Russia), Paris, 1929, pp. 185 186. ‒ 982Parks, pp. 153, 155, 233. 983Sbornik materalov ob ekonomitcheskom polojenii evreiev v Rossii (Collection of materials on the economic situation of Jews in Russia), vol. 2, St., Evreiskoie Kolonizatsionnoie Obschestvo (Jewish Colonising Association), 1904, p. 64.
is 29% in European Russia, 61% in the Pale of Settlement (95% in the province of Grodno, 93% in Mogilev, 91% in the province of Minsk).984 It is understandable that the reform which established the state monopoly on spirits was “greeted with horror… by the Jews of the Pale of Settlement.”985 It is incontestable: the establishment of a State monopoly on spirits dealt a very severe blow to the economic activity of the Jews of Russia. And until the First World War (it ended at that time), this monopoly remained the favourite target of general indignation—whereas it merely instituted a rigorous control of the amount of alcohol produced in the country, and its quality. Forgetting that it reached the Christian tenants in the same way (see the statistics above), it is always presented as an anti‐Jewish measure: “The introduction at the end of the 90s of the sale of alcohol by the State in the Pale of Settlement has deprived more than 100,000 Jews of their livelihood”; “Power meant… forcing the Jews to leave the rural areas,” and since then “this trade has lost for the Jews the importance it once had.”986 It was indeed the moment—from the end of the nineteenth century—when Jewish emigration from Russia grew remarkably. Is there a link between this emigration and the establishment of the state monopoly on the sale of spirits? That is difficult to say, but the figure of 100,000 quoted above suggests so. The fact is that Jewish emigration (in America) remained low until 1886 1887; it ‒ experienced a brief surge in 1891 1892, but it was only after 1897 that it ‒ became massive and continuous.987 The “Provisional Regulations” of 1882 had not prevented further infiltration of Jewish spirits into the countryside. Just as, in the 70s, they had found a loophole against the prohibition of selling elsewhere than home by inventing “street” commerce. It had been devised to circumvent the law of May 3rd, 1882 (which also forbade the commerce of vodka by contract issued with a Jew), leasing “on the sly”: to set up an inn there, one rented a land by oral and not written contract, in order for the taxes to be covered by the owner, and the proceeds from the sale of drinks went to the Jew.988 It was through this and other means that the implantation of the Jews in the countryside could continue after the categorical prohibition of 1882. As Sliosberg writes, it was from 1889 that began the “wave of expulsions” of the Jews outside the villages of the Pale of Settlement, which resulted in “a pitiless competition, generating a terrible evil: denunciation” (in other words, Jews began to denounce those among them who lived illegally). But here are the figures put forward by P. N. Miliukov: if in 1881 there were 580,000 Jews living in villages, there were 711,000 Jews in 1897, which means that the rate of new arrivals and births far outweighed those
984Evreiskaia piteïnaia torgovlia v Rossii. Statistitcheski Vremennik Rossiiskoy Imperii (The Jewish Trade of Spirits in Russia, Statistical Yearbook of the Russian Empire), Series III, Book 9, Saint Petersburg, 1886, p. V‐X. 985Sliosberg, t. 2, p. 230. 986Evreiskaya piteinaia torgovlia v Rossii (Jewish trade of spirits in Russia), op. cit. 987JE, t. 2, pp. 235 238. ‒ 988Cf. Sliosberg, t. 2, p. 55.
of evictions and deaths. In 1899, a new Committee for Jewish Affairs, the eleventh of the name, with Baron Lexhull von Hildebrandt at its head, was set up to revise the Provisional Regulations. This Committee, wrote Miliukov, rejected the proposal to expel from the countryside the Jews who illegally established themselves there, and softened the law of 1882.989 While “recognising that the peasantry, which is not very developed, has no entrepreneurial spirit and no means of development, must be protected from any contact with Jews,” the Committee insisted that “the landowners have no need for the tutelage of the government; the limitation of the right of the owners to manage their property as they see fit depreciates said property and compels the proprietors to employ, in concert with the Jews, all sorts of expedients to circumvent the law”; the lifting of prohibitions on Jews will enable landowners to derive greater benefit from their assets.990 But the proprietors no longer had the prestige, which might have given weight to this argument in the eyes of the administration. It was in 1903 1904 that the revision of the Regulations of 1882 was ‒ seriously undertaken. Reports came from the provinces (notably from Sviatopolk Mirsky, who was Governor‐General and soon to become the Liberal Minister of the Interior), saying that the Regulations had not proved their worth, that it was imperative that the Jews should leave towns and villages where their concentration was too high, and that, thanks to the establishment of a State monopoly on beverages, the threat of Jewish exploitation of the rural population was removed. These proposals were approved by Sipyagin, the minister (who was soon to be shot down by a terrorist), and, in 1908, endorsed by Plehve (soon assassinated in his turn). A list of a hundred and one villages had been drawn up and published, to which fifty‐seven others would soon be added, in which the Jews acquired the right to settle and purchase real estate, and to lease it. (In the Jewish Encyclopædia dating before the revolution, we read the names of these localities, some of which, already quite important, were to spread rapidly: Yuzovka, Lozovaya, Ienakievo, Krivoy Rog, Sinelnikovo, Slavgorod, Kakhovka, Zhmerynka, Chepetovka, Zdolbuniv, Novye Senjary, among others.) Outside this list and Jewish agricultural settlements, Jews did not get the right to acquire land. However, the Regulations were soon abrogated for certain categories: graduates of higher studies, pharmacists, artisans and former retired soldiers. These people were given the right to reside in the countryside, to engage in commerce and various other trades.991 While the sale of spirits and the various kinds of farming—including that of the land—were the main sources of income for Jews, there were others, including notably the ownership of land. Among the Jews, “the aspiration to 989P. Miliukov, Evreiski vopros v rossii (The Jewish Question in Russia), Schit: Literatourny sbornik (The Shield: Literary Collection) edited by L. Andreev, M. Gorky and F. Sologoub, 3rd ed., M. Rousskoie Obschestvo dlia izoutcheniia evreiskoi jizni (Russian Association for the Study of Jewish Life), 1916, p. 170. 990JE, t. 5, pp. 821 822. ‒ 991Ibidem, t. 5, pp. 821 822. ‒
possess the land was expressed by the acquisition of large areas capable of harbouring several types of activities rather than by the use of small parcels which are to be developed by the owner himself.”992 When the land, which gives life to the peasant, reaches a higher price than that of a purely agricultural property, it was not uncommon for a Jewish entrepreneur to acquire it. As we have seen, the direct leasing and purchasing of the land by the Jews was not prohibited until 1881, and the purchasers were not deprived of their rights by the new prohibitions. This is how, for example, Trotsky’s father, David Bronstein, possessed in the province of Kherson, not far from Elizabethgrad, and held in his possession until the revolution an important business (an “economy” as it was called in the South). He also owned, later on, the “Nadejda” mine in the suburb of Krivoi Rog.993 On the basis of what he had observed in the exploitation of his father—and, as he heard it, “in all farms it is the same”, Trotsky relates that the seasonal workers, who had come by foot from the central provinces to be hired, were very malnourished: never meat nor bacon, oil but very little, vegetables and oatmeal, that’s all, and this, during the hard summer work, from dawn to twilight, and even, “one summer, an epidemic of hemeralopia994 was declared among the workers.”995 For my part, I will argue that in an “economy” of the same type, in Kuban, with my grandfather Scherbak (himself a member of a family of agricultural workers), the day workers were served, during the harvest, meat three times a day. But a new prohibition fell in 1903: “A provision of the Council of Ministers deprived all Jews of the right to acquire immovable property throughout the empire, outside urban areas, that is to say in rural areas.”996 This limited to a certain extent the industrial activity of the Jews, but, as the Jewish Encyclopædia points out, by no means their agricultural activity; in any case, “to use the right to acquire land, the Jews would undoubtedly have delegated fewer cultivators than landlords and tenants. It seems doubtful whether a population as urban as the Jewish population was able to supply a large number of farmers.”997 In the early years of the twentieth century, the picture was as follows: “About two million hectares which are now owned or leased by Jews in the empire and the Kingdom of Poland… only 113,000… are home to Jewish agricultural settlements.”998
992Ibidem, t. 1, p. 422. 993Fabritchno‐zavodskie predpriatia Rossiskoi Imperii (Factories and Plants of the Russian Empire), 2nd ed., Council of Congresses of Industry and Commerce, 1914, No. 590. 994Hemeralopia (in Russian: kourinaïa slepota = chicken blindness) weakening or loss of vision in low light, especially at dusk. 995L. Trotsky, Moia jizn : Opyt avtobiografii (My Life: autobiographical), t. 1, Berlin, Granit, 1930, pp. 42 43. ‒ 996JE, t. 7, p. 734. 997JE, t. 1, p. 423. 998Ibidem.
Although the Provisional Regulations of 1882 prohibited the Jews from buying or leasing out of towns and villages, devious means were also found there, notably for the acquisition of land intended for the sugar industry. Thus the Jews who possessed large areas of land were opposed to the agrarian reform of Stolypin, which granted land to the peasants on a personal basis. (They were not the only ones: one is astonished at the hostility with which this reform was received by the press of those years, and not only by that of the extreme right, but by the perfectly liberal press, not to mention the revolutionary press.) The Jewish Encyclopædia argues: “The agrarian reforms that planned to cede land exclusively to those who cultivated it would have harmed the interests of a part of the Jewish population, that which worked in the large farms of Jewish owners.”999 It was not until the Revolution passed that a Jewish author took a look back and, already boiling with proletarian indignation, wrote: “The Jewish landowners possessed under the tsarist regime more than two million hectares of land (mainly around Ukrainian sugar factories, as well as large estates in Crimea and Belarus)”, and, moreover, “they owned more than two million hectares of the best land, black earth.” Thus, Baron Ginzburg possessed in the district of Dzhankoy 87,000 hectares; the industrialist Brodsky owned tens of thousands of hectares for his sugar mills, and others owned similar estates, so that in total the Jewish capitalists combined 872,000 hectares of arable land.1000 After the land ownership came the trade of wheat and cereal products. (Let us remember that the export of grain “was chiefly carried out by Jews.”1001 “Of the total Jewish population of the USSR, not less than 18%, before the revolution (i.e. more than one million people!] were engaged in the trade of wheat, bosses and members of their families alike, which caused a real animosity of the peasants towards the Jewish population” (because the big buyers did everything to lower the price of the wheat in order to resell it for more profit.1002) In the western provinces and in Ukraine, the Jews bought in bulk other agricultural commodities. (Moreover, how can we not point out that in places like Klintsy, Zlynka, Starodub, Ielenovka, Novozybkov, the old believers, workers and industrious, never let trade go by other hands?) Biekerman believes that the prohibition of Jewish merchants to operate throughout the territory of Russia fostered apathy, immobility, domination by the kulaks. However, “If Russia’s trade in wheat has become an integral part of world trade, Russia owes it to the Jews.” As we have already seen, “as early as 1878, 60% of wheat exports from the port of Odessa were by Jews. They were the first to develop the wheat trade at Nikolayev,” Kherson, Rostov‐on‐Don, as well as in the provinces of Orel, Kursk, and Chernigov. They were “well
999Ibidem. 1000Larine, pp. 27, 68 69, 170. ‒ 1001SJE, t. 7, p. 337. 1002Larine, p. 70.
represented in the wheat trade in Saint Petersburg.” And in the North‐West region, out of 1,000 traders of cereal products there were 930 Jews.”1003 However, most of our sources do not shed light on how these Jewish merchants behaved with their trading partners. In fact, they were often very hard and practised procedures that today we would consider illicit; they could, for example, agree among themselves and refuse to buy the crop in order to bring down prices. It is understandable that in the 90s farmers’ cooperatives (under the leadership of Count Heiden and Bekhteyev) were set up in the southern provinces for the first time in Russia and a step ahead of Europe. Their mission was to thwart these massive, monopolistic purchases of peasant wheat. Let us recall another form of commerce in the hands of the Jews: the “export of wood came second after the wheat.”1004 From 1813 to 1913, these exports were multiplied by 140! And the Communist Larinus fulminated: “The Jewish proprietors possessed… large forested areas, and they leased a part of it, even in the provinces where the Jews were not normally allowed to reside.”1005 The Jewish Encyclopædia confirms it: “The Jews acquired the land, especially in the central provinces, chiefly to exploit the forest wealth.”1006 However, as they did not have the right to install sawmills in some places, the wood left abroad in the raw state, for a dead loss for the country. (There existed other prohibitions: access for export of timber in the ports of Riga, Revel, Petersburg; the installation of warehouses along the railways).1007 Such is the picture. Everything is there. And the tireless dynamism of Jewish commerce, which drives entire states. And the prohibitions of a timorous, sclerotic bureaucracy that only hinders progress. And the everincreasing irritation these prohibitions provoke among the Jews. And the sale of the Russian forest, exported abroad in its raw state, as a raw material. And the small farmer, the small operator, who, caught in a merciless vise, has neither the relationships nor the skills to invent other forms of trade. And let us not forget the Ministry of Finance, which pours its subsidies on industry and railways and abandons agriculture, whereas the tax burden is carried by the class of the farmers, not the merchants. One wonders: under the conditions of the new economic dynamics that came to replenish the Treasury and was largely due to the Jews, was there anyone to worry about the harm done to the common people, the shock suffered by it, from the break in its way of life, in its very being? For half a century, Russia has been accused—from the inside as well as from the outside—of having enslaved the Jews economically and having forced them to misery. It was necessary that the years passed, that this abominable Russia disappear from the surface of the earth, it will be necessary to cross the 1003I. M. Dijour, Evrei v ekonomitchesköjizni Rossii (The Jews in the Economic Life of Russia), BJWR‐l *, p. 172. 1004Ibidem*, p. 173. 1005Larine, p.69. 1006JE, t. 1, p. 423. 1007Dijour, SJE-1, p. 173.
revolutionary turmoil for a Jewish author of the 30s to look at the past, over the bloody wall of the Revolution, and acknowledge: “The tsarist government has not pursued a policy of total eviction of Jews from economic life. Apart from the well‐known limitations… in the countryside…, on the whole, the tsarist government tolerated the economic activity of the Jews.” The tensions of the national struggle, “the Jews did not feel them in their economic activity. The dominant nation did not want to take the side of a particular ethnic group, it was only trying to play the role of arbiter or mediator.”1008 Besides, it happened that the government was intruding into the economy on national grounds. It then took measures which, more often than not, were doomed to failure. Thus, “in 1890, a bulletin was diffused under which the Jews lost the right to be directors of corporations that intended to purchase or lease lands.”1009 But it was the childhood of the art of circumventing this law: remaining anonymous. This kind of prohibition in no way impeded the activity of Jewish entrepreneurs. “The role of Jews was especially important in foreign trade where their hegemony was assured and their geographical location (near borders) and by their contacts abroad, and by their commercial intermediaries skills.”1010 As regards to the sugar industry, more than a third of the factories were Jewish at the end of the century.1011 We have seen in previous chapters how the industry had developed under the leadership of Israel Brodsky and his sons Lazar and Leon (“at the beginning of the twentieth century, they controlled directly or indirectly seventeen sugar mills”1012). Galperine Moses, “in the early twentieth century had eight factories and three refineries… He also owned 50,000 hectares of sugar beet cropland.”1013 “Hundreds of thousands of Jewish families lived off the sugar industry, acting as intermediaries, sellers, and so on.” When competition appeared, as the price of sugar began to fall, a syndicate of sugar producers in Kiev called for control of production and sale, in order for prices not to fall.1014 The Brodsky Brothers were the founders of the Refiners’ Union in 1903.1015 In addition to the grain trade, the wood trade and the sugar industry where they occupied a predominant position, other areas must be cited in which the Jews largely contributed to development: flour milling, fur trade, spinning mills, confection, the tobacco industry, the brewery.1016 In 1835 they were also present at the major fairs in Nizhny Novgorod.1017 In Transbaikalia they launched a 1008A. Menes, Evreiski vopros v Vostotchnoï Evrope (The Jewish Question in Eastern Europe), JW-1, p. 146. 1009SJE, t. 7, p. 368. 1010JE, t. 13, p. 646. 1011Ibidem, p. 662. 1012RJE, t. 1, p. 171. 1013Ibidem, p. 264. 1014Sliosberg, t. 2, p. 231. 1015RJE, t. 1, p. 171. 1016Dijour, BJWR-1, pp. 163 174. ‒ 1017JE, t. 11, p. 697.
livestock trade which took off in the 90s, and the same happened in Siberia for the production of coal—Andjero‐Soudji hard coal—and the extraction of gold, where they played a major role. After 1892, the Ginzburg “devoted themselves almost exclusively to the extraction of gold.” The most prosperous enterprise was the Lena Gold Mining Company, which “was controlled in fact (from 1896 until its death in 1909) by Baron Horace Ginzburg, son of Evzel Ginzburg, founder of the Bank of the same name and president of its branch in Saint Petersburg. (The son of Horace, David, also a baron, remained at the head of the Jewish community of Saint Petersburg until his death in 1910. His sons Alexander and Alfred sat on the board of Lena, the gold mining company. Another son, Vladimir, married the daughter of the owner of the Kiev sugar factory, L. I. Brodsky.) Horace Ginzburg was also “the founder of… the gold extraction companies from Transbaikalia, Miias, Berezovka, Altai and a few others.”1018 In 1912, a huge scandal about the Lena mines broke out and caused quite a stir throughout the country: the operating conditions were abominable, the workers had been misled… Appropriately, the tsarist government was accused of everything and demonised. No one, in the raging liberal press mentioned the main shareholders, notably the Ginzburg sons. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Jews represented 35% of the merchant class in Russia.1019 Choulguine gives us what he observed in the southwest region: “Where have they gone, Russian traders, where is the Russian third estate? … In time, we had a strong Russian bourgeoisie… Where have they gone?” “They were ousted by the Jews, lowered into the social ladder, to the state of moujiks.”1020 The Russians in the southwest region have chosen their own fate: it is clear. And at the beginning of the century, the eminent politician V. I. Gourko1021 observed: “The place of the Russian merchant is more and more frequently taken by a Jew.”1022 The Jews also gained influence and authority in the booming sector of the cooperative system. More than half of the Mutual Credit and Savings and Loan Companies were in the Pale of Settlement (86% of their members in 1911 were Jewish).1023 We have already spoken of the construction and operation of the Russian railways by the Poliakov brothers, Bliokh and Varshavsky. With the exception of the very first lines (the Tsarskoselskaya line and the Nikolaevskaya line), almost all the railways that were later built were made by concessionary
1018SJE, t. 7, p. 369; RJE, t. 1, pp. 315 316; JE, t. 6, p. 527. ‒ 1019M. Vernatsky, Evrei i rousskoie narodnoie khoziaistvo (The Jews and the Russian Economy), p. 30. 1020Choulguine, pp. 128 129. ‒ 1021Vladimir Yossifovich Gourko (1863 1917): Deputy Minister of the Interior in 1906, ‒ elected member of the Council of the Empire since 1912. Emigrated after the Civil War. 1022Vf Gourko, Oustoi narodnogo khoziastva v Rossii: Agrarno‐ekonomitcheskie etiudy (The Foundations of the National Economy in Russia: Agrarian and Economic Studies), Saint Petersburg, 1902, p. 199. 1023Dijour, BJWR-1, p. 176.
companies in which the Jews occupied the command posts; “But, as of the 1890s, the state was the first builder.” On the other hand, it is under the leadership of David Margoline that was created in 1883 the great shipping company “on the Dnieper and its tributaries”, the main shareholders of which were Jews. In 1911, the company owned a fleet of 78 vessels and accounted for 71% of the traffic on the Dnieper.1024 Other companies operating on the Western Dvina, the Niemen, joined the Mariinsky Canal and the Volga. There were also about ten oil companies belonging to Jews from Baku. “The biggest were the oil company belonging to the brothers S. and M. Poliak and to Rothschild, and the joint‐stock company of the Caspian‐Black Sea, behind which was also found the name of Rothschild.” These companies were not allowed to extract oil; they specialised in refining and exporting.1025 But it was in finance that the economic activity of the Jews was the most brilliant. “Credit is an area where Jews have long felt at home. They have created new ways and have perfected the old. They played a leading role in the hands of a few large capitalists and in the organisation of commercial investment banks. The Jews brought out of their ranks not only the banking aristocracy but also the mass of employees.”1026 The bank of Evzel Ginzburg, founded in 1859 in Saint Petersburg, grew and strengthened thanks to its links with the Mendelssohn in Berlin, the Warburg in Hamburg, the Rothschild in Paris and Vienna. But when the financial crisis of 1892 broke out, and “because of the government’s refusal to support its bank with loans,” as had happened twice before, E. Ginzburg withdrew from business.1027 By the 70s, there existed a network of banks founded by the three Poliakov brothers, Jacob, Samuel and Lazar. These are the Azov‐Don Commercial Bank (to be later managed by B. Kaminka), the Mortgage Lending of Moscow, the Don Land Bank, the Poliakov Bank, the International Bank and “a few other houses which will later form the Unified Bank.”—The Bank of Siberia had A. Soloveitchik at its head, the Commercial Bank of Warsaw was directed by I. Bliokh. In several other large establishments, Jews occupied important posts (Zak, Outine, Khesine, A. Dobryi, Vavelberg, Landau, Epstein, Krongold). “In two large banks only, the Commercial Bank of Moscow and that of the Volga‐Kama, there were no Jews either in the leadership or among the staff.”1028 The Poliakov brothers all had the rank of secret counsellor and, as we have said, all three were granted hereditary nobility.1029
1024SJE, t. 7, p. 369. 1025Dijour, BJWR-1, pp. 178 179; JE, t. 13, p. 660; SJE, t. 7, p. 369. ‒ 1026JE, t. 13, pp. 651 652. ‒ 1027JE, t. 6, p. 527. 1028Dijour, BJWR-1, pp. 174 175; SJE, t. 6, pp. 670 671. ‒ ‒ 1029JE, t. 12, p. 734; SJE, t. 6, pp. 670 671. ‒
Thus, at the dawn of the twentieth century, the Pale of Settlement had already completely emptied itself of its substance. It had not prevented the Jews from occupying solid positions in the vital sectors of the country’s life, from economy and finance to the intellectual sphere. The “Pale” no longer had any practical utility; its economic and political purpose was outdated. It had only filled the Jews with anti‐government bitterness and resentment; it had thrown oil on the fire of social discontent and had struck the Russian government with the seal of infamy in the eyes of the West. But let us be clear: this Russian Empire, with the slowness and sclerosis of its bureaucracy, the mentality of its leaders, where and in what way did it fall behind all through the nineteenth century and decades before the revolution? It had been unable to settle a dozen major problems affecting the life of the country. It had not been able to organise local civil self‐government, install zemstvos in rural districts, carry out agrarian reform, remedy the state of pernicious state of humiliation of the Church, or communicate with civil society and make its action understood. It had managed neither the boom of mass education nor the development of Ukrainian culture. To this list let us add another point where the delay proved catastrophic: the revision of the real conditions of the Pale of Settlement, the awareness of their influence on all positionings of the State. The Russian authorities have had a hundred years and more to solve the problems of the Jewish population, and they have not been able to do so, neither in the sense of an open assimilation nor by allowing the Jews to remain in voluntary isolation, that which was already theirs a century before. Meanwhile, during the decades from the 70s to the beginning of the twentieth century, Russian Judaism experienced a rapid development, an undeniable blossoming of its elite, which already felt cramped, not only within the limits of the Pale of Settlement, but in those of the empire. When analysing the concrete aspects of the inequality in Jewish rights in Russia, the Pale of Settlement and the numerus clausus, we must not lose sight of this general picture. For if American Judaism grew in importance, the Jews of Russia at the beginning of the twentieth century still constituted nearly half of the Jewish population of the planet.1030 This is to be remembered as an important fact in the history of Judaism. And it is still Mr. Biekerman who, looking behind him over the ditch of the revolution, wrote in 1924: “Tsarist Russia was home to more than half the Jewish people. It is natural, consequently, that the Jewish history of the generations that are closest to us is mainly the history of the Jews of Russia.” And even though in the nineteenth century “the Jews of the West had been richer, more influential, and more cultured than we were, the vitality of Judaism was nevertheless in Russia. And this vitality grew stronger and stronger at the same time as the Russian Empire flourished… It was only when provinces populated by Jews were united to Russia that this rebirth began. The Jewish population grew rapidly in number, to
1030SJE, t. 2, pp. 313 314. ‒
such an extent that it was able to leave a very numerous colony overseas; it had amassed and possessed important capital in its hands; a middle class had grown and acquired authority; the standard of living of the lower strata had also grown incessantly. By a variety of efforts, the Jews of Russia had been able to overcome the physical and moral abjection which they had brought from Poland; European culture and education reached Jewish circles… and we went so far in this direction, we have amassed such spiritual wealth that we have been able to afford the luxury of having a literature in three languages…” All this culture, all this wealth, it is in Russia that the Jews of Eastern Europe have received them. Russian Judaism, “by its numbers and by the greenness of the energies it contained, proved to be the backbone of all the Jewish people.”1031 A more recent author, our contemporary, confirms in 1989 the correctness of this painting brushed by his elder, witness of the time. He wrote: “The public life of the Jews of Russia had reached, at the turn of the two centuries, a degree of maturity and amplitude which many small peoples in Europe might have envied.”1032 If there is a reproach that cannot be made to the “prison of the people”, it is to have denationalised the people, be it the Jews or others. Certain Jewish authors, it is true, deplore the fact that in the 80s “the cultivated Jews of the capital had hardly been involved in the defence of Jewish interests”, that only Baron Ginzburg and a few other wealthy Jews with good relations.1033 “The Jews of Petersburg (30,000 to 40,000 in 1900) lived unconnected with one another, and the Jewish intelligentsia, in its majority, remained aloof, indifferent to the needs and interests of the community as a whole.”1034 Yet it was also the time when “the holy spirit of the Renaissance… hovered over the Pale of Settlement and awakened in the younger generations the forces that had been dormant for many centuries among the Jewish people… It was a veritable spiritual revolution.” Among Jewish girls, “the thirst for instruction showed literarily religious signs.” And already, even in Saint Petersburg, “a large number of Jewish students frequented higher education institutions.” At the beginning of the twentieth century, “a great part of the Jewish intelligentsia… felt… that it was its duty to return to its people.”1035 Thanks to this spiritual awakening at the end of the nineteenth century, very diverse and sometimes contradictory trends emerged in Russian Judaism. Some
1031I. M. Bickerman, Rossiia i rousskoie evreistvo (Russia and Russian Judaism), RJE, pp. 84‒ 85, 87. 1032E. Finkelstein, Evrei v SSSR. Pout v XXI vek (The Jews in the USSR. Entry into the 21st Century), Strana i mir: Obschetv. Polititcheski, ekonomitcheski i koultournofilosfski journal (The Country and the World: Socio‐political, Economic, Cultural and Philosophical Review), Munich, 1989, no. 1 (49), p. 70. 1033Sliosberg, t. 1, p. 145. 1034M.A. Krol, Stranitsy moeï jizni (Pages of my life), t. 1, New York, Union of Russian Jews in New York, 1944, p. 267. 1035Krol., op. cit., pp. 260 261, 267, 299. ‒
of them will be called upon to determine to a large extent the destinies of our land throughout the twentieth century. At the time, the Jews of Russia envisaged at least six possible orientations, however incompatible with each other. Namely:
• the safeguard of their religious identity by isolation, as had been practised for centuries (but this path became more and more unpopular); • assimilation; • the struggle for national and cultural autonomy, the active presence of Judaism in Russia as a distinct element; • emigration; • adherence to Zionism; • adherence to the revolution.
Indeed, the proponents of these different tendencies were often united in the work of acculturation of the Jewish masses in three languages—Hebrew, Yiddish and Russian—and in welfare works—in the spirit of the theory of “small gestures” in vogue in Russia in the 80s. Mutual aid was embodied in Jewish associations, some of which, after the revolution, were able to continue their action in emigration. This was the case with the Society for the Dissemination of Education among the Jews of Russia, which had been founded in 1863. By the mid-90s, this Society was already opening its own schools, with, besides an education in Russian, courses in Hebrew. It convened Pan‐Russian conferences on the theme of Jewish popular education.1036 In 1891 began the works of a Commission of Jewish History and Ethnography, which in 1908 became the Society of Jewish History and Ethnography. It coordinated the study of Jewish history through Russia and the collection of archives.1037 In 1880, the “King of the Railways”, Samuel Poliakov, founded the Society of Craft and Agricultural Labour among the Jews (SCAL). The latter collected a good deal of money and “devoted the bulk of its efforts, at the beginning of its efforts, to the transfer of Jewish artisans outside the Pale of Settlement to the central provinces.”1038 We have seen that after the initial authorisation given (in 1865) to this transfer the craftsmen moved only in small numbers. What happened after the pogroms of 1881 1882? We could think: now, they will ‒ certainly leave, they have the help the SCAL, plus a subsidy from the government for the displacement, they will not remain there, moping around, confined in this damned Pale where one was condemned to a wretched death,
1036JE, t. 1, pp. 60 61. ‒ 1037Ibidem, t. 8, p. 466. 1038Ibidem, t. 11, p. 924.
but no: after more than ten years of efforts on the part of the SCAL, only 170 artisans moved! The SCAL decided then to help artisans inside the Pale by purchasing tools, setting up workshops and then creating professional schools.1039 Emigration was taken over by the Society for Colonisation by the Jews (SCJ), whose creation followed the opposite course: first abroad, then in Russia. It was founded in London in 1891 by Baron Moritz von Hirsch, who for this purpose made a donation of 2,000,000 pounds sterling. His idea was the following: to substitute the chaotic emigration of the Jews of Eastern Europe with a well‐ordered colonisation, oriented towards the countries requiring cultivators, and thus to bring back at least part of the Jews to the cultivation of the land, to free them from this “anomaly… which arouses the animosity of the European peoples.”1040 “To seek for the Jews who leave Russia ‘a new homeland and try to divert them from their usual activity, trade, make them farmers and thereby contribute to the work of rebirth of the Jewish people’.”1041 This new homeland, it would be Argentina. (Another objective was to divert the wave of Jewish immigration away from the shores of the United States where, owing to the influx of immigrants, the wage decline induced by their competition, there rose the spectre of anti‐Semitism.) As it was proposed to populate this land with Jews of Russia, an office of the Society for Colonisation opened in Saint Petersburg in 1892. It “set up 450 information offices and 20 neighbourhood committees. They received the candidates for emigration to help them obtain their exit papers from the territory, they negotiated with the maritime messengers, they procured travellers with tickets at reduced prices, they published brochures” on countries likely to welcome new settlers.1042 (Sliosberg denounces in passing the fact that “no person not holding a double title as a banker or a millionaire had access to their direction.”1043) Since the end of the nineteenth century, the emigration of Jews from Russia had been growing steadily for various reasons, some of which have already been mentioned here. One of the most serious of these was the compulsory conscription: if so many young men (it is Denikin who writes it) chose to mutilate themselves, was it not better to emigrate? Especially when we know that conscription simply did not exist in the United States! (The Jewish authors are silent on this motif, and the Jewish Encyclopædia itself, in the article “The Emigration of the Jews of Russia”, does not say a single word of it.1044 It is true that this reason does not explain on its own the emigration boom in the 90s.) Another reason, also of significance: the Provisional Regulations of 1882. The third major shock was the expulsion of Jewish craftsmen from Moscow in 1891. And also this other, very violent: the establishment of the state monopoly on 1039Ibidem, pp. 924 925. ‒ 1040Sliosberg, t. 2, pp. 32, 96 102. ‒ 1041JE, t. 7, p. 504. 1042SJE, t. 2, p. 365. 1043Sliosberg, t. 2, pp. 29, 98 100. ‒ 1044JE, t. 16, pp. 264 268. ‒
spirits in Russia in 1896, which deprived all the tenants of drinking places of their income and reduced the revenues of the distillers. (Sliosberg: those who had been expelled from the villages or provinces of the interior were volunteers for emigration.) G. Aronson notes that in the 80s an average of 15,000 Jews emigrated each year, and that they were up to 30,000 in the 90s.1045 The attitude of the Russian authorities in the face of this growing emigration—a genuine boon to the State—was benevolent. The Russian Government readily agreed to the establishment of the SCJ in Saint Petersburg, and the measures that it adopted to promote emigration; it did not interfere in any of its actions, authorising the age group of the conscripts to emigrate with their families; it issued free exit visas and granted special rates on trains—on one condition, however: once gone, the emigrants were never to return to Russia again.1046 To cross the ocean, it was necessary at the time to pass through England, which meant that in the English port cities there was provisionally a crowd of Jewish emigrants—some of whom remained and settled in Great Britain while others returned there after an attempt to settle in the United States. As early as 1890, English public opinion rebelled against the policy of the Russian government: “The Jewish question is constantly occupying the columns of the British newspapers… In America, too, the question of the situation of Jews in Russia remains day after day of actuality.”1047 Having assessed the proportions that this migratory flow was likely to take, Great Britain soon closed its doors.1048 The immigration to Argentina had also stopped in 1894. The Jewish Encyclopædia described this as a “brooding crisis… in the Argentine question.”1049 Sliosberg spoke of the “disenchantment of immigrants in Argentina” (the disgruntled rebelled and sent collective petitions to the administration of Baron Hirsch). The Duma debates highlighted a situation similar to the experience in New Russia: “Immigration to Argentina provides examples that confirm that in many cases people have received land on very advantageous terms, but have abandoned it to engage in other trades more in line with their abilities.”1050 After this, although its vocation remained in the principle of pushing the Jews to become farming “settlers”, the Society for Colonisation renounced this objective. It set itself the task of helping “the excessively disorderly emigration of Jews from Russia”, “it was concerned with providing information to the
1045G. I. Aronson, V borbe za natsionalnye i granjdanskie prava: Obschestvennye telchénia v rousskom evreistve (In the struggle for civil and national rights: Social currents among the Jews of Russia), BJWR-1, p. 212. 1046JE, t. 7, p. 507; Sliosberg, t. 2, pp. 34 41; SJE, t. 7, p. 366. ‒ 1047Sliosberg, t. 2, pp. 27 30. ‒ 1048JE, t. 2, pp. 534 535. ‒ 1049Ibidem, t. 7, p. 504. 1050Gosudarslvcnnaia Duma—Vtoroi sozyv (State Duma, 2nd Legislature), Stenogramme, Session 2, Saint Petersburg, 1907, Meeting 24, 9 April 1907, p. 1814.
emigrants, defending their interests, being the connection with host countries”, and it had to modify its statutes, which had been bequeathed by Baron Hirsch. Large sums were allocated “to raise the standard of living of Jews in their places of residence”; from 1898 onwards, “action was taken among the population within Russia itself,” and in the existing Jewish agricultural colonies the “introduction of more modern tools and methods of cultivation”, “the granting of an advantageous credit for the improvement of the soil.” However, again, “despite the large sums invested in this sector, agricultural activity remained relatively stagnant.”1051 Conversely, migratory flows outside Russia continued to increase, “in direct connection with the craft crisis and the gradual elimination of small trade and factories”; this flow “reached its peak… in 1906”, but was not “able to absorb the annual surplus of the population” of the Jews. It should be noted that “the great mass of emigrants was destined for the United States”— for example, in 1910, they were 73%.1052 “From 1881 to 1914, 78.6% of emigrants from Russia landed in the United States.”1053 From this period, we can thus see what will be the general movement of our century. (Note that at the entrance to the American territory no paper certifying craftsmanship was required, and it followed that during the first six years of the century 63% of Russian immigrants “engaged in industry”. This meant that those who left Russia for America were exclusively artisans? This could offer an explanation to the question as to why the artisans did not go to the Central provinces, which were now open to them? But it is also necessary to consider that for many immigrants, and especially for those who had neither resources nor trade, no other answer was possible than that of recognising themselves as part of the “category notoriously well accepted by the Americans.”1054) One is struck by how few of the emigrants are the individuals belonging to the cultivated stratum, the one allegedly the most persecuted in Russia. These people did not emigrate. From 1899 to 1907, they were barely 1% to do so.1055 The Jewish intelligentsia did not in any way tend to emigrate: it was, in its eyes, a way of escaping the problems and fate of Russia at the very moment when opportunities for action were opening up. As late as 1882, the resolution of a Congress of Jewish public figures “called for a definite rejection of the idea of organising an emigration, for this idea contradicts the dignity of the Russian State.”1056 In the last years of the nineteenth century, “the new generation wanted to be actively involved in history… and across the board, from the outside as well as from the inside, it has gone from defensive to offensive… Young Jews now want to write their own history, to affix the seal of their will to their
1051JE, t. 7, p. 505 509; ‒ I. M. Troilsky, Samodeiatelnost i samopomosch evreiev v Rossii (autonomous activity and mutual assistance of Jews in Russia), BJWR-1, pp. 491 495. ‒ 1052JE, t. 16, p. 265. 1053SJE, t. 7, p. 366. 1054JE, t. 2, pp. 246 248. ‒ 1055Ibidem, pp. 247 248. ‒ 1056SJE, t. 7, p. 365.
destiny, and also, to a just extent, on the destiny of the country in which they live.”1057 The religious wing of Russian Judaism also denounced emigration, considering it as a break with the vivifying roots of East European Judaism. The secular efforts of the new generation were primarily concerned with a vast program of specifically Jewish instruction, culture and literature in Yiddish, the only ones capable of creating a link with the mass of the people. (According to the census of 1897, only 3% of Russian Jews recognised Russian as their mother tongue, while Hebrew seemed forgotten and no one thought it could be reborn.) It was proposed to create a network of libraries specially designed for Jews, newspapers in Yiddish (the daily Der Freynd appeared in 1903; and it sold like hot cakes in the villages; not belonging to any political party, it nevertheless sought to give political training1058). It was in the 90s that took shape “the grandiose metamorphosis of the amorphous Jewish mass into a nation, the Jewish Renaissance.”1059 One after the other, authors writing in Yiddish became very popular: Mendele Mocher‐Sefarim, Scholom‐Aleichem, Itzhak‐Leibush Peretz. And the poet Bialik, to follow the movement, translated his own poems into Yiddish. In 1908, this trend reached its peak at the Tchernovtsy Conference, which proclaimed Yiddish as the “national language of the Jewish people” and advocated the translation of all printed texts into Yiddish.1060 At the same time, considerable efforts were made for Jewish culture in the Russian language. Thus the ten volumes of the Jewish Library, of historical and literary content1061; the Petersburg magazines born from 1881, Rassvet (“The Dawn”), then Rousski Evrei (“The Russian Jew”). (They soon stopped appearing: “these publications did not meet the support of the Jewish public itself”1062). The magazine Voskhod (“The Break of Day”) opened its pages to all Jewish authors, translating all the novelties, offering a place of choice for studies on Jewish history,1063 (May we, Russians, show the same interest in our own history!). For the time being, “the dominant role in the public life of Russian Judaism” was held by the “Jewish Petersburg”: “towards the middle of the 90s, [it is in Petersburg that] almost all senior management was formed, the Jewish intellectual aristocracy”; all the talents are in Petersburg.1064 According to an approximate calculation, only 67,000 Jews spoke Russian fluently in 1897, but it was the cultivated elite. And already “the whole younger generation” in 1057V. Jabotinsky, Vvedenie (Preface to K. N. Bialik, Pesni i poemy (Songs and poems), Saint Petersburg, ed. Zaltsman, 1914, p. 36 1058I. Mark, Literatoura na idish v Rossii (Literature in Yiddish in Russia), BJWR-1, pp. 537‒ 539. 1059Aronson, op. cit., BJWR-1, p. 216. 1060Mark, LJE-1, pp. 519 541. ‒ 1061G. I. Aronson, Roussko‐evreiskaïa pclchat (The Russian‐Jewish Press), BJWR-1, p. 563. 1062Sliosberg, t. 1, pp. 105, 260. 1063Aronson, The Russian‐Jewish Press, op. cit., pp. 563 568. ‒ 1064S. M. Ginzburg, O roussko‐evrciskoï intelligentsii (De l’intelligentsia russo‐juive), JW-1. pp. 35 36. ‒
Ukraine in the 90s was raised in Russian, and those who went to study in the high schools completely lost contact with Jewish education.1065 There was not, strictly speaking, a slogan of the type: Assimilation! We must blend into the Russian element! Nor an appeal to renounce one’s nationality. Assimilation was a commonplace phenomenon, but it created a link between Russian Judaism and the future of Russia.1066 Moreover, Sliosberg refutes the term assimilation: “Nothing was more opposed to the truth” than to say that “assimilated persons considered themselves… Russians under the Mosaic Law.” On the contrary, “the appetite for Russian culture did not exclude confessing the traditions of Hebrew culture.”1067 However, after the disillusionment of the 80s, “certain Jewish intellectuals, deeply imbued with the idea of assimilation, felt a break in their conception of public life.”1068 Soon, “there soon was only one Jewish organisation left, one party defending assimilation. However… while it had given up arms as a theory, it remained a very real part of the life of the Jews of Russia, at least among those who lived in the big cities.”1069 But it was decided to “break the link between emancipation… and… assimilation”—in other words: to obtain one and not the other, to gain equality but without the loss of Jewishness.1070 In the 90s, Voskhod‘s primary objective was to fight for the equal rights of Jews in Russia.1071 A “Defence Office” for the Jews of Russia had been formed in Saint Petersburg at the beginning of the century, the members of which were eminent advocates and men of letters. (Before them, Baron Hirsch had been the only one to work as they did: it was to him that all the grievances of the Jews went.) Sliosberg speaks to us in detail about its founders.1072 During those years, “the Jewish spirit awoke for the struggle”, the Jews were assisted to “a strong thrust of their self‐consciousness, public and national”—but a conscience now devoid of any religious form: “The villages deserted by the most fortunate…, the villages abandoned by the young people, gone to join the city…, the galloping urbanisation” undermined the religion “in broad sections of the Jewish population from the 90s”, and caused the authority of the rabbis to fall. The scholars of the Talmudic schools themselves were seduced by secularisation.1073 (That being said, the biographical notes of the Jewish Encyclopædia concerning the generation that grew up at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries often include the words “received a traditional religious education”.) 1065I. Ben‐Tvi, Iz istorii rabotchego sionizma v Rossii (About the History of Workers’ Zionism in Russia). BJWR-1, p. 272. 1066Ginzburg, About Russian‐Jewish Intelligentsia, op. cit., pp. 37 39 ‒ 1067Sliosberg, t. 2, pp. 301 302. ‒ 1068Hessen, t. 2, p. 232. 1069JE, t. 3, p. 232. 1070I. Mark, Pamiati I. M. Tcherkover (To the Memory of I. M. Tcherkover), JW-2, New York, 1944, p. 425. 1071Aronson, The Russian‐Jewish Press, op. cit., pp. 564 568. ‒ 1072Sliosberg, L 3, pp. 110 135. ‒ 1073Aronson, The Russian‐Jewish Press, op. cit., pp. 213 215. ‒
On the other hand, as we have pointed out, what developed with unpredictable force and in an unexpected form was palestinophilia.
The events in Russia could not but be perceived by the Jews of Russia and by the Russians involved in public life in the light of what was happening at the same time in Europe: contacts were then free and frequent between educated people and the borders were permeable to ideas and events. European historians point to a “nineteenth‐century anti‐Semitism… a growing animosity towards Jews in Western Europe, where, however, it seemed that we were making great strides towards its disappearance.”1074 Up to Switzerland where the Jews, in the middle of the century, had not been able to obtain freedom of residence in the townships, the freedom to trade or to exercise handicrafts. In France, it was the blast of the Dreyfus Affair. In Hungary, “the old landed aristocracy… accused the Jews… of having ruined it”; In Austria and in the present‐day Czech Republic, at the end of the nineteenth century, an “anti‐Semitic movement” was spreading, and “the petty bourgeoisie… fought the social‐democratic proletariat with anti‐Jewish slogans.”1075 In 1898, bloody pogroms took place in Galicia. The rise in all countries of the bourgeoisie “increased the influence of the Jews, grouped in large numbers in capitals and industrial centres… In cities such as Vienna and Budapest…, the press, the theatre, the bar, the medical profession, found in their ranks a percentage of Jews much higher than their proportion in the population as a whole. Those years mark the beginning of the great fortunes of certain Jewish merchants and bankers.”1076 But it was in Germany that the anti‐Jewish tendencies manifested themselves with the greatest insistence. Let us first name Richard Wagner (as early as 1869). In the 70s conservative and clerical circles demanded that the rights of German Jews should be restricted and that any new Jewish immigration should be banned. From the end of the 70s, the “intellectual circles themselves,” whose spokesman was the Prussian historian Heinrich von Treitschke, said: “The agitators of today have well perceived the mindset of society which regards the Jews as our national misfortune”; “The Jews never succeed in merging with the peoples of Western Europe”, and show hatred towards Germanism. Then comes Karl Eugen Duhring, made famous for his polemic with Marx and Engels1077: “The Jewish question is a simple matter of race, and the Jews are a race that is not only foreign but irremediably and 1074Parks, p. 161. 1075Istoria XIX veka v 8-mi t. (Russian translation of the History of the XIX century in 8 volumes, by Lavisse and Rambaud, t. 7), M., 139, pp. 186, 203. 1076Parks, p. 164. 1077Karl Eugen Dühring (1833 1921): German philosopher. His theses, opposed to the ‒ economic and social theories of Marx and Engels, were strongly criticised by the latter in the work entitled precisely the Anti‐Dühring.
ontologically bad.” Then comes the philosopher Edward Hartman. In the political sphere, this movement led to the first international anti‐Jewish congress of 1882 (in Dresden), which adopted the “Manifesto addressed to the Christian peoples and governments that are dying of Judaism”, and demanded the expulsion of Jews from Germany.—But in the early 90s the anti‐Jewish parties had regressed and suffered a series of setbacks on the political scene.1078 France was also the scene if not of the emergence of an equally aggressive racial theory, at least of a broad anti‐Jewish political propaganda: the one broadcast by Edouard Drumont in his Libre Parole from 1892. Then came “a real competition between Socialism and anti‐Semitism”; “The Socialists did not hesitate to embellish their speeches of outputs against the Jews and to lower themselves right up to anti‐Semitic demagogy… A social anti‐Semitic fog enveloped the entirety of France.”1079 (Very similar to the propaganda of the populists in Russia in the years 1881 1882.) And it was then that in 1894 the ‒ thunderous Dreyfus Affair broke out. “In 1898, it [anti‐Semitism] reached its climax throughout Western Europe—in Germany, France, Great Britain and the United States.”1080 The Russian press of the years 1870 1890 also issued some anti‐Jewish ‒ statements, but without the strong theoretical colouring they had in Germany, nor the exacerbated social violence in Austria‐Hungary and France. Let us recall the accounts of Vsevolod Krestovsky (Egyptian Darkness, among others) and some crude newspaper articles. It is appropriate to set apart the newspaper Novoïe Vremia (“The New Times”), which owed its success to its engaged positions to the “Slav movement” linked to the Russo‐Turkish war for the defence of the Balkans. But when “from the theatre of operations were received reports on acts of plunder perpetrated by intendants and suppliers, these suppliers “of Jewish origin” appeared as the incarnation of all Russian Judaism, and Novoïe Vremia adopted a frankly anti‐Semitic stance.” Beginning in the 80s, the newspaper did more than “go into the camp of reactionaries”, “it went beyond all the limits of hatred and improbity in the Jewish question. The warning cry ‘Beware the Jew!’ resounded for the first time in the columns of Novoïe Vremia. The paper insisted on the need to take firm measures against the Jews’ ‘stranglehold’ over Russian science, literature and art…” It did not miss an opportunity to denounce the fact of “withdrawing from military service.”1081 These attacks on Jews, both abroad and in Russia, stirred Vladimir Solovyov, and in 1884 he vigorously criticised them: “The Judaeans have always behaved to us in the manner of the Judaeans, and we, Christians, have not yet learned to behave with Judaism in a Christian way”; “With regard to Judaism, the Christian world in its mass has so far shown only an irrational 1078JE*, t. 2, pp. 696 708. ‒ 1079Ibidem, pp. 676 677. ‒ 1080R. Noudelman, Prizrak brodit po Evrope (A Spectre Haunts Europe), in «22», Tel‐Aviv, 1992, no. 84, p. 128. 1081JE, t. 11, p. 758 759. ‒
jealousy or a feeble indifference.” No, “it is not Christian Europe that is tolerant of Jews, it is the Europe of unbelievers.”1082 The growing importance of the Jewish question for Russia, Russian society understood it only half a century behind its government. It was only after the Crimean War that “the emerging Russian public opinion began to conceive the existence of a Jewish problem in Russia.”1083 But there needed to elapse a few more decades before it understood the primacy of this question. “Providence has brought the greatest part of the Jewish people to our country, and the strongest,” wrote Vladimir Solovyov in 1891.1084 The year before, with the support of some sympathisers, Solovyov wrote a “Protest” in which it was said that “the sole cause of the so‐called Jewish question” was the abandonment of all righteousness and humanity, “a senseless craze for blind national egoism.” “To stir up racial and religious hatred, which is so contrary to the spirit of Christianity…, deeply perverts society and can lead to a return to barbarism…” “We must strongly denounce the anti‐Semitic movement, “even if only through the instinct of national survival.”1085 According to the account given to him by M. Doubnov, Solovyov collected more than a hundred signatures, including those of Tolstoy and Korolenko1086. But the editors of all the newspapers had been ordered not to publish this protest. Solovyov wrote a scalding letter to Tsar Alexander III, but was told that if he persisted, he would be punished with an administrative measure. He gave up.1087 Just as in Europe, the multifaceted thrust of Jewish ambitions could not fail to arouse anxiety among the actors of Russian public life here, a fierce opposition there, and there again, on the contrary, sympathy. And, in some, a political calculation. Like the Will of the People in 1881, who understood the profit to be drawn from the Jewish question (at the time, it was in the direction of persecution), the radical and liberal circles of the time, namely the left wing of society, conceived and made theirs for a long time still the idea that the Jewish question could be used as a political map of the struggle against the 1082V. S. Solovyov, Evreistvo i khristianski vopros (Judaism and the Christian Question), Compl. Works in 10 vols., 2nd ed., St. Petersburg, 1911 1914, vol. 4, pp. 135, 136, 138. ‒ 1083Aronson, The Russian‐Jewish Press, op. cit., p. 549. 1084Letter from V. Solovyov to F. Hetz, in V. S. Solovyov. Evreiski vopros—Khristianski vopros / Sobranie statei (The Jewish question—The Christian question—Collection of articles), Warsaw, Pravda, 1906. p. 34. 1085Neopoublikovannyi protest protiv antisemitizma (Protest against anti‐Semitism, unpublished [edited by Vladimir Solovyov]), BJWR-1, pp. 574 575. The text of this ‒ protest was originally published in the book by F. Hetz, Ob otnoshenii V. Solovyova k evreiskomou voprosou (V. Solovyov’s attitude towards the Jewish question) (M., 1920), where it figures under the title “Ob antisemititcheskom dvijenii v petchati: Neizdannaïa statia V. Solovyova” (On the anti‐Semitic movement in the press: an unpublished article by V. Solovyov), then it was reprinted in the “free” brochure of Warsaw quoted above. 1086Vladimir Galaktionovich Korolenko (1853 1921) famous Russian writer, great democrat. ‒ A political exile, he spent ten years in Eastern Siberia. Denounces police violence and antiSemitism. Will be horrified by the terror and despotism of the Bolsheviks. 1087Cf. BJWR-1*, p. 565.
autocracy: it was necessary to repeat over and over that the only way to obtain equality in rights for the Jews was the definitive overthrow of the power of the tsars. From the Liberals to the Bolsheviks. Passing by the S.‐R., all have never ceased to involve the Jews—some with real sympathy—to use them as a convenient asset in the anti‐monarchical combat. This asset, the revolutionaries never let it go, they exploited it without the least scruple until 1917. However, these various tendencies and debates in the newspapers did not affect the attitude of the people towards the Jews in Greater Russia. Many testimonies confirm this. Thus J. Teitel, a man who lived for a long time in deep Russia and frequented common people, affirms that “any racial or national hostility is foreign to the common people.”1088 Or, in memoires left by the Viazemsky princes, this episode: there was at Korobovka Hospital, a district of Ousmansky, a somewhat inconsiderate Russian physician, Doctor Smirnov; the peasants did not like him, and his successor, the devoted Doctor Szafran, immediately benefited from the affection and gratitude of all the peasants in the neighbourhood. Another confirmation, inspired by the experience of the prisoners of the years 1880 1890: P. F. Iakoubovitch‐Melchine writes: “It ‒ would be an ungrateful task to seek, even in the scum of our people, the least trace of anti‐Semitism.”1089 And it was indeed because they sensed this that the Jews of a small town in Belarus addressed a telegram at the beginning of the twentieth century to Madam F. Morozova, the wife of a wealthy merchant, who was in charge of charity: “Give us this much. The synagogue burned down. You know we have the same God.” And she sent the sum requested. Deep down, neither the Russian liberal press nor the Jewish press have ever accused the Russian people of any land‐based anti‐Semitism. What both of them repeated relentlessly was that anti‐Semitism in the popular mass, had been completely fabricated and fuelled by the government. The very formula “Autocracy, Orthodoxy, Nationality” was felt in Jewish circles as a formula directed against the Jews. In the middle of the twentieth century, we can read from a Jewish writer: “In tsarist Russia, anti‐Semitism had no deep roots among the people… In the broad masses of the people, there was practically no anti‐Semitism; moreover, the very question of relations with Judaism did not arise… It was only in certain parts of what was called the Pale of Settlement, and mainly in Ukraine since the time of Polish domination, that, due to certain circumstances on which there is no need to dwell here, a certain tendency towards anti‐Semitism manifested itself in the peasantry,”1090 that is perfectly true. And one could add: Bessarabia. (One can judge of the antiquity of these feelings and circumstances by reading
1088Teitel, p. 176. 1089JE, t. 10, p. 827. 1090S. M. Schwartz, Antisemitizm v Sovetskom Soiouze (Anti‐Semitism in the Soviet Union), New York, ed. Chekhov, 1952, p. 13.
Karamzin1091: the Cossacks who surrounded the False Dmitry1092—of the Cossacks of the Don, obviously—treated the Russians of Jidy (Jews)1093, which means that in the western provinces this word was an insult.) And what about Russian folklore? The Dahl dictionary encompasses Great Russia, and the western provinces, and Ukraine. Editions before the revolution contain a large number of words and expressions formed on the root jid(Judeo‐). (Significant detail: in the Soviet edition of 1955, the entire typography of the page containing these words was revised1094, and the whole lexical “niche” between jidkii and jigalo has been entirely suppressed.) However, amongst these expressions quoted by Dahl, there are some which are inherited from the Slavonic Church where the word jid was by no means pejorative: it was the name of a people. There are also some that come from Polish and postPolish practice within the Pale of Settlement. Still others were introduced into the language at the time of the Troubles, in the seventeenth century, at a time when, in Greater Russia, there was almost no contact with the Jews. These inheritances are also reflected in the dicta that Dahl mentions in their Russian form—but we can guess under the latter the southern form. (And, what is certain is that they did not leave the bowels of the Ministry of the Interior! …) And then, let us compare these sayings with others: oh how the people created malicious adages against the Orthodox clergy! Not one, almost, is favourable to it! A witness of Mariupol1095 (and he is not the only one, it is a well‐known fact) tells us that among them, before the revolution, there was a clear distinction between the two words evrei (Hebrew) and jid (Jew). The Evrei was a law‐abiding citizen, whose morals, conduct, and behaviour towards others did not differ in any way from the surrounding environment. While the Jid was the jivoder (the swindler). And it was not uncommon to hear: “I’m not a Jid, I’m an honest Evrei, I do not intend to dupe you.” (Such words put into the mouths of Jews, we find them in literature, and we have also read them in the pamphlets of the populists.) This semantic differentiation, we must never lose sight of it when interpreting sayings. All this is the trace of an old national quarrel on the territory of the West and Southwest.
1091Nikolai Mikhailovich Karamzin (1766 1826): Russian writer. His great History of the ‒ Russian State made Pushkin say of him that he was the “Christopher Columbus of Ancient Russia.” 1092The False‐Dmitry, said the Usurper: in 1601, this character appeared in Poland pretending to be the son of Ivan IV. He marched on Moscow and occupied the throne from 1905 to 1906. He was killed by conspirator boyars. 1093N. M. Karamzin, Istoria Gosudarsva Rossiiskogo (History of the Russian State), 12 vols., 5 ed., Saint Petersburg, Einerling, 1842 1844, t. 11, p. 143. ‒ 1094Dahl, Toljovyi slovar jivogo velokorousskogo iazyka (Dictionary of the living GreatRussian language), t. 1, 1955, p. 541. 1095I. E. Temirov, Vospominania (Souvenirs), BFRZ, f. 1, A-29, p. 23.
For neither in Central Russia nor in the North and East, not even during the general shock of October 1905, there weren’t any anti‐Jewish pogroms (if there was indignation, it was against the revolutionary intellectuals in general, against their jubilation and ridicule of the Manifesto of October 17th). But this does not prevent, in the eyes of the whole world, the pre‐revolutionary Russia—not the empire, but Russia—to bear forever the seal of infamy, that of the pogroms and the Black Hundreds. And it is indelible, encrusted in minds for yet how many centuries to come? The anti‐Jewish pogroms have always and exclusively broken out in SouthWestern Russia—as it was the case in 1881. And the Kichinev pogrom of 1903 was of the same nature.
Let us not forget that at the time the population of Bessarabia was largely illiterate, that in Kishinev there were 50,000 Jews, 50,000 Moldovans, 8,000 Russians (in fact, mainly Ukrainians, but the difference was not noted) and a few thousand others. What were the main forces responsible for the pogroms? “The delinquents of the pogroms were mainly Moldovans.”1096 The Kishinev pogrom began on April 6, the last day of the Jewish Passover and the first day of the Orthodox Passover. (This is not the first time we have observed this tragic link between anti‐Jewish pogroms and the Passover of Christians: in 1881, 1882, and 1899 in Nikolaev1097—and it fills us with extreme pain and anxiety.) Let us use the one document that is based on a rigorous investigation carried out right after the events. This is the indictment issued by the local court prosecutor, V. N. Goremykine, who “did not call a single Jew as an accused, for which he was harshly vilified by the reactionary press.”1098 (As we shall see, the court first sat in closed session to “not exacerbate the passions”, and the indictment was originally published abroad in the emigrated press organ of Stuttgart Osvobojdenie [“Release”].1099) The document begins with an account of “the usual clashes between Jews and Christians as happened in recent years at Easter” and “the animosity of the local population towards the Jews.” It says that “two weeks before the Passover… rumours circulated in the city, announcing that there would be, during future holidays, aggressions against the Jews.” A newspaper, the Bessarabets (“the Bessarabian”), had played a role of blaster in publishing “day after day, throughout the last few weeks, incendiary articles, strongly antiJewish, which did not go unnoticed among small clerks, pencil‐pushers, the 1096SJE, t. 4, p. 327. 1097L. Praisman, Pogromy i samooborona (Pogroms and self‐defense), in “22”, 1986 1987, ‒ no. 51, p. 176. 1098JE, t. 9, p. 507. 1099Kichinevski pogrom: Obvinitelnyi akt (The Kichinev pogrom: the indictment), Osvobojdenie, Stuttgart, Oct. 19, 1903, no. 9 (33), supplement, pp. 1 4. ‒
entire little people of Bessarabia. Among the last provocative articles in the newspaper was the one about the murder of a Christian child in the village of Doubossary, allegedly carried out by Jews for ritual purposes” (and another rumour ran that a Jew had murdered his Christian servant when she had actually committed suicide1100). And the police of Kishinev, what did it do? “Did not give any particular consideration to the rumours,” and despite the fact that “in recent years there has been regular fighting between Jews and Christians, the Kishinev police did not take any serious preventive measures,” it only reinforced the patrols “for the holidays, in the places where the crowd was going to be the densest”, by adding men recruited from the local garrison.1101 The chief of police gave no clear instruction to his officers. This is clearly the most unpardonable: repeated brawls every year for the Passover, rumours of such a content—and the police fold their arms. One more sign of the state of decline of the governmental machinery. For there are two things, one: either we let go of the empire (how many wars, how many efforts have been made to unite, for obscure reasons, Moldavia with Russia), or we safeguard the good order which must reign over its entire territory. On the afternoon of April 6, the streets of the city is invaded by “people in celebration”, with “many teenagers” wandering among the crowd, as well as angry people. The boys start throwing stones at nearby Jewish houses, throwing harder and harder, and when the commissioner and his inspectors try to arrest one of them, “they get stones in their turn.” Adults then get involved. “The police took no firm measures to stop the disorders” and these led to the sacking of two Jewish shops and a few sheds. In the evening, the disorders subsided, “no assault had been perpetrated against the Jews that day”; the police had arrested sixty people during the day. However, “on the early morning of April 7, the very agitated Christian population began to assemble in various parts of the city and in the suburbs, in small groups which provoked Jews to clashes of increasing violence.” In the same way, from the first hour on the New Market, “more than a hundred Jews had gathered, armed with stakes and pickets, rifles even here and there, who fired a few shots. The Christians had no firearms. The Jews said: ‘Yesterday you did not scatter the Russians, today we will defend ourselves.’ And some held bottles of vitriol in their hands, which they threw at the Christians they met.” (Pharmacies were traditionally held by Jews.) “Rumours spread throughout the city, reporting that the Christians were being assaulted by the Jews; they swell from mouth to mouth and exasperate the Christian population”: one transforms “were beaten” into “were slaughtered”, one carries that the Jews have sacked the cathedral and murdered the priest. And now, “in various parts of the town,
1100I. G. Froumkine, Iz istorii rousskogo evrcistva: vospominaniia, materialy, dokoumenty (On the history of the Jews of Russia: memoires, materials, documents), BJWR-1, p. 59. 1101Kichinevski pogrom: Obvinitelnyi akt (The Kichinev pogrom: the indictment), Osvobojdenie, op. cit., p. 1.
small groups of fifteen to twenty persons each, chiefly workmen, with teenagers in their lead who throw stones into the window‐panes, begin to plunder the shops, the premises, the dwellings of the Jews, smashing everything inside. These groups are gradually enlarged by the passers‐by.” Towards two, three o’clock in the morning, “disturbances spread in a more and more extended radius”; “the houses where icons or crosses have been exposed in windows are not affected.” “In the sacked premises, everything was totally destroyed, the goods ejected from the shops to be trampled or stolen by individuals who escorted the attackers.” They went so far as to “sack the houses of prayer of the Jews, and throw down the sacred scrolls [the Torah] in the street.” Drinking places, of course, were sacked; “The wine was poured into the street or drunk on the spot by the bandits.” The inertia of the police, owing to the absence of a proper command, caused these crimes to be perpetrated with impunity, and this did not fail to encourage and excite the evil‐doers. The police forces, left to their own devices, far from uniting their efforts, acted according to their instinct… “and the subordinate policemen were mostly mute spectators of the pogrom.” However, a phone call was made to the local garrison to call for reinforcements, but “whenever the soldiers went to a certain point, they could not find anybody there,” and “in the absence of new instructions, they remained inactive”; “They were scattered in the city in isolated groups, with no clear objective and no coordination with each other”; “They only dispersed the excited crowds.” (This garrison was not the most efficient, and, moreover, it was just after Passover: many officers and soldiers were on leave.1102) “The inertia of the police… engendered new rumours, saying that the government would have allowed to attack the Jews, since they are enemies of the country”—and the pogrom, unleashed, inebriated, became envenomed. “The Jews, fearing for their possessions and for their lives, lost all composure, fear made them go mad. Several of them, armed with revolvers, proceeded to counter‐attack to defend themselves. Ambushed on street corners, behind fences, on balconies, they began to shoot looters, but awkwardly, without aiming at their targets, so that it did nothing to help them and only aroused in the pogrom troublemakers a terrible explosion of rage. “The crowd of plunderers was seized with rage, and where the shooting had resounded, it came at once to tear everything apart and be violent towards the Jews who were there. “A shot was particularly fatal to the Jews: the man who snatched a young Russian boy, little Ostapov.” “From one, two o’clock in the afternoon, the blows of the Jews became more and more violent,” and by five o’clock they were accompanied by “a series of murders.” At half‐past three in the afternoon, Governor Von Raaben, completely overwhelmed, passed an order to the chief of the garrison, General Bekman, authorising the “use of arms”. Bekman immediately had the city canvassed, and
1102Materialy dlia istorii antievreiskikh pogromov v Rossii (Materials for history 12 vols., 5th ed., Saint Petersburg, Einerling, 1842 1844, 11, pp. 143, S. M. Dubnov and G. I. Krasnyi‒ Admoni, t. 1, Pg. 1919 (Materials…), p. 340.
the troops, who had “ventured out” walked in good order from that moment on. “From that moment on, the troops were now able to carry out mass arrests,” and energetic measures were taken. At nightfall, the pogrom was under control. The act stipulates the death toll: “There were 42 deaths, including 38 Jews”; “all the bodies bore traces of blows by blunt objects—clubs, shovels, stones—and some, blows of axes”; “almost all were wounded in the head, some in the chest also. They had no traces of bullets, no evidence of torture or rape either (this was confirmed by doctors’ expert opinions and autopsies, as well as by the report of the Medico‐Legal Department of the Central Administration of Bessarabia); “there were 456 wounded, including 62 among the Christians…; eight were wounded by bullets… of the 394 Jewish wounded, only five were seriously injured. No trace of abuse… except for a one‐eyed man whose healthy eye had been ripped out… three‐quarters of the men assaulted were adults; there were three complaints of rape, two of which were prosecuted.” Seven soldiers were wounded, including a soldier who “had his face burned with vitriol”; 68 policemen received minor injuries. “There were 1,350 homes ransacked, almost a third of the houses in Kishinev: an enormous figure, the equivalent of a bombing… as for the arrests, “there were 816 on the morning of April 9”, and in addition to the investigations into the murders, 664 persons appeared in court. In some authors, the figures of the victims among the Jews differ from the official statistics, but the gap is not very large. The Book of the Jews of Russia estimates that there were 45 Jews killed, 86 seriously wounded, 1,500 houses and shops looted or destroyed.1103 Biekerman puts forward the figure of 53 dead, but maybe not all Jews.1104 The recent Jewish Encyclopædia (1988) states: “49 people were killed, 586 wounded, more than 1,500 houses and shops looted.”1105 This is the official description. But we sense what is hiding behind it. We are told: “Only one person, one Jew with one eye” has had the other ripped out. We learn a little more from Korolenko in his essay Dom no 13 (“House No. 13”).1106 This poor man was called Meer Weisman: “To my question, wrote Korolenko—did he know who did this?—, he answered with perfect serenity that he did not know, but that ‘a kid’, the son of his neighbours, had boasted that he had done it with a lead weight attached to a string.” We see then that perpetrators and victims knew each other rather well… Korolenko resumed: “It is true that what I advance, I hold of the Jews themselves, but there is no reason not to believe their sayings… Why would they have invented these details? …” And, in fact, why would the family of Bentsion Galanter, mortally hit on the head, invent that the murderers had planted nails all over his body? Was not the family of the Nisenson accountant sufficiently tried, why would it add that he had been “rinsed” in a puddle before being massacred? These details are not fiction.
1103Froumkine, BJWR-1, p. 59. 1104Biekerman, RJE, p. 57. 1105SJE, t. 4, p. 327. 1106V. G. Korolenko, Dom no 13, Sobr. sotch. (Complete works), t. 9, M. 1995, pp. 406 422. ‒
But to those who were far from the events, to the agitators of public opinion, these horrors were not enough. What they remembered was not tragedy, misfortune, the dead, but rather: how to exploit them to strike the tsarist power? And they resorted to terrifying exaggerations. To overcome reactions of horror, to try to see clearly in the versions built up in the months and years following, would it not be minimising the tragedy? And to attract many insults? But to see it clearly is a duty, because we took advantage of the pogrom of Kishinev to blacken Russia and mark her forever of the seal of infamy. Today, all honest historical work on the subject demands a distinction between the horrible truth and the treacherous lies. The conclusion of the indictment is the following: the disorders “have reached the magnitude described only because of the inertia of the police, deprived of an adequate command… The preliminary investigation did not find evidence that the disorders had been premeditated.”1107 These clues, no further investigation found them either. But so be it: the Office for the Defence of the Jews, which we have already mentioned, (was attended by such eminent persons as Mr. Winaver, Mr. G. Sliosberg, Mr. Bramson, Mr. Koulicher, Mr. A. Braoudo, Mr. S. Pozner, Krohl1108), as soon as the news of the pogrom of Kishinev reached it, it excluded from the outset all possible causes apart from that of a conspiracy fomented from above: “Who gave the order of organising the pogrom, who took the direction of the dark forces that perpetrated it?”1109 “As soon as we learned of the climate in which the killings of Kishinev took place, we did not doubt that this diabolical undertaking had been concocted by the Police Department and carried out at his command.” Although, of course, “the wretches kept their project secret,” wrote Krohl in the 40s of the 20th century.1110 “But, as convinced as we are that the killings of Kishinev were premeditated in high places, with the tacit agreement and perhaps at the initiative of Plehve, we can unmask these high‐placed assassins and expose them to the light of the world only on one condition: if we have the most indisputable proofs against them. That is why we decided to send the famous lawyer Zaroudny to Kishinev.”1111 “He was the most suitable person for the mission we had entrusted to him,” “he undertook to reveal the hidden springs of the Kishinev massacre, after which the police, to divert attention, arrested a few dozens thieves and looters.”1112 (Recall that in the aftermath of the pogrom, 816 people were arrested.) Zaroudny gathered information and brought back “material of exceptional importance”. That is to say that “the chief person in charge, the organiser of the pogrom, had been the head of local security, K. Lewendal,” a gendarmerie officer who had been appointed to Kishinev shortly before the pogrom. It was “at his command
1107The Kichinev pogrom: The indictment, op. cit., pp. 3, 202. 1108Krohl, Stranitsy… (Pages…), p. 299. 1109Sliosberg, t. 3, p. 49. 1110M. Krohl, Kishinevski pogrom 1903 goda i Kishinevski pogromnyi protses (The Kichinev pogrom of 1903 and the trial of the Kichinev pogrom), Mi-2, p. 372. 1111Ibidem, pp. 372 373. ‒ 1112Krohl, Stranitsy… (Pages…), op. cit., pp. 301, 303.
that the police and the troops openly lent a hand to the assassins and the looters.”1113 He would have “totally paralysed the action of the governor.”1114 (It is known, however, that in Russia neither the police nor the troops were under the orders of the Okhrana.) This said “exceptionally important” material, which denounced the guilty “with absolute certainty,” was never published neither at the time or later. Why? But because, if it had been so, how could Lewendal and his accomplices escape punishment and dishonour? This material is known only by hearsay: a dealer named Pronine and a notary named Pissarjevsky would have been found several times in a certain café and, on Lewendal’s instructions, would have planned the pogrom.1115 And it was after these meetings that all the police and the troops opted for the pogrom. The prosecutor Goremykine examined the charges against Lowendal and declared them unfounded.1116 (The journalist Kruchevane, whose incendiary articles had really favoured the pogrom, was stabbed in Petersburg two months later by Pinhas Dachevsky who wanted to kill him.1117) The authorities, during this time, continued the investigation. The director of the police department, A. A. Lopoukhine (with his liberal sympathies, he was unsuspected in the eyes of the public) was quickly dispatched to Kishinev. Governor Von Raaden was dismissed, along with several other senior officials from Bessarabia; a new governor was appointed, Prince S. Urusov (soon to be a prominent K. D., and would sign the appeal to the rebellion called “Vyborg’s Appeal”). A bulletin from the Minister of the Interior, Plehve, was published in The Messenger of the Government of April 29: in it he stated his indignation at the inaction of the authorities of Kishinev; he called on all provincial governors, city governors and police chiefs to vigorously halt all violence by taking all possible measures.1118 The Orthodox Church also expressed itself. The Holy Synod issued a bulletin inviting the clergy to take measures to extirpate feelings of hostility towards the Jews. Some of the hierarchs, notably Father John of Kronstadt, who were very much listened to and revered by the faithful, appealed to the Christian people, expressing their disapproval, their exhortations, their appeals for appeasement. “They have substituted for the Christian holiday a sanguinary and satanic orgy.”1119 And Bishop Antony (Krapovitsky) declared: “The punishment of God will befall the wretches who have spilled blood related to that of the God‐Man, to His pure Mother, the apostles and the prophets… so that you know
1113Ibidem, pp. 301 304. ‒ 1114Krohl, op. cit., Mi-2, p. 374. 1115Ibidem. 1116Report to the Prosecutor No. 1392 of 20 Nov. 1903; Report to the prosecutor No. 1437 of 1 Dec. 1903, in Materialy… [Materials…], op. cit., pp. 319, 322 323. ‒ 1117RJE, t. 1, p. 417. 1118In Materialy… [Materials…], op. cit., pp. 333 335; Pravitelstvennyi vestnik (Government ‒ Messenger). Saint Petersburg, no. 97, 1903, 29 April (12 May). 1119J. de Cronstadt: My thoughts about the violence perpetrated by Christians against the Jews in Kishinev, in Materialy… [Materials…], op. cit., pp. 354, 356.
how much the Divine Spirit cherishes the Jewish people, still rejected today, and know what is His wrath against those who would want to offend Him.”1120 A text on the subject was distributed to the people. (The long exhortations and explanations of the Church, however, were not unrelated to an archaic state of mind, frozen for centuries and to be surpassed by the formidable evolutions in progress.) In the first days of May, a month after the events, an information campaign but also one of intoxication about the pogrom broke out in the Russian press as well as in the European and American ones. In Petersburg, fanatical articles spoke of assassinations of mothers and infants, of rape—sometimes of underage girls, sometimes of women under the eyes of their husbands or of their father and mother; there was talk of “torn tongues; a man was ripped open, a woman’s head was pierced with nails driven in by the nostrils.”1121 Less than a week had elapsed when these horrifying details appeared in the papers of the West. Western public opinion gave it full credence. The influential Jews in England relied on these fabrications and included them word for word in their public protest.1122 Should we repeat: “No evidence of abuse or rape was observed on the bodies.” Due to a new wave of newspaper articles, forensic pathologists were asked to submit supplementary reports. The doctor of the City Health Service, named Frenkel (who had examined the bodies in the Jewish cemetery), and another named Tchorba (who had received the dead and wounded at the hospital in the Kishinev Zemstvo between 5 P.M., the second day after the Passover, and noon, the third day, and then at the Jewish hospital), and the doctor Vassiliev (who had carried out an autopsy of thirty‐five corpses)—all attested the absence of traces of torture or violence on the bodies described in the newspapers.1123 It was later learned at the trial that doctor Dorochevsky—the one who, it was thought, had supplied these frightening reports—had seen nothing of these atrocities, and declined any responsibility for the publication of the tabloids.1124 As for the prosecutor at the Criminal Chamber of Odessa, he had, in reply to a question from Lopoukhine regarding the rapes, “secretly conducted his own investigation”: the accounts of the families of the victims themselves did not confirm any case of rape; the concrete cases, in the expertise, are positively excluded.1125 But who paid attention to the examinations and conclusions of doctors? Who cares about the prosecutor’s specific research? All these documents may remain, turning yellow, in cabinets files!
1120Homily of Bishop Antoine of 30 April 1903, in Materialy… [Materials…], op. cit., pp. 354, 356. 1121Sankt‐Petersburgskie vedomosti (News from Saint Petersburg), 24 April (7 May 1903), p. 5. 1122Baltimore Sun, 16 May 1903, p. 2; The Jewish Chronicle, 15 May 1903, p. 2; Protest by the Board of Deputies and the Anglo‐Jewish Association, Times, 18 May 1903, p. 10. 1123In Materialy… [Materials…], op. cit., pp. 174 175. ‒ 1124Ibidem, p. 279. 1125Ibidem, pp. 172 173. ‒
All that the witnesses had not confirmed, all that Korolenko had not related, the authorities did not have the presence of mind to refute it. And all these details spread throughout the world, and took the form of a fact in public opinion, which they were to remain throughout the twentieth century, and which they will probably still be throughout the whole of the twenty‐first century— cold, frozen, stowed forever in the name of Russia. However, Russia, for many years now, but with increasing acuteness, knew a mad, deadly distortion between “civil society” and the government. It was a struggle to the death: for the liberal and radical circles, and even more so for the revolutionaries, any incident (true or false) discrediting the government was a blessing, and for them everything was permitted—any exaggeration, any distortion, any make‐up of facts; the important thing was to humiliate power as severely as possible. For the Russian radicals, a pogrom of this gravity was a chance in their fight! The government resolved to forbid all publication in the newspapers concerning the pogrom, but it was a blunder, for the rumours were re‐echoed with greater force by the European and American press; All the rantings escalated with even more impunity—exactly as if there had never been any police report. And here it was, the great offensive launched against the government of the tsar. The Bureau for the Defence of the Jews sent telegrams to all the capitals: organise protest meetings everywhere!1126 A member of the Bureau wrote: “We have communicated the details of the atrocities… in Germany, France, England, the United States… The impression that our information caused was shattering; in Paris, Berlin, London and New York, there were protest meetings in which the speakers painted a frightening picture of the crimes committed by the tsarist government.”1127 Here he is, they thought, the Russian bear as it has been since the dawn of time! “These atrocities shocked the world. And now, without any restraint, the police and the soldiers have by all means assisted the assassins and the plunderers in perpetrating their inhuman acts.”1128 The “cursed autocracy” has marked itself with an indelible stigma! In meetings, they stigmatised the new plan of tsarism, “premeditated by it”. In the synagogues of London, they accused… the Holy Synod of having committed this killing due to religious inspiration. Some of the hierarchs of the Catholic Church also declared their disapproval. But it was by far the European and American press that showed themselves as being the most virulent (notably the press tycoon William Hearst): “We accuse the tsarist power of being responsible for the massacre of Kishinev. We declare that his guilt in this holocaust is total. It is before his door and in front of any other that the victims of this violence are exposed. “May the God of Justice descend here below to finish with Russia as He has finished with Sodom and Gomorrah… and let him evacuate this pestilential focus from the
1126Krohl, op. cit., RW-2, pp. 376 377. ‒ 1127Krohl, Stranitsy… (Pages…), op. cit., p. 302. 1128Krohl, op. cit., RW-2, pp. 371 372. ‒
face of the earth.” “The killing of Kishinev surpasses in insolent cruelty all that has ever been recorded in any civilised nation”1129… (including, one must believe, the extermination of the Jews in medieval Europe?). Alas, Jews more or less circumspect, more or less stunned, joined in the same assessment of the events. And not less than thirty years after the events, the respectable jurist G. Sliosberg retains the same details in publications of emigration—(even though he himself never went to Kishinev, then or later): the nails planted in the head of the victim (he goes so far as attributing this information to the account of Korolenko!), and the rapes, and the presence of “several thousand soldiers” (the modest garrison of Kishinev had never seen as many!) who “seemed to be there to protect the perpetrators of the pogrom.”1130 But Russia, in the field of communication, was inexperienced, unable to justify itself coherently seeing it was still unaware of the methods used for this. Meanwhile, the so‐called “cold premeditation” of the pogrom was not supported by any solid proof—none that was commensurate with the raging campaign. And although lawyer Zaroudny had already “closed his investigation and… firmly established that the chief organiser and the sponsor of the pogrom was none other than the chief of the local Okhrana, Baron Lewendal”1131—even in this variant, the character of Lewendal did not reach the government sufficiently, it was necessary to draw a little more to reach the central power. But here we are!—six weeks after the pogrom, in order to further stir up general indignation, and to dishonour the key figure of power, one “discovered” (no one knows by whom, but very appropriately) an “ultra‐secret letter” from the Minister of Interior Plehve to the governor of Kishinev, Von Raaben (not a bulletin addressed to all the governors of the Pale of Settlement, no, but a letter addressed to him alone ten days before the pogrom), in which the minister, in rather evasive terms, gave advice: if serious disturbances occur in the province of Bessarabia, not to repress them by arms, but to use only persuasion. And now an individual, very timely there too, transmitted the text of this letter to an English correspondent in Saint Petersburg, D. D. Braham, and the latter hastened to publish it in London in the Times of 18 May 1903.1132 A priori: what is the weight of a single publication in a single newspaper, which nothing corroborates—neither on the spot nor later? But it weighs as much as you want! Enormously, even! And in this case, the publication of the Times was supported by the protest of prominent British Jews, with Montefiore at their head (from an internationally‐known family).1133 Thanks to the climate that reigned throughout the world, this letter was a colossal success: the sanguinary intentions against the Jews of the universally
1129“Remember Kichineff” (editorial), The Jewish Chronicle, 15 May 1903, p. 21; 22 May 1903, p. 10; Baltimore Sun, 16 May 1903, p. 4. 1130Sliosberg, vol. 3, pp. 48 49, 61 64. ‒ ‒ 1131Ibidem. 1132Times, 18 May 1903, p. 10. 1133“Protest by the Board of Deputies and the Anglo‐Jewish Association”, Times, 18 May 1903, p. 10.
abhorred tsarism, which had not yet been proved, were suddenly “attested with supporting documents.” Articles and meetings had a new upsurge throughout the world. On the third day after the publication, the New York Times pointed out that “three days already that the letter was disclosed—and no denial occurred”, and the British press has already declared it to be authentic. “What can we say about the level of civilisation of a country, of which a minister can give his signature to such exactions?”1134 The Russian government, in its awkwardness and incomprehension of the gravity of the matter, found nothing better to do than to negligently abandon a laconic denial signed by the head of the Police Department, A. Lopoukhine, and only on the ninth day after the scandalous publication of the Times,1135 but instead of investigating the falsification, he simply settled on expelling Braham from the territory. One can argue with certainty that this was indeed a forgery, for several reasons. Not only because Braham never exhibited any proof of the authenticity of the letter. Not only because Lopoukhine, the declared enemy of Plehve, had himself denied this text. Not only because Prince Urusov, the great Jewish sympathiser who had succeeded Von Raaben and controlled the archives of the governorate, found no “letter of Plehve.” Not only because poor Von Raaben, dismissed, his life and career broken, never, in his desperate efforts to restore his reputation, complained of having received instructions “from above”— which would have immediately restored his career and made him the idol of liberal society. The main reason lies in the fact that the State archives in Russia had nothing in common with the rigged archives of the Soviet era when any document was concocted upon request or others burned in secret. No, in the Russian archives everything was preserved, inviolably and forever. Immediately after the February Revolution, an extraordinary commission of inquiry of the Provisional Government, and, still more zealously, the “Special Commission for the Study of the History of the Pogroms,” with investigators as serious as S. Dubnov, Krasny‐Admoni, did not find the document in Petersburg or Kishinev, nor its record it upon entrance or exit; they found only the translation into English of Braham’s English text (as well as papers containing “indications of severe punishment and dismissal… sanctioning any illegal action by agents responsible for the Jewish question”).1136 After 1917, what was still to be feared? But not a single witness, not a single memorialist, was able to tell the story of where this immortal telegram had fallen, or to boast of having acted as an intermediary. And Braham himself —neither at the time, nor later—didn’t say a single word about it. But this did not prevent the constitutional‐Democratic newspaper Retch (“The Word”) from writing with confidence, on 19 March 1917: “The bloodbath of Kishinev, the counter‐revolutionary pogroms of 1905 were organised, as was
1134New York Times, 19 May 1903, p. 10; 21 May 1903, p. 8. 1135Times, 27 May 1903, p. 7. 1136P. P. Zavarsine, Rabota taino politsii (The Work of Your Secret Police), Paris, 1924, pp. 68 69. ‒
definitively established, by the Police Department.” And, in August 1917, at the Moscow State Conference, the President of the Special Commission of Inquiry publicly declared that he would “soon present the police department’s documents concerning the organisation of anti‐Jewish pogroms”—but neither soon nor later, neither the Commission, nor, subsequently, the Bolsheviks exhibited any document of this kind. Thus the lie encrusted itself, practically up to now! … (In my November 16, one of the characters evokes the pogrom of Kishinev, and in 1986 the German publisher adds an explanatory note in this regard stating: “Anti‐Jewish Pogrom, carefully prepared, which lasted two days. The Minister of the Interior Plehve had conjured the governor of Bessarabia, in the event of a pogrom, not to use firearms.”1137) In the recent Jewish Encyclopædia (1996) we read this statement: “In April 1903, the new Minister of the Interior, Plehve, organised with his agents a pogrom in Kishinev.”1138 (Paradoxically, we read in the previous tome: “The text of Plehve’s telegram published in the Times of London… is held by most scholars as being a fake”1139). And here: the false story of the Kishinev pogrom made much more noise than the real, cruel and authentic one. Will the point be made one day? Or will it take yet another hundred years? The incompetence of the tsarist government, the decrepitude of its power, had manifested itself on various occasions, in Transcaucasia, for example, during the killing spree between the Armenians and Azeris, but the government was declared guilty only in the affair of Kishinev. “The Jews,” wrote D. Pasmanik, “have never imputed the pogrom to the people, they have always accused the power and the administration exclusively… No facts could ever shake this opinion, a furthermore perfectly superficial opinion.”1140 And Biekerman emphasised that it was a matter of public knowledge that pogroms were for the government a form of struggle against the revolution. More circumspect minds reasoned thus: if in the recent pogroms no technical preparation by the power is attested, “the state of mind which reigns in Saint Petersburg is such that any virulent judeophobe will find among the authorities, from the minister to the last sergeant of town, a benevolent attitude towards him.” Yet the Kishinev trial, which took place in the autumn of 1903, showed exactly the opposite. For the liberal and radical opposition, this trial was to be transformed into a battle against the autocracy. Were sent as “civil parties” eminent lawyers, Jews and Christians—Mr. Karabchevsky, O. Gruzenberg, S. Kalmanovitch, A. Zaroudny, N. Sokolov. The “brilliant left‐wing advocate” P. Pereverzev and a few others joined as defenders of the accused “so that they would not be afraid 1137November sechzehn, München‐Zürich, Piper, 1986, p. 1149. French Trans., ed. Fayard, Paris, 1985. 1138SJE, t. 7, p. 347. 1139Ibidem, t. 6, p. 533. 1140D. S. Pasmanik, Rousskaïa revolioutisiia i evreistvo (Bolchevisme i ioudaïsme) (The Russian Revolution and Judaism [The Bolshevism and Judaism]), Paris, 1923, p. 142.
to tell the court… who had prompted them to start the carnage”1141—to clarify: to say that it was the power that had armed them. The “civil parties” demanded that further investigation be carried out and that the “real culprits” should be placed on the stand. The authorities did not publish the transcripts so as not to exacerbate the passions in the city of Kishinev, nor those already white‐hot of world opinion. Things were all the easier: the squad of activists who surrounded the “civil parties” made their own reports and sent them through the world, via Romania, for publication. This, however, did not modify the course of the trial. The killers’ faces were scrutinized, but the culprits were undoubtedly the authorities—guilty only, it is true, of not having intervened in a timely manner. At that point, the group of lawyers split a collective statement stating that “if the court refuses to bring to justice and punish the main culprits of the pogrom”— that is, not some ordinary Governor Von Raaben (he no longer interested anyone), but indeed Minister Plehve himself and the central government of Russia—“they [the defenders] will have nothing more to do in this trial.” For they “encountered such hostility on the part of the court that it gave them no possibility… to defend freely and in conscience the interests of their clients, as well as those of justice.”1142 This new tactic of the lawyers, which constituted a purely political approach, proved to be quite fertile and promising; it made a great impression on the whole world. “The action of lawyers has been approved by all the best minds in Russia.”1143 The trial before the Criminal Division of Odessa was now proceeding in order. The prognostications of Western newspapers that “the trial of Kishinev will only be a masquerade, a parody of justice,”1144 were not confirmed in any way. The accused, in view of their number, had to be divided into several groups according to the gravity of the charge. As mentioned above, there were no Jews among the accused.1145 The chief of the gendarmerie of the province had already announced in April that out of 816 people arrested, 250 had been dismissed for inconsistency of the charges against them, 446 had immediately been the subject of judicial decisions (as evidenced in the Times), and “persons convicted by the court have been sentenced to the heaviest penalties”; about 100 were seriously charged, including 36 accused of murder and rape (in November, they will be 37). In December, the same chief of the gendarmerie announced the results of the trial: deprivation of rights, property, and penal colony (seven years or five years), deprivation of rights and disciplinary battalion (one year and one and a half years). In all, 25 convictions and 12 acquittals.1146 The real culprits of real crimes had been condemned, the ones we have described. The condemnations, however, were not tender—“the drama of Kishinev ends on a
1141Krohl, Stranitsy… (Pages…) op. cit., p. 303. 1142Krohl, op. cit., JW2*, pp. 379 380. ‒ 1143Sliosberg, t. 3, p. 69. 1144Times, 10 November 1903, p. 4. 1145JE, t. 9, p. 507. 1146Materialy… (Materials…), op. cit., p. 147; Times, 18 May 1903, p. 8; Materialy…, op. cit., p. 294.
usual contradiction in Russia: in Kishinev, criminals seem to be subjected to a rigorous judicial repression,” the American Jewish Yearbook stated, astonished.1147 In the spring of 1904, the Cassation proceedings in Petersburg were made public.1148 And in 1905 the Kishinev pogrom was once again examined in the Senate; Winaver took the floor to prove nothing new. In reality, the affair of the Kishinev pogrom had inflicted a hard lesson on the tsarist government by revealing to it that a State that tolerates such infamy is a scandalously impotent State. But the lesson would have been equally clear without poisonous falsifications or false additions. Why did the simple truth about Kichinev’s pogrom seem insufficient? Presumably because this truth would have reflected the true nature of the government—a sclerotic organisation, guilty of bullying the Jews, but which remained unsteady and incoherent. However, with the aid of lies, it was represented as a wise persecutor, infinitely sure of himself, and evil. Such an enemy could only deserve annihilation. The Russian government, which for a long time already had been largely surpassed on the international stage, did not understand, either on the spot nor afterwards, what a shocking defeat it had just wiped out there. This pogrom soiled a stinking stain on all of Russian history, all the ideas that the world had of Russia as a whole; the sinister gleam of fire projected by it announced and precipitated the upheavals which were soon to shake the country.
1147The American Jewish Year Book, 5664 (1903 1904), Philadelphia, 1903, p. 22. ‒ 1148Froumkine, BJWR-1, pp. 60 61. ‒
Chapter 9. During the Revolution of 1905
The Kishinev pogrom produced a devastating and indelible effect on the Jewish community in Russia. Jabotinsky: Kishinev traces “the boundary between two epochs, two psychologies.” The Jews of Russia have not only experienced deep sorrow, but, more profoundly so, “something which had almost made one forget the pain—and that was shame.”1149 “If the carnage of Kishinev played a major role in the realisation of our situation, it was because we then realised that the Jews were cowards.”1150 We have already mentioned the failure of the police and the awkwardness of the authorities—it was therefore natural that the Jews had asked themselves the question: should we continue to rely on the protection of public authorities? Why not create our own armed militias and defend ourselves weapons in hand? They were incited by a group of prominent public men and writers—Doubnov, Ahad Haam, Rovnitsky, Ben‐Ami, Bialik: “Brothers… cease weeping and begging for mercy. Do not expect any help from your enemies. Only rely on your own arms!”1151 These calls “produced on Jewish youth the effect of an electric shock.”1152 And in the overheated atmosphere that began to reign after the Kishinev pogrom, “armed groups of self‐defence” quickly saw the light at various locations in the Pale of Settlement. They were generally financed “by the Jewish community”1153, and the illegal introduction of weapons from abroad did not pose a problem for the Jews. It was not unusual for these weapons to fall into the hands of very young people. Official reports do not indicate the existence of armed groups among the Christian population. The government struggled as best it could against the bombs of terrorists. When armed militias began to develop, it saw in them—it is
1149V. Jabotinsky, Vvedenie (Preface to Kh. N. Bialik, Pesni i poemy (Songs and Poems), Saint Petersburg, Zalzman ed., 1914, pp. 42 43. ‒ 1150V. Jabotinsky, V traournye dni (Days of Mourning), Felietony, Saint Petersburg, Tipografia “Guerold”, 1913, p. 25. 1151M. Krohl, Kishinovsky pogrom 1903 goda Kishinëvskiy pogromnyi protsess (The Kishinev pogrom of 1903), BJWR-2, New York, 1944, p. 377. 1152Ibidem. 1153S. Dimanstein, Revoloutsionnoïe dvijenie sredi ievreyev (The revolution-Saint Petersburg, 1905: Istoria rcvoloutsionnovo dvijenia v otdelnykh otcherkakh (History of the Revolutionary Movement—abbreviated: “1905”) / pod redaktskiei M. N. Pokrovskovo, vol. 3, vyp. 1, M. L., 1927, p. 150.
only natural—totally illegal demonstrations, the premises of the civil war, and it banned them by the means and information it had at its disposal. (Also today, the whole world condemns and prohibits “illegal paramilitary formations.”) A highly operational armed group was formed in Gomel under the direction of the local committee of the Bund. On March 1st, 1903, the latter had organised “festivities” for the anniversary of the “execution of Alexander II.”1154 In this city, where Christians and Jews were nearly equal in number1155, and the socialist Jews were more than determined, the establishment of armed groups of self‐defence was particularly strong. This was to be noted during the events of August 29th and September 1st 1903—the Gomel pogrom. According to the findings of the official investigation, the responsibility for the Gomel pogrom is shared: Christians and Jews mutually attacked each other. Let us take a closer look at the official documents of the time, in this case the indictment of the Gomel affair, based on the police reports drawn up on the spot. (Police reports, which date back to the early twentieth century in Russia, have repeatedly proven their accuracy and their irreproachable precision—and this up to the hustle and bustle of the days of February 1917, up to the moment where the police stations of Petrograd were vested by the insurgents, burnt down—since then, this stream of minutely‐recorded information was cut off, and remained so for us.) At the Gomel trial, the indictment states: “The Jewish population… began to procure weapons and to organise self‐defence circles in the event of trouble directed at the Jews… Some residents of Gomel had the opportunity to attend Jewish youth training sessions outside the city and which gathered up to a hundred people practising shooting guns.”1156 “The generalisation of the possession of weapons, on the one hand, the awareness of one’s numerical superiority and cohesion, on the other hand, have emboldened the Jewish population to the extent that, among its youth, they spoke not only of self‐defence, but of indispensable revenge for the Kishinev pogrom.” Thus hatred expressed in one place is reflected in another, distant—and against the innocent. “For some time past, the attitude of the Jews of Gomel has become not only contemptuous, but frankly provocative; the attacks—both verbal and physical— on peasants and workers have become commonplace, and the Jews display their contempt in all sorts of ways even against the Russians belonging to higher social strata, for example, by forcing soldiers to change sidewalk.” On August 29th, 1903, everything started with a banal incident in a market: an altercation between the herring merchant Malitskaya and her client Chalykov; she spat in 1154N. A. Buchbinder, Ivrevskoye rabotchee dvijenie v Gomele (1890 1905) (The Jewish ‒ Workers’ Movement in Gomel [1890 1905]), Krasnaya lelopis: Istoritcheskii journal, Pg., ‒ 1922, nos. 2 3, pp. 65 69. ‒ ‒ 1155Ibidem, p. 38. 1156Kievskaya soudebnaya palata: Delo o gomelskom pogrom (Kiev courthouse: the Gomel pogrom case), Pravo, Saint Petersburg, 1904, no. 44, pp. 3041 3042. ‒
his face, the dispute turned into a brawl, “immediately several Jews rushed upon Chalykov, threw him to the ground, and began to strike him with everything they could put their hands on. A dozen peasants wanted to defend Chalykov, but the Jews immediately emitted whistles previously agreed upon, causing a considerable influx of other Jews… No doubt these whistles were a call for help… thus they immediately mobilised the entire Jewish population of the city”; “on foot, by car, armed as they could, the Jews flocked to the market everywhere. Very soon, the Street of the Market, the market itself and all the adjacent streets were swarming with people; The Jews were armed with stones, sticks, hammers, specially‐made clubs or even simply iron bars. Everywhere shouts were heard: ‘Let’s go, Jews! To the market! It is the pogrom of the Russians!’ And all this mass went into small groups to pursue the peasants to strike them”—and the latter were numerous, on a market day. “Leaving there their purchases, the peasants—when they had time—jumped on their chariots and hastened to leave the city… Witnesses say that when they caught Russians, the Jews beat them without mercy, they beat old people, women and even children. For example, a little girl was pulled out of a chariot and dragged by her hair on the roadway.” “A peasant by the name of Silkov had placed himself at some distance to enjoy the spectacle while nibbling a piece of bread. At that moment, a Jew who ran behind him struck his throat with a mortal knife wound, then disappeared among the crowd.” Other episodes are listed. An officer was only saved thanks to the intervention of Rabbi Maiants and the owner of the neighbouring house, Rudzievsky. Upon arriving at the scene, the police were welcomed “on the Jews’ side, by a hail of stones and by revolver shots… which started not only from the crowd but also from the balconies of neighbouring buildings”; “the violence against the Christian population continued almost until the evening, and it was only with the arrival of a detachment from the army that the mobs of Jews were dispersed”; “the Jews struck the Russians, and especially the peasants, who… were incapable of any resistance, either because of their small number compared to that of the Jews or because of their lack of defences… That day, all the victims were Russians… many wounded, people beaten to a pulp.”1157 The indictment concludes with regard to the events of August 29th that they “undeniably had the character of an ‘anti‐Russian pogrom’.”1158 These facts caused “deep indignation among the Christian population”, which reinforced “the euphoric mood” of the Jews, their “enthusiasm”…: “We are no longer in Kishinev!” On September 1st, after the midday siren, the railway workers were abnormally noisy as they left the workshops, shouts and exclamations were heard, and the chief of police ordered to block the bridge leading to the city. Then the workers spread to the neighbouring streets and “stones flew to the windows of houses inhabited by Jews,” while “in the city were beginning to form large gatherings of Jews” who “threw from a distance
1157Ibidem, pp. 3041 3043. ‒ 1158Ibidem, p. 3041.
pieces of wood and stones onto the crowd of workers”; “two paving stones thrown by the Jewish crowd” struck a police commissioner in the back who fell unconscious. The Russian crowd began to yell: “the kikes have killed the commissary!” and undertook to sack Jewish houses and shops. The intervention of the troop, which separated the adversaries and deployed itself in the face of both, prevented the shedding of blood. On the Jews’ side, stones were thrown, and revolver shots were fired at the soldiers “with a shower of insults.” The commander asked Rabbi Maiants and Doctor Zalkind to intervene with the Jews, but “their appeals for calm were of no effect and the crowd continued its agitation”; it was only possible to draw it back by pointing the bayonets. The main success of the army was to prevent “the breakers from reaching the city centre, where were found the shops and houses of the wealthy Jews.” Then the pogrom moved to the outskirts of the city. The chief of the police still tried to exhort the crowd, but they cried out: “You are with the Jews, you have betrayed us! The salvos drawn by the troops upon the Russians as well as on the Jews curbed the pogrom, but two hours later it resumed in the suburbs—again shootings on the crowd, several dead and wounded, and then the pogrom ceased. However, the indictment refers to the presence in the city centre of “groups of Jews who conducted themselves in a very provocative manner and opposed the army and the police… As on 29 August, all were armed… many brandished revolvers and daggers”, “going as far as firing shots or throwing stones on the troops charged to protect their property”; “they attacked the Russians who ventured alone in the streets, including the soldiers”: a peasant and a beggar were killed. During that day, three middle‐class Jews succumbed to “deadly wounds”. Towards the evening the disorders ceased. Five Jews and four Christians had been killed. “Nearly 250 commercial or residential premises belonging to Jews had been affected by the pogrom.” On the Jewish side, “the overwhelming majority of active participants in the events consisted exclusively of… young people,” but many “more mature” people, as well as children, had handed them stones, boards, and logs.”1159 No description of these events can be found by any Jewish writer. “The Gomel pogrom had not taken its organisers off guard. It had been prepared for a long time, the formation of self‐defence had been put in place soon after the events of Kishinev.”1160 Only a few months after Kishinev, the Jews could no longer despise themselves for the resigned attitude with which they were accused of, among others, by the poet Bialik. And, as always happens with armed groups of this type, the boundary between defence and attack became blurred. The first was fed by the Kishinev pogrom, the second of the revolutionary spirit of the organisers. (Activism of Jewish youth had already manifested itself before. Thus, in 1899, the “Chklov affair” was revealed: in this city where there were nine Jews for a Russian, disarmed Russian soldiers—they were demobilised—were
1159Ibidem, pp. 3043 3046. ‒ 1160Buchbinder, op. cit., p. 69.
severely beaten by Jews. After examining this episode, the Senate considered it to be a manifestation of ethnic and religious hatred of Jews towards Russians under the same article of the Penal Code as that had been applied to the trial of those responsible for the Kishinev pogrom.) This activism must not be accounted for solely by the Bund. “At the head of this process [of creating, at a steady pace, organisations of self‐defence] are found the Zionists and the parties close to Zionism—the Zionist‐Socialists and the ‘Poalei Zion’.” Thus, it is how in Gomel, in 1903, “the majority of the detachments were organised by the ‘Poalei Zion’ party.”1161 (Which contradicts Buchbinder, fervent admirer of the Bund—I do not really know whom to believe.) When the news of Gomel’s pogrom reached Saint Petersburg, the Jewish Defence Office dispatched two lawyers—still Zaroudny and N. D. Sokolov—to proceed to a private investigation as soon as possible. Zaroudny once again gathered “irrefutable proofs” that the pogrom had been organised by the Department of Security,1162 but here also, they were not made public. (Thirty years later, even Sliosberg, who participated in the trials of Gomel, followed suit in his Memoirs in three volumes, asserting, without any shred of evidence —which seems incomprehensible on the part of a lawyer—, mistaking the dates —and those errors that can be attributed to age, he found no one to correct them —, that the Gomel pogrom had been deliberately organised by the police. He excludes also all offensive action on the part of the self‐defence detachments of the Bund and of the Poalei Zion. (He speaks of it incoherently and confusedly, for example: “The young people of the self‐defence groups quickly put an end to the misbehaviour and drove out the peasants”, “the young Jews gathered promptly and, on more than one occasion, they were able to repel the rioters,”1163 just like that, without using any weapons? …) The official investigation was proceeding seriously, step by step—and during that time Russia was plunging into the Japanese war. And it was not until October 1904 that Gomel’s trial took place—in a white‐hot political atmosphere. Forty‐four Christians and 36 Jews appeared before the court; Nearly a thousand people were called to the witness stand.1164 The Defence Office was represented by several lawyers: Sliosberg, Kupernik, Mandelstam, Kalmanovich, Ratner, Krohl. From their point of view, it was unjust that even a single Jew should be included in the bench of the accused: for the entire Jewish community in Russia “it was like a warning against recourse to self
1161L. Praisman, Pogromy i samooborona (The pogroms and self‐defence), “22”: Obchtchestvenno‐polititcheskii literatoumyi newspaper Ivreiskoi intelligentsii iz SSSR v Izraele, Tel Aviv, 1986 1987, no. 51, p. 178. ‒ 1162From the minouvehikh dnei: Zapiski ruskovo ievreia (Things of the past: memories of a Russian Jew), V 3-kh t. Paris, 1933 1934. t. 3, pp. 78 79. ‒ ‒ 1163Ibidem, p. 77. 1164Delo o gomelskom pogrom (Kiev courthouse: the Gomel pogrom case), op. cit., p. 3040.
defence.”1165 From the government’s point of view, this was not “self‐defence”. But the lawyers of the Jewish defendants did not deal with the details, nor the Jewish property that had really been sacked—they focused only on one thing: to uncover the “political motives” of the pogrom, for example, to point out that Jewish youth, in the midst of the fray, was shouting: “Down with the autocracy!” In fact, shortly afterwards, they decided to abandon their clients and leave the courtroom collectively in order to send an even stronger message: to repeat the precedent of the Kishinev trial.1166 This method, as skilful as it was revolutionary, was entirely in the air of the time in December 1904: these liberal advocates wanted to explode the judicial system itself! After their departure, “the trial quickly came to an end” insofar as it was now possible to examine the facts. Some of the Jews were acquitted, the others were sentenced to penalties not exceeding five months; “The condemnations which befell the Christians were equal to those of the Jews.”1167 In the end, there were about as many convictions on one side as on the other.1168
By plunging into the Japanese war, by adopting a rigid and insightful stance in the conflict over Korea, neither the Emperor Nicholas II nor the high dignitaries around him realised how much, on the international plane, Russia was vulnerable to the west and especially to the “traditionally friendly” America. Nor did they take into account the rise of Western financiers, who were already influencing the policy of the great powers, increasingly dependent on credit. In the nineteenth century things did not happen this way yet, and the Russian government, always slow to react, did not know how to perceive these changes. However, after the Kishinev pogrom, Western opinion had become firmly established in an attitude of repulsion towards Russia, considered as an old scarecrow, an Asiatic and despotic country where obscurantism reigns, where the people are exploited, where the revolutionaries are treated without pity, subjected to inhuman sufferings and deprivations, and now they are massacring the Jews “by the thousands”, and behind all this there is the hand of the government! (As we have seen, the government was unable to rectify this distorted version of the facts in time, with energy and efficiency.) So, in the West, people began to consider it appropriate, even worthy of consideration, to hope that the revolution would break out in Russia as soon as possible: it would be a good thing for the whole world—and for the Jews of Russia in particular. And, above all, the incompetence, the incapacity, the unpreparedness to conduct far‐off military operations against a country that at that time seemed 1165JE, t. 6, p. 666. 1166Sliosberg, t. 3, pp. 78 87. ‒ 1167JE, t. 6, p. 667. 1168I. G. Froumkine, Iz istorii ruskovo ievreïstva—(Sb.) Kniga o rousskom cvrcïve: Ot 1860 godov do Revolutsii 1917 g. (Aspects of the History of Russian Jews), in BJWR-1, p. 61.
small and weak, in the context of an agitated, openly hostile public opinion, that longed for the defeat of its own country. The sympathy of the United States for Japan expressed itself abundantly in the American press. It “hailed every Japanese victory and did not hide its desire to see Russia undergo a rapid and decisive setback.”1169 Witte mentions twice in his Memoirs that President Theodore Roosevelt was on the side of Japan and supported it.1170 And Roosevelt himself: “As soon as this war broke out I brought to Germany’s and France’s attention, with the utmost courtesy and discretion, that in case of an anti‐Japanese agreement” with Russia “I would immediately take the side of Japan and would do everything in the future to serve its interests.”1171 It may be supposed that Roosevelt’s intentions were not unknown to Japan. And it was there that the very powerful banker Jakob Schiff appeared—one of the greatest of the Jews, he who could realise his ideals thanks to his exceptional position in the economic sphere.”1172 “From his earliest years Schiff took care of business affairs”; he emigrated from Germany to New York and soon became head of the Bank Kuhn, Loeb & Co. In 1912, “he is in America the king of rail, owner of twenty‐two thousand miles of railroads”; “he also has a reputation as an energetic and generous philanthropist; he is particularly sensitive to the needs of the Jewish community.”1173 Schiff was particularly keen on the fate of the Russian Jews—hence his hostility towards Russia until 1917. According to the Encyclopædia Judaica (in English), “Schiff made a remarkable contribution to the allocation of credits to his own government and to that of other countries, particularly pointing out a loan of 200 million dollars to Japan during the conflict opposing it to Russia in 1904 1905. Outraged by ‒ the anti‐Semitic policy of the tsarist regime in Russia, he eagerly supported the Japanese war effort. He constantly refused to participate in lending to Russia and used his influence to deter other institutions from doing so, while granting financial aid to the self‐defence groups of Russian Jews.”1174 But while it is true that this money allowed the Bund and the Poalei Zion to supply themselves with weapons, it is no less likely that they also benefited from other revolutionary organisations in Russia (including the S.‐R. who, at the time, practised terrorism). There is evidence that Schiff, in an interview with an official of the Ministry of Finance of Russia, G. A. Vilenkine, who was also one of his distant relatives, “acknowledged that he contributed to the financing of the
1169F. R. Dulles, The Road to Tehran: The Story of Russia and America, 1781 1943, ‒ Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1944, pp. 88 89. ‒ 1170S. I. Witte, Vospominania. Tsarstvovanie Nikolaïa (Memoirs, The Reign of Nicholas II). In 2 vols., Berlin, Slovo, 1922, t. 1, pp. 376, 393. 1171T. Dennett, Roosevelt and the Russo‐Japanese War, Doubleday, Page and Company, 1925 (reprinted: Gloucester, Mass., Peter Smith, 1959), p. 2. 1172Sliosberg, t. 3, p. 155. 1173JE, t. 16, p. 41. 1174Encyclopædia Judaica, vol. 14, Jerusalem, Keter Publishing House, Ltd., 1971, p. 961.
revolutionary movement in Russia” and that “things had gone too far”1175 to put an end to it. However, in Russia, Baron G. O. Ginzburg continued to intervene in favour of equal rights for the Jews. To this end, in 1903 he visited Witte at the head of a Jewish delegation. The latter (who had already dealt with the Jewish question when he was secretary‐general of the government) replied to them then: that the Jews should be granted equal rights only gradually, but “in order for the question to be raised, the Jews must adopt ‘a completely different behaviour’,” that is to say, to refrain from interfering in the political life of the country. “It is not your business, leave it to those who are Russian by blood and civil status, it is not for you to give us lessons, you should rather take care of yourself.” Ginzburg, Sliosberg, and Koulicher agreed with this opinion, other participants did not, particularly Winaver, who objected: “The time has come to grant equal rights to all the subjects [of the empire]… The Jews must support with all their strength those of the Russians who fight for it, and thus against the power in place.”1176 From the Japanese war, from the beginning of 1904, the Russian government sought financial support from the West, and in order to obtain it, was willing to promise an extension of the rights of the Jews. At Plehve’s request, high personalities came into contact with Baron Ginzburg on this subject, and Sliosberg was sent abroad to survey the opinion of the greatest Jewish financiers. As a matter of principle, Schiff “declined all bargaining over the number and nature of the rights granted to the Jews.” He could “enter into financial relations only with a government that recognises to all its citizens the equality of civic and political rights… ‘One can only maintain financial relations with civilized countries’.” In Paris, Baron de Rothschild also refused: “I am not prepared to mount any financial operation whatsoever, even if the Russian government brings improvements to the fate of the Jews.”1177 Witte succeeded in obtaining a large loan without the help of Jewish financial circles. Meanwhile, in 1903 1904, the Russian government had ‒ undertaken to lift certain provisions limiting the rights of the Jews (we have already mentioned them in part). The first step in this direction, and the most important, had been, during Plehve’s lifetime, and by way of derogation of the 1882 Regulations, the lifting of the prohibition on Jews settling in 101 densely populated localities which were not considered cities despite significant industrial and commercial activity, particularly in the grain trade.1178 Secondly, the decision to promote a group of Jews to the rank of avowed attorneys, which had not been done since 1889.1179 After the assassination of Plehve and the era of “confidence” inaugurated by the short‐lived minister of the Interior Sviatopolk‐Mirsky, this process continued. Thus, for Jews with higher 1175A. Davydov, Vospominania, 1881 1955 (Memoirs, 1881 1955), Paris, 1982. ‒ ‒ 1176Witte, Memoirs, op. cit., t. 2, pp. 286 287. ‒ 1177Sliosberg, t. 3, pp. 97, 100 101. ‒ 1178JE, t. 5, p. 863. 1179Sliosberg, t. 2, p. 190.
education, the lifting of restrictive measures taken in 1882 took place, including the right to settle in areas previously prohibited to them, such as those of the Army of the Don, of Kuban, of Terek. The ban on residence in the border strip of 50 versts was also lifted; they re‐established the right (abolished under Alexander II after 1874) to reside throughout the whole territory of the empire for “the brass of the army of Jewish origin… with exemplary service records.”1180 On the occasion of the birth of the heir to the throne, in 1904, amnesty was decreed on the fines, which had befallen the Jews who had evaded their military obligations. But all these concessions came too late. In the node of the Japanese war that surrounded Russia, they were henceforth not accepted, as we have seen, neither by Western Jewish financiers, nor by the majority of Jewish politicians in Russia, nor, with strong reason, by Jewish youth. And in response to statements made by Sviatopolk‐Mirsky when he took office—promising relief in both the Pale of Settlement and the choice of an activity—a declaration of “more than six thousand people” (The signatures had been collected by the Jewish Democratic Group): “We consider all efforts to satisfy and appease the Jewish population by partial improvements in their condition as futile. We consider as null and void any policy of gradually lifting the prohibitions weighing on us… We are waiting for equal rights… we make of it a matter of honour and justice.”1181 It had become easier to weigh on a government entangled in war. It goes without saying that, in a context in which cultivated Russian society had only contempt for power, it was difficult to expect Jewish youth to manifest massively its patriotic enthusiasm. According to the data provided by General Kushropkin, then Minister of War, then commander‐in‐chief of the eastern front, “in 1904 the number of insubordinates among the Jewish conscripts doubled compared with the year 1903; more than 20,000 of them have evaded their military obligations without good cause. Out of 1,000 conscripts, more than 300 were missing, while among the Russian conscripts this number fell to only 2 per 1,000. As for the Jewish reservists, they deserted en masse on the way to the area of military operations.”1182 An American statistic suggests indirectly that from the beginning of the Japanese war there was a wave of mass emigration of Jews of military service age. During the two years of war, the figures for Jewish immigration to the United States increased very sharply for people of working age (14 44 years) ‒ and men: the former were 29,000 more than what they were expected, (compared to other immigrant categories); the second, 28,000 more (compared to women). After the war, the usual proportions were found.1183 (The Kievian newspaper reported at the time that “from 20,000 to 30,000 Jewish soldiers and 1180JE, t. 5, pp. 671, 864. 1181Frumkin, op. cit., BJWR-1, pp. 64, 109 110. ‒ 1182A. N. Kouropatkine, Zadatchi ruskko armii (The Problems of the Russian Army), Saint Petersburg, 1910, t. 3, pp. 344 345. ‒ 1183JE, t. 2, pp. 239 240. ‒
reservists… have gone into hiding or fled abroad.”1184 In the article “Military service in Russia” of the Jewish Encyclopædia, we can see a comparative picture of insubordination among Jews and Christians, according to official figures, the proportion of the former compared with the latter is 30 to one in 1902 and 34 to one in 1903. The Jewish Encyclopædia indicates that these figures can also be explained by emigration, deaths not taken into account, or miscalculations, but the inexplicable absence in this table of statistical data for 1904 and 1905, leaves no possibility of obtaining a precise idea of the extent of the insubordination during the war.1185 As for the Jewish fighters, the Jewish Encyclopædia says that there were between 20,000 and 30,000 during the war, not to mention the 3,000 Jews serving as doctors; and it points out that even the newspaper Novoïe Vremia, although hostile to the Jews, recognised their courageous behaviour in combat.1186 These statements are corroborated by the testimony of General Denikin “In the Russian army, the Jewish soldiers, resourceful and conscientious, adapted well, even in times of peace. But in times of war all differences were self‐effacing, and individual courage and intelligence were also recognised.”1187 A historical fact: the heroism of Iossif Troumpeldor who, having lost a hand, asked to remain in the ranks. In fact, he was not the only one to distinguish himself.1188 At the end of this war lost by Russia, President Theodore Roosevelt agreed to mediate the talks with Japan (Portsmouth, USA). Witte, who led the Russian delegation, evokes “this delegation of Jewish big shots who came to see me twice in America to talk to me about the Jewish question.” These were Jakob Schiff, the eminent lawyer Louis Marshall and Oscar Strauss, among others. The position of Russia had become rather uncomfortable, which imposed a more conciliatory tone on the Russian minister than in 1903. Witte’s arguments “raised violent objections on the part of Schiff.”1189 Fifteen years later, Kraus, one of the members of this delegation, who in 1920 became president of the B’nai B’rith Lodge, said: “If the tsar does not give his people the freedoms to which it is entitled, the revolution will be able to establish a republic that will allow access to these freedoms.”1190 During the same weeks, a new danger began to undermine RussianAmerican relations. On his way back to Witte, T. Roosevelt asked him to inform the Emperor that the trade agreement which had long bound (1832) his country
1184Kievlianine, 16 Dec. 1905—V. V. Choulguine, “Chto nam v nikh ne nravitsa…” Ob Antisemilizm v Rossii (“What we do not like about them…” On Anti‐Semitism in Russia), Paris, 1929, annexes, p. 308. 1185JE, t. 5, pp. 705 707. ‒ 1186Ibidem, t. 3, pp. 168 169. ‒ 1187A. I. Denikine, Pout rousskovo ofitsera (The Routine of a Russian Officer), New York, ed. Imeni Chekhov, 1953, p. 285. 1188JE, t. 3, p. 169. 1189Witte, op. cit., t. 1, pp. 394 395. ‒ 1190B’nai B’rith News, May 1920, vol. XII, no. 9.
to Russia would suffer if it applied confessional restrictions to American businessmen going to its territory.1191 This protest, which, of course, was a matter of principle, concerned, in practice, a significant number of Russian Jews who had immigrated to the United States and had become American citizens. They returned to Russia—often to engage in revolutionary activities— henceforth as merchants who were not subject to any professional or geographical limitation. This landmine could only explode a few years later. For several years Stuttgart had published the Osvoboj‐denie1192 magazine, and the great mass of cultivated Russians scarcely concealed its sympathies for the illegal organisation Union for Liberation. In the autumn of 1904, a “banqueting campaign” was held in all the major cities of Russia, where impassioned and premonitory toasts were called for the overthrow of the “regime”. Participants from abroad also spoke in public (such as Tan Bogoraz). “Political unrest had penetrated all layers of the Jewish community.” The latter was engulfed in this bubbling, without distinction of classes or parties. Thus “many Jewish public men, even of patriotic sensibility, were part of the Union for Liberation.”1193 Like all Russian liberals, they proved to be “defeatists” during the Japanese war. Like them, they applauded the “executions” of the ministers Bogolepov, Sipiagin, Plehve. And this entire “progressive” Russia pushed even the Jews in this direction, unable to admit that a Jew could be more on the right than a left‐wing democrat, but feeling that he should, more naturally yet, be a socialist. A Conservative Jew? Ugh! Even in an academic institution such as the Jewish Historical‐Ethnographic Commission, “in these tumultuous years there was no time to serenely engage in scientific research…” it was necessary “to make History”.1194 “The radical and revolutionary movements within the Russian Jewish community have always been based on the idea that the problem of equal rights… the fundamental historical question of the Jews of Russia, would be solved only when one would cut once for all the head of the Medusa and all the serpents that spring from it.”1195 During these years in Saint Petersburg, the Jewish Defence Office developed its activities with the aim of “fighting anti‐Semitic literature and disseminating appropriate information on the legal situation of Jews in order to influence mainly the opinion of liberal Russian circles.” (Sliosberg points out
1191Witte, op. cit., p. 401. 1192Organ of the Union for Liberation, organisation of the liberal opposition, which became the Constitutional‐Democratic Party (or KD, or Cadet) in 1905. 1193G. I. Aronson, V borbe za grajdanskie i natsionalnye prava: Obchtchestvennye tetchenia v rousskom evreïstve (The struggle for civil and national rights: The movements of opinion within the Jewish community of Russia), BJWR-1, pp. 221 222. ‒ 1194M. L. Vichnitser, Iz peterbourgskikh vospominanii (Memories of Petersburg), BJWR-1, p. 41. 1195S. Ivanovich, Ievrei i sovetskaya diktatoura (The Jews and the Soviet Dictatorship), pp. 41 42. ‒
that these activities were largely subsidised by the international EK01196.1197) But it was not so much Russian society that it was a question of influencing. The Bureau did not open branches in Russia, not even in Moscow, Kiev, or Odessa: on the one hand, Zionist propaganda absorbed all the energy of the most cultivated Jews; on the other, “Bund propaganda mobilised the greater part of the educated Jewish youth.” (Sliosberg insisting that the Bund be condemned, Winaver objected that he should not quarrel with the Bund: “it disposes of energy and propaganda power.”1198 However, the Bureau soon maintained a strong relationship, built on reciprocal information and mutual aid, with the American Jewish Committee (chaired by J. Schiff, then Louis Marshall), the English Jewish Committee (Claude Montefiore, Lucine Woolf), the Alliance in Paris and the Support Committee of the German Jews (Hilfsverein der deutschen Juden: James Simon, Paul Nathan1199). Here is the testimony of M. Krohl: “The heart of our group was the ‘Press Office’[whose mission was to disseminate] through the Russian and foreign press serious information about the situation of the Jews in Russia.” It was A. I. Braudo who undertook this task. “He accomplished it perfectly. Under the conditions of the Russia of that time, this kind of work required a great deal of prudence,” was to be carried out “in the greatest secrecy. Even the members of the Defence Office did not know by what means or by what channels he had succeeded in organising such and such a press campaign… A large number of articles published in the Russian or foreign press of the time, often with great repercussions, had been communicated to the newspapers or magazines either personally by Braudo, or through his intermediary.”1200 “Providing serious information” to launch “this or that press campaign”—it is a bit chilling, especially in light of what happened in the 20th century. In today’s language, it is called “skilful manipulation of the media.” In March 1905 the Defence Bureau convened in Vilnius the Constituent Congress of the “Union for the Equal Rights for the Jewish People in Russia,”1201 but it quickly proceeded to its self‐dissolution and joined the direction of the Union for the integrality of rights (the expression “integrality”, because it was stronger than that of “equal rights”, had been proposed by Winaver. Today, we evoke it under a hybrid form such as the “Union for Achieving Integral Equality of Rights”1202). It was wanted that this new Union bring together all Jewish parties and groups.1203 But the Bund denounced this congress as a bourgeois. However, many Zionists could not remain in their splendid isolation. The prodromes of
1196Jewish mutual aid committee 1197Sliosberg, t. 3, pp. 132, 248 249. ‒ 1198Ibidem, pp. 138, 168. 1199Ibidem, pp. 142 147, 152 157. ‒ ‒ 1200M. Krohl, Stranitsy moiei jisni (Pages of my life), t. 1, New York, 1944, pp. 299 300. ‒ 1201JE, t. 14, p. 515. 1202RJE, t. 3, M., 1997, p. 65. 1203JE, t. 14, p. 515.
the Russian revolution led to a split in their ranks. And some of these fractions did not resist the temptation to participate in the great things that unfolded before their eyes! But in so doing, they exerted an influence on the strictly civic orientation of the congress agenda. The idea was making its way not only to fight for civic rights but also, with the same energy, for national rights.1204 Sliosberg fought against the influence of the Zionists “who wanted to withdraw the Jews from the number of citizens of Russia” and whose demands “were often formulated only for demagogic reasons.” For the Jewish community in Russia “has in no way been limited in the expression of its national life… Was it appropriate to raise the question of national autonomy of the Jews when none of the nationalities living in Russia possessed it, whereas the Russian people themselves, in their orthodox part, were far from being free in the expression of their religious and national life?” But, “at that time, demagogy assumed a very special significance in the Jewish backstreet.”1205 Thus, in place of the notion, clear in the eyes of everyone, of “equality of rights”, which certainly had not yet happened, but seemed no longer to lag behind political developments, the slogan was issued for the integrality of rights of the Jews. What was meant by this was that, in addition to equal rights, “national autonomy” was also recognised. “It must be said that those who formulated these requirements did not have a very clear idea of their content. The creation of Jewish schools was not limited by any law. The study of the Russian language was required… insofar as it was not a question of Heders.1206 But other more civilised countries also imposed the use of the State language in relations with the administration as well as in school.1207 Thus, there was no “national autonomy” for the Jews in the United States. But the “obtentionists” (“Union for the obtention…”) demanded “national and cultural selfdetermination” on the territory of Russia, as well as a substantial autonomy for the Jewish communities (and, in the same breath: the secularisation of these, to tear them away from the religious influence of Judaism—which suited both the Zionists and the Socialists). Later, this was called “national‐personal autonomy”. (Accompanied by the requirement that the Jewish cultural and social institutions be financed by the State but without it interfering in their functioning.) And how can we imagine the “self‐management” of a nation scattered territorially? The Second Congress of the Union, in November 1905, took the decision to convene a Jewish National Assembly of Russia.1208 All these ideas, including the “national‐personal autonomy” of the Jews of Russia, were expressed and continued in various forms until 1917. However, the Union for the Integrality of Rights proved ephemeral. At the end of 1906, the Jewish People’s Anti‐Zionist Group seceded (Winaver, Sliosberg, Koulicher, Sternberg) on the grounds that it refused the idea of a Jewish National 1204Aronson, The Struggle…, op. cit., p. 222. 1205Sliosberg, t. 3, pp. 170 171. ‒ 1206Jewish elementary schools 1207Ibidem, p. 170. 1208JE, t. 14, p. 516.
Assembly; shortly afterwards it was the turn of the Jewish People’s Party (S. Doubnov—religious and cultural nationalism, notably the right to use the Jewish language in public life throughout the country, but with what means, how?); then the Jewish Democratic Group (Bramson, Landau), close to the Labour Party.1209 The Union for the integrality of rights was also accused of having rallied to the KD and, consequently, was “no longer being able to represent the Jewish population of Russia”; the Zionists regarded the “secularists” as “partisans of assimilation”, and the socialists as bourgeois.1210 In short, at the beginning of 1907, the Union ceased to exist.1211 The Zionists were increasingly drawn into the revolutionary whirlpool, and in November 1906, at their All‐Russian Congress in Helsinfors, it was declared “indispensable not only to turn to the daily needs and demands of the Jews of Russia, but also to engage fully in their political and social struggle”1212; Jabotinsky insisted that the Zionist program should include the requirement of the establishment in Russia of the sovereignty of the people; D. Pasmanik objected that “such a demand can only be made by those who are ready to stand on the barricades.”1213 At the end of its work, the Congress brought its “sanction to the rallying of the Zionists to the Liberation Movement”.1214 But the latter was just about to lose momentum after the failure of Vyborg’s manifesto.1215 The author of this program, Jabotinsky, put forward the following arguments: the goal set by Zionism can only be reached in several decades, but by fighting for their full rights, Jews will understand better what Zionism is.1216 However, he said: “We leave the first ranks to the representatives of the majority nation. We cannot pretend to play a leading role: we are aligning ourselves.1217 In other words: Palestine is one thing; in the meantime, let us fight in Russia. Three years earlier, Plehve had told Herzl that he feared precisely this kind of drift of Zionism. Sliosberg is far from minimising the role of the Zionists: “After the Congress of Helsinfors, they decided to take control of all public activities of the Jews” by trying to “impose their influence at the local level”. (In the first Duma, of the 12 Jewish deputies, five were Zionists.) But he also notes that this
1209Ibidem, t. 7, pp. 437 440. ‒ 1210Sliosberg, t. 3, pp. 257 258. ‒ 1211JE, t. 14. p. 517. 1212Aronson, The Struggle…, op. cit., p. 224. 1213D. S. Pasmanik, Chevo je my dobivaïemsia? (What do we really want?), Rossia i Ievrei, Sb 1 (Russia and the Jews, book 1—later: RJ) / Otetchestvennoïe obedinenie rousskikh ievreyev za granitsei, Paris, YMCA Press, 1978, p. 211. 1214Aronson, The Struggle…, op. cit., p. 224. 1215After the dissolution of the first Duma, about two hundred deputies met at Vyborg, and expressed their opposition to the government in the form of a manifesto, which did not meet with any public echo. 1216G. Svet, Rousskie evrei v sionizme i v stroitelstve Palestiny i Izrailia (Russian Jews in Zionism and the Construction of Palestine and Israel), BJWR-1, pp. 263 264. ‒ 1217V. Jabotinsky, levreiskaya kramola (The Jewish Conspiracy), Felietony, p. 43.
profusion of parties was “the business of small circles of intellectuals”, not of the Jewish masses, and their propaganda “only caused to confuse the issues.”1218 True, all this scattering did not contribute to the clarification of the debate: it was no longer very clear what the Russian Jews were fighting, for what rights —equal or integral?—or on which plan—civic or national? And, let us not forget: “All these groups composed only of intellectuals… did not understand Orthodox Jews, who eventually understood the need to organise to combat the growing anti‐religious influence exerting itself on Jewish youth.” And it was thus that “was born what was later to develop in ‘T’Agoudat Israel’.” “This movement was concerned that “Jewish revolutionary elements are recruited among the Jewish youth who have moved away from religion,” whereas “the majority of the Jews are religious and, while demanding recognition of their rights and the lifting of the prohibitions against them, remain loyal subjects of the Emperor and are far from any idea of overthrowing the existing regime.”1219 When one studies the history of Russian Jews at the beginning of the twentieth century, there are few references to Orthodox Jews. Sliosberg once said, raising the ire of the Bund: “With the melameds1220 behind me, I rely on a greater number of Jews than the Bund leaders, for there are more melameds among the Jews than the workers.”1221 In fact, the secularisation of Jewish society in no way affected the existence of traditional communities in the Pale of Settlement. For them, all the ancestral questions concerning the organisation of their lives, the religious instruction, the rabbinate, remained topical. During the temporary lull of 1909, the reform of the traditional Jewish community was discussed with great seriousness at the Kovno Congress. “The work of the Congress proved to be very fruitful, and few Jewish assemblies could have equalled it by the seriousness and wisdom of the resolutions adopted there.”1222 “Orthodox Judaism has always been in conflict—not always open, but rather latent—with the Jewish intelligentsia. It was clear that in condemning the movement for the liberation of the Jews it hoped to win the government’s favour.”1223 But it was too late: on the eve of the 1905 revolution, we have seen that the autocratic regime had lost control of the country. As for traditional Judaism, it had already lost a whole generation—moreover it was not the first —who had gone towards Zionism, secular liberalism, rarely enlightened conservatism, but also, and with the heaviest consequences, towards the revolutionary movement.
1218Sliosberg, t. 3, pp. 253, 255, 262. 1219Ibidem, pp. 225 256. ‒ 1220Teachers teaching in heders. 1221Ibidem, p. 258. 1222Ibidem, p. 263. 1223Ibidem, p. 265.
The new generation of revolutionaries had emerged at the turn of the century. Its leaders, Grigory Gershuni and Mikhail Gotz, had decided to revive the terrorist methods of The Will of the People. “Gershuni took upon himself the heavy responsibility of creating in Russia a new revolutionary party called to succeed with dignity to the Will of the People,” and “thanks to his talents as organiser as well as to those of other revolutionaries entirely devoted to the cause, this party was born at the end of the year 1901.” “At the same time… was also constituted its armed faction. Its creator and its inspirer was none other than the very same Gershuni.”1224 Among the S.‐R.1225, the Jews “immediately played a leading role.” Amongst them were “An‐ski Rappoport, K. Jitlovsky, Ossip Minor, I. Roubanovitch” and—still him!—Mark Natanson. The armed faction included among its members “Abraham Gotz, Dora Brilliant, L. Zilberberg”, not to mention the famous Azef. It is among the S.‐R. That M. Trilisser was also formed—he who later would become famous in the Cheka. “Among the grassroots activists of the S.‐R. party, there were also quite a few Jews,” even though, adds Schub, “they never represented a tiny minority.” According to him, it is even “the most Russian” of the revolutionary parties.1226 For security reasons, the seat of the party was transferred abroad (for example, the Bund was absent), in Geneva, at M. Gotz and O. Minor’s place. As for Gershuni, this indomitable “tiger”, after succeeding in deceiving Zubatov’s1227 vigilance, he began to criss-cross Russia, like B. Savinkov, fomenting terrorist actions and checking their proper execution. It was thus that he was present at the Place Saint‐Isaac during the assassination of Sipiagin1228; he was at Ufa when Governor Bogdanovitch was killed1229; and at Kharkov when it was Governor Obolensky’s turn; on the Nevsky prospect during the failed attack on Pobedonostsev1230. The execution was always entrusted to “Christians” such as P. Karpovitch, S. Balmachov, E. Sozonov, etc. (The bombs used for the assassination of Plehve, Grand Duke Sergey Aleksandrovich, and planned attacks on Grand Duke Vladimir Alexandrovich and Interior Ministers Boulygin and Durnovo were made by Maximilian Schweitzer, who in 1905 was himself victim of the machine he was making.1231) Arrested by chance, Gershuni was condemned to death, reprieved by the Emperor without having asked for it; in 1907 he found an ingenious means of escaping from the prison of Akatuysk, hiding in a cabbage‐barrel, and then gained by way of Vladivostok, America and Europe; the Russian government demanded his extradition from Italy, but the European liberal opinion was unanimous in refusing it and Clemenceau also
1224Krohl, Stanitsy… (Pages…), op. cit., pp. 283 284. ‒ 1225Social Revolutionaries. 1226D. Schub, Evrei rousskoï revolutsii (The Jews in the Russian Revolution), JW-2, p. 138. 1227Chief of the Russian secret police at the beginning of the twentieth century. 1228Minister of the Interior assassinated in 1902. 1229SJE, t. 2, p. 111. 1230Politician with revolutionary ideas, very influential with the emperors Alexander and Nicolas II (1827 1907). ‒ 1231RJE, t. 3, pp. 378 379. ‒
used his influence: he was also, as we know, a “tiger”. Soon after, Gershuni died of a sarcoma in the lung. Among other leading S.‐R. terrorists, we must also mention Abraham Gotz, who played an active part in the attacks on Dournovo, Akimov, Shuvalov, Trepov1232, and played a role in the assassination of Mine and Rieman. (But, he had the misfortune of living much longer than his elder brother, who died prematurely—and the Bolsheviks later gave him a hard time.) To play with History, precautions were less taken than the previous revolutionary generation. Less well known than others, Pinhas (Pyotr) Rutenberg is not less worthy of interest. In 1905 he trained groups of fighters in Saint Petersburg and supplied them with weapons. Inspired by Gapon1233, he was at his side on 9 January 1905; But it was also he who, in 1906, “by order of the S.‐R. party, organises and supervises his assassination” (later he will author a book entitled Gapon’s Assassination1234). In 1919, he immigrated to Palestine where he distinguished himself in the electrification of the country. There, he shows that he is capable of building; but in his early years, in Russia, he certainly does not work as an engineer, he destroys! One loses the trace of the “student of Zion”, irresponsible instigator of the mutiny of Sveaborg, who, however, escaped the slaughter that ensued. Apart from the S.‐R., each year brought with it new social‐democratic fighters, theorists, and talkers. Some had short‐lived notoriety in narrow circles, such as Alekandra Sokolovskaya, whom History retained only because she was Trotsky’s first wife and the mother of his two daughters. Others have been unjustly forgotten: Zinovy Litvine‐Sedoi, the chief of staff of the detachments of the Krasnaya Presnia district during the armed insurrection in Moscow; Zinovy Dosser, a member of the “troika” who led this insurrection. Among its leaders, we can cite again “Marat”—V. L. Chanzer, Lev Kafenhausen, LubotskyZagorsky (who for nearly a century gave his pseudonym1235 to the monastery of The Trinity Saint Sergius) and Martin Mandelstam‐Liadov, member of the executive Commission of the RSDLP1236 for the organisation of the armed insurrection.1237 Others—like F. Dan or O. Nakhamkis—were to play an important role later in 1917. Despite Bakunin’s aversion for the Jews, there are many of them among the leaders and theorists of anarchism. But “other Russian anarchists, such as Kropotkin, had no hostility towards the Jews and tried to win them over to their cause.”1238 Among these leaders are Yakov Novomirsky, Alexander Gue, Lev
1232P. Dournovo (1845 1915), Minister of the Interior in 1905 1906; P. Shuvalov (1830 ‒ ‒ ‒ 1906), Russian diplomat and politician; D. Trepov (1855 1906), Deputy Minister of the ‒ Interior, one of the leaders of the repression of the revolution of 1905 1907. ‒ 1233G. Gapon (1870 1906), priest and agent of the secret police, one of the persons ‒ responsible for the massacre of demonstrators in Saint Petersburg, 9 January 1905. 1234RJE, t. 2, p. 517. 1235Zagorsk. 1236Russian Social‐Democratic Labour Party. 1237RJE, t. 1, pp. 436, 468; t. 2, pp. 13, 218. 1238SJE, t. 1, p. 124.
Tcherny, V. Gordine.1239 One of them, I. Grossman‐Rochin, evokes with the greatest respect the figure of Aron Eline, of Bialystok: “a famous terrorist”, but not only “a specialist in gory operations” “never does he fall… into ‘systematic activism’.”1240 “The least patient among the mass of Jews… are looking for a faster way to achieve socialism. And this recourse, this ‘ambulance’, they find in anarchism.”1241 It is the Jews of Kiev and Southern Russia who have been most attracted to anarchism, and in the documents relating to the Bogrov affair1242 there is often mention of smaller‐scale anarchists, forgotten by history. We have already observed, but it is worth recalling, that it was not only because of the inequalities of which they were the victims that many Jews were rushing into the revolution. “The participation of the Jews in the revolutionary movement which had gained the whole of Russia is only partly explained by their situation of inequality… The Jews merely shared the general feeling of hostility towards the autocracy.1243 Should we be surprised? Young people from the intelligentsia, both Russian and Jewish, heard in their families, all year long, only “crimes perpetrated by the power”, of the “government composed of assassins”, and they precipitated the revolutionary action with all the energy of their fury. Bogrov like the others. In 1905, the Jewish historian S. Doubnov accused all Jewish revolutionaries of “national treason.” In his article entitled “Slavery in the Revolution,” he wrote: “This entire numerous army of young Jews, who occupy the most prominent positions in the Social Democratic Party and who run for positions of command, has formally cut off all ties with the Jewish community… You build nothing new, you are only the valets of the revolution, or its commissionaires.”1244 But as time passed, the approval of the adults to their revolutionary progeny grew. This phenomenon was intensified among the “fathers” of the new generation and was on the whole more marked among the Jews than among the Russians. Meier Bomach, member of the Duma, declared ten years later (1916): “We do not regret that the Jews participated in the struggle for liberation… They were fighting for your freedom.”1245 And six months later, in the conflagration of the new revolution, in March 1917, the celebrated lawyer O. O. Gruzenberg held these passionate but not unfounded remarks before the leaders
1239A. Vetlouguine, Avanturisly Grajdanskoy voïny (Adventurers of the Civil War), Paris, Imprimerie Zemgor, 1921, pp. 65 67, 85. ‒ 1240I. Grossman‐Rochin, Doumy o bylom (Reflections on the Past) (Iz istorii Belostotskovo, anarkhitcheskovo, “tchemosnamenskovo” dvijenia), Byloïe, M., 1924, nos. 27 28, p. 179. ‒ 1241Ben‐Khoïrin, Anarkhism i ievreïskaïa massa (Anarchism and the Jewish masses) (St. Petersburg) Soblazn sotsializma: Revolutsia v Rossi i ievrci / Sost. A. Serebren‐nikov, Paris, M., YMCA Press, Rousskii Pout, 1995, p. 453. 1242See infra, Chapter 10. 1243SJE, t. 7, p. 398. 1244Dimanstein, “1905*”, op. cit., t. 3, v. 1, p. 174. 1245Mejdounarodnoïe finansovoïë polojenie tsarskoi Rossii vo vremia mirovoï voïny (The financial situation of tsarist Russia during the World War), Krasnyi Arkhiv, 1934, t. 64, p. 28.
of the Provisional Government and the Soviet of deputies of workers and soldiers: “We generously offered to the revolution a huge ‘percentage’ of our people—almost all its flower, almost all its youth… And, when in 1905 the people rose up, countless Jewish fighters came to swell their ranks, carried by an irresistible impulse.”1246 Others will say the same thing: “Historical circumstances made the Jewish masses of Russia unable to not participate in the most active way in the revolution.”1247 “For the Jews, the solution of the Jewish question in Russia was the triumph of progressive ideas in this country.”1248 The revolutionary effervescence that had seized Russia was undoubtedly stirred up by that which reigned among the Jews. However, youth alone, trained in intellectual or manual labour, could not make the revolution. One of the top priorities was to win over to the revolutionary cause, and to lead the industrial workers, and especially those of Saint Petersburg, to battle. However, as noted by the director of the police department at the time, “at the initial stage of its development, the workers’ movement… was foreign to political aspirations.” And even on the eve of January 9th, “during an extraordinary meeting which they had organised on December 27th, the workers chased a Jew who tried to make political propaganda and distribute leaflets, and three Jewish women who sought to propagate political ideas were apprehended.”1249 In order to train the workers of Saint Petersburg, Gapon’s pseudo‐religious propaganda took place. On 9 January, even before the troops opened fire, it was the young Simon Rechtzammer (the son of the director of the Warehouse and Grain Storage Company) who took the lead of the only barricade erected that day (On the fourth street of Saint‐Basil’s island), with the destruction of the telegraph and telephone lines and the attack on the police station. Moreover, the workers of this quarter were employed two days later “to copiously beat the intellectuals.”1250 We know that the Russian revolutionaries who immigrated to Europe welcomed the news of the shooting of Petersburg with a mixture of indignation and enthusiasm: it’s about time!! Now it’s going to blow!! As for the propagation of this enthusiasm—and of the insurrection—in the Pale of Settlement, it was the tireless Bund who harnessed itself, whose hymn (An‐ski said of it that it was “The Marseillaise of the Jewish Workers”) included the following words:
1246Retch, 1917, 25 March, p. 6. 1247Dimanstein, “1905”, op. cit., p. 175. 1248JE, t. 7, p. 370. 1249Doklad direktora departamenta politsii Lopoukhina ministrou vnoutrennykh del o sobytiakh 9-vo ianvaria (Report of the Director of the Police Department, Lopoukhine, to the Minister of the Interior on the events of 9 January), Krasnaya Ictopis, 1922, no. 1, p. 333. 1250V Nevsky, Ianvarskie dni v Peterbourgue v 1905 godou (The Days of January in Petersburg in 1905), ibidem, pp. 51, 53.
Enough of loving our enemies, we want to hate them!! … … it is ready the pyre! We will find enough logs For its holy flames to engulf the planet!!1251 (Let us note in passing that The International was translated into Russian by Arkadi Kotz as early as 1912.1252 Several generations were religiously imbued with his words: Stand up! The damned of the earth! and of the past let us make a clean slate…) The Bund immediately issued a proclamation (“about two hundred thousand copies”): “The revolution has begun. It burned in the capital, its flames covering the whole country… To arms! Storm the armouries and seize all the weapons… Let all the streets become battlefields!”1253 According to the Red Chronicle of the Soviet regime’s beginnings, “the events of 9 January in Saint Petersburg echoed a great deal in the Jewish workers’ movement: they were followed by mass demonstrations of the Jewish proletariat throughout the Pale of Settlement. At their head was the Bund. To ensure the massive nature of these demonstrations, detachments of the Bund went to workshops, factories, and even to the workers’ homes to call for the cessation of work; they employed force to empty the boilers of their steam, to tear off the transmission belts; they threatened the owners of companies, here and there shots were fired, at Vitebsk one of them received a jet of sulphuric acid. It was not “a spontaneous mass demonstration, but an action carefully prepared and organised.” N. Buchbinder regrets, however, that “almost everywhere the strikes were followed only by the Jewish workers… In a whole series of towns the Russian workers put up a strong resistance to the attempts to stop factories and plants.” There were week‐long strikes in Vilnius, Minsk, Gomel, Riga, of two weeks in Libava. The police had to intervene, naturally, and in several cities the Bund constituted “armed detachments to combat police terror.”1254 In Krinki (the province of Grodno), the strikers gunned the police, interrupted telegraphic communications, and for two days all the power was in the hands of the strike committee. “The fact that workers, and among them a majority of Jews, had thus been able to hold power from the beginning of 1905, was very significant of what this revolution was, and gave rise to many hopes.” It is no less true that the Bund’s important participation in these actions “might lead one to believe that discontent was above all the result of the Jews, while the other nationalities were not that revolutionary.”1255 The strength of the revolutionaries manifested itself through the actions, carried out in broad daylight, of armed detachments of “self‐defence” which had been illustrated during the Gomel pogrom and which had since then grown considerably stronger. “Self‐defence was most often in close contact with the 1251Soblazn Sotsializma, p. 329. 1252RJE, t. 2, p. 70. 1253Dimanstein, “1905”, op. cit., p. 144. 1254N. Buchbinder, 9 ianvaria i icvskoye rabotchee dvijenie (On 9 January and Jewish Labour Movement), Krasnaya Letopis, 1922, no. 1, pp. 81 87. ‒ 1255Dimanstein, “1905”, op. cit., pp. 145, 147.
armed detachments of political organisations… It can be said that the whole Pale of Settlement was covered by a whole network of armed self‐defence groups which played an important military role—only a professional army could face them.”1256—At the height of the revolution, they were joined by Zionist groups of various tendencies: “the particularly active participation of the Poalei Zion”, as well as “armed detachments of the ZS [Zionist Socialists]”, But also from SERP. So that “in the armed operations that occurred during the revolution, these socialists belonging to different currents of Zionism found themselves at our side,”1257 remembers S. Dimanstein, later a prominent Bolshevik leader. The Bund was to continue its military operations throughout this changing and uncertain year of 1905. Special mention should be made to the April events in Jitomir. According to the Jewish Encyclopædia, it was a pogrom against the Jews, moreover “fomented by the police.”1258 As for Dimanstein, who boasts of having “actively participated in the 1905 revolution on the territory of the socalled Pale of Settlement,” he wrote: “It was not a pogrom, but a fight against the troops of the counter‐revolution.”1259 The Jewish Encyclopædia indicates that up to twenty Jews were killed1260; the new one: “almost fifty (according to other sources, about thirty‐five).”1261 According to the latter, “disorders began after provocateurs had declared that Jews had fired shots on the portrait of the tsar outside the city.”1262 While The Messenger of the Government gives as a fact that, two weeks before the pogrom, “a crowd of nearly three hundred people gathered outside the city… to practice shooting with revolvers… by aiming for the portrait of His Majesty the Emperor.” After this, several brawls broke out between the Jews and the Christians within the city—still according to The Messenger of the Government, the aggressors were mostly Jews.1263 According to the new Jewish Encyclopædia, on the day of the event, “the Jewish detachments of self‐defence heroically resisted the rioters.” From a neighbouring village, a group of young armed Jews came to their rescue, when, on the way, “they were stopped by Ukrainian peasants” at Troyanovo. “They tried to take refuge among the Jewish inhabitants of the village, but these did not let them in” and, a characteristic fact, “indicated to the peasants where two of them had been hiding”; “ten members of the detachment were killed.”1264 At the time, a particularly effective manœuvre had already been devised: “The funerals of the victims who fell for the revolution constituted one of the most effective means of propaganda capable of inflating the masses”, which had
1256Ibidem, pp. 150 151. ‒ 1257Ibidem, pp. 123 124. ‒ 1258SJE, t. 2, p. 513. 1259Dimanstein, “1905”, op. cit., p. 144. 1260JE, t. 7, p. 602. 1261SJE, t. 2, p. 513. 1262Ibidem, t. 6, p. 566. 1263Pravo, 5 May 1905, pp. 1483 1484. ‒ 1264SJE, t. 2, p. 513; Dimanstein, “1905”, op. cit., pp. 151 152. ‒
for consequence that “the fighters were aware that their death would be used for the profit of the revolution, that it would arouse a desire for vengeance among the thousands of people who were going to attend their funeral,” and that on these occasions “it was relatively easier to organise manifestations. The liberal circles considered it their duty to ensure that the police did not intervene during a funeral.” Thus “the funeral became one of the components of revolutionary propaganda in 1905.”1265 In the summer of that year, “the police terror was massive, but there were also many acts of revenge on the part of the workers who threw bombs on patrols of soldiers or Cossacks, murdered policemen, whether officers or not; these cases were far from being isolated”, because it was “a step backwards or forwards for the revolution in the Jewish sector.”1266 Example: the Cossacks killed a Bund militant in Gomel; eight thousand people attend his funeral, revolutionary speeches are given—and the revolution advances, always advances! And when the time came to protest against the convening of the “Boulyguine”1267 consultative Duma, the campaign “moved from the Stock Exchange in the Jewish quarter to the synagogues… where speakers of the Party intervened during the service… under the protection of armed detachments that sealed off the exits… During these assemblies, it was frequent that resolutions prepared in advance were adopted without discussion”—the unfortunate faithfuls come to pray, did they have a choice? Go and talk to these fellows! There is no question of “stopping the revolutionary process at this stage…”1268 The project of convocation of this consultative Duma, which was not followed up on due to the events of 1905, started from the assumption that they did not possess it for the designation of municipal self‐government bodies, it had been originally planned to not grant the Jews the right to vote. But the revolutionary momentum was growing, the Jewish municipal councillors appointed by the provincial authorities resigned demonstratively here and there, and the Duma Elections Act of August 1905 already provided for the granting of voting rights to the Jews. But the revolution continued its course, and public opinion rejected this consultative Duma, which was therefore not united. The tension remained high throughout this unhappy year 1905; the government was overtaken by the events. In the fall, strikes, notably in the railways, were being prepared everywhere in Russia. And, of course, the Pale of Settlement was not spared. In the region of the Northwest, during early October, was seen “a rapid rise… of the revolutionary energy of the masses”, “a new campaign of meetings takes place in the synagogues” (always in the same way, with men posted at exits to intimidate the faithful), “we prepare ourselves feverishly for the general strike.” In Vilnius, during a meeting authorised by the governor, “some shot the immense portrait of the Emperor that was there, and
1265Dimanstein, “1905”, op. cit., p. 153. 1266Ibidem, p. 164. 1267A. Boulyguine (1851 1919). Minister of the Interior in 1905. ‒ 1268Ibidem, pp. 165 166. ‒
some smashed it with chairs”; An hour later, it was on the governor in person that one drew—here it was, the frenzy of 1905! But in Gomel, for example, the Social Democrats could not agree with the Bund and “they acted in disorder”; as for the social revolutionists, they “joined” the Zionist Socialists; and then “bombs are thrown at the Cossacks, who retaliate by shooting and knocking on all those who fall under their hand, without distinction of nationality,”1269—a very pretty revolutionary outburst! They were rubbing their hands! It is not surprising that “in many places… we could observe well‐to‐do and religious Jews actively fighting the revolution. They worked with the police to track down Jewish revolutionaries, to break up demonstrations, strikes, and so on.” Not that it was pleasing to them to find themselves on the side of power. But, not having detached themselves from God, they refused to witness the destruction of life. Still less did they accept the revolutionary law: they venerated their Law. While in Bialystok and other places the young revolutionaries assimilated the “Union of the Jews” to the “Black Hundreds” because of its religious orientation.1270 According to Dimanstein, the situation after the general strike in October could be summarised as follows: “The Bund, the ZS and other Jewish workers’ parties called for insurrection,” but “there a certain weariness could be perceived.”1271 Later, like the Bolsheviks, the Bund boycotted early in the 19061272 the elections to the first Duma, still caressing the hopes of a revolutionary explosion. This expectation having been disappointed, it resigned itself to bring its positions closer to those of the Mensheviks; in 1907, at the fifth Congress of the RSDLP, of the 305 deputies, 55 were members of the Bund. And it even became a “supporter of extreme Yiddishism.”1273 It is in this amped atmosphere, very uncertain for the power in place, that Witte persuaded Nicholas II to promulgate the Manifesto of 17 October 1905. (More exactly, Witte wanted to publish it in the form of a simple government press release, but it is Nicholas II himself who insisted that the promulgation of the Manifesto, made in the name of the tsar, should assume a solemn character: he thought he would thus touch the hearts of his subjects.) A. D. Obolensky, who drew up the initial draft, reported that among the three main points of the Manifesto there was a special one devoted to the rights and freedoms of the Jews—but Witte (doubtlessly at the pressing request of the Emperor) modified its formulation by addressing in a general way the respect for individuals and the liberty of conscience, expression, and assembly.”1274 The question of the equal rights of the Jews was therefore no longer mentioned. “It was only in the speech published at the same time than the Manifesto… that Witte spoke of the
1269Ibidem, pp. 167 168. ‒ 1270Ibidem, pp. 173 175. ‒ 1271Ibidem, pp. 177 178. ‒ 1272JE, t. 5, pp. 99 100. ‒ 1273SJE, t. 1, p. 560. 1274Manifest 17 oktiabria (Dokoumenry) (The Manifesto of 17 October [documents]), Krasnyi arkhiv, 1925, t. 11 12, pp. 73, 89. ‒
need to “equalise all Russian subjects before the law irrespective of their confession and nationality.”1275 But: we must make concessions only at the right time and in a position of strength—and this was no longer the case. Liberal and revolutionary opinion laughed at the Manifesto, seeing it only as a capitulation, and rejected it. The Emperor, like Witte, was deeply affected, but also certain representatives of the Jewish intelligentsia: “For what the best of the Russians had been waiting for decades was finally realised… In fact, the Emperor willingly surrendered the autocratic regime and pledged to hand over the legislative power to the representatives of the people… One would have thought that this change would fill everyone with joy”—but the news was welcomed with the same revolutionary intransigence: the struggle continues!1276 In the streets, the national flag, the portraits of the Emperor and the coat of arms of the State were torn off. The account of Witte’s interview with the Petersburg press on 18 October, following the promulgation of the Manifesto, is rich in information. Witte obviously expected manifestations of gratitude and relied on the friendly support of the press to calm the spirits, he even openly solicited it. He obtained only scathing replies, first from the director of the Stock Exchange News, S. M. Propper, then from Notovitch, Khodski, Arabajine, and Annensky; all demanded with one voice: proclaim immediately political amnesty! “This requirement is categorical!” General Trepov must be dismissed from his post as governorgeneral of Saint Petersburg. This is the unanimous decision of the press.” The unanimous decision of the press! And to withdraw the Cossacks and the army from the capital: “We shall not publish any more newspapers as long as the troops are there!” The army is the cause of the disorder… The security of the city must be entrusted to the “popular militia”! (That is to say, to the detachments of revolutionaries, which meant creating in Petersburg the conditions for a butchery, as it would soon be in Odessa, or, in the future, to set up in Petersburg the conditions favourable to the future revolution of February.) And Witte implored: “Let me breathe a little!”, “Help me, give me a few weeks!”; he even passed among them, shaking hands with each one.1277 (For his part, he will remember later: Propper’s demands “meant for me that the press had lost its head.”) Despite this, the government had intelligence and courage to refuse the establishment of anarchy and nothing serious happened in the capital. (In his Memoirs, Witte relates that Propper “had arrived in Russia from abroad, a penniless Jew with no mastery of the Russian language… He had made his mark in the press and had become the head of the Stock Exchange News, running through the antechambers of influential figures… When I was Minister of Finance, [Propper] begged for official announcements, various advantages, and eventually obtained from me the title of commercial advisor.”
1275SJE, t. 7, p. 349. 1276Sliosberg, t. 3, p. 175. 1277Manifest 17 oktiabria (The Manifesto of 17 October), op. cit., pp. 99 105. ‒
However, at this meeting, he formulated, not without a certain insolence, “demands, even declarations” like this one: “We have no confidence in the government.”1278) In the course of the same month of October, The Kievian published an account of an officer returning to Moscow just at that moment, after a year and a half of captivity in Japan, who was initially moved to tears by the generosity of the Emperor’s Manifesto, which opened up favourable prospects for the country. At the mere sight of this officer in battle dress, the welcome which the Muscovite crowd received from him was expressed in these terms: “Spook! Suck‐up! The tsar’s lackey!” During a large meeting in the Theatre Plaza, “the orator called for struggle and destruction”; another speaker began his speech by shouting: “Down with the autocracy!” “His accent betrayed his Jewish origins, but the Russian public listened to him, and no one found anything to reply to him.” Nods of agreement met the insults uttered against the tsar and his family; Cossacks, policemen and soldiers, all without exception—no mercy! And all the Muscovite newspapers called for armed struggle.”1279 In Petersburg, as is well known, a “Soviet of the Workers’ Deputies” was formed on 13 October, headed by the incomparable Parvus and Trotsky, and with the straw man Khroustalëv‐Nossarëv as a bonus. This Soviet aimed for the complete annihilation of the government. The events of October had even greater and more tragic consequences in Kiev and Odessa: two great pogroms against the Jews, which must now be examined. They were the subject of detailed reports of Senate committees of inquiry—these were the most rigorous investigative procedures in Imperial Russia, the Senate representing the highest and most authoritative judicial institution and of the greatest independence.
It is Senator Tourau who drafted the report on the Kiev pogrom.1280 He writes that the causes of this “are related to the troubles that have won the whole of Russia in recent years”, and he supports this assertion by a detailed description of what preceded it and the course of the facts themselves. Let us remind that after the events of 9 January in Saint Petersburg, after months of social unrest, after the infamous defeat against Japan, the imperial government found nothing better to do to calm the minds than to proclaim on the 27th of August, the complete administrative autonomy of the higher education institutions and the territory on which they were located. This measure had no other result than to turn up the revolutionary heat. 1278Witte, Memoirs, op. cit., t. 2, pp. 52 54. ‒ 1279Kievlianin, 1905, no. 305: Choulguine*, annexes, op. cit., pp. 271 274. ‒ 1280Vseppodaneïchiï ottchët o proizvedennom senatorom Tourau izsledovanii pritchin besporiadkov, byvehikh v gor. Kicvc (Report of Senator Tourau on the causes of the disorders in the city of Kiev), Materialy k istorii rousskoi kontr‐revolutsii, t. 1. Pogromy po olitsialnym dokoumentam, Saint Petersburg, 1908, pp. 203 296. ‒
It is thus, writes Senator Tourau, that “individuals having nothing to do with the scientific activity of these institutions were free to access them,” and they did so “for the purpose of political propaganda.” At the University and Polytechnic of Kiev “a series of meetings were organised by the students, to which participated an external audience,” and they were called “popular meetings”; a more numerous day‐to‐day public went there: at the end of September, up to “several thousand people.” During these meetings, red flags were displayed, “passionate speeches were given about the deficiencies of the political regime in place, on the necessity of fighting the government”; “funds were raised for the purchase of weapons”, “leaflets were distributed and brochures on revolutionary propaganda were sold.” In mid‐October, “the university as well as the Polytechnic Institute had gradually been transformed into arenas for open and unbridled anti‐government propaganda. Revolutionary militants who were, until recently, prosecuted by the authorities for organising clandestine meetings in private places, now felt invulnerable,” they “hatched and discussed plans to bring down the existing political system.” But even this did not seem sufficient and the revolutionary action began its expansion: by attracting the “pupils of secondary schools”, in other words, high school pupils, and by moving the field of revolutionary activity: (A Jewish student takes the floor to denounce the Kishinev pogrom, immediately leaflets are spread out in the room and cries are heard: “Down with the police! Down with the autocracy!”); in some cases at a meeting of the Society of Art and Literature (windows are broken, “we break chairs and staircase ramps to throw them on peacekeepers”). And there was no authority to prevent this: the universities, autonomous, now had their own law. The description of these events, supported by the statements of more than five hundred witnesses, alternates throughout this report with remarks on the Jews who stand out in the background of this revolutionary crowd. “During the years of the Russian revolution of 1905 1907, the revolutionary activity of the ‒ Jews increased considerably”. No doubt the novelty of the thing made it seem obvious. “The Jewish youth,” the report says, “dominated by numbers both at the 9 September meeting at the Polytechnic Institute and during the occupation of the premises of the Arts and Literary Society”; and, also, on 23 September in the University Hall where “up to 5,000 students and persons outside the university were gathered, with more than 500 women among them.” On October 3rd, at the Polytechnic Institute, “nearly 5,000 people gathered… with a Jewish majority of women.” The preponderant role of the Jews is mentioned again and again: at the meetings of 5 9 October; at the university meeting on ‒ 12 October, in which “participated employees of the railway administration, students, individuals of indeterminate professions” as well as “masses of Jews of both sexes”; on 13 October at the university where “nearly 10,000 people from diverse backgrounds gathered” and speeches were delivered by S‐R. and Bund militants. (The Jewish Encyclopædia confirms the fact that even beyond Kiev, during demonstrations celebrating new freedoms, “most of the protesters
in the Pale of Settlement were Jews.” However, it calls “lies” the information according to which, in Ekaterinoslav, “they were collecting silver for the Emperor’s coffin in the street,” and in Kiev they “lacerated the portraits of the Emperor in the premises of the Municipal Duma.”1281 Yet this last fact is precisely confirmed by the Tourau report.) In Kiev, in October, the revolutionary movement was gaining momentum. Alexander Schlichter (future Bolshevik leader, specialist in flour requisitions and “Agriculture Commissioner” in Ukraine just before the great organised famine) fomented a south‐western railway strike, paralysing the trains to Poltava, Kursk, Voronezh, and Moscow. Threats were made to force the workers of the Kiev mechanical construction factory to go on strike on 12 October. At the university, “exceptional collections ‘for armaments’ took place: the participants threw gold coins, bank notes, silverware, a lady even offered her earrings.” “Flying detachments” were formed with the mission of interrupting by force the work in high schools, the factories, the transports, the commerce, and to “prepare the armed resistance to the forces of order.” The whole movement “had to take to the streets.” On the 14th of October, the newspapers ceased to appear, with the exception of The Kievian, aligned on the right; only the telegrammes relating to the liberation movement were allowed to pass. The “flying detachments” prevented the trams from rolling, breaking their windows (some passengers were wounded). At the first appearance of the agitators everything was closed, everything stopped; the post office closed its doors after a bomb threat; streams of students and pupils were converging towards the university at the call of Schlichter, as well as “young Jews of various professions”. It was then that the authorities took the first steps. It was forbidden to meet in the streets and in public squares, and the cordoning off by the army of the university and the Polytechnic took place in order for only the students to be allowed in, “arrest… of a few individuals for contempt of the police and the army”, of some S.‐R. and Social Democrats, of the lawyer Ratner, who “had actively participated in popular meetings” (Schlichter, him, had taken off). The trams began to circulate again, the shops re‐opened their doors, and in Kiev the days of 16 and 17 October went by peacefully. It was in this context (which was that of many other places in Russia) that the Emperor, relying on the gratitude of the population, launched on 17 October the Manifesto establishing the liberties and a parliamentary system of government. The news reached Kiev by telegram on the night of the 18th, and in the morning the text of the Manifesto was sold or distributed in the streets of the city (as for the newspaper The Kievian, “Jewish student youth rushed to buy it and immediately tear it ostensibly into pieces”). The authorities ordered ipso facto the release of both those who had been arrested in the last days and those who had previously been “charged with assault on the security of the State”, with the exception, however, of those who had used explosives. Both the police
1281SJE, t. 6, p. 567.
and the army had deserted the streets, “important rallies” were formed, at first calmly. “In the vicinity of the university there was a large crowd of students, high school pupils and “a significant number of young Jews of both sexes”. Giving way to their demands, the rector “had the portal of the main building opened.” Immediately “the great hall was invaded by a part of the crowd which destroyed the portraits of the Emperor, tore up the red hangings” to make flags and banners, and some “noisily invited the public to kneel before Schlichter by virtue of victim of arbitrariness.” If “those who were near him actually fell on their knees,” another part of the public “considered that all that had just taken place was offensive to their national sentiments.” Then the crowd went to the Municipal Duma, and at its head Schlichter pranced around on a horse, displaying a red band, and at every halt harangued the crowd, claiming that “the struggle against the government was not over.” Meanwhile, in the Nicholas Park, “the Jews had thrown a rope around the statue of the Emperor [Nicholas I] and tried to overthrow it from its pedestal”; “At another place, Jews wearing red bands began to insult four soldiers who passed by, spitting on them”; the crowd threw stones on a patrol of soldiers, wounded six, and two demonstrators were hit by the firing of a riposte. However, the interim mayor was visited by a group of peaceful citizens who “asked for the opening of the meeting room of the municipal council” so that the grateful protesters could “express their feelings about the Manifesto. Their request was met” and a peaceful rally was held “under the presidency of the municipal councillor Scheftel.” But a new wave, many thousands of people wearing red badges and ribbons, flocked in; “it was made up of students, people of different social classes, age, sex and condition, but the Jews were especially noted for it”; one party burst into the meeting room, the others occupied the square in front of the Duma. “In a moment all the national flags which had decorated the Duma on the occasion of the Manifesto were torn out and replaced by red and black banners. At that moment a new procession approached, carrying at arm’s length the lawyer Ratner who had just gotten out of prison; he called the crowd to release all the other prisoners; on the balcony of the Duma, Schlichter publicly embraced him. For his part, the latter “exhorted the population to go on a general strike… and pronounced insulting words addressed to the person of the Sovereign. In the meantime, the crowd had torn the Emperor’s portraits hung in the assembly hall of the Duma, and broken the emblems of imperial power which had been placed on the balcony for the festivities.” “There is no doubt that these acts were perpetrated by both Russians and Jews”; a “Russian worker” had even begun to break the crown, some demanded that it should be put back in its place, “but a few moments later it was again thrown to the ground, this time by a Jew who then broke in half of the letter ‘N’”; “Another young man, Jewish in appearance,” then attacked the jewels of the diadem. All the furniture of the Duma was shattered, the administrative documents torn. Schlichter directed the operations: in the corridors, “money was collected for unknown purposes”. Excitement in front of the Duma, however, only increased; perched on the roof of stationary
trams, orators delivered fiery speeches; but it was Ratner and Schlichter who were the most successful from the balcony of the Duma. “An apprentice of Jewish nationality began shouting from the balcony: ‘Down with the autocracy!’; another Jew, properly dressed: ‘Same to the swine!’”; “Another Jew, who had cut the tsar’s head from the picture, reproducing him, introduced his own by the orifice thus formed, and began to yell at the balcony: ‘I am the tsar!’”; “the building of the Duma passed completely into the hands of revolutionary socialist extremists as well as the Jewish youth who had sympathised with them, losing all control of itself.” I dare say that something stupid and evil has revealed itself in this frantic jubilation: the inability to remain within certain limits. What, then, prompted these Jews, in the midst of the delirious plebs, to trample so brutally what the people still venerated? Aware of the precarious situation of their people and their families, on 18 and 19 October they could not, in dozens of cities, refrain from embarking in such events with such passion, to the point of becoming its soul and sometimes its main actors? Let us continue reading the Tourau report: “Respect for the national sentiment and the symbols venerated by the people was forgotten. As if a part of the population… did not shy away from any means of expressing its contempt…”; “the indignities carried out to the portraits of the Emperor excited an immense popular emotion. Cries came from the crowd gathered in front of the Duma: ‘Who has dethroned the tsar?’, others wept.” “Without being a prophet, one could foresee that such offences would not be forgiven to the Jews,” “voices rose to express astonishment at the inaction of the authorities; here and there, in the crowd… they began to shout: ‘We must break some kikes!’” Near the Duma, the police and an infantry company stood idly by. At that moment, a squadron of dragoons appeared briefly, greeted by shots from the windows and the balcony of the Duma; they began to bombard the infantry company with stones and bottles, to blast it from all sides: the Duma, the Stock Exchange, the crowd of demonstrators. Several soldiers were wounded; the captain gave orders to open fire. There were seven dead and one hundred and thirty wounded. The crowd dispersed. But on the evening of the 18th of October, “the news of the degradations committed on the Emperor’s portraits, the crown, the emblems of the monarchy, the national flag, circled the city, and spread into the suburbs. Small groups of passers‐by, mostly workers, craftsmen, merchants, who commented on the events with animation put the full responsibility for them on the Jews, who always stood out clearly from the other demonstrators.” “In the Podol district, the workers’ crowd decided to seize all the ‘democrats’… who had fomented the disturbances and placed them in a state of arrest ‘pending the orders of His Majesty the Emperor’.” In the evening, “a first group of demonstrators gathered in the Alexander Plaza, brandishing the portrait of the Emperor and singing the national anthem. The crowd grew rapidly and, as many Jews returned from the Krechtchatik with red insignia in the buttonhole, they were taken for the perpetrators of the disorders perpetrated
in the Duma and became the target of aggressions; some were beaten.” This was already the beginning of the pogrom against the Jews. Now, to understand both the unpardonable inaction of the authorities during the sacking of the Duma and the destruction of the national emblems, but also their even more unpardonable inaction during the pogrom itself, one has to take a look at what was happening within the organs of power. At first glance, one might think it was the result of a combination of circumstances. But their accumulation has been such in Kiev (as well as in other places) that one cannot fail to discern the mismanagement of the imperial administration of the last years, the consequences of which were fatal. As for the governor of Kiev, he was simply absent. Vice‐Governor Rafalski had just taken office, had not had time to find his bearings, and lacked confidence in the exercise of temporary responsibilities. Above him, Governor General Kleigels, who had authority over a vast region, had, from the beginning of October, taken steps to be released from his duties—for health reasons. (His real motivations remain unknown, and it is not excluded that his decision was dictated by the bubbling revolution of September, which he did not know how to control.) In any case, he, too, considered himself as temporary, while in October the directives of the Ministry of the Interior continued to rain on him— 10 October: take the most energetic measures “to prevent disorder in the street and to put an end to it by all means in case they occur”; 12: “repress street demonstrations, do not hesitate to use armed force”; 13: “do not tolerate any rally or gathering in the streets and, if necessary, disperse them by force”. On 14 October, as we have seen, the unrest in Kiev has crossed a dangerous limit. Kleigels brought together his close collaborators, including the Kiev chief of police, Colonel Tsikhotski, and the deputy head of security (again, the leader was absent), Kouliabka, a man as agitated as he was ineffective, the very one who, by stupidity, was about to expose Stolypin to the blows of his assassin.1282 From the panicked report of the latter stemmed the possibility not only of demonstrations of armed people in the streets of Kiev, but also of an armed insurrection. Kleigels, therefore, renounced reliance on the police, put in place the provisions for “recourse to the armed forces to assist the civil authorities”— and, on 14 October, handed over “his full powers to the military command”, more precisely to the commander—on a temporary basis once again (the commander himself is absent, but it must be said that the situation is anything but worrying!)—from the Kiev military region, the general Karass. The responsibility for security in the city was entrusted to General Drake. (Is it not comical enough: which of the surnames that have just been enumerated makes it possible to suppose that the action is taking place in Russia?) General Karass “found himself in a particularly difficult situation” insofar as he did not know the “data of the situation nor of the staff of the administration and of the police”; “By giving him his powers, General Kleigels did not consider it
1282See infra, Chapter 10.
necessary to facilitate the work of his successor; he confined himself to respecting forms, and at once ceased to deal with anything.” It is now time to talk about the chief of police, Tsikhotski. As early as 1902, an administrative inspection had revealed that he concealed the practice of extortion of the Jews in exchange for the right of residence. It was also discovered that he lived “above his means”, that he had bought—as well as for his son‐in‐law—properties worth 100,000 rubles. It was considered that he should be brought to justice when Kleigels was appointed Governor‐General; very quickly (and, of course, not without having received a large bribe), the latter intervened so that Tsikhotski was kept at his post and even obtained a promotion and the title of general. Regarding the promotion, it did not work, but there were no penalties either, although General Trepov had been working towards this end from Petersburg. Tsikhotski was informed at the beginning of October that Kleigels had asked to leave his post at the end of the month—his morale fell even lower, he saw himself already condemned. And on the night of the 18th of October, at the same time as the Imperial Manifesto, the official confirmation of the retirement of Kleigels came from Saint Petersburg. Tsikhotski now had nothing to lose. (Another detail: even though the situation was so troubled, Kleigels left his post even before the arrival of his successor, who was none other than the pearl of the Imperial administration, General Sukhomlinov, the future Minister of Defence who scuttled the preparations for the war against Germany; as for the functions of Governor‐General, they were temporarily assumed by the aforesaid General Karass.) And it was thus that “there was no rapid termination of the confusion that had settled within the police after the handing over of power to the army, but that it only increased to manifest itself with the greatest acuity during the disorders.” The fact that Kleigels had “renounced his ‘full powers’… and that these had been handed over for an indefinite period to the military authorities of the city of Kiev is mainly at the origin of the uncertain mutual relations which later established themselves between civil authorities and military authorities”; “the extent and limits of the powers [of the army] were not known to anybody” and this vagueness “lead to a general disorganisation of services.” This manifested itself from the beginning of the pogrom against the Jews. “Many police officers were convinced that the power had been fully handed over to the military command and that only the army was competent to act and to repress the disorders”; that is why they “did not feel concerned by the disorders which took place in their presence. As for the army, referring to an article of the provisions on the use of the armed forces to assist the civil authorities, it was awaiting indications from the police, considering with reason that it was not its responsibility to fulfil the missions of the latter”: these provisions “stipulated precisely” that the civil authorities “present at the scene of the disorders should guide the joint action of the police and the army with a view to their repression.” It was also up to the civil authorities to determine when to use force. Moreover, “Kleigels had not considered it useful to inform
the military command about the situation in the city, nor had he told it what he knew about the revolutionary movement in Kiev. And this is what made units of the army begin to scour the city aimlessly.” So, the pogrom against the Jews began in the evening of 18 October. “At its initial stage, the pogrom undoubtedly assumed the character of retaliation against the offence to national sentiment. The assaults against the Jews passed in the street, the destruction of shops and the merchandise they contained were accompanied by words such as: ‘Here it is, your liberty! Here it is, your Constitution and your revolution! This, this is for the portraits of the tsar and the crown!’” The next morning, 19 October, a large crowd came from the Duma to the Cathedral of Saint Sophia, bearing the empty frames of the Tsar’s portraits and the broken emblems of the imperial power. It stopped at the university to have the damaged portraits restored; a mass was celebrated and “the Metropolitan Flavian exhorted the people not to indulge in excesses and return home”. “But while the people who formed the heart of the patriotic demonstration… maintained an exemplary order, individuals who joined them along the way allowed themselves to be subjected to all kinds of violence against the Jewish passers‐by, as well as high school pupils or students in uniform.” They were then joined by “the workers, the homeless of the flea market, the bums”; “groups of rioters sacked the houses and shops of the Jews, threw into the street their goods and merchandise, which were partly destroyed on the spot, partly plundered”; “the servants, the guardians of buildings, the little shopkeepers apparently saw nothing wrong with taking advantage of the property of others”; “others, on the contrary, remained isolated to all interested goals until the last day of the disorders,” “they tore from the hands of their companions the objects that they had stolen and, without paying attention to their value, destroyed them on the spot.” The rioters did not touch the shops of the Karaites nor the “houses where they were presented portraits of the Emperor.” “But, on the whole, only a few hours after it had begun, the pogrom took the form of a pitiless rampage. On the 18th, it continued long into the night, then stopped on its own, to resume on the morning of the 19th, and to cease only on the evening of the 20th. (There were no fires, except one in the Podol district.) On the 19th, “luxury shops belonging to Jews were sacked as far as the city centre on the Krechtchatik. The heavy metal curtains and the locks were forced after half an hour of hard work”; “Expensive textiles, velvet cloths were thrown into the street and spread out in the mud, in the rain, like rags of no value. In front of the shop of the jeweller Markisch, on the Krechtchatik, the pavement was littered with precious objects”—and the same for fashion shops, the dry goods stores; the pavement was fraught with account books, invoices. In Lipki (the chic neighbourhood) “the private mansions of Jews were sacked,— that of Baron Ginzburg, of Halperine, of Alexander and Leon Brodksy, of Landau, and many more. All the luxurious decoration of these houses was destroyed, the furniture broken and thrown into the street”; likewise, “a model secondary school for the Jews, the Brodsky school, was ravaged,” “there was
nothing left of the marble staircases and the wrought iron ramps.” In all, it was “nearly fifteen hundred apartments and commercial premises belonging to Jews were plundered.” Starting from the fact that “nearly two‐thirds of the city’s trade was in the hands of Jews,” Tourau assessed losses—including the richest mansions—to “several million rubles.” It had been planned to ransack not only Jewish houses, but also those of prominent liberal personalities. On the 19th, Bishop Plato “led a procession through the streets of Podol where the pogrom had been particularly violent, urging the people to put an end to the abuses. Imploring the crowd to spare the lives and property of the Jews, the bishop knelt several times before it… A broken man came out of the crowd and shouted threateningly: ‘You too, you’re for the Jews?’” We have already seen the carelessness that prevailed among the authorities. “General Drake did not take appropriate measures to ensure the proper organisation of security.” The troops “should not have been scattered in small detachments,” “there were too many patrols,” and “the men often stayed idle.” And here we are: “What struck everyone during the pogrom was the obvious inaction, close to complacency, which was shown by both the army and the police. The latter was virtually absent, and the troops moved slowly, merely replying to the shots fired from certain houses, while on either side of the street the shops and apartments of the Jews were sacked with impunity.” A prosecutor asked a patrol of Cossacks to intervene to protect stores that were looted nearby; “the Cossacks replied that they would not go, that it was not their sector.” More serious still: a whole series of witnesses had “the impression that the police and the army had been dispatched not to disperse the breakers but to protect them.” Here the soldiers declared that they had “been ordered to ensure that there were no clashes and that the Russians were not attacked.” Elsewhere they said that if they had “taken an oath to God and to the tsar,” it was not to protect “those who had lacerated and jeered at the portraits of the tsar.” As for the officers, “they considered themselves powerless to prevent disorders, and felt themselves entitled to use force only in cases where the violence was directed against their men.” Example: of a house “ran out a Jew covered with blood, pursued by the crowd. An infantry company was right there, but it paid no attention to what was going on and quietly went up the street.” Elsewhere, “the plunderers were massacring two Jews with table legs; a detachment of cavalry stationed ten paces away contemplated placidly the scene.” It is not surprising that the man in the street could have understood things like this: “The tsar graciously granted us the right to beat the kikes for six days”; and the soldiers: “You see, is all this conceivable without the approval of the authorities?” For their part, the police officers, “when they were demanded to put an end to the disorders, objected that they could do nothing to the extent that the full powers had been transferred to the military command.” But there was also a large crowd of thugs that took flight “due to a police commissioner who brandished his revolver, assisted by only one peacekeeper”, and “police officer
Ostromenski, with three patrolmen and some soldiers, succeeded in preventing acts of looting in his neighbourhood without even resorting to force.” The looters did not have firearms, while the young Jews, they, had some. However, unlike what happened in Gomel, here the Jews had not organised their self‐defence, even though “shots were fired from many houses” by members of self‐defence groups who included in their ranks “both Jews and Russians who had taken their part”; “It is undeniable that in some cases these shots were directed against the troops and constituted acts of retaliation for the shots fired on the crowd during the demonstrations” of the previous days; “Sometimes Jews fired on the patriotic parades organised in response to the revolutionary demonstrations that had taken place before.” But these shots “had deplorable consequences. Without producing any effect on the rioters, they gave the troops a pretext to apply their instructions to the letter”; “as soon as shots came from a house, the troops who were there, without even inquiring whether they were directed against them or against the rioters, sent a salvo into its windows, after which the crowd” rushed in and ransacked it. “We saw cases where we were firing at a house solely because someone had claimed that shots had gone”; “it also happened that the looters climbed the stairs of a house and fired shots towards the street to provoke the troops’ retaliation” and then engage in plundering. And things got worse. “Some of the policemen and soldiers did not disdain the goods thrown into the street by the vandals, picked them up and hid them in their pockets or under their hoods.” And, although these cases “were exceptional and punctual”, one still saw a police officer dismantling the door of a shop himself, and a corporal imitating him. (The false rumours of looting by the army began to circulate when General Evert ordered in his area to confiscate goods taken by the looters and stolen goods and to transport them to the warehouses of the army for subsequent restitution to their owners on presentation of a receipt, thus saving property worth several tens of thousands of rubles.) It is hardly surprising that this scoundrel of Tsikhotski, seeing his career broken, not only did not take any action concerning the action of the police (having learned of the beginning of the pogrom on the evening of the 18th, he did not communicate by telegram any information to the neighbourhood police stations before late in the evening on the 19th), not only did he not transmit any information to the generals of military security, but he himself, passing through the city, had “considered what was going on with calm and indifference”, contenting himself to say to the plunderers: “Move along, gentlemen” (and those few, encouraged one another: “Do not be afraid, he’s joking!”); and when, from the balcony of the Duma, they began to shout: “Pound the kikes, plunder, break!” And the crowd then carried the chief of police in triumph, the latter “addressed greetings in response to the cheering of the demonstrators.” It was not until the 20th, after General Karass had sent him a severe warning (as to the Director of the Governor‐General’s Chancery, he declared that Tsikhovsky
would not escape the penal colony), that he ordered the police to take all measures to put an end to the pogrom. Senator Tourau effectively had to bring him to justice. Another security official, disgruntled with his career, General Bessonov, “was in the midst of the crowd of rioters and was peacefully parleying with them: ‘We have the right to demolish, but it is not right to steal.’ The crowd shouted: ‘Hurray!’” At another moment he behaved “as an indifferent witness to the plunder. And when one of the breakers shouted: ‘Slam the kikes!’ [Bessonov] reacted with an approving laugh.” He reportedly told a doctor that “if he had wanted to, he could have put an end to the pogrom in half an hour, but the Jews’ participation in the revolutionary movement had been too great, they had to pay the price.” After the pogrom, summoned by the military authorities to explain himself, he denied having spoken favourably of the pogrom and declared, on the contrary, to have exhorted people to return to calm: “Have mercy on us, do not force the troops to use their weapons… to shed Russian blood, our own blood!” Delegations went one after the other to General Karass, some requesting that some of them take troops out of the city, others for the use of force, and others for taking measures to protect their property. However, throughout the day of the 19th, the police did nothing and the military executed orders badly. On 20 October, Karass ordered “to encircle and apprehend the hooligans.” Many arrests were made; once, the army opened fire on the rioters, killing five and wounding several others. By the evening of the 20th, the pogrom was definitely over, but late in the evening “the rumour that the Jews murdered Russians sowed dismay among the population”; retaliation was feared. During the pogrom, according to police estimates (but a number of victims were taken by the crowd), there were a total of 47 deaths, including 12 Jews, and 205 wounded, one‐third of them Jews. Tourau concludes his report by explaining that “the root cause of the Kiev pogrom lies in the traditional enmity between the population of Little Russia and the Jewish population, motivated by differences of opinion. As for its immediate cause, it resides in the outrage of national sentiment caused by the revolutionary manifestations to which the Jewish youth had taken an active part.” The working class “imputed to the Jews only” the responsibility for the “blasphemies uttered against what was most sacred to them. They could not understand, after the grace granted by the Emperor, the very existence of the revolutionary movement, and explained it by the desire of the Jews to obtain ‘their own liberties’.” “The flip side of the war in which Jewish youth had always openly expressed its deepest satisfaction, its refusal to fulfil its military obligations, its participation in the revolutionary movement, acts of violence and the killings of agents of the State, its insulting attitude towards the armed forces… all this incontestably provoked exasperation towards the Jews among the working class,” and “this is why in Kiev there have been several cases
where many Russians gave open shelter to unfortunate Jews who fled from the violence, but categorically refused Jewish youth.” As for the newspaper The Kievian, it wrote1283: “Poor Jews! Where is the fault of these thousands of families? … For their misfortune, these poor Jews could not control their brainless youngsters … But brainless youngsters, there are also some among us, the Russians, and we could not control them either!” The revolutionary youth scoured the countryside, but it was the peaceful adult Jews who had to pay the piper. Thus, on both sides, we have dug a bottomless abyss.
As for the Odessa pogrom, we have a similar and equally detailed report, that of Senator Kozminski.1284 In Odessa, where a lively revolutionary sentiment had always existed, the tremors had started since January; the blast took place on the 13th of June (independently, therefore, of the arrival of the Potemkin battleship in the harbour of Odessa on the 14th). The entire day of the 14th of June passed in turmoil, especially among the young, but this time also among the workers, whose “numerous crowds began to impose by force the cessation of work in plants and factories.” A crowd “of about three hundred people attempted to break into a [tea] parlour… Several shots were fired at the head of the local police station, who was preventing the crowd from entering, but the latter was dispersed” by a salvo shot by a detachment of policemen. “However, the crowd soon re‐formed,” and proceeded to the police station; some shots were fired from the Doks house: “from the windows and the balcony, several shots were fired at the police officers.” Another group “erected a barricade with building materials in the street, and then began shooting at a police detachment.” In another street, a crowd of the same kind “overturned several tramway wagons with horses”. “A fairly large group of Jews broke into a tin factory, threw tobacco in the eyes [of a police officer]…, scattered at the appearance of a police detachment while opening fire with revolvers; among them four Jews [their names follow] were arrested on the spot”; at a crossroads, “a gathering of Jews was formed, [two of them] fired revolver shots at a mounted guard”; “in general, throughout the day of 14 June, almost all the streets of the city were the scene of clashes between Jews and the security forces, during which they used firearms and projectiles,” wounding several police officers. “A dozen Jews were 1283Kievlianin, 1905, nos. 290, 297, 311, 317, 358, in Choulguine, annexes, op. cit., pp. 286‒ 302. 1284Vseppodanischi ottehel senatora Kuzminskovo o pritchinakh bezporiadkov, proiskhodivehikh v r. Odcssc v oktiabre 1905 g., Io poriadke deïstvi m mestnykh vlaslei (Report by Senator Kouzminski on the causes of the disorders in the city of Odessa in October 1905 and on the actions carried out by the local authorities), Kievskii i odcsskii pogromy v ottehetakh senatorov Tourau i Kouzminskovo. SPb., Letopissets, (1907), pp. 111 220. ‒
also wounded,” which the crowd took to hide them. As he tried to escape, a certain Tsipkine threw a bomb, causing his own death as well as that of police officer Pavlovski. It was at this time that the Potemkin entered the Odessa harbour! A crowd of nearly five thousand people assembled, “many men and women gave speeches calling the people for an uprising against the government”; among the students who got aboard the battleship were Konstantin Feldman (who urged to support the movement in town by cannonading it, but “the majority of the crew opposed it”). And the authorities in all this? The governor of Odessa—in other words, the head of the police—Neudhart, was already completely distraught on the day of the arrival of the Potemkin; he felt (as in Kiev) that “the civil authorities were unable to restore order, and that is why he had handed over all subsequent decisions aimed at the cessation of disorder to the military command, that is to say, the commander of the Odessa garrison, General Kakhanov. (Did there exist a superior authority to that one in Odessa? Yes, of course, and it was Governor General Karangozov, who, as the reader will have guessed, was acting on a temporary basis, and felt hardly at ease.) General Kakhanov found nothing better than to have the port sealed by the army and to enclose the thousands of “unsafe elements” who had gathered there to cut them off—not yet contaminated—from the city. On 15 June, the uprising in Odessa and the Potemkin mutiny collapsed into one movement: the inhabitants of the city, “among whom many students and workers” boarded the battleship, exhorting “the crew to common actions”. The crowd in the harbour rushed to “plunder the goods that were stored there”, beginning with the boxes of wine; then stormed the warehouses to which it set fire (more than 8 million rubles of losses). The fire threatened the quarantine port where foreign vessels were anchored and import goods were stored. Kakhanov still could not resolve to put an end to the disorder by force, fearing that the Potemkin would reply by bombarding the city. The situation remained equally explosive on the 15th. The next day the Potemkin drew five salvos on the town, three of them blank, and called on the commander of the armed forces to board the ship to demand the withdrawal “of the troops from the city and the release of all political prisoners.” On the same day, 16 June, at the funeral of the only sailor killed, “scarcely had the procession entered the town than it was joined by all kinds of individuals who soon formed a crowd of several thousand persons, principally young Jews,” and on the grave an orator, “after shouting ‘Down with the autocracy!’, called on his comrades to act with more determination, without fear of the police.” But that very day, and for a long time, the state of siege was proclaimed in the city. The Potemkin had to take off to escape the squadron that had come to capture it. And although the four days it had been anchored in the port Odessa “and the many contacts which had been established between the people and it substantially raised the morale of the revolutionaries” and “gave rise to the hope
of a possible future support of the armed forces”, despite of that the summer was going to end calmly, perhaps even no upset would have occurred in Odessa if, on the 27th of August, had been promulgated the incomparable law on the autonomy of higher education institutions! Immediately, “a ‘soviet coalition’ was formed by the students,” which, “by its determination and audacity, succeeded in bringing under its influence not only the student community but also the teaching force” (professors feared “unpleasant confrontations with the students, such as the boycott of classes, the expulsion of such and such professor from the amphi, etc.”). Large gatherings took place at the university, “fund‐raising to arm the workers and the proletariat, for the military insurrection, for the purchase of weapons with a view to forming militias and self‐defence groups”, “discussions were held about the course of action to be taken at the time of the insurrection.” At these meetings the “faculty of professors” took an active part, “sometimes with the rector Zantchevski at its head,” who promised to “make available to the students all the means at their disposal to facilitate their participation in the liberation movement.” On 17 September, the first meeting at the university took place “in the presence of an outside public so numerous that it had to be split into two groups”; The S.‐R. Teper “and two Jewish students made speeches calling on the public to lead the struggle to free the country from political oppression and a deleterious autocracy.” On 30 September, the state of siege was lifted in Odessa and henceforth rushed to these meetings “students of all educational establishments, some of whom were not more than fourteen years old”; the Jews “were the principal orators, calling for open insurrection and armed struggle.” On 12 and 13 October, before all other secondary schools, “the pupils of two business schools, that of the Emperor Nicholas I and that of Feig, ceased to attend classes, being the most sensitive to revolutionary propaganda”; on the 14th, it was decided to halt the work in all the other secondary schools, and business schools and the students went to all the high schools of the city to force the pupils to go on course strikes. The rumour went around that in front of the Berezina high school, three students and three high school students had been wounded with swords by police officers. Certainly, “the investigation would establish with certainty that none of the young people had been affected and that the pupils had not yet had time to leave the school.” But this kind of incident, what a boon to raise the revolutionary pressure! On the same day, the courses ceased at the university, forty‐eight hours after the start of the school year; the striking students burst into the municipal Duma shouting: “Death to Neudhart!” and demanding that they stop paying salaries to the police. After the episode of the Potemkin, Neudhart had regained power in his hands, but until the middle of October he did not make any measure against the revolutionary meetings—besides, could he do very much when the autonomy of universities had been established? On the 15th he received orders from the Ministry of the Interior to prohibit the entrance of outsiders to the university,