200 years together 300-400

and on the following day he surrounded the latter by the army, while ordering the cartridges to be taken out from the armouries, until then sold over‐thecounter. “The closure of the university to the outside world provoked great agitation among Jewish students and Jewish youth,” an immense crowd set out, closing the shops on its way (the American armoury was plundered), overturning streetcars and omnibuses, sawing trees to make barricades, cutting off telegraph and telephone wires for the same purpose, dismantling the gates of the parks. Neudhart asked Kakhanov to have the town occupied by the troops. Then, “the barricades behind which the demonstrators had gathered—mostly Jews, among them women and adolescents—, they began to fire on the troops; shots were fired from the roofs of houses, balconies, and windows”; the army opened fire in its turn, the demonstrators were scattered and the barricades dismantled. “It is impossible to accurately estimate the number of deaths and injuries that occurred on that day, as the health team—consisting mainly of Jewish students in red‐white blouses with a red cross—hurried to take the wounded and the dead to the university infirmary”—thus in an autonomous and inaccessible zone—, “at the Jewish hospital or at the emergency stations near the barricades, as well as in almost all pharmacies.” (They had stopped delivering medicine even before the events.) According to the governor of the city, there were nine deaths, nearly 80 wounded, including some policemen. “Among the participants in the disorders were apprehended that day 214 people, of whom 197 Jews, a large number of women, and 13 children aged 12 to 14 years.” And all this, still twenty‐four hours before the incendiary effect of the Manifesto was felt. One might think that by exposing the role of the Jews so frequently in revolutionary movements, the Senate’s report was biased. But it must be borne in mind that in Odessa the Jews represented one‐third of the population, and, as we have seen, a very significant proportion of the student population; it must also be borne in mind that the Jews had taken an active part in the Russian revolutionary movement, especially in the Pale of Settlement. In addition, Senator Kouzminski’s report provides evidence of its objectivity in many places. On 16 October, “when they arrived at the police station, the people arrested were victims of assault by the police and soldiers”; however, “neither the governor of the city nor the police officials responded in due course… and no investigation was carried out”; it was not until later that more than twenty of those who had been in this precinct declared that “those arrested had been systematically beaten; first they were pushed down a staircase leading to the basement… many of them fell to the ground and it was then that policemen and soldiers, arranged in a row, beat them with the back of their sabres, rubber truncheons, or simply their feet and fists”; the women were not spared. (It is true that, on the same evening, municipal councillors and justices of the peace went to the scene and gathered complaints from the victims. As for the senator,
he identified several culprits during his inquiry in November and had them brought to justice.) “On the 17th of October, the whole town was occupied by the army, patrols were criss-crossing the streets, and public order was not troubled all day. However, the Municipal Duma had met to discuss emergency measures, including how to replace the state police with an urban militia. On the same day, the Bund’s local committee decided to organise a solemn funeral for the victims who had fallen the day before on the barricades, but Neudhart, understanding that such a demonstration would cause, as always, a new revolutionary explosion, “gave the order to remove in secret, of the Jewish hospital” where they were, the five corpses and “to bury them before the scheduled date”, which was done on the night of 18. (The next day the organisers demanded that the corpses be unearthed and brought back to the hospital. Due to the developments of events, the bodies were embalmed there and remained in that state for a long time.) And it was at this time that the news of the Imperial Manifesto spread, pushing Odessa towards new storms. Let us quote first of all the testimony of members of a Jewish self‐defence detachment: “During the pogrom, there was a certain coordination centre that worked quite well… Universities played an enormous role in the preparation of the events of October… the soviet coalition of the Odessa University included” a Bolshevik, a Menshevik, an S.‐R., a representative of the Bund, Zionist Socialists, the Armenian communities, Georgian and Polish ones as well. “Student detachments were formed even before the pogrom”; during “immense meetings at the university”, money was collected to buy weapons, “of course not only to defend ourselves, but with a view to a possible insurrection.” “The soviet coalition also raised funds to arm the students”; “when the pogrom broke out, there were two hundred revolvers at the university,” and “a professor… procured another hundred and fifty others.” A “dictator” was appointed at the head of each detachment “without taking into account his political stance”, and “it happened that a detachment composed mainly of members of the Bund was commanded by a Zionist‐Socialist, or vice versa”; “on Wednesday [19 October], a large quantity of weapons were distributed in a pro‐Zionist synagogue”; “the detachments were made up of Jewish and Russian students, Jewish workers, young Jews of all parties, and a very small number of Russian workers.”1285 A few years later, Jabotinsky wrote that during the pogroms of the year 1905 “the new Jewish soul had already reached its maturity.”1286 And in the still rose‐tinted atmosphere of the February Revolution, a major Russian newspaper gave the following description: “When, during the Neudhart pogroms in 1905, the young militiamen of self‐defence travelled through Odessa, weapons in their
1285Odesskii pogrom i samooborona (The Odessa pogrom and self‐defence), Paris, Zapadnyi Tsentralnyi Komitet Samooborony Poalei Zion, 1906, pp. 50 52. ‒ 1286V. Jabotinsky, Vvedenic (Preface), in K. N. Bialik. Pesni i poemy, op. cit., p. 44.
fists, they aroused emotion and admiration, we were heavy‐hearted, we were touched and full of compassion…”1287 And this is what one of our contemporaries wrote: “The courage shown by Gomel’s fighters inflames tens of thousands of hearts. In Kiev, 1,500 people are engaged in self‐defence detachments, in Odessa several thousands.”1288 But in Odessa, the number of combatants as well as their state of mind—and, in response, the brutality of the police forces—gave a much different turn to events than they had experienced in Kiev. Let us go back to the Kuzminski report. After the proclamation of the Manifesto, on the morning of the 18th, General Kaoulbars, commanding the military district of Odessa, in order “to give the population the possibility of enjoying without restrictions the freedom in all its forms granted by the Manifesto,” ordered the troops not to appear in the streets, “so as not to disturb the joyous humour of the population.” However, “this joyous mood did not last.” On all sides “groups of Jews and students began to flock towards the city centre,” brandishing red flags and shouting: “Down with the autocracy!”, while speakers called for revolution. On the façade of the Duma, two of the words forming the inscription in metal letters “God save the Tsar” were broken; the Council Chamber was invaded, “a large portrait of His Majesty the Emperor was torn to shreds,” the national flag which floated on the Duma was replaced by a red flag. The headdresses of three ecclesiastics, who were in a cab at a funeral, were stolen; later, the funeral procession they conducted was repeatedly stopped, “religious songs interrupted by cheers.” “There was a headless scarecrow bearing the inscription ‘Here is the Autocracy’, and a dead cat was showed off while collecting money ‘to demolish the tsar’ or ‘for Nicholas’s death’.” “The young people, especially the Jews, who were obviously aware of their superiority, taught the Russians that their freedom had not been freely granted to them, that it had been torn from the government by the Jews… They declared openly to the Russians: ‘Now we are going to govern you’,” but also: “We have given you God, we will give you a tsar.” A large crowd of Jews waving red flags long pursued two peacekeepers, one of them managed to escape by the roofs, while on the other, a man named Goubiy, the crowd “armed with revolvers, axes, stakes, and iron bars, found him in an attic, and hurt him so badly that he died during his transport to the hospital; the concierge of the building found two of his fingers cut by axe.” Later, three police officers were beaten and wounded, and the revolvers of five peacekeepers were confiscated. The prisoners were then freed in one, two, and three police stations (where on the 16th there had been beatings, but the detainees had already been released on the orders of Neudhart; in one of these precincts, the liberation of the prisoners was negotiated in exchange for Goubiy’s corpse; sometimes there was nobody behind bars. As for the rector of the university, he actively participated in all this, transmitting to the prosecutor the demands of “a crowd of five thousand
1287D. Aizman, Iskouchenie (Temptation), Rousskaïa volia, 29 April 1917, pp. 2 3. ‒ 1288Praisman, in “22”, op. cit., p. 179.
people”, while “the students went so far as to threaten to hang the police officers”. Neudhart solicited the advice of the mayor of the city, Kryjanovsky, and a professor at the university, Shtchepkin, but they only demanded that he “disarm the police on the spot and make it invisible,” otherwise, added Shchepkin, “the victims of popular revenge cannot be saved, and the police will be legitimately disarmed by force.” (Interrogated later by the senator, he denied having spoken so violently, but one can doubt his sincerity in view of the fact that on the same day he had distributed 150 revolvers to the students and that, during the inquiry, he refused to say where he had procured them.) After this interview, Neudhart ordered (without even warning the chief of police) to withdraw all the peacekeepers “in such a way that from that moment the whole of the city was deprived of any visible police presence”—which could have been understood if the measure had been intended to protect the life of the agents, but at the same time, the streets had been deserted by the army, which, for the moment, was pure stupidity. (But we remember that in Petersburg this was precisely what the press owners demanded from Witte, and it had been difficult for him to resist them.) “After the police left, two types of armed groups appeared: the student militia and the Jewish self‐defence detachments. The first was set up by the ‘soviet coalition’ which had procured arms.” Now, “the municipal militia, made up of armed students and other individuals, placed themselves on guard” instead of policemen. This was done with the assent of General Baron Kaulbars and the governor of the city, Neudhart, while the police chief, Golovin, offered his resignation in protest and was replaced by his deputy, von Hobsberg. A provisional committee was set up at the Municipal Duma; in one of his first statements, he expressed his gratitude to the students of the university “for their way of ensuring the security of the city with energy, intelligence, and devotion”. The committee itself assumed rather vague functions. (During the month of November the press took an interest in one of the members of this committee, also a member of the Duma of the Empire, O. I. Pergament, and in the second Duma somebody had to recall that he proclaimed himself President “of the Republic of the Danube and the Black Sea,” or “President of the Republic of South Russia,”1289 in the intoxication of those days, this was not unlikely.) And what could happen after the streets had been deserted, during these feverish days, by both the army and the police, and that the power had passed into the hands of an inexperienced student militia and groups of self‐defence? “The militia arrested persons who seemed suspicious to it and sent them to the university for examination”; here a student “walked at the head of a group of Jews of about sixty persons who fired revolver shots at random”; “the student militia and Jewish self‐defence groups themselves perpetrated acts of violence directed against the army and peaceful elements of the Russian population, using firearms and killing innocent people.”
1289Gossudarstvennaya Duma—Vtoroy Sozyv (The Duma of Elai—second convocation), Slenogralitcheskiï ollchel, p. 2033.
The confrontation “was inevitable, given the crystallisation of two antagonistic camps among the population.” On the evening of the 18th, “a crowd of demonstrators waving red flags, and composed predominantly of Jews, tried to impose a stoppage of work at the factory at Guen… The workers refused to comply with this demand; after which the same crowd, crossing Russian workmen in the street, demanded that they should uncover themselves before the red flags. As the latter refused,”—well here it is, the proletariat!— from the crowd “shots were fired; the workers, though unarmed, succeeded in dispersing it,” and pursued it until it was joined by another crowd of armed Jews, up to a thousand people, who began to fire on the workmen…; four of them were killed. This is how “brawls and armed clashes between Russians and Jews were unleashed at various points in the city; Russian workers and individuals without any definite occupation, also known as hooligans, began to chase the Jews and to beat them up, and then move on with the rampage and destruction of houses, apartments and shops belonging to Jews.” It was then that a police commissioner called “an infantry company which put an end to the clashes.” On the following day, 19 October, “towards 10, 11 in the morning, there were seen forming in the streets… crowds of Russian workers and persons of various professions carrying icons, portraits of His Majesty the Emperor, as well as the national flag, and singing religious hymns. These patriotic demonstrations composed exclusively of Russians were formed simultaneously at several locations in the city, but their starting point was in the port from where set off a first manifestation of workmen, especially numerous.” There exists “reasons to assert that the anger provoked by the offensive attitude of the Jews over the whole of the previous day, their arrogance and their contempt for the national sentiment shared by the Russian population had to, in one way or another, lead to a reaction of protest.” Neudhart was not ignorant of the fact that a demonstration was being prepared and he authorised it, and it passed under the windows of the commander of the military district and the governor of the city, and then proceeded to the cathedral. “As it went on, the crowd was swollen by the addition of passers‐by, including a large number of hooligans, tramps, women and adolescents.” (But it is appropriate here to draw a parallel between the story of a member of the Poalei Zion: “The pogrom of Odessa was not the work of hooligans… During these days the police did not allow entrance to the city to the tramps of the port,”; “it was the small artisans and the small merchants who gave free rein to their exasperation, the workers and apprentices of various workshops, plants, or factories”, “Russian workers lacking political consciousness”; “I went to Odessa only to see a pogrom organised by provocation, but, alas, I did not find it!” And he explains it as hatred between nationalities.1290) “Not far from the Cathedral Square…, several shots were fired towards the crowd of protesters, one of them killed a little boy who was carrying an icon”;
1290Odesskiï pogrom… (The pogrom of Odessa), Poalei Zion. pp. 64 65. ‒
“the infantry company who arrived on the spot was also greeted by gunfire.” They fired from the windows of the editorial office of the newspaper Yuzhnoye Obozrenie, and “during the entire route of the procession gunshots came from windows, balconies, roofs”; “moreover, explosive devices were launched in several places on the demonstrators”, “six people were killed” by one of them; in the centre of Odessa, “at the corner of Deribassov and Richelieu, three bombs were thrown on a squadron of Cossacks.” “There were many deaths and wounded among the demonstrators,” “not without reason the Russians blamed the Jews, and it is why shouts merged quickly from the crowd: ‘Beat up the kikes!’, ‘Death to the heebs!’,” and “at various points in the city the crowd rushed to the Jewish shops to plunder them”; “these isolated acts were rapidly transformed into a generalised pogrom: all the shops, houses and apartments of the Jews on the path of the demonstration were completely devastated, all their property destroyed, and what had escaped the vandals was stolen by the cohorts of hooligans and beggars who had followed the lead of the protesters”; “it was not uncommon for scenes of looting to unfold under the eyes of demonstrators carrying icons and singing religious hymns.” On the evening of the 19th, “the hatred of the antagonist camps reached its peak: each one hit and tortured mercilessly, sometimes with exceptional cruelty, and without distinction of sex or age, those who fell into their hands.” According to the testimony of a doctor at the university clinic, “hooligans threw children from the first or second floor onto the road; one of them grabbed a child by the feet and smashed his skull against the wall. For their part, the Jews did not spare the Russians, killing those they could at the first opportunity; during the day they did not show themselves in the streets, but fired on the passers‐by from the doors, from the windows, etc., but in the evening they met in numerous groups,” going as far as “besieging police stations.” “The Jews were particularly cruel with police officers when they managed to catch them.” (Here is now the point of view of the Poalei Zion: “The press spread a legend that self‐defence had taken a huge crowd of hooligans and locked them up in the university premises. Numbers in the order of 800 to 900 individuals were cited; it is in fact necessary to divide this number by ten. It was only at the beginning of the pogrom that the vandals were brought to the university, after which things took a completely different turn.”1291 There are also descriptions of the Odessa pogrom in the November 1905 issues of the newspaper The Kievian.1292) And what about the police, in all this? In accordance with Neudhart’s stupid dispositions, “on 19 October… as on the following days, the police were totally absent from the streets of Odessa”: a few patrols, and only occasionally. “The vagueness that reigned in the relations between civil authorities and military authorities, which ran counter to the legal provisions,” had the consequence that “the police officers did not have a very clear idea of their obligations”; even more, “all the police officers, considering that the
1291Ibidem, p. 53. 1292The Kievlianin, 14 Nov. 1905, in Choulguine, annexes, op. cit., pp. 303 308. ‒
responsibility for the political upheavals was incumbent on the Jews” and that “these were revolutionaries, felt the greatest sympathy for the pogrom which was unfolding before their eyes and judged even superfluous to conceal themselves.” Worse: “In many cases, police officers themselves incited hooligans to ransack and loot Jewish houses, apartments, and shops”; and at the height of it: “in civilian clothes, without their insignia”, they themselves “took part in these rampages,” “directed the crowd,” and there were even “cases where police officers fired on the ground or in the air to make the military believe that these shots came from the windows of houses belonging to Jews.” And it was the police who did that! Senator Kouzminski brought to trial forty‐two policemen, twenty‐three of whom were officers. And the army—“scattered over the immense territory of the city” and supposed to “act autonomously”? “The military also did not pay any attention to the pogroms, since they were not aware of their exact obligations and were not given any indication by the police officers”, they “did not know against whom or according to what order they should use armed force; on the other hand, the soldiers could assume that the pogrom had been organised with the approval of the police.” Consequently, “the army took no action against the vandals.” Worse still, “there is evidence that soldiers and Cossacks also took part in the looting of shops and houses.” “Some witnesses affirmed that soldiers and Cossacks massacred innocent people for no reason.” Again, these are innocent people who have paid for others. “On 20 and 21 October, far from subsiding, the pogrom gained frightening momentum”; “the plunder and destruction of Jewish property, the acts of violence and the killings were openly perpetrated, and with complete impunity, day and night.” (Point of view of the Poalei Zion: on the evening of the 20th, “the university was closed by the army” while “inside it, we had barricaded ourselves in the event of an assault by the troops. Detachments of self‐defence no longer went into town.” In the latter, on the other hand, “self‐defence had organised itself spontaneously”, “powerful detachments of townspeople”, “equipped with weapons of opportunity: hatchets, cutlasses, limes”, “defended themselves with determination and anger equal to those they were victims of, and succeeded in protecting their perimeter almost completely.”1293 On the 20th, a group of municipal councillors headed by the new mayor (the former Kryjanovsky, who noted his powerlessness in the face of what was happening in the university, where even weapons were being gathered, and had resigned on the 18th) went to General Kaulbars, “urging him to take all the power in his hands to the extent that the military command… alone is capable of saving the city.” The latter explained to them that “before the declaration of the state of siege, the military command had no right to interfere in the decisions of the civil administration and had no other obligation” than to assist it when it requested it. “Not to mention that the firing of the troops and the
1293Odesskiï pogrom… (The pogrom of Odessa), Poalei Zion, pp. 53 54. ‒
bombs thrown at them made it extremely difficult to restore order.” He finally agreed to intervene.—On the 21st of October he gave orders to take the most energetic measures against the buildings from which shots were fired and bombs were thrown. On the 22nd: “order to take down on the spot all those who guilty of attacks on buildings, businesses or persons.” As early as the 21st, calm began to return to different parts of the city; from the 22nd, “the police ensured the surveillance of the streets” with the reinforcement of the army; “the streetcars began to circulate again and in the evening, one could consider that the order was restored in the city.” The number of victims was difficult to define and varies from one source to another. The Kuzminski report states that “according to information provided by the police, the number of people killed amounts to more than 500 persons, including more than 400 Jews; as to the number of injuries recorded by the police, it is 289…, of which 237 Jews. According to the data collected from the cemetery guardians, 86 funerals were celebrated in the Christian cemetery, 298 in the Jewish cemetery.” In the hospitals were admitted “608 wounded, including 392 Jews.” (However, many had to be those who refrained from going to hospitals, fearing that they would later be prosecuted.)—The Jewish Encyclopædia reports 400 deaths among the Jews.1294—According to the Poalei Zion: based on the list published by the rabbinate of Odessa, “302 Jews were killed, including 55 members of self‐defence detachments, as well as 15 Christians who were members of these same detachments”; “among the other deaths, 45 could not be identified; 179 men and 23 women were identified.” “Many deaths among the vandals; no one counted them, nor cared to know their number; in any event, it is said that there were not less than a hundred.”1295 As for the Soviet work already quoted, it did not hesitate to put forward the following figures: “more than 500 dead and 900 wounded among the Jews.”1296 One should also mention, by way of illustration, the hot reactions of the foreign press. In the Berliner Tageblatt, even before the 21st of October, one could read: “Thousands and thousands of Jews are massacred in the south of Russia; more than a thousand Jewish girls and children were raped and strangled.”1297 On the other hand, it is without exaggeration that Kuzmininski summarises the events: “By its magnitude and its violence, this pogrom surpassed all those who preceded it.”—He considers that the main person in charge is the governor of the city, Neudhart. The latter made an “unworthy concession” by yielding to Professor Chtchepkin’s demands, by withdrawing the police from the city and handing it over to a student militia that did not yet exist. On the 18th, “he did not take any measure… to disperse the revolutionary crowd that had gathered in the streets”, he tolerated that power would go to “the ramifications of Jews and
1294SJE, t. 6, p. 122. 1295Odesskiï pogrom… (Le pogrom d’Odessa), Poalei Zion, pp. 63 64. ‒ 1296Dimanstein, in “1905”, t. 3, v. 1, p. 172. 1297Choutguine, Annexes, p. 292.
revolutionaries” (did he not understand that reprisals in the form of a pogrom would follow?). His negligence could have been explained if he had handed power over to the army, but that did not happen “during the entire period of the troubles.” This did not, however, prevent him from broadcasting during the events fairly ambiguous statements and later, during the investigation, to lie to try to justify himself. Having established “the evidence of criminal acts committed in the exercise of his functions,” Senator Kouzminski had Neudhart brought to justice. With respect to the military command, the senator had no power to do so. But he indicates that it was criminal on behalf of Kaulbars to yield on 18 October to the demands of the Municipal Duma and to withdraw the army from the streets of the city. On the 21st, Kaulbars also uses equivocal arguments in addressing the police officers gathered at the governor’s house: “Let us call things by name. It must be acknowledged that in our heart we all approve of this pogrom. But, in the exercise of our functions, we must not let the persecution we may feel for the Jews transpire. It is our duty to maintain order and to prevent pogroms and murders.” The senator concluded his report by stating that “the troubles and disorders of October were provoked by causes of undeniably revolutionary character and found their culmination in an anti‐Jewish pogrom solely because it was precisely the representatives of that nationality which had taken a preponderant part in the revolutionary movement.” But could we not add that it is also due to the long‐standing laxity of the authorities over the excesses of which the revolutionaries were guilty? But as “the conviction that the events of October were the sole cause of Neudhart’s actions…”, “his provocations”, immediately after the end of the disorders “several commissions were formed in Odessa, including the University, the Municipal Duma and the Council of the Bar Association”; they were actively engaged in collecting documents proving that “the pogrom was the result of a provocation.” But after examining the evidence, the senator “discovered… no evidence” and the investigation “did not reveal any facts demonstrating the participation of even a single police officer to the organisation of the patriotic manifestation.” The senator’s report also highlights other aspects of the year 1905 and the general era. On 21 October, “as rumours spread throughout the city that bombs were being made and weapons were being stored in large quantities within the university compound,” the military district commander proposed to have the buildings inspected by a Committee composed of officers and professors. The rector told him that “such an intrusion would violate the autonomy of the university”. Since the day it was proclaimed in August, the university was run by a commission composed of “twelve professors of extremist orientation”. (Shchepkin, for example, declared at a meeting on October 7th: “When the hour strikes and you knock on our door, we will join you on your Potemkin!”), But
this commission itself was made under the control of the student “soviet coalition” who dictated its orders to the rector. After the rejection of Kaulbars’ request, the “inspection” was carried out by a commission composed of professors and three municipal councillors, and, of course, “nothing suspicious” was discovered.—“Facts of the same nature were also be observed in the Municipal Duma. There, it was the municipal employees who manifested claims to exercise influence and authority”; their committee presented to the Duma, composed of elected representatives, demands “of an essentially political character”; on the 17th, the day of the Manifesto, they concocted a resolution: “At last the Autocracy has fallen into the precipice!”—as the senator writes, “it is not excluded that at the outset of the troubles there might have been inclinations to take the whole of power.” (After that, it was the revolutionary wave of December, the comminatory tone of the Soviet of Workers’ Deputies—“we demand” the general strike—the interruption of electric lighting in Odessa, the paralysis of commerce, transport, the activity of the port, bombs were flying again, “the destruction in sets of the new patriotic‐oriented newspaper Rousskaïa retch1298, “the collection [under threat] of money to finance the revolution”, the cohorts of disaffected high school students and the population frightened “under the yoke of the revolutionary movement.”)
This spirit of 1905 (the spirit of the whole “liberation movement”), which had manifested itself so violently in Odessa, also broke out in these “constitutional days”1299 in many other cities of Russia; both in and outside the Pale of Settlement, the pogroms “broke out everywhere… on the very day when was received the news of the Proclamation” from the Manifesto. Within the Pale of Settlement, pogroms were held in Kremenchug, Chemigov, Vinnitsa, Kishinev, Balta, Ekaterinoslav, Elizabethgrad, Oman, and many other towns and villages; the property of the Jews was most often destroyed but not looted. “Where the police and the army took energetic measures, the pogroms remained very limited and lasted only a short time. Thus at Kamenets‐Podolsk, thanks to the effective and rapid action of the police and the army, all attempts to provoke a pogrom were stifled in the bud.” “In Chersonese and Nikolayev, the pogrom was stopped from the beginning.”1300 (And, in a south‐western town, the pogrom did not take place for the good reason that adult Jews administered a punishment to the young people who had organised an anti‐government demonstration after the proclamation of the Imperial Manifesto of 17 October.”1301)
1298“The Russian Word” 1299Because of the proclamation of the Manifesto modifying the Russian regime. 1300Report of Senator Kouzminski, pp. 176 178. ‒ 1301Report of Senator Tourau, p. 262.
Where, in the Pale of Settlement, there was no single pogrom, it was in the northwest region where the Jews were most numerous, and it might have seemed incomprehensible if the pogroms had been organised by the authorities and “generally proceeded according to the same scenario.”1302 “Twenty‐four pogroms took place outside the Pale of Settlement, but they were directed against all the progressive elements of society,”1303 and not exclusively against the Jews—this circumstance puts in evidence what pushed people to organise pogroms: the shock effect provoked by the Manifesto and a spontaneous impulse to defend the throne against those who wanted to put down the tsar. Pogroms of this type broke out in Rostov‐on‐the‐Don, Tula, Kursk, Kaluga, Voronezh, Riazan, Yaroslav, Viazma, Simferopol, “the Tatars participated actively in the pogroms at Kazan and Feodossia.”1304 In Tver, the building of the Council of the Zemstvo was sacked; at Tomsk the crowd set fire to the theatre where a meeting of the Left took place; two hundred persons perished in the disaster! In Saratov, there were disturbances, but no casualties (the local governor was none other than Stolypin1305). On the nature of all these pogroms and the number of their victims, the opinions diverge strongly according to the authors. The estimates that are made today are sometimes very fanciful. For example, in a 1987 publication: “in the course of the pogroms we count a thousand killed and tens of thousands of wounded and maimed”—and, as echoed by the press at the time: “Thousands of women were raped, very often under the eyes of their mothers and children.”1306 Conversely, G. Sliosberg, a contemporary of the events and with all the information, wrote: “Fortunately, these hundreds of pogroms did not bring about significant violence on the person of the Jews, and in the overwhelming majority of cases the pogroms were not accompanied by murders.”1307 As for the women and the elderly, the rebuttal comes from the Bolshevik fighter Dimanstein, who declared with pride: “Jews who were killed or wounded were for the most part some of the best elements of self‐defence, they were young and combative and preferred to die rather than surrender.”1308 As for the origins of the pogroms, the Jewish community and then the Russian public opinion in 1881 were under the tenacious hold of a hypnosis: undoubtedly and undeniably, the pogroms were manipulated by the government! Petersburg guided by the Police Department! After the events of 1905, the whole press also presented things as such. And Sliosberg himself, in the midst of this hypnosis, abounds in this sense: “For three days, the wave of pogroms has swept over the Pale of Settlement [we have just seen that this area was not
1302SJE, t. 6, p. 566. 1303Ibidem. 1304JE, t. 12, pp. 620 622. ‒ 1305I. L. Teitel, Iz moiii jizni za 40 let (Memories of 40 years of my life), Paris, 1925, pp. 184‒ 186. 1306Praisman, in “22”, 1986/87, no. 51, p. 183. 1307Sliosberg, t. 3, p. 180. 1308Dimanstein, t. 3, p.172.
touched in full and that, conversely, other regions of Russia were—A. S.], and according to a perfectly identical scenario, were planned in advance.”1309 And this strange absence, in so many, many authors, if only one would attempt to explain things differently! (Many years later, I. Frumkin acknowledged at least: the pogroms of 1905 were “not only anti‐Jewish, but also counter‐revolutionary.”1310 And no one even asks the question: and if the root causes were the same and should be sought in political events, the state of mind of the population? Are not the same concerns expressed in this way? Let us recall that the crowd had here and there demonstrated against the strikers before the proclamation of the Manifesto. Let us also recall that a general strike of the railways took place in October and that the communications had been interrupted throughout the country—and, in spite of this, so many pogroms broke out at the same time? It should also be noted that the authorities ordered investigations in a whole series of towns and that sanctions were imposed on police officers convicted of breaches of duty. Let us recall that during the same period the peasants organised pogroms against the landowners all over the place, and that they all proceeded in the same way. Without doubt, we are not going to say that these pogroms were also contrived by the Police Department and that they did not reflect the same uneasiness among all the peasants. It seems that one proof—only one—of the existence of a scheme exists, but it does not point in the direction of power either. The Minister of the Interior R. N. Dournovo discovered in 1906 that an official in charge of special missions, M. S. Komissarov, had used the premises of the Police Department to secretly print leaflets calling for the fight against Jews and revolutionaries.1311 It should be emphasised, however, that this was not an initiative of the Department, but a conspiracy by an adventurer, a former gendarmerie officer, who was subsequently entrusted with “special missions” by the Bolsheviks, to the Cheka, to the GPU, and was sent to the Balkans to infiltrate what remained of the Wrangel army1312. The falsified versions of events have nonetheless solidly embedded themselves in consciences, especially in the distant regions of the West, where Russia has always been perceived through a thick fog, while anti‐Russian propaganda was heard distinctly. Lenin had every interest in inventing the fable according to which tsarism “endeavoured to direct against the Jews the hatred which the workers and peasants, overwhelmed by misery, devoted to the nobles and capitalists”; and his henchman, Lourie‐Larine, tried to explain this by class struggle: only the rich Jews would have been targeted—whereas the facts prove the contrary: it was precisely they who enjoyed the protection of the police.1313 But, even today, it is everywhere the same version of the facts—let us take the 1309Sliosberg, t. 3, p. 177. 1310Frumkin, BJWR-1, p. 71. 1311Retch, 1906, 5 May. 1312One of the main components of the White Army. 1313I. Larme, Ievrei i antisemitizm v SSSR (The Jews and Anti‐Semitism in the USSR), M.‐L. 1929, pp. 36, 292.
example of the Encyclopædia Judaica: “From the beginning, these pogroms were inspired by government circles. The local authorities received instruction to give freedom of action to the thugs and to protect them against Jewish detachments of self‐defence.”1314 Let us take again the Jewish Encyclopædia published in Israel in the Russian language: “By organising the pogroms, the Russian authorities sought to…”; “the government wanted to physically eliminate as many Jews as possible”1315 [emphasis in italics added everywhere by me—A. S.]. All these events, therefore, would not have been the effect of the criminal laxity of the local authorities, but the fruit of a machination carefully guarded by the central government? However, Leo Tolstoy himself, who at the time was particularly upset with the government and did not miss an opportunity to speak ill of it, said at the time: “I do not believe that the police push the people [to the pogroms]. This has been said for Kishinev as well as for Baku… It is the brutal manifestation of the popular will… The people see the violence of the revolutionary youth and resist it.”1316 At the tribune of the Duma, Chulguine proposed an explanation similar to that of Tolstoy: “The posse justice is very widespread in Russia as in other countries… What happens in America is rich in lessons regarding this…: posse justice is called lynching… But what has recently happened in Russia is even more terrible—it is the form of posse justice called pogrom! When the power went on strike, when the most inadmissible attacks on the national sentiment and the most sacred values for the people remained completely unpunished, then, under the influence of an unreasoned anger, it began to do justice to itself. It goes without saying that in such circumstances the people are incapable of differentiating between the guilty and the innocent and, in any case, what has happened to us—it has rejected all the fault on the Jews. Of these, few guilty have suffered, for they have been clever enough to escape abroad; it is the innocent who have massively paid for them.”1317 (Cadet leader F. Rodichev, for his part, had the following formula: “Anti‐Semitism is the patriotism of disoriented people”—let us say: where there are Jews.) The tsar had been too weak to defend his power by the law, and the government proved its pusillanimity; then the petty bourgeois, the petty traders and even the workers, those of the railways, the factories, the very people who had organised the general strike, revolted, stood up in a spontaneous way to defend their most sacred values, wounded by the contortions of those who denigrated them. Uncontrollable, abandoned, desperate, this mass gave free rein to its rage in the barbaric violence of the pogroms. And in the case of a contemporary Jewish writer who is also lacking in sagacity when he persists in asserting that “undoubtedly, tsarist power played a 1314Encyclopædia Judaica, vol. 13, p. 698. 1315SJE, t. 6, p. 568. 1316D. P. Makovitsky, 1905 1906 v Iasnoi Poliane (1905 1906 in Yasnaya Poliana), Golos ‒ ‒ minovehevo. M., 1923, no. 3, p. 26. 1317Second Duma, shorthand for the debates, 12 March 1907, p. 376.
major role in the organisation of anti‐Jewish pogroms”, we find in a nearby paragraph: “We are absolutely convinced that the Police Department was not sufficiently organised to implement simultaneous pogroms in six hundred and sixty different places that same week.” The responsibility for these pogroms “is not solely and not so much for the administration, but rather for the Russian and Ukrainian population in the Pale of Settlement.”1318 On the latter point, I agree as well. But subject to a reservation, and it is of size: the Jewish youth of this time also carries a heavy share of responsibility in what happened. Here manifested itself a tragic characteristic of the RussianUkrainian character (without attempting to distinguish which of the Russians or Ukrainians participated in the pogroms): under the influence of anger, we yield blindly to the need to “blow off some steam” without distinguishing between good and bad; after which, we are not able to take the time—patiently, methodically, for years, if necessary—to repair the damage. The spiritual weakness of our two peoples is revealed in this sudden outburst of vindictive brutality after a long somnolence. We find the same impotence on the side of the patriots, who hesitate between indifference and semi‐approval, unable to make their voice heard clearly and firmly, to guide opinion, to rely on cultural organisations. (Let us note in passing that at the famous meeting at Witte’s, there were also representatives of the press of the right, but they did not say a word, they even acquiesced sometimes to Propper’s impertinences.) Another secular sin of the Russian Empire tragically had its effects felt during this period: the Orthodox Church had long since been crushed by the State, deprived of all influence over society, and had no ascendancy over the popular masses (an authority which it had disposed of in ancient Russia and during the time of the Troubles, and which would soon be lacking very much during the civil war!). The highest hierarchs were able to exhort the good Christian people, for months and years, and yet they could not even prevent the crowd from sporting crucifixes and icons at the head of the pogroms. It was also said that the pogroms of October 1905 had been organised by The Union of the Russian People. This is not true: it did not appear until November 1905, in instinctive reaction to the humiliation felt by the people. Its programme at the time had indeed global anti‐Jewish orientations: “The destructive, anti‐governmental action of the Jewish masses, solidarity in their hatred for everything Russian and indifferent to the means to be used.”1319 In December, its militants called on the Semienovski regiment to crush the armed insurrection in Moscow. Yet the Union of the Russian People, which was ultimately made legendary by rumours and fears, was in reality only a shabby little party lacking in means whose only raison d’être was to lend its support to the autocratic monarch, which, early as the spring of 1906, had become a constitutional monarch. As for the government, it felt embarrassed to have
1318Praisman, in “22”, 1986 87, no. 51, pp. 183, 186 187. ‒ ‒ 1319Novoie vremia, 1905, 20 Nov. (3 Dec), pp. 2 3. ‒
support for such a party. So that the latter, strong of its two or three thousand local soviets composed of illiterates and incompetents, found itself in opposition to the government of the constitutional monarchy, and especially to Stolypin.—From the tribune of the Duma, Purishkevich1320 interrogated in these terms the deputies, “since the appearance of the monarchist organisations, have you seen many pogroms in the Pale of Settlement?… Not one, because the monarchists organisations struggled and struggled against Jewish predominance by economic measures, cultural measures, and not by punches.”1321—These measures were they so cultural, one might ask, but no pogrom is actually known to have been caused by the Union of the Russian People, and those which preceded were indeed the result of a spontaneous popular explosion. A few years later, the Union of the Russian People—which, from the start, was merely a masquerade—disappeared in the mist of general indifference. (One can judge of the vagueness that surrounded this party by the astonishing characteristic that is given in the Jewish Encyclopædia: the anti‐Semitism of the Union of the Russian People “is very characteristic of nobility and great capital”!1322) There is another mark of infamy, all the more indelible as its outlines are vague: “the Black Hundreds.” Where does that name come from? Difficult to say: according to some, this is how the Poles would have designated out of spite the Russian monks who resisted victoriously the assault of the Trinity Lavra of Saint Sergius in 1608‒ 1609. Through obscure historical channels, it reached the twentieth century and was then used as a very convenient label to stigmatise the popular patriotic movement that had spontaneously formed. It was precisely its character, both imprecise and insulting, that made it a success. (Thus, for example, the four KDs who became emboldened to the point of entering into negotiations with Stolypin were denounced as “KD‐Black‐Hundreds”. In 1909, the Milestones Collection was accused of “propagating in a masked form the ideology of the Black Hundreds.”) And the “expression” became commonplace for a century, although the Slavic populations, totally dismayed and discouraged, were never counted by hundreds but by millions. In 1908 1912, the ‒ Jewish Encyclopædia published in Russia, in its honour, did not interfere in giving a definition of the “Black Hundreds”: the Jewish intellectual elite of Russia had in its ranks sufficient minds that were balanced, penetrating, and sensible. But during the same period before the First World War, the Brockhaus‐Efron Encyclopædia proposed a definition in one of its supplements: “The ‘Black Hundreds’ has been for a few years the common name given to the dregs of society focused on pogroms against Jews and intellectuals.” Further, the article broadens the statement: “This phenomenon is not specifically Russian; it appeared on the stage of history… in different
1320V. Purishkevich (1870 1920), one of the leaders of the Russian extreme right. ‒ 1321Stenographic Record of the Third Duma, 1911, p. 3118. 1322JE, t. 14, p. 519.
countries and at different times.”1323 And it is true that, in the press after the February revolution, I found the expression “the Swedish Black Hundreds!”… A wise contemporary Jewish author rightly points out that “the phenomenon which has been designated by the term ‘Black Hundreds’ has not been sufficiently studied.”1324 But this kind of scruple is totally foreign to the famous Encyclopædia Britannica whose authority extends to the entire planet: “The Black Hundreds or Union of the Russian People or organisation of reactionary and anti‐Semitic groups in Russia, constituted during the revolution of 1905. Unofficially encouraged by authorities, the Black Hundreds recruited their troops for the most part from the landowners, the rich peasants, the bureaucrats, the police, and the clergy; they supported the Orthodox Church, autocracy and Russian nationalism. Particularly active between 1906 and 1911…”1325 One remains stunned before so much science! And this is what is being read to all cultivated humanity: “recruited their troops for the most part from the landowners, the rich peasants, the bureaucrats, the police, and the clergy!” It was thus those people who smashed the windows of the Jewish shops with their sticks! And they were “particularly active” after 1905… when the calm had returned! True, in 1905 1907 there were actions against landowners, there were even ‒ more pogroms against the Jews. It was always the same ignorant and brutal crowd that ransacked and looted houses and property, massacring people (including children), and even cattle; but these massacres never led to condemnation on the part of the progressive intelligentsia, while the deputy in the Duma Herzenstein, in a speech in which he took with passion and reason the defence of small peasant farms, alerting parliamentarians of the danger of an extension of the fires of rural estates, exclaimed: “The illuminations of the month of May last year are not enough for you, when in the region of Saratov one hundred and fifty properties were destroyed practically in a single day?”1326 These illuminations were never forgiven. It was, of course, a blunder on his part, from which it should not be inferred that he was glad of such a situation. Would he have used this word, however, about the pogroms against the Jews of the preceding autumn? It was not until the Great, the real revolution, that the violence against the noble landlords was heard, they “were no less barbaric and unacceptable than the pogroms against the Jews… There is, however, in the left‐wing circles a tendency to consider… as positive the destruction of the old political and social system.”1327 Yes, there was another frightening similarity between these two forms of pogroms: the sanguinary crowd had the feeling of being in its right. 1323Entsiklopcditcheskii slovar, Spb., Brockhaus i Efron. Dopoln, t. 2 (4 / d), 1907, p. 869. 1324Boris Orlov, Rossia bez evrcev (Russia without the Jews), “22”, 1988, no. 60, p. 151. 1325Encyclopædia Britannica. 15th ed., 1981, vol. II, p. 62, cl. 2. 1326Proceedings of the First Duma, May 19th 1906, p. 524. 1327I. O. Levine, Evrei v revolutsii (The Jews in the Revolution), RaJ, p. 135.
The last pogroms against the Jews took place in 1906 in Sedlets, in Poland— which is beyond our scope—and in Bialystok during the summer. (Soon after, the police stifled a pogrom in preparation in Odessa after the dissolution of the first Duma.) In Bialystok was constituted the most powerful of the anarchist groups in Russia. Here, “important bands of anarchists had made their appearance; they perpetrated terrorist acts against owners, police officers, Cossacks, military personnel.”1328 The memories left by some of them make it possible to represent the atmosphere of the city very clearly in 1905 1906: repeated attacks by the ‒ anarchists who had settled in the Street de Souraje, where the police did not dare go any more. “It was very common for policemen on duty to be assassinated in broad daylight; This is why we saw fewer and fewer of them…” Here is the anarchist Nissel Farber: “he threw a bomb at the police station,” wounding two peacekeepers, a secretary, killing “two bourgeois who were there by chance,” and, lack of luck, perished himself in the explosion. Here is Guelinker (a.k.a. Aron Eline): he also launched a bomb, which seriously wounded the deputy of the chief of police, a commissioner, two inspectors and three agents. Here is another anarchist whose bomb “wounds an officer and three soldiers,” hurts him as well, in fact, “and, unfortunately, kills a militant of the Bund.” Here again it is a commissioner and a peacekeeper who are killed, there are two gendarmes, and again the same “Guelinker kills a concierge.” (Apart from the attacks, the “expropriation of consumer products” was also practised—food had to be eaten.) “The authorities lived in fear of an ‘uprising’ of the anarchists in the Street de Souraje,” the police had taken the habit of “expecting such an uprising for today, tomorrow or the day after tomorrow.” “The majority… of the anarchists… were leaning towards a resolute armed action in order to maintain, as much as possible, an atmosphere of class war.” To this end, terror was also extended to the Jewish “bourgeois”. The same Farber attacked the head of a workshop, a certain Kagan, “at the exit of the synagogue… he wounded him seriously with a knife in the neck”; another little patron, Lifchitz, suffered the same fate; also “the wealthy Weinreich was attacked in the synagogue,” but the revolver was of poor quality and jammed three times.” There was a demand for a series of “significant ‘gratuitous’ actions against the bourgeois: “the bourgeois must feel himself in danger of death at every moment of his existence.” There was even the idea of “disposing all along [the main street of Bialystok] infernal machines to blow up the entire upper class” at once. But “how to transmit the anarchist ‘message’?” Two currents emerged in Bialystok: the “gratuitous” terrorists and the “communards” who considered terrorism to be a “dull” and mediocre method, but tended towards the armed insurrection “in the name of communism without State”: “To invest in the city, to arm the masses, to resist several attacks by the army and then to drive them out of the city,” and, “at the same time, to invest in plants, factories
1328Dimanstein, t. 3, p. 163.
and shops.” It was in these terms that, “during meetings of fifteen to twenty thousand people, our speakers called for an armed uprising.” Alas, “the working masses of Bialystok having withdrawn from the revolutionary vanguard that they themselves had suckled from,” it was imperative to “overcome… the passivity of the masses.” The anarchists of Bialystok thus prepared an insurrection in 1906. Its course and its consequences are known as the “pogrom of Bialystok”.1329 It all began with the assassination of the chief of police, which took place precisely in this “Street de Souraje where the Jewish anarchist organisation was concentrated”; then someone shot or threw a bomb on a religious procession. After that, a commission of inquiry was dispatched by the State Duma, but alas, alas, three times alas, it failed to determine “whether it was a shot or some sort of whistling: witnesses were unable to say.”1330 This, the communist Dimanstein wrote very clearly, twenty years later, that “a firecracker was thrown at an Orthodox procession as a provocation.”1331 Nor can one exclude the participation of the Bund who, during the “best” months of the 1905 revolution, had burned with a desire to move to armed action, but in vain, and was withering away to the point of having to consider renewing allegiance to the Social democrats. But it is of course the anarchists of Bialystok themselves who manifested themselves with the most brilliance. Their leader, Judas Grossman‐Rochinin, recounted after 1917 what this nest of anarchists was: above all, they were afraid of “yielding to a wait‐and‐see approach and to common sense”. Having failed in organising two or three strikes because of the lack of support from the population, they decided in June 1906 to “take charge of the city” and expropriate the tools of production. “We considered that there was no reason to withdraw from Bialystok without having given a last class struggle, that it would have come down to capitulating in front of a complex problem of a superior type”; if “we do not move to the ultimate stage of the struggle, the masses will lose confidence [in us].” However, men and weapons were lacking to take the city, and Grossman ran to Warsaw to seek help from the armed fraction of the PPS (the Polish Socialists). And there he heard a newsagent shouting: “Bloody pogrom in Bialystok!… thousands of victims!”… Everything became clear: the reaction had preceded us!”1332 And it is there, in the passage “to the ultimate stage of the struggle”, that is doubtlessly found the explanation for the “pogrom”. The revolutionary impetus of the Bialystok anarchists was expressed subsequently. At the trial, in the pleadings of the lawyer Gillerson who “called for the overthrow of the government and the political and social system existing in Russia”, and which, for precisely this reason, was himself prosecuted. As for the Duma commission, it considered that “the conditions of a pogrom had also been created by various 1329Iz istorii anarkhitcheskovo dvijenia v Bialystoka (Aspects of the history of the anarchist movement in Bialystok), Soblazn sotsializma, pp. 417 432. ‒ 1330JE, t. 5, pp. 171 172. ‒ 1331Dimanslein, t. 3, p. 180. 1332Grossman‐Rochtchine, Byloïe, 1924, nos. 27 28. pp. 180 182. ‒ ‒
elements of society who imagined that fighting the Jews was tantamount to fighting the liberation movement.”1333 But after that “firecracker thrown by the provocation” which the Duma Committee had not been able to detect, what had been the course of events? According to the commission’s findings, “the systematic execution of innocent Jews, including women and children, was carried out under the pretext of repressing the revolutionaries.” There were “more than seventy dead and about eighty wounded” among the Jews. Conversely, “the indictment tended to explain the pogrom by the revolutionary activity of the Jews, which had provoked the anger of the rest of the population.” The Duma Committee rejected this version of the facts: “There was no racial, religious, or economic antagonism in Bialystok between Jews and Christians.”1334 And here is what is written today: “This time the pogrom was purely military. The soldiers were transformed into rioters,” and chased the revolutionaries. At the same time, these soldiers were said to be afraid of the detachments of Jewish anarchists in the Street de Souraje, because “the war in Japan… had taught [Russian soldiers] to beware of gunshots”—such were the words pronounced in the Municipal Duma by a Jewish councillor.1335 Against the Jewish detachments of self‐defence are given the infantry and the cavalry, but, on the other side, there are bombs and firearms. In this period of strong social unrest, the Duma committee concluded to a “strafing of the population”, but twenty years later, we can read in a Soviet book (in any case, the “old regime” will not come back, will not be able to justify itself, and so we can go ahead!): “They massacred entire families with the use of nails, they pierced their eyes, cut tongues, smashed the skulls of children, etc.”1336 And a luxury book edited abroad, sensationalist book, denunciatory, a richly illustrated folio, printed on coated paper, entitled The Last Autocrat (decreeing in advance that Nicholas II would indeed be the “last”), proposed the following version: the pogrom “had been the object of such a staging that it seemed possible to describe the program of the first day in the Berlin newspapers; thus, two hours before the beginning of the Bialystok pogrom, the Berliners could be informed of the event.”1337 (But if something appeared in the Berlin press, was it not merely an echo of Grossman‐Rochin’s shenanigans?) Moreover, it would have been rather absurd on the part of the Russian government to provoke pogroms against the Jews even as the Russian ministers were lobbying among Western financiers in the hope of obtaining loans. Let us remember that Witte had great difficulty in obtaining from the Rothschilds, who were ill‐disposed towards Russia because of the situation of the Jews and the pogroms, “as well as other important Jewish establishments,”1338 with the exception of the Berliner banker Mendelssohn. As early as December 1905, the 1333JE, t. 5, pp. 171 174. ‒ 1334Ibidem, pp. 170. 172. 1335Praisman, pp. 185 186. ‒ 1336Dimanstein, t. 3, p. 180. 1337Der Leizte russischc Allcinherrscher, Berlin, Eberhard Frowein Verlag (1913), p. 340.
Russian ambassador to London, Benkendorf, warned his minister: “The Rothschilds are repeating everywhere… That Russia’s credit is now at its lowest level, but that it will be restored immediately if the Jewish question is settled.”1339 At the beginning of 1906, Witte disseminated a government communiqué saying that “finding a radical solution to the Jewish problem is a matter of conscience for the Russian people, and this will be done by the Duma, but even before the Duma unites itself, the most stringent provisions will be repealed insofar as they are no longer justified in the present situation.”1340 He begged the most eminent representatives of the Jewish community of Saint Petersburg to go as a delegation to the tsar, and he promised them the most kind welcome. This proposal was discussed at the Congress of the Union for the Integrality of Rights—and after the fiery speech of I. B. Bak (editor of the Retch newspaper) it was decided to reject it and to send a less important delegation to Witte, not to provide answers, but to make accusations: to tell him “clearly and unambiguously” that the wave of pogroms was organised “at the initiative and with the support of the government.”1341 After two years of revolutionary earthquake, the leaders of the Jewish community in Russia who had taken the upper hand did not for a moment contemplate accepting a progressive settlement regarding the question of equal rights. They felt that they were carried by the wave of victory and had no need to go to the tsar in the position of beggars and loyal subjects. They were proud of the audacity displayed by the Jewish revolutionary youth. (One must position oneself in the context of the time when the old imperial army was believed to be immovable, to perceive the significance of the episode during which, in front of the regiment of Rostov grenadiers standing at attention, his commander, Colonel Simanski, had been arrested by a volunteer Jew!) After all, perhaps these revolutionaries had not been guilty of “national treason,” as Doubnov had accused them, perhaps they were the ones who were in the truth?—After 1905, only the fortunate and prudent Jews were left to doubt it. What was the record of the year 1905 for the entire Jewish community in Russia? On the one hand, “the revolution of 1905 had overall positive results… it brought to the Jews political equality even when they did not even enjoy civil equality… Never as after the “Liberation Movement” did the Jewish question benefit from a more favourable climate in public opinion.”1342 But, on the other hand, the strong participation of the Jews in the revolution contributed to the
1338A. Popov, Zaem 1906 g. V Donesseniakh ruskovo posla v Parije (The loan of 1906 through the despatches of the Russian ambassador to Paris), Krasnyy arkhiv, 1925, t. 11/12, p. 432. 1339K peregovoram Kokovtseva o zaïme v 1905 1906 gg. (The Kokovtsev Talks for ‒ Borrowing), Krasnyy arkhiv, 1925, t. 10, p. 7. 1340Perepiska N.A. Romanova i P.A. Solypina (Correspondence between N. A. Romanov and P. A. Stolypin). Krasnyi Arkhiv, 1924, t. 5, p. 106. 1341Sliosberg, t. 3, pp. 185 188. ‒ 1342G. A. Landau, Revolutsionnye idei v ievreïskoi obchtchcstvennosti (Revolutionary ideas in Jewish opinion). RaJ, p. 116.
fact that they were henceforth all identified with it. At the tribune of the Duma in 1907 V. Choulgin proposed to vote a resolution to find that “… the western half of Russia, from Bessarabia to Warsaw, is full of hatred towards the Jews whom they consider the responsible for all their misfortunes…”1343 This is indirectly confirmed by the increase in Jewish emigration from Russia. If, in 1904 1905, there was still an increase in emigration among ‒ mature men, the whole age pyramid is concerned from 1906 onwards. The phenomenon is therefore not due to the pogroms of 1881 1882, but indeed ‒ those of 1905 1906. From now on, for the United States alone, the number of ‒ immigrants rose to 125,000 people in 1905 1906 and to 115,000 in 1906 ‒ ‒ 1907.1344 But at the same time, writes B. I. Goldman, “in the short years of agitation, higher education institutions did not rigorously apply the numerus clausus to the Jews, a relatively large number of Jewish professional executives, and as they were more skilful than the Russians in placing themselves on the market, without always being distinguished by a great moral rigour in their activity, some began to speak of a “hold of the Jews” on the intellectual professions.1345 And “in the ‘Project for Universities’ prepared in 1906 by the Ministry of Public Instruction, no mention was made to the numerus clausus.” In 1905 there were 2,247 (9.2%) Jewish students in Russia; in 1906, 3,702 (11.6%); In 1907, 4,266 (12%).1346 In the program of reforms announced on August 25th, 1906 by the Government, the latter undertook to re‐examine, among the limitations to which the Jews were subjected, those which could be immediately lifted “insofar as they merely provoke dissatisfaction and are obviously obsolete.” However, at the same time, the Russian government could no longer be affected by the revolution (which was prolonged for another two years by a wave of terrorism hardly contained by Stolypin) and by the very visible participation of the Jews in this revolution. To these subjects of discontent was added the humiliating defeat against Japan, and the ruling circles of Saint Petersburg yielded to the temptation of a simplistic explanation: Russia is fundamentally sound, and the whole revolution, from beginning to end, is a dark plot hatched by the Jews, an episode of the Judeo‐Masonic plot. Explain everything by one and the same cause: the Jews! Russia would long have been at the zenith of glory and universal power if there were no Jews! And, clinging to this short but convenient explanation, the high spheres only brought the hour of their fall even closer.
1343Stenographic Record of Debates at the Second Duma, 6 March 1907, p. 151. 1344JE, t. 2, pp. 235 236; SJE, t. 6, p. 568. ‒ 1345B. I. Goldman (B. Gorev), Icvrci v proizvedcniakh rousskikh pissatelei (The Jews in Russian Literature), Pd. Svobodnoïe slovo, 1917, p. 28. 1346SJE, t. 7, p. 348.
The superstitious belief in the historical force of conspiracies (even if they exist, individual or collective) leaves completely aside the main cause of failures suffered by individuals as well as by states: human weaknesses. It is our Russian weaknesses that have determined the course of our sad history—the absurdity of the religious schism caused by Nikon1347, the senseless violence of Peter the Great and the incredible series of counter‐shocks that ensued, wasting our strength for causes that are not ours, the inveterate sufficiency of the nobility and bureaucratic petrification throughout the nineteenth century. It is not by the effect of a plot hatched from the outside that we have abandoned our peasants to their misery. It was not a plot that led the great and cruel Petersburg to stifle the sweet Ukrainian culture. It was not because of a conspiracy that four ministries were unable to agree on the assignment of a particular case to one or the other of them, they spent years in exhausting squabbles mobilising all levels of the hierarchy. It is not the result of a plot if our emperors, one after the other, have proved incapable of understanding the evolution of the world and defining the true priorities. If we had preserved the purity and strength, which were formerly infused into us by Saint Sergius of Radonezh, we should not fear any plot in the world. No, it can not be said in any case that it was the Jews who “organised” the revolutions of 1905 or 1917, just as one cannot say that it was this nation as a whole that fomented them. In the same way, it was not the Russians or the Ukrainians, taken together as nations, who organised the pogroms. It would be easy for us all to take a retrospective look at this revolution and condemn our “renegades.” Some were “non‐Jewish Jews,”1348 others were “internationalists, not Russians.” But every nation must answer for its members in that it has helped to train them. On the side of the Jewish revolutionary youth (but also of those who had formed it) as well as those of the Jews who “constituted an important revolutionary force,”1349 it seems that the wise advice Jeremiah addressed to the Jews deported to Babylon was forgotten: “Seek peace for the city where I have deported you; pray to Yahweh in its favour, for its peace depends on yours.” (Jeremiah 29 7.) ‒ While the Jews of Russia, who rallied the revolution, only dreamed of bringing down this same city without thinking of the consequences.
In the long and chaotic human history, the role played by the Jewish people— few but energetic—is undeniable and considerable. This also applies to the history of Russia. But for all of us, this role remains a historical enigma.
1347Patriarch of the Russian Church, who in the seventeenth century wished to impose by force a reform of liturgical texts and ritual, which gave rise to the schism of the “old believers”. 1348See, for example, Paul Johnson, A History of the Jews, Harper Collins, 1987, p. 448. 1349SJE, t. 7, p. 349.
For the Jews as well. This strange mission brought them everything but happiness.
Chapter 10. The Period of the Duma
The Manifesto of 17 October marked the beginning of a qualitatively new period in Russian history, which was later consolidated by a year of Stolypin’s government: the period of the Duma or of limited Autocracy, during which the previous principles of government—the absolute power of the tsar, the opacity of the ministries, the immutability of the hierarchy—were rapidly and sensibly restricted. This period was very difficult for all the higher spheres, and only men with a solid character and an active temperament could enrol with dignity in the new era. But public opinion also found it difficult to get accustomed to the new electoral practices, to the publicity of the debates in the Duma (and even more to the responsibility of the latter); and, in its left wing, the enraged Leninists as well as the enraged of the Bund simply boycotted the elections to the first Duma: we have nothing to do with your parliaments, we will achieve our ends by bombs, blood, convulsions! And so “the attitude of the Bund towards the Jewish deputies of the Duma was violently hostile.”1350 But the Jews of Russia, led by the Union for the integrality of rights, were not mistaken and, expressing their sympathy for the new institution, “participated very actively in the elections, voting most often for the representatives of the [Cadet] party who had placed the equality of rights for the Jews on its agenda.” Some revolutionaries who had regained their spirits shared the same dispositions. Thus Isaac Gurvitch, who had emigrated in 1889—an active supporter of the Marxist left, was the co‐founder of the American SocialDemocratic Party—, returned to Russia in 1905, where he was elected to the Duma Electoral College.1351—There were no limitations on the Jews in the elections, and twelve of them sat in the first Duma; it was true that most of them came from the Pale of Settlement, while the Jewish leaders of the capital, who did not have the property qualifications, could not be elected: only Winaver, L. Bramson1352, and the converted Jew M. Herzenstein (to whom Prince P. Dolgorukov had given his place). As the number of Jews in the Duma was significant, the Zionist deputies proposed forming an “independent Jewish group” abiding by “the discipline of a real political party”, but the non‐Zionist deputies rejected this idea, contenting itself “to meet from time to time to discuss matters of direct concern to Jewish 1350JE, t. 5, p. 100. 1351RJE, t. 1, p. 392. 1352JE, t. 7, p. 370.
interests,”1353 agreeing however, to comply already to “a genuine discipline in the sense of strictly abiding by the decisions of a college composed of members of the Duma and those of the Committee for the integrality of rights”1354 (the “Political Bureau”). At the same time a solid alliance was formed between the Jews and the Cadet party. “It was not uncommon for the local chapters of the Union [for the integrality of rights] and the constitutional‐democratic party to be composed of the same people.”1355 (Some teased Winaver by calling him the “Mosaic Cadet”.) “In the Pale of Settlement, the overwhelming majority of the [Cadet] party members were Jews; in the interior provinces, they represented in number the second nationality… As Witte wrote, ‘almost all Jews who graduated from higher education joined the party of People’s Freedom [that is, The Cadets]… which promised them immediate access to equal rights.’ This party owes much of its influence on the Jews who provided it with both intellectual and material support.”1356 The Jews “introduced coherence and rigour… into the Russian ‘Liberation Movement’ of 1905.”1357 However, A. Tyrkova, an important figure in the Cadet party, notes in his memoirs that “the chief founders and leaders of the Cadet party were not Jews. There were not, among the latter, any personality sufficiently prominent to drive the Russian liberals behind it, as the Jew Disraeli had done for the English Conservatives in the middle of the nineteenth century… The people that mattered most within the Cadet party were Russians. This does not mean that I deny the influence of these Jews who have joined our masses. They could not fail to act upon us, if only by their inexhaustible energy. Their very presence, their activity, did not allow us to forget them, to forget their situation, to forget that they had to be helped.” And, further on: “Reflecting on all these networks of influence of the Jews [within the Cadet party], one cannot overlook the case of Miliukov. From the beginning, he became their favourite, surrounded by a circle of admirers, more precisely feminine admirers… who cradled him in muted melodies, cajoled him, covered him without restraint of praise so excessive that they were comical.”1358 V. A. Obolensky, also a member of the party, describes a Cadet club during the time of the First Duma at the corner of Sergevskaya and Potmekinskaya streets. The elite of the secularised Jewish society and the elite of the Russian politicised intelligentsia were mingled: “There were always a lot of people, and the public, composed mostly of wealthy Jewish Petersburgers, was very elegant: the ladies wore silk robes, shiny brooches and rings, the gentlemen had the airs
1353JE, t. 7, p. 371. 1354G. B. Sliosberg, t. 3, p. 200. 1355SJE, p. 349 1356Ibidem, pp. 398‐399. 1357V. V. Choulguine, “Chto nam v nikh ne nravitsa…”, Ob Antisemitism v Rossii (“What we do not like about them…” On anti‐Semitism in Russia), Paris, 1929, p. 207. 1358A. Tyrkova‐Williams, Na poutiakh k svobode (The Paths to Freedom), New York, ed. Chekov, 1952, pp. 303‐304.
of well‐nourished and self‐satisfied bourgeois. Despite our democratic convictions, we were somewhat shocked by the atmosphere that prevailed in this ‘Cadet club’. One can imagine the embarrassment experienced by the peasants who came to attend the meetings of our parliamentary group. A ‘party of gentlemen’, that is what they said to each other when they ceased to attend our meetings.”1359 At the local level, cooperation between the Union for the integrality of rights and the Cadet Party was manifested not only in the presence of “as many Jewish candidates as possible”, but also in the fact that “the local factions of the Union [for the integrality of rights] was instructed to support [non‐Jews] who promised to contribute to the emancipation of the Jews.”1360 As explained in 1907 the cadet newspaper Retch, in reply to questions repeatedly asked by other newspapers: “Retch has, in its time, formulated very precisely the conditions of the agreement with the Jewish group… The latter has the right to challenge the electoral college and to oppose nominations to the Duma.”1361 During the parliamentary debates, the Duma, following the logic of the Imperial Manifesto, raised the question of equal rights for Jews within the general framework of granting the same rights to all citizens. “The State Duma has promised to prepare a ‘law on the full equalisation of the rights of all citizens and the abrogation of any limitations or privileges associated with membership to a social class, nationality, religion or sex’.”1362 After adopting the main guidelines of this law, the Duma lost itself in debates for another month, multiplying “thunderous declarations followed by no effect”1363, to be ultimately dissolved. And the law on civil equality, especially for the Jews, remained pending. Like most Cadets, the Jewish deputies of the First Duma signed Vyborg’s appeal, which meant that it was now impossible for them to stand for elections; Winaver’s career particularly suffered from it. (In the First Duma, he had made violent remarks, although he would later advise the Jews not to put themselves too much in the spotlight to prevent a recurrence of what had happened in the revolution of 1905.) “The participation of the Jews in the elections of the second Duma was even more marked than during the first election campaign… The Jewish populations of the Pale of Settlement showed the strongest interest in this election. The political debate reached all levels of society.” Nevertheless, as the Jewish Encyclopædia published before the Revolution indicates, there was also an important anti‐Jewish propaganda carried out by right‐wing monarchist
1359V. A. Obolensky, Moïa jizn. Moi sovremenniki (My life, My contemporaries), Paris, YMCA Press. 1988, p. 335. 1360SJE, t. 7, p. 349. 1361Retch (The Word), 1907, 7 (19) January, p. 2. 1362JE, t. 7, p. 371. 1363V. A. Maklakov, 1905‐1906 gody (1905‐1906)—M. Winaver i ruskaya obchtchestvennost nachala XX veka (M. Winaver and the Russian public opinion at the beginning of the twentieth century), Paris, 1937, p. 94.
circles, particularly active in the western provinces; “the peasants were persuaded that all progressive parties were fighting for the equal rights of the Jews to the detriment of the interests of the ethnic population”1364; that “behind the masquerade of the popular representation, the country was governed by a Judeo‐Masonic union of spoliators of the people and traitors to the fatherland”; that the peasant should be alarmed at the “unprecedented number of new masters unknown to the elders of the village, and whom he henceforth had to nourish with his labour”; that the Constitution “promised to replace the Tatar yoke by that, injurious, of the international Kahal.” And a list of the existing rights to be abrogated was drawn up: not only were Jews not to be elected to the Duma, but they all had to be relegated to the Pale of Settlement; prohibiting them from selling wheat, grain and timber, working in banks or commercial establishments; confiscating their properties; prohibiting them from changing their names; to serve as publisher or editor of news organisation; to reduce the Pale of Settlement itself by excluding the fertile regions, to not grant land to the Jews within the province of Yakutsk; in general, to regard them as foreigners, to substitute for them military service by a tax, etc. “The result of this anti‐Semitic propaganda, spread both orally and in writing, was the collapse of progressive candidates in the second Duma throughout the Pale of Settlement.”1365 There were only four Jewish deputies in the second Duma (including three Cadets).1366 But even before these elections, the government addressed the issue of equal rights for Jews. Six months after taking office as Prime Minister in December 1906, Stolypin had the government adopt a resolution (the so‐called “Journal of the Council of Ministers”) on the continuation of the lifting of restrictions imposed on Jews, and this in essential areas, thus orienting itself towards integral equality. “They considered to eliminate: the prohibition of Jews from residing in rural areas within the Pale of Settlement; the prohibition of residing in rural areas throughout the Empire for persons enjoying the right of universal residence”; “the prohibition of including Jews in the directory of joint stock companies holding land.”1367 But the Emperor replied in a letter dated 10 December: “Despite the most convincing arguments in favour of adopting these measures… an inner voice dictates with increasing insistence not to take this decision upon myself.”1368 As if he did not understand—or rather forgot—that the resolution proposed in the Journal was the direct and inescapable consequence of the Manifesto he had signed himself a year earlier… Even in the most closed bureaucratic world, there are always officials with eyes and hands. And if the rumour of a decision taken by the Council of Ministers had already spread to the public opinion? And here we are: we will 1364JE, t. 7, p. 372. 1365JE, t. 2, pp. 749‐751. 1366JE, t. 7, p. 373. 1367SJE, t. 7, p. 351. 1368Perepiska N. A. Romanova and P. A. Solypina (Correspondence between N. A. Romanov and P. A. Stolypin), Krasnyi Arkhiv, 1924, vol. 5, p. 105; See also SJE, t. 7, p. 351
know that the ministers want to emancipate the Jews while the sovereign, he, stood in its way… On the same day, 10 December, Stolypin hastened to write to the Emperor a letter full of anxiety, repeating all his arguments one by one, and especially: “The dismissal of the Journal is for the moment not known by anyone,” it is therefore still possible to conceal the equivocations of the monarch. “Your Majesty, we have no right to put you in this position and shelter ourselves behind you.” Stolypin would have liked the advantages accorded to the Jews to appear as a favour granted by the tsar. But since this was not the case, he now proposed to adopt another resolution: the Emperor made no objections on the merits, but did not want the law to be promulgated over the head of the Duma; it must be done by the Duma. Secretary of State S. E. Kryjanovski said that the emperor then adopted a resolution which went along in this direction: that the representatives of the people take responsibility both for raising this issue as well as resolving it. But, no one knows why, this resolution received little publicity, and “on the side of the Duma, absolutely nothing happened.”1369 Widely to the left, penetrated by progressive ideas and so vehement towards the government, the second Duma was free! Yet, in the second Duma, there was still less talk of the deprivation of rights suffered by the Jews than in the first.”1370 The law on equal rights for Jews was not even discussed, so, what can be said about its adoption… Why then did the second Duma not take advantage of the opportunities offered to it? Why did it not seize them? It had three entire months to do it. And why did the debates, the clashes, relate only to secondary, tangential issues? The equality of the Jews—still partial, but already well advanced—was abandoned. Why, indeed, why? As for the “Extra‐Parliamentary Extraordinary Commission”, it did not even discuss the plan to repeal the restrictions imposed on Jews, but circumvented the problem by focusing on integral equality “as quickly as possible.”1371 Difficult to explain this other than by a political calculation: the aim being to fight the Autocracy, the interest was to raise more and more the pressure on the Jewish question, and to certainly not resolve it: ammunition was thus kept in reserve. These brave knights of liberty reasoned in these terms: to avoid that the lifting of restrictions imposed on the Jews would diminish their ardour in battle. For these knights without fear and without reproach, the most important, was indeed the fight against the power. All this was beginning to be seen and understood. Berdyaev, for example, addressed the whole spectrum of Russian radicalism with the following reproaches: “You are very sensitive to the Jewish question, you are fighting for their rights. But do you feel the ‘Jew’, do you feel the soul of the Jewish
1369S. E. Kryjanorski, Vospominania (Memoirs), Berlin, Petropolis, pp. 94‐95. 1370SJE, t. 7, p. 351. 1371JE, t. 7, p. 373.
people?… No, your fight in favour for the Jews does not want to know the Jews.”1372 Then, in the third Duma, the Cadets no longer had the majority; they “did not take any more initiatives on the Jewish question, fearing that they would be defeated… This caused great discontent among the Jewish masses, and the Jewish press did not deprive itself of attacking the party of the People’s Freedom.”1373 Although “the Jews had participated in the electoral campaign with the greatest ardour and the number of Jewish voters exceeded that of the Christians in all the cities of the Pale of Settlement,” they were beaten by the opposing party, and in the third Duma there were only two Jewish deputies: Nisselovitch and Friedman.1374 (The latter succeeded to remain up to the fourth Duma.)—Beginning in 1915, the Council of State included among its members a Jew, G. E. Weinstein, of Odessa. (Just before the revolution, there was also Solomon Samoylovich Krym, a Karaim.1375) As for the Octobrists1376 whose party had become a majority in the third Duma, on the one hand they ceded, not without hesitation, to the pressure of public opinion which demanded equal rights for the Jews, which led to the criticism of Russian nationalist deputies: “We thought that the Octobrists remained attached to the defence of national interests”—and now, without warning, they had relegated to the background both the question of “the granting of equal rights to the Russians of Finland” (which meant that this equality did not exist in this “Russian colony”…) and that of the annexation by Russia of the Kholm region in Poland, with all Russians that inhabit it—but “they have prepared a bill to abolish the Pale of Settlement.”1377 On the other hand, they were attributed statements “of manifestly anti‐Semitic character”: thus the third Duma, on the initiative of Guchkov, issued in 1906 “the wish… that Jewish doctors not be admitted to work in the army health services”1378; likewise, “it was proposed to replace the military service of the Jews by a tax.”1379 (In the years preceding the war, the project of dispensing the Jews from military service was still largely and seriously debated; and I. V. Hessen published a book on this subject entitled The War and the Jews.) In short, neither the second, third, nor fourth Dumas took it upon themselves to pass the law on the integral equality of rights for the Jews. And every time it was necessary to ratify the law on equality of rights for peasants 1372Nikolai Berdyaev, Filosofia neravenstva (The Philosophy of Inequality), Paris, YMCA Press, 1970, p. 72. 1373Sliosberg, t. 3, p. 247. 1374JE, t. 7, pp. 373‐374. 1375A. A. Goldenweiser, Pravovoe polojenie ievreyev v Rossii (The legal position of Jews in Russia), [Sb.] Kniga o ruskom evreïstve Ot 1860 godov do Revolutsii 1917 g. (Aspects of the History of Russian Jews), in BJWR‐1, p. 132; RJE, L 1, p. 212, t. 2, p. 99. 1376Dissenting Cadet Party, founded by Guchkov, demanding the strict application of 30 October Manifesto. 1377Third Duma, Stenographic Record of Debates, 1911, p. 2958. 1378JE, t. 7, p. 375. 1379SJE, t. 7, p. 353.
(promulgated by Stolypin as of 5 October 1906), it was blocked by the same Dumas, under the pressure of the left, on the grounds that the peasants could not be granted equal rights before they were granted to the Jews (and the Poles)! And thus the pressure exerted upon this execrated tsarist government was not relieved, but doubled, quintupled. And not only did this pressure exerted on the government not be relieved, not only were these laws not voted upon by the Duma, but it would last until the February Revolution. While Stolypin, after his unfortunate attempt in December 1906, quietly took administrative measures to partially lift the restrictions imposed on the Jews. An editorialist from Novoie Vremia, Menshikov, condemned this method: “Under Stolypin, the Pale of Settlement has become a fiction.”1380 The Jews “are defeating the Russian power by gradually withdrawing all its capacity to intervene… The government behaves as if it were a Jew.”1381 Such is the fate of the middle way. The general outcry of the parties of the left against a policy of progressive measures, this tactical refusal for a smooth evolution towards equal rights, was strongly supported by the Russian press. Since the end of 1905, it was no longer subject to prior censorship. But it was not only a press that had become free, it was a press that considered itself a full‐fledged actor in the political arena, a press, as we have seen, that could formulate demands, such as that of withdrawing the police from the streets of the city! Witte said it had lost its reason. In the case of the Duma, the way in which Russia, even in its most remote provinces, was informed of what was going on there and what was said there, depended entirely on journalists. The shorthand accounts of the debates appeared late and with very low circulation, so there was no other source of information than the daily press, and it was based on what they read that the people formed an opinion. However, the newspapers systematically distorted the debates in the Duma, largely opening their columns to the deputies of the left and showering them with praise, while to the deputies of the right they allowed only a bare minimum. A. Tyrkova says that in the second Duma, “the accredited journalists formed their own press office,” which “depended on the distribution of places” among the correspondents. The members of this office “refused to give his card of accreditation” to the correspondent of the Journal the Kolokol (favourite newspaper of the priests of the countryside). Tyrkova intervened, noting that “these readers should not be deprived of the possibility of being informed about the debates in the Duma by a newspaper in which they had more confidence than those of the opposition”; but “my colleagues, among whom the Jews were
1380Novoie Vremia, 1911, 8 (21) Sept., p. 4. 1381Ibidem, 10 (23) Sept., p. 4.
the most numerous…, got carried away, began shouting, explaining that no one was reading the Kolokol, that that newspaper was of no use.”1382 For the Russian nationalist circles, responsibility for this conduct of the press was simply and solely the responsibility of the Jews. They wanted to prove that almost all journalists accredited to the Duma were Jews. And they published “whistle‐blowing” lists listing the names of these correspondents. More revealing is this comical episode of parliamentary life: one day, answering to the attacks of which he was the object, Purishkevich pointed, in the middle of his speech, the box of the press, located near the tribune and delimited by a circular barrier, and said: “But see this Pale of Settlement of the Jews!”— Everyone turned involuntarily to the representatives of the press, and it was a general burst of laughter that even the Left could not repress. This “Pale of Settlement of the Duma” became an adopted wording. Among the prominent Jewish publishers, we have already spoken of S. M. Propper, owner of the Stock Exchange News and unfailing sympathiser of the “revolutionary democracy”. Sliosberg evokes more warmly the one who founded and funded to a large extent the cadet newspaper Retch, I. B. Bak: “A very obliging man, very cultured, with a radically liberal orientation.” It was his passionate intervention at the Congress of the Jewish mutual aid committees at the beginning of 1906 that prevented a conciliation with the tsar. “There was no Jewish organisation devoted to cultural action or beneficence, of which I. Bak was not a member”; he was particularly distinguished by his work in the Jewish Committee for Liberation.1383 As for the Retch newspaper and its editor‐in‐chief I. V. Hessen, they were far from limiting themselves to Jewish questions alone, and their orientation was more generally liberal (Hessen subsequently proved it in emigration with the Roul and the Archives of the Russian Revolution). The very serious Russkie Vedomosti published Jewish authors of various tendencies, both V. Jabotinsky and the future inventor of war communism, Lourie‐Larine. S. Melgounov noted that the publication in this body of articles favorable to the Jews was explained “not only by the desire to defend the oppressed, but also by the composition of the newspaper’s managing team.”1384 “There were Jews even among the collaborators of the Novoie Vremia of Suvorin”; the Jewish Encyclopædia quotes the names of five of them.1385 The newspaper Russkie Vedomosti was long dominated by the figure of G. B. Iollos, called there by Guerzenstein who had been working there since the 80s. Both were deputies to the First Duma. Their lives suffered cruelly from the atmosphere of violence engendered by political assassinations—these being the very essence of the revolution—a “rehearsal” of 1905‐06. According to the Israeli Jewish Encyclopædia, the responsibility for their assassination would
1382Tyrkova‐Williams, pp. 340‐342. 1383Sliosberg, t. 3, pp. 186‐187. 1384S. P. Melgunov, Vospominania i dnevniki. Vyp. I (Memoirs and Journal, 1), Paris, 1964, p. 88. 1385SJE, t. 7, p. 517.
rest with the Union of the Russian People.1386 For the Russian Jewish Encyclopædia, if the latter bore responsibility for the assassination of Guerzenstein (1906), Iollos, him, was killed (1907) by “Black Hundreds Terrorists.”1387 Jewish publishers and journalists did not restrict their activities to the capital or to highly intellectual publications, but they also intervened in the popular press, such as the Kopeika, a favourite reading of the concierges—a quarter of a million copies in circulation, it “played a major role in the fight against anti‐Semitic denigration campaigns.” (It had been created and was led by M. B. Gorodetski.1388) The very influential Kievskaya Mysl (to the left of the Cadets) had as editor‐in‐chief Iona Kugel (they were four brothers, all journalists), and D. Zaslavski, a wicked rascal, and, what seems to us very moving, Leo Trotsky! The biggest newspaper of Saratov was edited by Averbakh‐senior (brother‐in‐law of Sverdlov). In Odessa appeared for some time the Novorossiysky Telegraf, with strong right‐wing convictions, but measures of economic suffocation were taken against it—successfully. The Russian press also had “migrant” stars. Thus L. I. Goldstein, an inspired journalist who wrote in the most diverse newspapers for thirty‐five years, including the Syn Otetchestva, and it was also he who founded and directed the Rossia, a clearly patriotic newspaper. The latter was closed because of a particularly virulent chronicle directed against the Imperial family: “These Obmanovy gentlemen”. The press was to celebrate Goldstein’s jubilee in the spring of 1917.1389—As well as the discreet Garvei‐Altus, who had a moment of glory for his chronicle “The Leap of the Passionate Panther”, in which he poured a torrent of calumnies on the Minister of the Interior, N. A. Maklakov. (But all this was nothing compared to the unheard‐of insolence of the “humouristic leaflets” of the years 1905‐1907 which covered in muck, in unimaginable terms, all the spheres of power and of the State. The chameleon Zinovi Grjebine: in 1905 he published a satirical leaflet, the Joupel; in 19141915 he directed the right-minded Otetchestvo, and in 1920 he set up a Russian publishing house in Berlin in collaboration with the editions of the Soviet State.1390) But if the press reflected all sorts of currents of thought, from liberalism to socialism, and, as far as the Jewish thematic was concerned, from Zionism to Autonomism, it was a position deemed incompatible with journalistic respectability: which consisted in adopting a comprehensive attitude towards power. In the 70s, Dostoyevsky had already noted on several occasions that “the Russian press is out of control.” This was even to be seen on the occasion of the meeting of 8 March 1881, with Alexander III, newly enthroned emperor, and 1386Nationalist mass organisation founded in October 1905 by Dr. Dubrovin and Vladimir Purishkevich. 1387Ibidem, p. 351; RJE, t. 1, pp. 290, 510. 1388RJE, t. 1, p. 361. 1389Novoie Vremia, 1917, 21 April (4 May); as well as other newspapers. 1390RJE, t. 1, p. 373.
often afterwards: the journalists acted as self‐proclaimed representatives of society. The following statement was attributed to Napoleon: “Three opposition papers are more dangerous than one hundred thousand enemy soldiers.” This sentence applies largely to the Russo‐Japanese war. The Russian press was openly defeatist throughout the conflict and in each of its battles. Even worse, it did not conceal its sympathies for terrorism and revolution. This press, totally out of control in 1905, was considered during the period of the Duma, if we are to believe Witte, as essentially “Jewish” or “semiJewish”1391; or, to be more precise, as a press dominated by left‐wing or radical Jews who occupied key positions. In November 1905, D. I. Pikhno, editor‐inchief for twenty‐five years of the Russian newspaper The Kievian and a connoisseur of the press of his time, wrote: “The Jews… have bet heavily on the card of the revolution… Those, among the Russians, who think seriously, have understood that in such moments, the press represents a force and that this force is not in their hands, but in that of their adversaries; that they speak on their behalf throughout Russia and have forced people to read them because there is nothing else to read; and as one cannot launch a publication in one day, [the opinion] has been drowned beneath this mass of lies, incapable of finding itself there.”1392 L. Tikhomirov did not see the national dimension of this phenomenon, but he made in 1910 the following remarks about the Russian press: “They play on the nerves… They cannot stand contradiction… They do not want courtesy, fair play… They have no ideal, they do not know what that is.” As for the public formed by this press, it “wants aggressiveness, brutality, it does not respect knowledge and lets itself be deceived by ignorance.”1393 At the other end of the political spectrum, here is the judgement that the Bolshevik M. Lemke passed on the Russian press: “In our day, ideas are not cheap and information is sensational, self‐assured and authoritative ignorance fills the columns of the newspapers.” More specifically, in the cultural sphere, Andrei Bely—who was anything but a right‐wing man or “chauvinist”—wrote these bitter lines in 1909: “Our national culture is dominated by people who are foreign to it… See the names of those who write in Russian newspapers and magazines, literary critics, musical critics: they are practically nothing but Jews; there are among them people who have talent and sensibility, and some, few in number, understand our national culture perhaps better than the Russians themselves; but they are the exception. The mass of Jewish critics is totally foreign to Russian art, it
1391S. I. Witte, Vopominania. TsarsLvoanie Nikolaïa II (Memoirs, The reign of Nicholas II) in 2 vols., Berlin, Slovo, 1922, t. 2, p. 54. 1392The Kievian, 1905, 17 Nov. in Choulguine, Annexes, pp. 285‐286. 1393Iz dncvnika L. Tikhomirova (Excerpts from the diary of L. Tikhomirov). Krasny Arkhiv, 1936, t. 74, pp. 177‐179.
expresses itself in a jargon resembling Esperanto, and carries on a reign of terror among those who try to deepen and enrich the Russian language.”1394 At the same time, V. Jabotinsky, a perspicacious Zionist, complained of “progressive newspapers financed by Jewish funds and stuffed with Jewish collaborators,” and warned: “When the Jews rushed en masse into Russian politics, we predicted that nothing good would come of it, neither for Russian policy nor for the Jews.”1395 The Russian press played a decisive role in the assault of the Cadets and the intelligentsia against the government before the revolution; the deputy in the Duma A. I. Chingariov expresses well the state of mind that reigned there: “This government only has to sink! To a power like this we cannot even throw the smallest bit of rope!” In this regard, it may be recalled that the First Duma observed a minute of silence in memory of the victims of the Bialystok pogrom (refusing to admit, as we have seen, that it was an armed confrontation between anarchists and the army); the second Duma also paid tribute to Iollos, murdered by a terrorist; but when Purishkevich offered to observe a minute of silence in memory of the officers and soldiers who had died in the course of their duty, he was removed from the sitting and the parliamentarians were so manic that they thought it unthinkable to pity those who ensured security in the country, that elementary security which they all needed. A. Koulicher drew up a fair assessment of this period, but too late, in 1923, in emigration: “Before the revolution there were, among the Jews of Russia, individuals and groups of individuals, the activity could be characterised… precisely by the lack of sense of responsibility in the face of the confusion that reigned in the minds of the Jews… [through] the propagation of a ‘revolutionary spirit’ as vague as it was superficial… All their political action consisted in being more to the left than the others. Confined to the role of irresponsible critics, never going to the end of things, they considered that their mission consisted of always saying: ‘It is not enough!’… These people were ‘democrats’… But there was also a particular category of democrats— moreover, they referred to themselves as the ‘Jewish Democratic Group’—who attached this adjective to any substantive, inventing an unsustainable talmud of democracy… With the only end to demonstrate that the others were not yet sufficiently democrats… They maintained an atmosphere of irresponsibility around them, of contentless maximalism, of insatiable demand. All of which had fatal consequences when the revolution came.”1396 The destructive influence of this press is undoubtedly one of the weaknesses, of great vulnerability, of Russian public life in the years 1914‐1917.
1394Boris Bougayev (Andrei Bely), Chtempelevennaïa kultura (The Obliterated Culture), Viesy, 1909, no. 9, pp. 75‐77. 1395Vl. Jabotinsky, Dezertiry i khoziaieva (Deserters and Masters), Felietony, Spb, 1913, pp. 75‐76. 1396A. Koulicher, Ob otvetstvennosti i bezotvetstvennosti (responsibility and irresponsibility). Ievsreiskaya tribouna, Paris, 1923, no. 7 (160), 6 April, p. 4.
But what became of the “reptilian press”, the one that laid down in front of the authorities, the press of the Russian nationalists? The Russkoye Znamya of Dubrovin—it was said that things fell from your hands so much he was rude and bad. (Let us note, in passing, that it was forbidden to circulate it in the army at the request of certain generals.) The Zemshchina was hardly better—I do not know, I have not read any of these papers. As for the Moskovskiye Vedomosti, out of breath, they no longer had readers after 1905. But where were the strong minds and sharp pens of the conservatives, those who were concerned about the fate of the Russians? Why were there no good newspapers to counterbalance the devastating whirlwind? It must be said that, in view of the agile thought and writing of the liberal and radical press, so accountable for its dynamism to its Jewish collaborators, the Russian nationalists could only align slow, rather soft, spirits who were not at all prepared to fight this kind of battle (but what is there to say about this state of affairs today!). There were only a few literary types exasperated by the left press, but totally devoid of talent. Moreover, right‐wing publications were facing serious financial difficulties. While the newspapers financed by “Jewish money”—as Jabotinsky used to say—offered very good wages, hence the profusion of wordsmiths; and, above all, all these journals without exception were interesting. Finally, the left‐wing press and the Duma demanded the closure of the “subsidised newspapers”, that is to say, supported in secret and rather weakly by the government. State Secretary S. E. Kryjanovski acknowledged that the government was providing financial support to more than 30 newspapers in various parts of Russia, but without success, both because the right lacked educated people, prepared for journalistic activity, and because the power itself did not know how to do it either. More gifted than others was I. I. Gourland, a Jew of the Ministry of the Interior, a unique case—who, under the pseudonym of “Vassiliev”, wrote pamphlets sent in sealed envelopes to prominent public figures. Thus the government had only one organ which merely enumerated the news in a dry and bureaucratic tone, the Pravitelstvenny Vestnik. But to create something strong, brilliant, convincing, to openly go to the conquest of public opinion even in Russia—let us not even talk about Europe!—that, the imperial government either did not understand the necessity of it, or was incapable of doing so, the enterprise being beyond its means or intelligence. The Novoie Vremia of Suvorin long maintained a pro‐governmental orientation; it was a very lively, brilliant and energetic newspaper (but, it must be said, equally changing—sometimes favourable to the alliance with Germany, sometimes violently hostile to it), and, alas, not always knowing how to make the difference between national revival and attacks on the Jews. (Its founder, old Suvorin, sharing his property among his three sons before dying, gave them as a condition to never yielding any of their shares to Jews.) Witte ranked Novoie Vremia among the newspapers which, in 1905, “had an interest to be of the left…, then turned right to become now ultra‐reactionaries. This very interesting
and influential journal offers a striking example of this orientation.” Although very commercial, “it still counts among the best.”1397 It provided a great deal of information and was widely disseminated—perhaps the most dynamic of the Russian newspapers and, certainly, the most intelligent of the organs of the right. And the leaders of the right? And the deputies of the right in the Duma? Most often they acted without taking into account the real relationship between their strengths and their weaknesses, showing themselves both brutal and ineffective, seeing no other means of “defending the integrity of the Russian State” than calling for more bans on Jews. In 1911, the deputy Balachov developed a programme that went against the current and the times: reinforcing the Pale of Settlement, removing Jews from publishing, justice, and the Russian school. Deputy Zamyslovski protested that within the universities, the Jews, the S.‐R.s, the Social Democrats enjoyed a “secret sympathy”—as if one could overcome by decree a “secret sympathy”—In 1913 the Congress of the Union of the nobility demanded (as had already been done in 1908 under the third Duma) that more Jews be taken into the army, but that they be symmetrically excluded from public functions, the territorial and municipal administration, and justice. In the spring of 1911, Purishkevich, striving with others against an already weakened Stolypin, proposed to the Duma these extreme measures: “Formally forbid the Jews to take any official duty in any administration… especially in the periphery of the Empire… The Jews convicted of having tried to occupy these functions will have to answer before justice.”1398 Thus the right reproached Stolypin for making concessions to the Jews. When he had taken office in the spring of 1906, Stolypin had had to consider the Manifesto of 17 October as a fait accompli, even if it had to be slightly amended. That the Emperor had hastily signed it without sufficient reflection—it no longer mattered, it had to be applied, the State had to be rebuilt in the midst of difficulties, in accordance with the Manifesto and in spite of the hesitations of the tsar himself. And this implied equal rights for the Jews. Of course, the restrictions imposed on the Jews continued, not only in Russia. In Poland, which was considered—as well as Finland—to be oppressed, these limitations were even more brutal. Jabotinsky writes: “The yoke that weighs heavily on Jews in Finland is beyond measure even with what is known of Russia or Romania… The first Finnish man, if he surprises a Jew out of a city, has the right to arrest the criminal and take him to the police station. Most trades are forbidden to Jews. Jewish marriages are subject to compulsory and humiliating formalities… It is very difficult to obtain permission to build a synagogue… The Jews are deprived of all political rights.” Elsewhere in Austrian Galicia, “the Poles do not hide that they see in the Jews only a material used to strengthen their political power in this region… There have been cases where high school students were excluded from their establishment ‘for cause
1397Witte, t. 2, p. 55. 1398Stenographic Record of the Debates in the Third Duma, 1911, p. 2911.
of Zionism’, one hinders in a thousand and one ways the functioning of Jewish schools, manifests hatred towards their jargon (Yiddish), and the Jewish Socialist Party itself is boycotted by the Polish Social‐Democrats.”1399 Even in Austria, although a country of Central Europe, hatred towards the Jews was still alive, and many restrictions remained in force, such as the Karlsbad baths: sometimes they were simply closed to the Jews, sometimes they could only go there in the summer, and the “winter Jews” could only access it under strict control.1400 But the system of limitations in Russia itself fully justified the grievances expressed in the Jewish Encyclopædia as a whole: “The position of the Jews is highly uncertain, inasmuch as it depends on how the law is interpreted by those responsible for applying it, even at the lowest level of the hierarchy, or even simply their goodwill… This blur… is due to… the extreme difficulty of achieving uniform interpretation and application of the laws limiting the rights of the Jews… Their many provisions have been supplemented and modified by numerous decrees signed by the emperor on the proposal of various ministries… and which, moreover, were not always reported in the General Code of Laws”; “Even if he has an express authorisation issued by the competent authority, the Jew is not certain that his rights are intangible”; “A refusal emanating from a junior official, an anonymous letter sent by a competitor, or an approach made in the open by a more powerful rival seeking the expropriation of a Jew, suffice to condemn him to vagrancy.”1401 Stolypin understood very well the absurdity of such a state of affairs, and the irresistible movement that then pushed for a status of equality for the Jews, a status that already existed to a large extent in Russia. The number of Jews established outside the Pale of Settlement increased steadily from year to year. After 1903, the Jews had access to an additional 101 places of residence, and the number of these was still significantly increased under Stolypin, which implemented a measure which the tsar had not taken in 1906 and which the Duma had rejected in 1907. The former Jewish Encyclopædia indicates that the number of these additional places of residence amounted to 291 in 1910‐19121402; As for the new Encyclopædia, it puts the number to 299 for the year 1911.1403 The old Encyclopædia reminds us that from the summer of 1905 onwards, in the wake of revolutionary events, “the governing bodies [of educational establishments] did not take into account the numerus clausus for three years.”1404 From August 1909 onwards, the latter was reduced from what it was before in the higher and secondary schools (now 5% in the capitals, 10%
1399Vl. Jabotinsky, Homo homini lupus, Felietony, pp. 111‐113. 1400JE, t. 9, p. 314. 1401JE, t. 13, pp. 622‐625. 1402JE, t. 5, p. 822. 1403SJE, t. 5, p, 315. 1404JE, t. 13, p. 55.
outside the Pale of Settlement, 15% within it1405), but subject to compliance. However, since the proportion of Jewish students was 11% at the University of Saint Petersburg and 24% at that of Odessa1406, this measure was felt to be a new restriction. A restrictive measure was adopted in 1911: the numerus clausus was extended to the outside world1407 (for boys only, and in girls’ institutions the real percentage was 13.5% in 1911). At the same time, artistic, commercial, technical and vocational schools accepted Jews without restrictions. “After secondary and higher education, the Jews rushed into vocational education” which they had neglected until then. Although in 1883 “Jews in all municipal and regional vocational schools” accounted for only 2% of the workforce, 12% of boys and 17% of girls in 1898.1408 In addition, “Jewish youth filled private higher education institutions”; thus, in 1912, the Kiev Institute of Commerce had 1,875 Jewish students, and the Psycho‐Neurological Institute, “thousands”. Beginning in 1914, any private educational institution could provide courses in the language of its choice.1409 It is true that compulsory education for all was part of the logic of the time. Stolypin’s main task was to carry out the agrarian reform, thus creating a solid class of peasant‐owners. His companion in arms, Minister of Agriculture A. V. Krivoshein, who was also in favour of abolishing the Pale of Settlement, insisted at the same time that be limited “the right of anonymous companies with shares” to proceed with the purchase of land, to the extent that it was likely to result in the formation of a “significant Jewish land capital”; indeed, “the penetration into the rural world of Jewish speculative capital risked jeopardising the success of the agrarian reform” (at the same time he expressed the fear that this would lead to the emergence of anti‐Semitism unknown until then in the countryside of Greater Russia1410). Neither Stolypin nor Krivoshein could allow that the peasants remain in misery due to the fact of not owning land. In 1906, Jewish agricultural settlements were also deprived of the right to acquire land belonging to the State, which was now reserved for peasants.1411 The economist M. Bernadski cited the following figures for the pre‐war period: 2.4% of Jews worked in agriculture, 4.7% were liberal professionals, 11.5% were domestic servants, 31% worked in commerce (Jews accounted for 35% of merchants in Russia), 36% in industry; 18% of the Jews were settled in the Pale of Settlement.1412 In comparing the latter figure to the 2.4% mentioned above, the number of Jews residing in rural areas and occupied in agriculture 1405SJE, t. 7, p. 352. 1406S. V. Pozner, Ievrei v obschechei chkole… (The Jews in the Public School…), SPb, Razoum, 1914, p. 54. 1407SJE, t. 6, p. 854; t. 7, p. 352. 1408JE, t. 13, pp. 55‐58. 1409I. M. Troitsky, Ievrei vrusskoï chkole (The Jews and the Russian School), in BJWR‐1, pp. 358, 360. 1410K. A. Krivoshein, A. V. Krivoshein (1857‐1921) Evo znatchenie v istorii Rossii natchal XX veka (A. V. Krivoshein: his role in the history of Russia at the beginning of the twentieth century), Paris, 1973, pp. 290, 292. 1411JE, t. 7, p. 757.
had not increased significantly, while according to Bernadski, “it was in the interest of the Russians that Jewish forces and resources were investing themselves in all areas of production”, any limitation imposed on them “represented a colossal waste of the productive forces of the country.” He pointed out that in 1912, for example, the Society of producers and manufacturers of an industrial district in Moscow had approached the President of the Council of Ministers so that the Jews would not be prevented from playing their role of intermediary link with Russian industrial production centres.1413 B. A. Kamenka, chairman of the Board of Directors of Azov Bank and the Don, turned to the financing of the mining and metallurgical industry and sponsored eleven important enterprises in the Donets and Urals region.1414— There was no restriction on the participation of Jews in joint‐stock companies in the industry, but “the limitations imposed on joint‐stock companies wishing to acquire property triggered an outcry in all financial and industrial circles.” And the measures taken by Krivoshein were to be abrogated.1415 V. Choulguine made the following comparison: “The ‘Russian power’ seemed very ingenuous in the face of the perfectly targeted offensive of the Jews. The Russian power reminded one of the flood of a long and peaceful river: an endless expanse plunged into a soft sleepiness; there is water, oh my God there is, but it is only sleeping water. Now this same river, a few versts farther away, enclosed by strong dikes, is transformed into an impetuous torrent, whose bubbling waters precipitate itself madly into turbines.”1416 It is the same rhetoric that is heard on the side of liberal economic thought: “Russia, so poor… in highly skilled workforce…, seems to want to further increase its ignorance and its intellectual lagging in relation to the West.” Denying the Jews access to the levers of production “amounts to a deliberate refusal to use… their productive forces.”1417 Stolypin saw very well that this was wasteful. But the different sectors of the Russian economy were developing too unevenly. And he regarded the restrictions imposed on Jews as a kind of customs tax that could only be temporary, until the Russians consolidated their forces in public life as well as in the sphere of the economy, these protective measures secreted an unhealthy greenhouse climate for them. Finally (but after how many years?), the government began to implement the measures for the development of the peasant world, from which were to result a true and genuine equality of rights
1412M. Bernadski, Ievrci I ruskoye narodnoïe khoziaïstvo (The Jews and the Russian economy), in Chtchit literatourny sbornik / pod red. L. Andreeva, M. Gorkovo and E Sologouba. 3‐e izd., Dop., M. Rousskoye Obchtchestvo dlia izoutchenia ievreiskoi jisni, 1916. pp. 28, 30; SJE, t. 7, p. 386. 1413Bernadski, Chtchit, pp. 30, 31. 1414RJE, t. 1, p. 536. 1415Krivoshein, pp. 292‐293. 1416Choulguine, p. 74. 1417Bernadski, pp. 27. 28.
between social classes and nationalities; a development which would have made the Russians’ fear of the Jews disappear and which would have put a definitive end to all the restrictions of which the latter were still victims. Stolypin was considering using Jewish capital to stimulate Russia’s economy by welcoming their many joint‐stock companies, enterprises, concessions and natural resource businesses. At the same time, he understood that private banks, dynamic and powerful, often preferred to agree among themselves rather than compete, but he intended to counterbalance this phenomenon by “nationalising credit”, that is, the strengthening of the role of the State Bank and the creation of a fund to help entrepreneurial peasants who could not obtain credit elsewhere. But Stolypin was making another political calculation: he thought that obtaining equal rights would take some of the Jews away from the revolutionary movement. (Among other arguments, he also put forward: at the local level, bribery was widely used to circumvent the law, which had the effect of spreading corruption within the State apparatus.) Among the Jews, those who did not give in to fanaticism realised that, despite the continued restrictions, in spite of the increasingly virulent (but impotent) attacks on right‐wing circles, those years offered more and more favourable conditions to the Jews and were necessarily leading to equal rights. Just a few years later, thrown into emigration by the “great revolution”, two renowned Jewish figures meditated on pre‐revolutionary Russia: Self‐taught out of poverty at the cost of the greatest efforts, he had passed his bachelor’s degree as an external candidate at the age of thirty and obtained his university degree at thirty‐five; he had actively participated in the Liberation Movement and had always regarded Zionism as an illusory dream—his name was Iosif Menassievich Bikerman. From the height of his fifty‐five years of age he wrote: “Despite the regulations of May [1882] and other provisions of the same type, despite the Pale of Settlement and numerus clausus, despite Kishinev and Bialystok, I was a free man and I felt as such, a man who had before him a wide range of possibilities to work in all kinds of fields, who could enrich himself both materially and spiritually, who could fight to improve his situation and conserve his strength to continue the fight. The restrictions… were always diminishing under the pressure of the times and under ours, and during the war a wide breach was opened in the last bastion of our inequality. It was necessary to wait another five or fifteen years before obtaining complete equality before the law; we could wait.”1418 Belonging to the same generation as Bikerman, he shared very different convictions and his life was also very different: a convinced Zionist, a doctor (he taught for a time at the Faculty of Medicine in Geneva), an essayist and a politician, Daniil Samoylovich Pasmanik, an immigrant as well, wrote at the same time as Bikerman the following lines: “Under the tsarist regime, the Jews
1418I. M. Bikerman, Rossia i ruskoye Ivreisstvo (Russia and its Jewish Community), in Rossia i ievrei (The Conservative and Destructive Elements among the Jews), in RaJ, p. 33.
lived infinitely better and, whatever may be said of them, their conditions of life before the war—both materially as well as others—were excellent. We were then deprived of political rights, but we could develop intense activity in the sphere of our national and cultural values, while the chronic misery that had been our lot disappeared progressively.”1419—“The chronic economic slump of the Jewish masses diminished day by day, leaving room for material ease, despite the senseless deportations of several tens of thousands of Jews out of the Front areas. The statistics of the mutual credit societies… are the best proof of the economic progress enjoyed by the Jews of Russia during the decade preceding the coup. And so it was in the field of culture. Despite the police regime—it was absolute freedom in comparison with the present Bolshevik regime—Jewish cultural institutions of all kinds prospered. Everything was bursting with activity: organisations were booming, creation was also very alive and vast prospects were now open.”1420 In a little more than a century, under the Russian crown, the Jewish community had grown from 820,000 (including the Kingdom of Poland) to more than five million representatives, even though more than one and a half million chose to emigrate,1421—an increase of a factor of eight between 1800 and 1914. Over the last 90 years, the number of Jews had multiplied by 3.5 (going from 1.5 million to 5,250,000), whereas during the same period the total population of the Empire (including the new territories) had multiplied by only 2.5. However, the Jews were still subject to restrictions, which fuelled antiRussian propaganda in the United States. Stolypin thought he could overcome it by explaining it, inviting members of Congress and American journalists to come and see, in Russia itself. But in the autumn of 1911, the situation became so severe that it led to the denunciation of a trade agreement with the United States dating back eighty years. Stolypin did not yet know what the effect of a passionate speech of the future peacemaker, Wilson, might be, nor what the unanimity of the American Congress could mean. He did not live enough to know. Stolypin, who imprinted its direction, gave its light and name to the decade before the First World War,—all the while he was the object of furious attacks on the part of both the Cadets and the extreme right, when deputies of all ranks dragged him in the mud because of the law on the Zemstvo reform in the western provinces—was assassinated in September 1911. The first head of the Russian government to have honestly raised and attempted to resolve, in spite of the Emperor’s resistance, the question of equality for the Jews, fell—irony of History!—under the blows of a Jew. Such is the fate of the middle way…
1419D. S. Pasmanik, Ruskaya revolutsia i ievreisstvo (Bolshevik i iudaism) (The Russian Revolution and the Jews [Bolshevism and Judaism]), Paris. 1923, pp. 195‐196. 1420D. S. Pasmanik, Tchevo je my dobivaïemsia? (But what do we want?), RaJ, p. 218. 1421SJE, t. 7, pp. 384‐385.
Seven times attempts had been made to kill Stolypin, and it was revolutionary groups more or less numerous that had fermented the attacks—in vain. Here, it was an isolated individual who pulled it off. At a very young age, Bogrov did not have sufficient intellectual maturity to understand the political importance of Stolypin’s role. But from his childhood he had witnessed the daily and humiliating consequences of the inequality of the Jews, and his family, his milieu, his own experience cultivated his hatred for imperial power. In the Jewish circles of Kiev, which seemed ideologically mobile, no one was grateful to Stolypin for his attempts to lift the restrictions imposed on the Jews, and even if this feeling had touched some of the better off, it was counterbalanced by the memory of the energetic way in which he had repressed the revolution of 1905‐1906, as well as by the discontent with his efforts to “nationalise credit” in order to openly compete with private capital. The Jewish circles in Kiev (but also in Petersburg where the future murderer had also stayed) were under the magnetic influence of a field of absolute radicalism, which led young Bogrov not only to feel entitled, but to consider it his duty to kill Stolypin. This field was so powerful that it allowed the following combination: Bogrov‐senior rose in society, he is a capitalist who prospers in the existing system; Bogrov‐junior works at destroying this system and his father, after the attack, publicly declares that he is proud of him. In fact, Bogrov was not so isolated: he was discreetly applauded in the circles which once manifested their unwavering fidelity to the regime. This gunshot that put an end to the hope that Russia ever recovered its health could have been equally fired at the tsar himself. But Bogrov had decided that it was impossible, for (as he declared himself) “it might have led to persecution against the Jews,” to have “damaging consequences on their legal position.” While the Prime Minister would simply not have such effects, he thought. But he was deceived heavily when he imagined that his act would serve to improve the lot of the Jews of Russia. And Menshikov himself, who had first reproached Stolypin with the concessions he had made to the Jews, now lamented his disappearance: our great man, our best political leader for a century and a half—assassinated! And the assassin is a Jew! A Jew who did not hesitate to shoot the Prime Minister of Russia!? “The gunshot of Kiev… must be considered as a warning signal… the situation is very serious… we must not cry revenge, but finally decide to resist!”1422 And what happened then in “Kiev the reactionary” where the Jews were so numerous? In the first hours after the attack, they were massively seized with panic and began to leave the city. Moreover, “the Jews were struck with terror not only in Kiev, but in the most remote corners of the Pale of Settlement and of the rest of Russia.”1423 The Club of Russian Nationalists expressed its intention
1422Novoie Vremia, 1911, 10 (23) Sept., p. 4. 1423Sliosberg, t. 3, p. 249.
to circulate a petition to drive out all the Jews of Kiev (which remained at the stage of intentions). There was not the start of a beginning of pogrom. The President of the youth organisation “The Two‐Headed Eagle”, Galkin, called for destroying the offices of the local security and for busting some Jew: he was immediately neutralised. The new Prime Minister, Kokovtsov, urgently recalled all Cossack regiments (they were manœuvring away from the city) and sent a very firm telegram to all the governors: to prevent pogroms by any means, including force. The troops were concentrated in greater numbers than during the revolution. (Sliosberg: if pogroms had broken out in 1911, “Kiev would have been the scene of a carnage comparable to the horrors of the time of Bogdan Khmelnitsky.”1424) No, nowhere in Russia there was the slightest pogrom. (Despite this, there has been much written, and insistently, that the tsarist power had never dreamed of anything but one thing: to organise an anti‐Jewish pogrom.) Of course, the prevention of public disorder is one of the primary duties of the State, and when this mission is fulfilled, it does not have to expect recognition. But that under such extreme circumstances—the assassination of the head of government—, that it was possible to avoid pogroms, the threat of which caused panic among the Jews, it nevertheless merited a small mention, if only in passing. Well, no, we did not hear anything like that and no one spoke about it. Difficult to believe, but the Kiev Jewish community did not publicly express condemnation nor regret regarding this assassination. On the contrary. After the execution of Bogrov, many Jewish students were ostensibly in mourning. However, all this, the Russians noted it. Thus, in December 1912, Rozanov wrote: “After [Stolypin’s assassination] something broke in my relationship [to the Jews]: would a Russian ever have dared to kill Rothschild or any other of ‘their great men’?”1425 If we look at it from a historical point of view, two important arguments prevent the act committed by Bogrov from being considered on behalf of the “powers of internationalism”. The first and most important: it was not the case. Not only the book written by his brother1426, but different neutral sources suggest that Bogrov really believed that he could work this way to improve the lot of the Jews. And the second: to return to certain uncomfortable episodes in history, to examine them attentively to deplore them, is to assume one’s responsibilities; but to deny them and wash one’s hands, that’s just low. Yet this is what happened almost immediately. In October 1911, the Duma was arrested by the Octobrists on the murky circumstances of the assassination of Stolypin. This provoked an immediate protest from the deputy Nisselovitch: 1424Ibidem. 1425Perepiska V. V. Rozanova and M. O. Gerschenzona (The correspondence of V. V. Rozanov and M. O. Gerschenzon), Novy mir. 1991, no. 3, p. 232. 1426Vladimir Bogrov, Drnitri Bogrov I oubiestvo Stolypina… (Dmitri Bogrov and the assassination of Stolypin…), Berlin, 1931.
why, when formulating their interpellation, did the Octobrists not conceal the fact that the murderer of Stolypin was Jewish? It was there, he declared, antiSemitism! I shall have to endure this incomparable argument myself. Seventy years later, I was the object of a heavy accusation on the part of the Jewish community in the United States: why, in my turn, did I not conceal, why did I say that the assassin of Stolypin was a Jew1427? It does not matter if I have endeavoured to make a description as complete as possible. It does not matter what the fact of being Jew represented in the motivations of his act. No, nondissimulation betrayed my anti‐Semitism!! At the time, Guchkov replied with dignity: “I think that there is much more anti‐Semitism in Bogrov’s very act. I would suggest to the Deputy Nisselovitch that he should address his passionate words not to us but to his fellow coreligionists. Let him use all the force of his eloquence to convince them to keep away from two profane professions: that of spy in the service of the secret police and that of terrorist. He would thus render a much greater service to the members of his community!”1428 But what can one ask of the Jewish memory when Russian history itself has allowed this murder to be effaced from its memory as an event without great significance, as a smear as marginal as it is negligible. It was only in the 80s that I started to pull it out of oblivion—for seventy years, to mention it was considered inappropriate. As the years go by, more events and meanings come to our eyes. More than once I have meditated on the whims of History: on the unpredictability of the consequences it raises on our path—I speak of the consequences of our actions. The Germany of William II opened the way for Lenin to destroy Russia, and twenty‐eight years later it found itself divided for half a century.—Poland contributed to the strengthening of the Bolsheviks in the year 1919, which was so difficult for them, and it harvested 1939, 1944, 1956, 1980.—With what eagerness Finland helped Russian revolutionaries, she who could not bear, who did not suffer from the particular freedoms at her disposal —but within Russia—and, in return, she suffered forty years of political humiliation (“Finlandisation”).—In 1914, England wanted to put down the power of Germany, its competitor on the world stage, and it lost its position of great power, and it was the whole of Europe that had been destroyed. In Petrograd, the Cossacks remained neutral both in February and in October; a year later, they underwent their genocide (and many of the victims were these same Cossacks).—In the first days of July 1917, the S.‐R. of the left approached the Bolsheviks, then formed a semblance of a “coalition”, a broad platform; a year later they were crushed as no autocracy could have had the means to do so. 1427In The Red Wheel, First Knot, August Fourteen, ed. Fayard / Seuil. 1428A. Guchkov, Retch v Gosudarstvennoi Doume 15 Oct. 1911 (Address to the Duma of 15 Oct. 1911)—A. I. Goutchkov v Tretieï Gosoudarstvennoï Doume (1907‐1912), Sbornik retchei (Collection of speeches delivered by A. Guchkov to The Third Duma), Spb, 1912, p. 163.
These distant consequences, none of us are capable of foreseeing them, ever. The only way to guard against such errors is to always be guided by the compass of divine morality. Or, as the people say: “Do not dig a pit for others, you will fall into it yourself.” Similarly, if the assassination of Stolypin had cruel consequences for Russia, the Jews neither derived any benefit from it. Everyone can see things in his own way, but I see here the giant footsteps of History, and I am struck by the unpredictable character of its results. Bogrov killed Stolypin, thus thinking of protecting the Jews from oppression. Stolypin would in any case have been removed from office by the Emperor, but he would surely have been recalled again in 1914‐16 because of the dizzying deficiency in men able to govern; and under his government we would not have had such a lamentable end neither in the war nor in the revolution. (Assuming that with him in power we would have engaged in this war.) First footstep of History: Stolypin is killed, Russia works its last nerves in war and lies under the heel of the Bolsheviks. Second footstep: however fierce they are, the Bolsheviks reveal themselves as being more lame than the imperial government, abandoning half of Russia to the Germans a quarter of a century later, including Kiev. Third footstep: the Nazis invest in Kiev without any difficulty and annihilate its Jewish community. Again the city of Kiev, once again a month of September, but thirty years after Bogrov’s revolver shot. And still in Kiev, still in 1911, six months before the assassination of Stolypin, had started what would become the Beilis affair1429. There is good reason to believe that under Stolypin, justice would not have been degraded as such. One clue: one knows that once, examining the archives of the Department of Security, Stolypin came across a note entitled “The Secret of the Jews” (which anticipated the “Protocols”1430), in which was discussed the “International Jewish plot”. Here is the judgement he made: “There may be logic, but also bias… The government cannot use under any circumstance this kind of method.”1431 As a result, “the official ideology of the tsarist government never relied on the ‘Protocols’.”1432 Thousands and thousands of pages have been written about the Beilis trial. Anyone who would like to study closely all the meanders of the investigation, of the public opinion, of the trial itself, would have to devote at least several years to it. This would go beyond the limits of this work. Twenty years after the event, under the Soviet regime, the daily reports of the police on the progress of 1429See infra, following pages. 1430The famous forgery of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. 1431Sliosberg*, t. 2, pp. 283‐284. 1432R. Nudelman, Doklad na seminare: Sovetskii antisemitizm—pritchiny i prognozy (Presentation at the seminar: Soviet antisemitism—causes and prognoses), in “22”, review of the Jewish intelligentsia of the USSR in Israel, Tel Aviv, 1978, no. 3, p. 145.
the trial were published1433; they can be commended to the attention of amateurs. It goes without saying that the verbatim record of the entire proceedings was also published. Not to mention the articles published in the press. Andrei Yushchinsky, a 12‐year‐old boy, pupil of a religious institution in Kiev, is the victim of a savage and unusual murder: there are forty‐seven punctures on his body, which indicate a certain knowledge of anatomy—they were made to the temple, to the veins and arteries of the neck, to the liver, to the kidneys, to the lungs, to the heart, with the clear intention of emptying him of his blood as long as he was still alive, and in addition—according to the traces left by the blood flow—in a standing position (tied and gagged, of course). It can only be the work of a very clever criminal who certainly did not act alone. The body was discovered only a week later in a cave on the territory of the factory of Zaitsev. But the murder was not committed there. The first accusations do not refer to ritual motives, but the latter soon appears: the connection is made with the beginning of Jewish Passover and the construction of a new synagogue on the grounds of Zaitsev (a Jew). Four months after the murder, this version of the accusation leads to the arrest of Menahem Mendel Beilis, 37, employed at the Zaitsev factory. He is arrested without any real charges against him. How did all this happen? The investigation into the murder was carried out by the criminal police of Kiev, a worthy colleague, obviously, of the Security section of Kiev, which had gotten tangled up in the Bogrov affair1434 and thus caused the loss of Stolypin. The work was entrusted to two nobodies in all respects similar to Kouliabko, Bogrov’s “curator”, Michtchouk, and Krassovsky, assisted by dangerous incompetents (they cleaned the snow in front of the cave to facilitate the passage of the corpulent commissioner of police, thus destroying any potential indications of the presence of the murderers). But worse still, rivalry settled between the investigators—it was to whom the merit of the discovery of the guilty person would be attributed, by whom the best version would be proposed —and they did not hesitate to get in each other’s way, to sow confusion in the investigation, to put pressure on the witnesses, to stop the competitor’s indicators; Krassovksy went so far as to put makeup on the suspect before introducing him to a witness! This parody of inquiry was conducted as if it were a trivial story, without the importance of the event even crossing their minds. When the trial finally opened, two and a half years later, Michtchouk had run off to Finland to escape the charge of falsification of material evidence, a significant collaborator of Krassovsky had also disappeared, and as for the latter, dismissed of his duties, he had switched sides and was now working for Beilis’s lawyers.
1433Protsess Beilisa v otsenke Departamenta politsii (The Beilis trial seen by the Police Department), Krasny Arkhiv, 1931, t. 44, pp. 85‐125. 1434See supra, chapter 9.
For nearly two years, we went from one false version to another; for a long time the accusation was directed to the family of the victim, until the latter was completely put out of the question. It became clearer and clearer that the prosecution was moving towards a formal accusation against Beilis and towards his trial. He was therefore accused of murder—even though the charges against him were doubtful—because he was a Jew. But how was it possible in the twentieth century to inflate a trial to the point of making it a threat to an entire people? Beyond the person of Beilis, the trial turned in fact into an accusation against the Jewish people as a whole—and, since then, the atmosphere around the investigation and then the trial became superheated, the affair took on an international dimension, gained the whole of Europe, and then America. (Until then, trials for ritual murders had taken place rather in the Catholic milieu: Grodno (1816), Velij (1825), Vilnius, the Blondes case (1900), the Koutais affair (1878) took place in Georgia, Doubossar (1903) in Moldavia, while in Russia strictly speaking, there was only the Saratov affair in 1856. Sliosberg, however, does not fail to point out that the Saratov affair also had also a Catholic origin, while in Beilis’s case it was observed that the band of thieves who had been suspected at one time was composed of Poles, that the ritual crime expert appointed at the trial was a Catholic, and that the attorney Tchaplinski was also Polish.1435) The findings of the investigation were so questionable that they were only retained by the Kiev indictment chambre by three votes to two. While the monarchist right had sparked an extensive press campaign, Purishkevich expressed himself in the Duma in April 1911: “We do not accuse the Jews as a whole, we cry for the truth” about this strange and mysterious crime. “Is there a Jewish sect that advocates ritual murders…? If there are such fanatics, let them be stigmatised”; as for us, “we are fighting against many sects in Russia,” our own1436, but at the same time he declared that, according to him, the affair would be stifled in the Duma by fear of the press. Indeed, at the opening of the trial, the right‐wing nationalist Chulguine declared himself opposed to it being held and to the “miserable baggage” of the judicial authorities in the columns of the patriotic Kievian (for which he was accused by the extreme Right to be sold to the Jews). But, in view of the exceptionally monstrous character of the crime, no one dared to go back to the accusation in order to resume the investigation from scratch. On the other side, the liberal‐radicals also launched a public campaign relayed by the press, and not only the Russian press, but that of the whole world. The tension had reached a point of no return. Sustained by the partiality of the accusation, it only escalated, and the witnesses themselves were soon attacked. According to V. Rozanov, every sense of measure had been lost,
1435Sliosberg, t. 3, pp. 23‐24, 37. 1436Stenographic Record of the Debates at the Third Duma, 1911, pp. 3119‐3120.
especially in the Jewish press: “The iron fist of the Jew… falls on venerable professors, on members of the Duma, on writers…”1437 However, the ultimate attempts to get the investigation back on track had failed. The stable near the Zaitsev factory, which was initially neglected by Krassovsky and then assumed to have been the scene of the crime, burned down two days before the date fixed for its examination by hasty investigators. A brazen journalist, Brazul‐Brouchkovsky, conducted his own investigation assisted by the same Krassovsky, now released from his official duties. (It must be remembered that Bonch‐Bruevich1438 published a pamphlet accusing Brazoul of venality.1439) They put forward a version of the facts according to which the murder was allegedly committed by Vera Cheberyak, whose children frequented Andrei Yushchinsky, herself flirting with the criminal underworld. During their long months of inquiry, the two Cheberyak sons died under obscure circumstances; Vera accused Krassovsky of poisoning them, who in turn accused her of killing her own children. Ultimately, their version was that Yushchinsky had been killed by Cheberyak in person with the intention of simulating a ritual murder. She said that the lawyer Margoline had offered her 40,000 rubles to endorse the crime, which he denied at the trial even though he was subject at the same moment to administrative penalties for indelicacy. Trying to disentangle the innumerable details of this judicial imbroglio would only make the understanding even more difficult. (It should also be mentioned that the “metis” of the revolution and the secret police were also involved. In this connection, mention should be made of the equivocal role and strange behaviour during the trial of Lieutenant‐Colonel Gendarmerie Pavel Ivanov—the very one who, in defiance of all laws, helped Bogrov, already condemned to death, to write a new version of the reasons which would have prompted him to kill Stolypin, a version in which the full weight of responsibility fell on the organs of Security to which Ivanov did not belong.) The trial was about to open in a stormy atmosphere. It lasted a month: September‐October 1913. It was incredibly heavy: 213 witnesses summoned to the bar (185) presented themselves, still slowed down by the procedural artifices raised by the parties involved; the prosecutor Vipper was not up to the standard of the group of brilliant lawyers—Gruzenberg, Karabtchevski, Maklakov, Zaroudny—who did not fail to demand that the blunders he uttered be recorded in the minutes, for example: the course of this trial is hampered by “Jewish gold”; “they [the Jews in general] seem to laugh at us, see, we have committed a crime, but no one will dare to hold us accountable.”1440 (Not surprisingly, during the trial, Vipper received threatening letters—on some were
1437V. V. Rozanov, Oboniatelnoye i osiazatelnoye otnochenie ievreyev krovi (The Olfactory and Tactile Relationship of the Jews to Blood), Stockholm, 1934, p. 110. 1438Vladimir Bonch‐Bruevich (1873‐1955), sociologist, publisher, publicist very attached to Lenin, collaborator of Pravda, specialist in religious matters. 1439N. V. Krylenko, Za piat let. 1918‐1922: Obvinitelnye retchi. (Five years, 1918‐1922: Indictments…), M., 1923, p. 359. 1440Ibidem, pp. 356, 364.
drawn a slipknot—and not just him, but the civil parties, the expert of the prosecution, probably also the defence lawyers; the dean of the jury also feared for his life.) There was a lot of turmoil around the trial, selling passes for access to hearings, all of Kiev’s educated people were boiling. The man in the street, him, remained indifferent. A detailed medical examination was carried out. Several professors spread their differences as to whether or not Yushchinsky had remained alive until the last wound, and how acute were the sufferings he had endured. But it was the theological‐scientific expertise that was at the centre of the trial: it focused on the very principle of the possibility of ritual murders perpetrated by Jews, and it was on this that the whole world focused its attention.1441 The defence appealed to recognised authorities in the field of Hebraism, such as Rabbi Maze, a specialist in the Talmud. The expert appointed by the Orthodox Church, Professor I. Troitsky of the Theological Academy of Petersburg, concluded his intervention by rejecting the accusation of an act of cold blood attributable to the Jews; he pointed out that the Orthodox Church had never made such accusations, that these were peculiar to the Catholic world. (Bikerman later recalled that in Imperial Russia the police officers themselves cut short “almost every year” rumours about the Christian blood shed during the Jewish Passover, “otherwise we would have had a ‘case of ritual murder’ not once every few decades, but every year.”1442 The main expert cited by the prosecution was the Catholic priest Pranaitis. To extend the public debate, the prosecutors demanded that previous ritual murder cases be examined, but the defence succeeded in rejecting the motion. These discussions on whether the murder was ritual or not ritual only further increased the emotion that the trial had created through the whole world. But it was necessary that a judgment should be pronounced—on this accused, and not another—and this mission went to a dull jury composed of peasants painfully supplemented by two civil servants and two petty bourgeois; all were exhausted by a month of trials, they fell asleep during the reading of the materials of the case, requested that the trial be shortened, four of them solicited permission to return home before its conclusion and some needed medical assistance. Nevertheless, these jurors judged on the evidence: the accusations against Beilis were unfounded, not proved. And Beilis was acquitted. And that was the end of it. No new search for the culprits was undertaken, and this strange and tragic murder remained unexplained. Instead—and this was in the tradition of Russian weakness—it was imagined (not without ostentation) to erect a chapel on the very spot where the corpse of young Yushchinsky had been discovered, but this project provoked
1441Retch, 1913, 26 Oct. (8 Nov.), p. 3 1442Bikerman, RaJ, p. 29
many protests, because it was judged reactionary. And Rasputin dissuaded the tsar from following up on it.1443 This trial, heavy and ill‐conducted, with a white‐hot public opinion for a whole year, in Russia as in the rest of the world, was rightly considered a battle of Tsou‐Shima.1444 It was reported in the European press that the Russian government had attacked the Jewish people, but that it was not the latter that had lost the war, it was the Russian State itself. As for the Jews, with all their passion, they were never to forgive this affront of the Russian monarchy. The fact that the law had finally triumphed did nothing to change their feelings. It would be instructive, however, to compare the Beilis trial with another that took place at the same time (1913‐15) in Atlanta, USA; a trial which then made great noise: the Jew Leo Frank, also accused of the murder of a child (a girl raped and murdered), and again with very uncertain charges. He was condemned to be hung, and during the proceedings of cassation an armed crowd snatched him from his prison and hanged him.1445 On the individual level, the comparison is in favour of Russia. But the Leo Frank affair had but little echo in public opinion, and did not become an object of reproach.
There is an epilogue in the Beilis case. “Threatened with revenge by extreme right‐wing groups, Beilis left Russia and went to Palestine with his family. In 1920 he moved to the United States. He died of natural causes, at the age of sixty, in the vicinity of New York.1446 Justice Minister Shcheglovitov (according to some sources, he had “given instructions for the case to be elucidated as a ritual murder”1447) was shot by the Bolsheviks. In 1919 the trial of Vera Cheberyak took place. It did not proceed according to the abhorred procedures of tsarism—no question of popular jury!—and lasted only about forty minutes in the premises of the Cheka of Kiev. A member of the latter, who was arrested in the same year by the Whites, noted in his testimony that “Vera Cheberyak was interrogated exclusively by Jewish Chekists, beginning with Sorine” [the head of the Blumstein Cheka]. Commander Faierman “subjected her to humiliating treatment, ripped off her clothes and struck her with the barrel of his revolver… She said: ‘You can do whatever you want with me, but what I said, I will not come back on it… What I said at the
1443Sliosberg, t. 3, p. 47. 1444An allusion to the terrible naval reverse suffered by Russia in its war against Japan (27‐28 May 1905). 1445V. Lazaris, Smert Leo Franka (Death of Leo Frank), in “22”, 1984, no. 36, pp. 155‐159. 1446SJE, t. 1, pp. 317, 318. 1447Ibidem, p. 317.
Beilis trial, nobody pushed me to say it, nobody bribed me…’” She was shot on the spot.1448 In 1919, Vipper, now a Soviet official, was discovered in Kaluga and tried by the Moscow Revolutionary Tribunal. The Bolshevik prosecutor Krylenko pronounced the following words: “Whereas he presents a real danger to the Republic… that there be one Vipper less among us!” (This macabre joke suggested that R. Vipper, a professor of medieval history, was still alive.) However, the Tribunal merely sent Vipper “to a concentration camp… until the communist regime be definitively consolidated.”1449 After that, we lose his track.
Beilis was acquitted by peasants, those Ukrainian peasants accused of having participated in the pogroms against the Jews at the turn of the century, and who were soon to know the collectivisation and organised famine of 1932‐33—a famine that journalists have ignored and that has not been included in the liabilities of this regime. Here is yet another of these footsteps of History…
1448Chekist o Tcheka (A Chekist speaks of the Cheka). Na tchoujoï storone: Istoriko literatournye sborniki / pod red. S. P. Melgounova, t. 9. Berlin: Vataga; Prague: Plamia, 1925, pp. 118, 135. 1449Krylenko, pp. 367‐368
Chapter 11. Jews and Russians before the First World War: The Growing Awareness
In Russia—for another ten years it escaped its ruin—the best minds among the Russians and the Jews had had time to look back and evaluate from different points of view the essence of our common life, to seriously consider the question of culture and national destiny. The Jewish people made its way through an ever‐changing present by dragging behind it the tail of a comet of three thousand years of diaspora, without ever losing consciousness of being “a nation without language nor territory, but with its own laws” (Salomon Lourie), preserving its difference and its specificity by the force of its religious and national tension—in the name of a superior, meta‐historical Providence. Have the Jews of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries sought to identify with the peoples who surrounded them, to blend into them? It was certainly the Jews of Russia who, longer than their other co‐religionists, had remained in the core of isolation, concentrated on their religious life and conscience. But, from the end of the nineteenth century, it was precisely this Jewish community in Russia that began to grow stronger, to flourish, and now “the whole history of the Jewish community in the modern age was placed under the sign of Russian Jewry”, which also manifested “a sharp sense of the movement of History.”1450 For their part, the Russian thinkers were perplexed by the particularism of the Jews. And for them, in the nineteenth century, the question was how to overcome it. Vladimir Solovyov, who expressed deep sympathy for the Jews, proposed to do so by the love of the Russians towards the Jews. Before him, Dostoyevsky had noticed the disproportionate fury provoked by his remarks, certainly offensive but very scarce, about the Jewish people: “This fury is a striking testimony to the way the Jews themselves regard the Russians… and that, in the motives of our differences with the Jews, it is perhaps not only the Russian people who bears all the responsibility, but that these motives, obviously, have accumulated on both sides, and it cannot be said on which side there is the most.”1451
1450B. T. Dinour, Religiozno‐natsionalny oblik ruskovo ievreistava (The religious and national aspects of the Jews of Russia), in BJWR-1, pp. 319, 322. 1451F. M. Dostoyevsky, Dnevnik pisatelia za 1877, 1880 i 1581 gody (Journal of a writer, March 1877, chapter 2), M., L., 1929, 1877, Mart, gl 2, p. 78.
From this same end of the nineteenth century, Teitel reports the following observation: “The Jews are in their majority materialists. Strong in them is the aspiration to acquire material goods. But what contempt for these material goods whenever it comes to the inner ‘I’, to national dignity! Why, in fact, the mass of Jewish youth—who has completely turned away from religious practice, which often does not even speak its mother tongue—why did this mass, if only for the sake of form, not convert to Orthodoxy, which would have opened to it wide the doors of all the universities and would have given it access to all the goods of the earth?” Even the thirst for knowledge was not enough, while “science, superior knowledge was held by them in higher esteem than fortune.” What held them back was the concern not to abandon their coreligionists in need. (He also adds that going to Europe to study was not a good solution either: “Jewish students felt very uncomfortable in the West… The German Jew considered them undesirable, insecure people, noisy, disorderly,”; and this attitude was not only that of the German Jews, “the French and Swiss Jews were no exception.”1452 As for D. Pasmanik, he also mentioned this category of Jews converted under duress, who felt only more resentment towards the power and could only oppose it. (From 1905, conversion was facilitated: it was no longer necessary to go to orthodoxy, it was enough to become a Christian, and Protestantism was more acceptable to many Jews. In 1905 was also repealed the prohibition to return to Judaism.1453) Another writer bitterly concluded, in 1924, that in the last decades preceding the revolution it was not only “the Russian government… which definitely ranked the Jewish people among the enemies of the country”, but “even worse, it was a lot of Jewish politicians who ranked themselves among these enemies, radicalising their position and ceasing to differentiate between the ‘government’ and the fatherland, that is, Russia… The indifference of the Jewish masses and their leaders to the destiny of Great Russia was a fatal political error.”1454 Of course, like any social process, this—and, moreover, in a context as diverse and mobile as the Jewish milieu—did not take place linearly, it was split; in the hearts of many educated Jews, it provoked rifts. On the one hand, “belonging to the Jewish people confers a specific position in the whole of the Russian milieu.”1455 But to observe immediately a “remarkable ambivalence: the traditional sentimental attachment of many Jews to the surrounding Russian
1452I. L. Teitel, Iz moiii jizni za 40 let (Memories of 40 years of my life), Paris, I. Povolotski i ko., 1925, pp. 227 228. ‒ 1453JE, t. 11, p. 894. 1454V. S. Mandel, Konservativnye i pazrouchitelnye elementy v ievreïstve (Conservative and destructive elements among Jews), in RaJ, pp. 201, 203. 1455D. O. Linsky, O natsionalnom samosoznanii ruskovo ievreia (The national consciousness of the Russian Jew), RaJ, p. 142.
world, their rootedness in this world, and at the same time an intellectual rejection, a refusal across the board. Affection for an abhorred world.”1456 This approach so painfully ambivalent could not fail to lead to equally painfully ambivalent results. And when I. V. Hessen, in an intervention in the second Duma in March 1907, after having denied that the revolution was still in its phase of rising violence, thus denying right‐wing parties the right to arise as defenders of the culture against anarchy, exclaimed: “We who are teachers, doctors, lawyers, statisticians, literary men, would we be the enemies of culture? Who will believe you, gentlemen?”—They shouted from the benches of the right: “You are the enemies of Russian culture, not of Jewish culture!”1457 Enemies, of course not, why go so far, but—as the Russian party pointed out— are you really, unreservedly, our friends? The rapprochement was made difficult precisely by this: how could these brilliant advocates, professors and doctors not have in their heart of hearts primarily Jewish sympathies? Could they feel, entirely and unreservedly, Russian by spirit? Hence the problem was even more complicated. Were they able to take to heart the interests of the Russian State in their full scope and depth? During this same singular period, we see on the one hand that the Jewish middle classes make a very clear choice to give secular education to their children in the Russian language, and on the other there is the development of publications in Yiddish—and comes into use the term “Yiddishism”: that the Jews remain Jewish, that they do not assimilate. There was still a path to assimilation, doubtlessly marginal, but not negligible: that of mixed marriages. And also a current of superficial assimilation consisting in adapting artificial pseudonyms to the Russian way. (And who did this most often?! The great sugar producers of Kiev “Dobry”1458, “Babushkin”1459, prosecuted during the war for agreement with the enemy. The editor “Iasny”1460 that even the newspaper of constitutional‐democrat orientation Retch called an “avid speculator”, an “unscrupulous shark.”1461 Or the future Bolshevik D. Goldenbach, who regarded “all of Russia as a country without worth” but disguised himself as “Riazanov” to bother the readers with his Marxist theoretician ratiocinations until his arrest in 1937.) And it was precisely during these decades, and especially in Russia, that Zionism developed. The Zionists were ironical about those who wanted to assimilate, who imagined that the fate of the Jews of Russia was indissolubly linked to the destiny of Russia itself. And then, we must turn first to Vl. Jabotinsky, a brilliant and original essayist, who was brought, in the years preceding the revolution, to express not
1456G. A. Landau, Revolioutsionnye idei v ievreïskoi obctchestvennosti (Revolutionary Ideas in Jewish Society), RaJ, p. 115. 1457Stenographic Record of the Debates of the Second Duma, 13 March 1907, p. 522. 1458Literally “good”, “generous”. 1459Formed from “babushka”—“grandmother”, “granny”. 1460Literally “clear”, “bright”. 1461P. G.—Marodiory knigi 3 (The Marauders of the Book), in Retch, 1917, 6 May, s.
only his rejection of Russia but also his despair. Jabotinsky considered that Russia was nothing more than a halt for the Jews on their historical journey and that it was necessary to hit the road—to Palestine. Passion ignited his words: it is not with the Russian people that we are in contact, we learn to know it through its culture, “mainly through its writers…, through the highest, the purest manifestations of the Russian spirit,”—and this appreciation, we transpose it to the whole of the Russian world. “Many of us, born of the Jewish intelligentsia, love the Russian culture with a maddening and degrading love… with the degrading love of swine keepers for a queen.” As for the Jewish world, we discover it through the baseness and ugliness of everyday life.1462 He is merciless towards those who seek to assimilate. “Many of the servile habits that developed in our psychology as our intelligentsia became russified,” “have ruined the hope or the desire to keep Jewishness intact, and lead to its disappearance.” The average Jewish intellectual forgets himself: it is better not to pronounce the word “Jew”, “the times are no longer about that”; we are afraid to write: “we the Jews”, but we write: “we the Russians” and even: “we the Russkoffs”. “The Jew can occupy a prominent place in Russian society, but he will always remain a second class Russian,” and this, all the more so because he retains a specific ‘inclination of the soul’.”—We are witnessing an epidemic of baptisms for interest, sometimes for stakes far more petty than obtaining a diploma. “The thirty pennies for equal rights…” When abjuring our faith, strip yourself also of our nationality.1463 The situation of the Jews in Russia—and not at any time, but precisely after the years 1905 1906—seemed to him desperately gloomy: “The objective ‒ reality, that is, the fact of living abroad, has turned itself against our people today, and we are weak and helpless.”—“Already in the past we knew we were surrounded by enemies”; “this prison” (Russia), “a pack of dogs”; “the body lying, covered with the wounds of the Jewish people of Russia, tracked, surrounded by enemies and defenceless”; “six million human beings swarming in a deep pit…, a slow torture, a pogrom that does not end”; and even, according to him, “newspapers financed by Jewish funds” do not defend the Jews “in these times of unprecedented persecution.” At the end of 1911, he wrote: “For several years now the Jews of Russia have been crammed on the bench of the accused”, despite the fact we are not revolutionaries, that “we have not sold Russia to the Japanese” and that we are not Azefs1464 or Bogrovs1465”; and in connection with Bogrov: “This unfortunate young man—he was what he was—, at the hour of such an admirable death[!], was booed by a dozen brutes
1462Vl. Jabotinsky, [Sb] Felietony. SPb.: Tipografia Gerold, 1913, pp. 9 11. ‒ 1463Vl. Jabotinsky, [Sb] Felietony, pp. 16, 62 63, 176 180, 253 254. ‒ ‒ ‒ 1464Azef Evno (1569 1918), terrorist, double agent (of the S.‐R. and the Okhrana), unmasked ‒ by A. Bourtsev. 1465The assassin of Stolypin; Cf. supra, chapter 10.
from the cesspool of the Kievian Black Hundreds, come to ensure that the execution had indeed taken place.”1466 And, returning again and again to the Jewish community itself: “Today we are culturally deprived, as at the bottom of a slum, of an obscure impasse.”—“What we suffer above all is contempt for ourselves; what we need above all is to respect ourselves… The study of Jewishness must become for us the central discipline… Jewish culture is now the only plank of salvation for us.”1467 All of this, we can, yes, we can understand it, share it. (And we, Russians, can do it, especially today, at the end of the twentieth century.) It does not condemn those who, in the past, have campaigned for assimilation: in the course of History “there are times when assimilation is undeniably desirable, when it represents a necessary stage of progress.” This was the case after the sixties of the nineteenth century, when the Jewish intelligentsia was still in its embryonic state, beginning to adapt to the surrounding environment, to a culture that had reached maturity. At that time, assimilation did not mean “denying the Jewish people, but on the contrary, taking the first step on the road to autonomous national activity, taking a first step towards renewal and rebirth of the nation.” It was necessary to “assimilate what was foreign to us in order to be able to develop with new energy what was our own.” But half a century later, many radical transformations took place both inside and outside the Jewish world. The desire to appropriate universal knowledge has become widespread as never before. And it is then, now, that must be inculcated to the younger generations the Jewish principles. It is now that there is a threat of an irremediable dilution in the foreign environment: “There is no day that passes in which our sons do not leave us” and “do not become strangers to us”; “enlightened by the Enlightenment, our children serve all the peoples of the Earth, except ours; no one is there to work for the Jewish cause.” “The world around us is too magnificent, too spacious and too rich”— we cannot admit that it diverts Jewish youth from “the ugliness of the daily existence of the Jews… The deepening of national values of Jewishness must become the main axis… of Jewish education.”—“Only the bond of solidarity allows a nation to hold” (we ourselves would need it!—A. S.), while denial slows down the struggle for the right of the Jews: one imagines that there is a way out, and “we leave… lately… in compact masses, with lightness and cynicism.”1468 Then, letting himself be carried away: “The royal spirit [of Israel] in all its power, its tragic history in all its grandiose magnificence…” “Who are we to justify ourselves before them? Who are they to demand accountability?”1469
1466Ibidem, pp. 26, 30, 75, 172 173, 195, 199 200, 205. ‒ ‒ 1467Ibidem, pp. 15, 17, 69. 1468Ibidem, pp. 18 24, 175 177. ‒ ‒ 1469Ibidem, pp. 14, 200.
The latter formula, we can also respect it fully. But under the condition of reciprocity. Especially since it is not up to any nation or religion to judge another. The calls to return to Jewish roots did not remain unheeded in those years. In Saint Petersburg, before the revolution, “we could note in the circles of the Russo‐Jewish intelligentsia a very great interest in Jewish history.”1470 In 1908, the Jewish Historical‐Ethnographic Commission expanded into a Jewish Historical‐Ethnographic Society,1471 headed by M. Winaver. It worked actively and efficiently to collect the archives on the history and ethnography of the Jews of Russia and Poland—nothing comparable was established by Jewish historical science in the West. The magazine The Jewish Past, led by S. Dubnov, then was created.1472 At the same time began the publication of the Jewish Encyclopædia in sixteen volumes (which we use extensively in this study), and the History of the Jewish People in fifteen volumes. It is true that in the last volume of the Jewish Encyclopædia, its editors complain that “the elite of the Jewish intelligentsia has shown its indifference to the cultural issues raised by this Encyclopædia,” devoting itself exclusively to the struggle for the equality—all formal—of rights for the Jews.1473 Meanwhile, on the contrary, in other minds and other Jewish hearts there was a growing conviction that the future of the Jews of Russia was indissolubly linked to that of Russia. Although “scattered over an immense territory and among a foreign world…, the Russian Jewish community had and was conscious of being a unique whole. Because unique was the environment that surrounded us…, unique its culture… This unique culture, we absorbed it throughout the whole country.”1474 “The Jews of Russia have always been able to align their own interests to those of all the Russian people. And this did not come from any nobility of character or a sense of gratitude, but from a perception of historical realities.” Open controversy with Jabotinsky: “Russia is not, for the millions of Jews who populate it, a step among others on the historical path of the wandering Jew… The contribution of Russian Jews to the international Jewish community has been and will be the most significant. There is no salvation for us without Russia, as there is no salvation for Russia without us.”1475 This interdependence is affirmed even more categorically by the deputy of the second and third Dumas, O. I. Pergament: “No improvement of the internal
1470Pamiati, M. L. Vichnitsera, BJWR-1. p. 8. 1471JE, t. 8, p. 466. 1472JE, t. 7, pp. 449 450. ‒ 1473JE, t. 16, p. 276. 1474I. M. Bikerman, Rossia i rousskoye ievreisstvo (Russia and the Jewish Community of Russia), RaJ. p. 86. 1475St. Ivanovich, Ievrei i sovetskaya dikiatoura (The Jews and the Soviet Dictatorship), in JW, pp. 55 56. ‒
situation of Russia ‘is possible without the simultaneous enfranchisement of the Jews from the yoke of inequality’.”1476 And there, one cannot ignore the exceptional personality of the jurist G. B. Sliosberg: among the Jews he was one of those who, for decades, had the closest relations with the Russian State, sometimes as Deputy to the Principal Secretary of the Senate, sometimes as a consultant to the Ministry of the Interior, but to whom many Jews reproached his habit of asking the authorities for rights for the Jews, when the time had come demand them. He writes in his memoirs: “From childhood, I have become accustomed to consider myself above all as a Jew. But from the beginning of my conscious life I also felt like a son of Russia… Being a good Jew does not mean that one is not a good Russian citizen.”1477—“In our work, we were not obliged to overcome the obstacles encountered at every step by the Jews of Poland because of the Polish authorities… In the Russian political and administrative system, we Jews did not represent a foreign element, insofar as, in Russia, cohabited many nationalities. The cultural interests of Russia did not conflict in any way with the cultural interests of the Jewish community. These two cultures were somewhat complementary.”1478 He even added this somewhat humorous remark: the legislation on Jews was so confusing and contradictory that in the 90s, “it was necessary to create a specific jurisprudence for the Jews using purely Talmudic methods.”1479 And again, in a higher register: “The easing of the national yoke which has been felt in recent years, shortly before Russia entered a tragic period in its history, bore in the hearts of all Russian Jews the hope that the Russian Jewish consciousness would gradually take a creative path, that of reconciling the Jewish and Russian aspects in the synthesis of a higher unity.”1480 And can we forget that, among the seven authors of the incomparable Milestones1481, three were Jews: M. O. Gershenzon, A. S. Izgoev‐Lande, and S. L. Frank? But there was reciprocity: in the decades preceding the revolution, the Jews benefited from the massive and unanimous support of progressive circles. Perhaps the amplitude of this support is due to a context of bullying and pogroms, but it has never been so complete in any other country (and perhaps never in all the past centuries). Our intelligentsia was so generous, so freedomloving, that it ostracised anti‐Semitism from society and humanity; moreover, the one who did not give his frank and massive support to the struggle for equal rights of the Jews, who did not make it a priority, was considered a “despicable anti‐Semite”. With its ever‐awakening moral consciousness and extreme
1476JE, t. 12, pp. 372 373. ‒ 1477Sliosberg, t. 1, pp. 3 4. ‒ 1478Sliosberg, t. 2, p. 302. 1479Sliosberg, t. 1, p. 302. 1480Linsky, RaJ, p. 144. 1481Vekhi: resounding collection of articles (1909) in which a group of intellectuals disillusioned from Marxism invited the intelligentsia to reconcile with the power.
sensitivity, the Russian intelligentsia sought to understand and assimilate the Jewish view of priorities affecting the whole of political life: is deemed progressive all that is a reaction against the persecution of the Jews, all the rest is reactionary. Not only did Russian society firmly defend the Jews against the government, but it forbade itself and forbade anyone to show any trace of a shadow of criticism of the conduct of each Jew in particular: and if this bore anti‐Semitism within me? (The generation formed at that time retained these principles for decades.) V. A. Maklakov evokes in his memoirs a significant episode that occurred during the congress of the Zemstvos in 1905, when the wave of pogroms against the Jews and intellectuals had just swept through and began to rise in strength the pogroms directed against landowners. “E. V. de Roberti proposed not to extend the amnesty [demanded by the congress] to the crimes related to violence against children and women.” He was immediately suspected of wanting to introduce a “class” amendment, that is to say, to concern himself with the families of the noble victims of pogroms. “E. de Roberti hastened… to reassure everybody: ‘I had absolutely no plan in regard to the property of the noblemen… Five or twenty properties burned down, this has no importance. I have in view the mass of immovable property and houses belonging to Jews, which were burned and pillaged by the Black Hundreds’.”1482 During the terror of 1905 1907, Gerzenstein (who had been ironic about ‒ the property fires of the noblemen) and Iollos were considered as martyrs, but no one among the thousands of other innocent victims, were considered so. In The Last Autocrat, a satirical publication that the Russian liberals published abroad, they succeeded in placing the following legend under the portrait of the general whom the terrorist Hirsch Lekkert had attempted in vain to assassinate: “Because of him”[I emphasise—A. S.], the tsar “had executed… the Jew Lekkert.”1483 It was not just the parties of the opposition, it was the whole mass of middle‐class civil servants who were trembling at the idea of sounding like “non‐progressives”. It was necessary to enjoy a good personal fortune, or possess remarkable freedom of mind, to resist with courage the pressure of general opinion. As for the world of the bar, of art, of science, ostracism immediately struck anyone who moved away from this magnetic field. Only Leo Tolstoy, who enjoyed a unique position in society, could afford to say that, for him, the Jewish question was in the 81st place. The Jewish Encyclopædia complained that the pogroms of October 1905 “provoked in the progressive intelligentsia a protestation that was not specific
1482V. A. Maklakov, Vlast i obchtchestvennost na zakate staroï Rossii (Vospominania sovremennika) [The power and opinion during the twilight of ancient Russia (Memoirs of a Contemporary)], Paris: Prilojenie k “Illioustrirovannoï Rossii” II n 1936, p. 466. 1483Der Letzte russische Alleinherscher (The Last Autocrat: Study on the Life and Reign of the Emperor of Russia Nicholas II), Berlin, Ebcrhard Frowein Verlag [1913], p. 58.
[i.e., exclusively Jewish‐centred], but general, oriented towards all manifestations of the ‘counter‐revolution’ in all its forms.”1484 Moreover, Russian society would have ceased to be itself if it had not brought everything to a single burning question: tsarism, still tsarism, always tsarism! But the consequence was this: “After the days of October [the pogroms of 1905], concrete aid to the Jewish victims was brought only by the Jews of Russia and other countries.”1485 And Berdyaev added: “Are you capable of feeling the soul of the Jewish people?… No, you are fighting… in favour of an abstract humanity.”1486 This is confirmed by Sliosberg: “In politically evolved circles,” the Jewish question “was not political in the broad sense of the term. Society was attentive to manifestations of the reaction in all its forms.”1487 In order to correct this misjudgement of Russian society, a collection of articles entitled Shchit [The Shield] was published in 1915: it took on globally and exclusively the defence of the Jews, but without the participation of the latter as writers, these were either Russian or Ukrainian, and a beautiful skewer of celebrities of the time was assembled there—nearly forty names.1488 The whole collection was based on a single theme: “Jews in Russia”; it is univocal in its conclusions and its formulations denote in some places a certain spirit of sacrifice. A few samples—L. Andreev: “The prospect of an approaching solution to the Jewish problem brings about a feeling of ‘joy close to fervour’, the feeling of being freed from a pain that has accompanied me all my life,” which was like “a hump on the back”; “I breathed poisonous air…”—M. Gorky: “The great European thinkers consider that the psychic structure of the Jew is culturally higher, more beautiful than that of the Russian.” (He then rejoiced at the development in Russia of the sect of the Sabbatists and that of the “New Israel”.)—P. Maliantovitch: “The arbitrariness to which the Jews are subjected is a reproach which, like a stain, covers the name of the Russian people… The best among the Russians feel it as a shame that pursues you all your life. We are barbarians among the civilised peoples of humanity… we are deprived of the precious right to be proud of our people… The struggle for the equal rights of the Jews represents for the Russian man… a national cause of prime importance… The arbitrariness subjected to the Jews condemns the Russians to failure in their attempts to attain their own happiness.” If we do not worry about the liberation of the Jews, “we will never be able to solve our own problems.”— K. Arseniev: “If we remove everything that hinders the Jews, we will see ‘an increase in the intellectual forces of Russia’.”—A. Kalmykova: “On the one 1484JE, t. 12, p. 621. 1485JE, t. 12, p. 621. 1486Nikolai Berdyaev, Filosofia neravenstva (Philosophy of Inequality), 2nd ed., Paris, YMCA Press, 1970, p. 72. 1487Sliosberg, t. 1, p. 260. 1488Shchit (the Shield), 1916.
hand, our ‘close spiritual relationship with the Jewish world in the domain of the highest spiritual values’; on the other, ‘the Jews may be the object of contempt, of hatred’.”—L. Andreev: “It is we, the Russians, who are the Jews of Europe; our border, it is precisely the Pale of Settlement.”—D. Merezhkovsky: “What do the Jews expect of us? Our moral indignation? But this indignation is so strong and so simple… that we only have to scream with the Jews. This is what we do.”—By the effect of I am not sure which misunderstanding, Berdyaev is not one of the authors of the Shield. But he said of himself that he had broken with his milieu from his earliest youth and that he preferred to frequent the Jews. All the authors of the Shield define anti‐Semitism as an ignoble feeling, as “a disease of consciousness, obstinate and contagious” (D. OvsianikovKulikovsky, Academician). But at the same time, several authors note that “the methods and processes… of anti‐Semites [Russians] are of foreign origin” (P. Milyukov). “The latest cry of anti‐Semitic ideology is a product of the German industry of the spirit… The ‘Aryan’ theory… has been taken up by our nationalist press… Menshikov1489 [copies] the ideas of Gobineau” (F. Kokochkin). The doctrine of the superiority of the Aryans in relation to the Semites is “of German manufacture” (see Ivanov). But for us, with our hump on our backs, what does it change? Invited by the “Progressive Circle” at the end of 1916, Gorky “devoted the two hours of his lecture to rolling the Russian people in the mud and raising the Jews to the skies,” as noted by the Progressive deputy Mansyrev, one of the founders of the “Circle”.1490 A contemporary Jewish writer analyses this phenomenon objectively and lucidly: “We assisted to a profound transformation of the minds of the cultivated Russians who, unfortunately, took to heart the Jewish problem much more greatly than might have been expected… Compassion for the Jews was transformed into an imperative almost as categorical as the formula ‘God, the Tsar, the Fatherland’”; as for the Jews, “they took advantage of this profession of faith according to their degree of cynicism.”1491 At the same time, Rozanov spoke of “the avid desire of the Jews to seize everything.”1492 In the 20s, V. Choulguine summed it up as follows: “At that time [a quarter of a century before the revolution], the Jews had taken control of the political life of the country… The brain of the nation (if we except the government and the circles close to it) found itself in the hands of the Jews and was accustomed
1489Menshikov Michel (1859 1918), began a career as a sailor (until 1892), then became a ‒ journalist at the New Times, supported Stolypin. After October, takes refuge in Valdai. Arrested in August 1918 by the Bolsheviks, he was executed without trial. 1490Kn. S. P. Mansyrev, Moi vospominania (My memories) // [Sb.] Fevralskaïa revolioutsia / sost. S. A. Alexeyev. M. L., 1926, p. 259. 1491A. Voronel, in “22”: Obchtchestvenno‐polititcheski i literatourny newspaper Ivreiskoi intelligentsii iz SSSR v Izrailie, Tel Aviv, 1986, no. 50, pp. 156 157. ‒ 1492Perepiska V. V. Rozanova and M. O. Gerchenzona (Correspondence of V. Rozanov and M. Gerchenzon), Novy Mir, 1991, no. 3, p. 239.
to think according to their directives.” “Despite all the ‘restrictions’ on their rights, the Jews had taken possession of the soul of the Russian people.”1493 But was it the Jews who had seized the Russian soul or did the Russians simply not know what to do with it? Still in the Shield, Merezhkovsky tried to explain that philo‐Semitism had arisen in reaction to anti‐Semitism, that the blind valourisation of a foreign nationality was asserted, that the absolutisation of the “no” led to that of the “yes”.1494 And Professor Baudouin de Courtenay acknowledged that “many, even among the ‘political friends’ of the Jews, experience repulsion and acknowledge it in private. Here, of course, there is nothing to do. Sympathy and antipathy… are not commanded.” We must nevertheless rely “not on affects, but on reason.”1495 The confusion that reigned in the minds of those days was brought to light with greater significance and reach by P. B. Struve, who devoted his entire life to breaking down the obstacles erected on the path that would lead him from Marxism to the rule of law, and, along the way, also obstacles of other kinds. The occasion was a polemic—fallen into a deep oblivion, but of great historical importance—which broke out in the liberal Slovo newspaper in March 1909 and immediately won the entirety of the Russian press. Everything had begun with the “Chirikov affair”, an episode whose importance was inflated to the extreme: an explosion of rage in a small literary circle accusing Chirikov—author of a play entitled The Jews, and well disposed towards them—to be anti‐Semitic. (And this because at a dinner of writers he had let himself go on to say that most of the literary critics of Saint Petersburg were Jews, but were they able to understand the reality of Russian life?) This affair shook many things in Russian society. (The journalist Lioubosh wrote about it: “It is the two kopeck candle that set fire to Moscow.”) Considering that he had not sufficiently expressed himself on the Chrikov affair in a first article, Jabotinsky published a text entitled “Asemitism” in the Slovo newspaper on 9 March 1909. He stated in it his fears and his indignation at the fact that the majority of the progressive press wanted to silence this matter. That even a great liberal newspaper (he was referring to the Russian News) had not published a word for twenty‐five years on “the atrocious persecutions suffered by the Jewish people… Since then the law of silence has been regarded as the latest trend by progressive philo‐Semites.” It was precisely here that evil resided: in passing over the Jewish question. (We can only agree with this!) When Chirikov and Arabajine “assure us that there is nothing antiSemitic in their remarks, they are both perfectly right.” Because of this tradition of silence, “one can be accused of anti‐Semitism for having only pronounced the word ‘Jew’ or made the most innocent remark about some particularity of
1493V. V. Choulguine, “Chto nam v nikh ne nravitsa…”: Ob antisemitzme v Rossii (“What we do not like about them…” On anti‐Semitism in Russia), Paris, 1929, pp. 58, 75. 1494Shchit (the Shield), p. 164. 1495Ibidem, p. 145.
the Jews… The problem is that the Jews have become a veritable taboo that forbids the most trivial criticism, and that it is them that are the big losers in the affair.” (Here again, we can only agree!) “There is a feeling that the word ‘Jew’ itself has become an indecent term.” “There is here an echo of a general state of mind that makes its way among the middle strata of the progressive Russian intelligentsia… We can not yet provide tangible proofs of it, we can only have a presentiment about this state of mind”—, but it is precisely this that torments him: no proofs, just an intuition—and the Jews will not see the storm coming, they will be caught unprepared. For the moment, “we see only a small cloud forming in the sky and we can hear a distant, but already menacing roll.” It is not anti‐Semitism, it is only “Asemitism”, but that also is not admissible, neutrality cannot be justified: after the pogrom of Kishinev and while the reactionary press peddles “the inflamed tow of hatred”, the silence of the progressive newspapers about “one of the most tragic questions of Russian life” is unacceptable.1496 In the editorial of the same issue of Slovo, were formulated the following reservations about Jabotinsky’s article: “The accusations made by the author against the progressive press correspond, in our opinion, to the reality of things. We understand the sentiments that have inspired the author with his bitter remarks, but to impute to the Russian intelligentsia the intention, so to speak deliberately, of sweeping the Jewish question under the rug, is unfair. The Russian reality has so many unresolved problems that we cannot devote much space to each one of them… Yet, if many of these problems are resolved, this will have very important effects, including for the Jews who are citizens of our common homeland.”1497 And if the editorialist of the Slovo had then asked Jabotinsky why he did not defend one or the other of those fools who uttered “the most innocent remark about some particularity of the Jews”? Was Jewish opinion interested only in them, did they take their part? Or was it enough to observe how the Russian intelligentsia got rid of these “anti‐Semites”? No, the Jews were no less responsible than the others for this “taboo”. Another article in the same paper helped launch the discussion: “The agreement, not the fusion”, of V. Golubev. Indeed, the Chirikov affair “is far from being an isolated case”, “at the present time… the national question… is also of concern to our intelligentsia”. In the recent past, especially in the year of the revolution1498, our intelligentsia has “sinned very much” by cosmopolitanism. But “the struggles that have been fought within our community and between the nationalities that populate the Russian State have not disappeared without leaving traces.” Like the other nationalities, in those years, “the Russians had to look at their own national question…; when
1496Vl. Jabotinsky, Asemitizm (Asemitism), in Slovo, SPb., 1909, 9 (22) March, p. 2; See also: [Sb.] Felietony, pp. 77 83. ‒ 1497Slovo, 1909, 9 (22) March, p. 1. 1498of 1905.
nationalities deprived of sovereignty began to self‐determine, the Russians felt the need to do so as well.” Even the history of Russia, “we Russian intellectuals, we know it perhaps less well than European history.” “Universal ideals… have always been more important to us than the edification of our own country.” But, even according to Vladimir Solovyov, who is however very far removed from nationalism, “before being a bearer of universal ideals, it is essential to raise oneself to a certain national level. And the feeling of raising oneself seems to have begun to make its way into our intelligentsia.” Until now, “we have been silent on our own peculiarities.” Remembering them in our memory does not constitute a manifestation of anti‐Semitism and oppression of other nationalities: between nationalities there must be “harmony and not fusion”.1499 The editorial team of the newspaper may have taken all these precautions because it was preparing to publish the following day, 10 March, an article by P. B. Struve, “The intelligentsia and the national face”, which had coincidentally arrived at the same time than that of Jabotinsky and also dealing with the Chirikov case. Struve wrote: “This incident,” which will “soon be forgotten”, “has shown that something has moved in the minds, has awakened and will no longer be calmed. And we will have to rely on that.” “The Russian intelligentsia hides its national face, it is an attitude that imposes nothing, which is sterile.”—“Nationality is something much more obvious [than race, colour of skin] and, at the same time, something subtle. It is the attraction and repulsion of the mind and, to become aware of them, it is not necessary to resort to anthropometry or to genealogy. They live and palpitate in the depths of the soul.” One can and must fight to make these attractions/repulsions not be brought into law, “but ‘political’ equity does not require from us ‘national’ indifference.” These attractions and repulsions belong to us, they are our goods”, “the organic feeling of our national belonging… And I do not see the slightest reason… to renounce this property in the name of anyone or anything.” Yes, insists Struve, it is essential to draw a border between the legal, the political domains and the realm where these sentiments live. “Especially with regard to the Jewish question, it is both very easy and very difficult.”—“The Jewish question is formally a question of law”, and, for this reason, it is easy and natural to help solve it: to grant the Jews equal rights—yes, of course! But at the same time it is “very difficult because the force of rejection towards the Jews in different strata of Russian society is considerable, and it requires great moral force and a very rational mind to, despite this repulsion, resolve definitively this question of right.” However, “even though there is a great force of rejection towards the Jews among large segments of the Russian population, of all the ‘foreigners’ the Jews are those who are closest to us, those who are the most closely linked to us. It is a historico‐cultural paradox, but it is so. The Russian intelligentsia has always regarded the Jews as Russians, and it is neither
1499V. Golubev, Soglachenie, a ne stianie, Slovo, 1909, 9 (22) March, p. 1.
fortuitous nor the effect of a ‘misunderstanding’. The deliberate initiative of rejecting Russian culture and asserting Jewish ‘national’ singularity does not belong to the Russian intelligentsia, but to this movement known as Zionism… I do not feel any sympathy for Zionism, but I understand that the problem of ‘Jewish’ nationality does indeed exist,” and even poses itself more and more. (It is significant that he places “national” and “Jewish” in quotation marks: he still cannot believe that the Jews think of themselves as others.) “There does not exist in Russia other ‘foreigners’ who play a role as important in Russian culture… And here is another difficulty: they play this role while remaining Jews.” One cannot, for example, deny the role of the Germans in Russian culture and science; but by immersing themselves in Russian culture, the Germans completely blend into it. “With the Jews, that’s another matter!” And he concludes: “We must not deceive [our national feeling] or hide our faces… I have a right, like any Russian, to these feelings… The better it is understood… the less there will be misunderstandings in the future.”1500 Yes… Oh, if we had woken up, as much as we are, a few decades earlier! (The Jews, they, had awakened long before the Russians.) But the very next day, it was a whirlwind: as if all the newspapers had waited for that! From the liberal Hacha Gazeta (“Is this the right moment to talk about this?”) and the right‐wing newspaper Novoie Vremia to the organ of the Democratic constitutional party Retch where Milyukov could not help exclaiming: Jabotinsky “has succeeded in breaking the wall of silence, and all the frightening and threatening things that the progressive press and the intelligentsia had sought to hide from the Jews now appear in their true dimension.” But, later on, argumentative and cold as usual, Milyukov goes on to the verdict. It begins with an important warning: Where does it lead? Who benefits from it? The “national face” which, moreover, “we must not hide”, is a step towards the worst of fanaticism! (Thus, the “national face” must be hidden.) Thus “the slippery slope of æsthetic nationalism will precipitate the intelligentsia towards its degeneration, towards a true tribal chauvinism” engendered “in the putrid atmosphere of the reaction reigning over today’s society.”1501 But P. B. Struve, with an almost juvenile agility in spite of his forty years, retaliates as soon as 12 March in the columns of the Slovo to the “professorial speech” of Milyukov. And, above all, to this sleight of hand: “Where does it lead?” (“Who benefits from it?” “Who will draw the chestnuts from the fire?”—this is how people will be silenced—whatever they say—for a hundred years or more. There is a falsifying process that denotes a total inability to understand that a speech can be honest and have weight in itself.)—“Our point of view is not refuted on the merits”, but confronted on the polemic mode to “a
1500P. Struve, Intelligentsia i natsionalnoïe litso, Slovo, 1909, 10 (23) March, p. 2. 1501P. Milyukov, Natsionalizm protiv natsionalizma (Nationalism Against Nationalism), Retch, 19O9, 11 (24) March, p. 2.
projection”: “Where does it lead?”1502 (A few days later, he wrote again in the Slovo: “It is an old process to discredit both an idea that one does not share and the one who formulates it, insinuating perfidiously that the people of Novoie Vremia or Russkoye Znamya will find it quite to their liking. This procedure is, in our opinion, utterly unworthy of a progressive press.”1503) Then, as to the substance: “National questions are, nowadays, associated with powerful, sometimes violent feelings. To the extent that they express in everyone the consciousness of their national identity, these feelings are fully legitimate and… to stifle them is… a great villainy.” That is it: if they are repressed, they will reappear in a denatured form. As for this “‘Asemitism’ which would be the worst thing, it is in fact a much more favourable ground for a legal solution of the Jewish question than the endless struggle between ‘anti‐Semitism’ and ‘philo‐Semitism’. There is no non‐Russian nationality that needs… all Russians to love it without reservation. Even less that they pretend to love it. In truth, ‘Asemitism’, combined with a clear and lucid conception of certain moral and political principles and certain political constraints, is much more necessary and useful to our Jewish compatriots than a sentimental and soft ‘philo‐Semitism’”, especially if this one is simulated.—And “it is good that the Jews see the ‘national face’” of Russian constitutionalism and democratic society. And “it is of no use to them to speak under the delusion that this face belongs only to antiSemitic fanaticism.” This is not “the head of the Medusa, but the honest and human face of the Russian nation, without which the Russian State would not stand up.”1504—And again these lines of Slovo‘s editorial team: “Harmony… implies recognition and respect for all the specificities of each [nationality].”1505 Heated debates continued in the newspapers. “Within a few days a whole literature was formed on the subject.” We assisted “In the Progressive Press… to something unthinkable even a short time ago: there is a debate on the question of Great‐Russian nationalism!”1506 But the discussion only reached this level in the Slovo; the other papers concentrated on the question of “attractions and repulsions”.1507 The intelligentsia turned its anger towards its hero of the day before. Jabotinsky also gave voice, and even twice… “The bear came out of his lair,” he lashed out, addressed to P. Struve, a man who was however so calm and well‐balanced. Jabotinsky, on the other hand, felt offended; he described his article, as well as that of Milyukov, as “a famous batch”: “their languorous declamation is impregnated with hypocrisy, insincerity, cowardice and
1502P. Struve, Polemitcheskie zigzagui i nesvoïevremennaya pravda (polemical zigzags and undesired truth), Slovo, 1909, 12 (25) March, p. 1. 1503Slovo, 1909, 17 (30) March, p. 1. 1504P. Struve, Slovo, 1909, 12 (25) March, p. 1. 1505V. Golubev, K polemike o natsionalizme (On the controversy regarding nationalism), ibidem, p. 2. 1506M. Slavinski, Ruskie, velikorossy i rossiane (The Russians, the Great Russians, and the citizens of Russia), ibidem, 14 (27) March, p. 2. 1507Slovo*, 1909, 17 (30) March, p. 1.
opportunism, which is why it is so incorrigibly worthless”; and to ironise in quoting Milyukov: thus “the holy and pure Russian intelligentsia of old” “felt feelings of ‘repulsion’ at the encounter of the Jews?… Bizarre, no?” He criticised “the ‘holy and pure’ climate of this marvellous country”, and the zoological species of Yursus judaeophagus intellectualis.” (The conciliatory Winaver also took for his rank: “the Jewish footman of the Russian palace”). Jabotinsky fulminated at the idea that the Jews should wait “until was resolved the central political problem” (i.e. the tsar’s deposition): “We thank you for having such a flattering opinion on our disposition to behave like a dog with his master”, “on the celerity of faithful Israel”. He even concluded by stating that “never before the exploitation of a people by another had ever been revealed with such ingenuous cynicism.”1508 It must be admitted that this excessive virulence hardly contributed to the victory of his cause. Moreover, the near future was going to show that it was precisely the deposition of the tsar which would open the Jews to even more possibilities than they sought to obtain, and cut the grass under the foot of Zionism in Russia; so much and so well that Jabotinsky was also deceived on the merits. Much later and with the retreat of time, another witness of that era, then a member of the Bund, recalled that “in the years 1907 1914, some liberal ‒ intellectuals were affected by the epidemic, if not of open anti‐Semitism, at least ‘Asemitism’ that struck Russia then; on the other hand, having gotten over the extremist tendencies that had arisen during the first Russian revolution, they were tempted to hold the Jews accountable, whose participation in the revolution had been blatant.” In the years leading up to the war, “the rise of Russian nationalism was present… in certain circles where, at first sight, the Jewish problem was, only a short time before, perceived as a Russian problem.”1509 In 1912, Jabotinsky himself, this time in a more balanced tone, reported this judicious observation of a prominent Jewish journalist: as soon as the Jews are interested in some cultural activity, immediately the latter becomes foreign to the Russian public, who is no longer attracted to it. A kind of invisible rejection. It is true, that a national demarcation cannot be avoided; it will be necessary to organise life in Russia “without external additions which, in so large a quantity, perhaps cannot be tolerated [by the Russians].”1510 To consider all that has been presented above, the most accurate conclusion is to say that within the Russian intelligentsia were developing simultaneously (as history offers many examples) two processes that, with regard to the Jewish problem, were distinguished by a question of temperament, not by a degree of sympathy. But the one represented by Struve was too weak, uncertain, and was 1508Vl. Jabotinsky, Medved iz berlogui—Sb. Felietony, pp. 87 90. ‒ 1509G. I. Aronson, V borbe za grajdanskie i natsionalnye prava Obchtchestvennye tetchenia v rousskom ievreïstve (The fight for civil and national rights currents of opinion in the Jewish community of Russia), BJWR-1, pp. 229, 572. 1510Vl. Jabotinsky—[Sb.] Felietony, pp. 245 247. ‒
stifled. Whilst the one who had trumpeted his philo‐Semitism in the collection The Shield enjoyed a wide publicity and prevailed among public opinion. There is only to regret that Jabotinsky did not recognise Struve’s point of view at its fair value. As for the 1909 debate in the Slovo columns, it was not limited to the Jewish question, but turned into a discussion of Russian national consciousness, which, after the eighty years of silence that followed, remains today still vivacious and instructive,—P. Struve wrote: “Just as we must not Russify those who do not want it, so we must not dissolve ourselves in Russian multinationalism.”1511—V. Golubev protested against the “monopolisation of patriotism and nationalism by reactionary groups”: “We have lost sight of the fact that the victories won by the Japanese have had a disastrous effect on the popular conscience and national sentiment. Our defeat not only humiliated our bureaucrats,” as public opinion hoped, “but, indirectly, the nation as well.” (Oh no, not “indirectly”: quite directly!) “Russian nationality… has vanished.”1512 Nor is it a joke that the flourishing of the word “Russian” itself, which has been transformed into “authentically Russian”. The progressive intelligentsia has let these two notions go, abandoning them to the people of the right. “Patriotism, we could only conceive it in quotation marks.” But “we must compete with reactionary patriotism with a popular patriotism… We have frozen in our refusal of the patriotism of the Black Hundreds, and if we have opposed something of it, it is not another conception of patriotism, but of universal ideals.”1513 And yet, all our cosmopolitanism has not allowed us, until today, to fraternise with the Polish society…1514 A. Pogodin was able to say that after V. Solovyov’s violent indictment of Danilevsky’s book, Russia and Europe, after Gradovsky’s articles, were “the first manifestations of this consciousness which, like the instinct of selfpreservation, awakens among the peoples when danger threatens them.” (Coincidentally—at the very moment when this polemic took place, Russia had to endure its national humiliation: it was forced to recognise with pitiable resignation the annexation by Austria of Bosnia and Herzegovina, which was equivalent to a “diplomatic Tsou‐Shina”.) “Fatality leads us to raise this question, which was formerly entirely foreign to the Russian intelligentsia, but which life itself imposes on us with a brutality that forbids all evasion.”1515 In conclusion, the Slovo wrote: “A fortuitous incident triggered quite a journalistic storm.” This means that “Russian society needs national awareness”. In the past, “it had turned away not only from a false anti‐national
1511P. Struve, Slovo, 1909, 10 (23) March, p. 2. 1512V. Golubev, ibidem, 12 (25) March, p. 2. 1513V. Golubev, O monopolii na patriotizm (On the monopoly of patriotism), ibidem, 14 (27) March, p. 2. 1514V. Golubev, Ot samuvajenia k ouvajeniou (From self‐respect to respect), ibidem, 25 March (7 April), p. 1. 1515A. Pogodin, K voprosou o natsionalizme (On the national question), ibidem, 15 (28) March, p. 1.
policy… but also from genuine nationalism without which a policy cannot really be built.” A people capable of creation “cannot but have its own face.”1516 “Minine1517 was certainly a nationalist.” A constructive nationalist, possessing the sense of the State, is peculiar to living nations, and that is what we need now.1518 “Just as three hundred years ago, history tells us to reply,” to say, “in the dark hours of trial… if we have the right, like any people worthy of the name, to exist by ourselves.”1519 And yet—even if, apparently, the year 1909 was rather peaceful—one felt that the Storm was in the air! However, certain things were not lost sight of (M. Slavinski): “Attempts to Russify or, more exactly, to impose the Russian‐Russian model on Russia… have had a disastrous effect on living national peculiarities, not only of all the non‐sovereign peoples of the Empire, but also and above all of the people of Great‐Russia… The cultural forces of the people of Great Russia proved insufficient for this.” “For the nationality of Great Russia, only the development of the interior, a normal circulation of blood, is good.”1520 (Alas! even today, the lesson has not been assimilated). “Necessary is the struggle against physiological nationalism, [when] a stronger people tries to impose on others who are less so a way of life that is foreign to them.”1521 But an empire as this could not have been constituted solely by physical force, there was also a “moral force”. And if we possess this force, then the equality of rights of other peoples (Jews as well as Poles) does not threaten us in any way.1522 In the nineteenth century already, and a fortiori at the beginning of the twentieth century, the Russian intelligentsia felt that it was at a high level of global consciousness, universality, cosmopolitanism or internationality (at the time, little difference was made between all these notions). In many fields, it had almost entirely denied what was Russian, national. (From the top of the tribune of the Duma, one practised at the pun: “patriot‐Iscariot.”) As for the Jewish intelligentsia, it did not deny its national identity. Even the most extreme of Jewish socialists struggled to reconcile their ideology with national sentiment. At the same time, there was no voice among the Jews—from Dubnov to Jabotinsky, passing by Winaver—to say that the Russian intelligentsia, who supported their persecuted brothers with all their souls, might not give up his own national feeling. Equity would have required it. But no one perceived this disparity: under the notion of equality of rights, the Jews understood something more. Thus, the Russian intelligentsia, solitary, took the road to the future.
1516Slovo, 1909, 17 (30) March, p. 1. 1517Hero of the Russian resistance to the Polish invasion in the early seventeenth century. 1518A. Pogodin, ibidem, 15 (28) March, p. 1. 1519Slovo, 1909, 17 (30) March, p. 1. 1520M. Slavinski, Slovo, 1909, 14 (27) March, p. 2. 1521A. Pogodin, ibidem, 15 (28) March, p. 1. 1522Slovo, 1909, 17 (30) March, p. 1.
The Jews did not obtain equal rights under the tsars, but—and probably partly for this very reason—they obtained the hand and the fidelity of the Russian intelligentsia. The power of their development, their energy, their talent penetrated the consciousness of Russian society. The idea we had of our perspectives, of our interests, the impetus we gave to the search for solutions to our problems, all this, we incorporated it to the idea that they were getting of it themselves. We have adopted their vision of our history and how to get out of it. Understanding this is much more important than calculating the percentage of Jews who tried to destabilise Russia (all of whom we did), who made the revolution or participated in Bolshevik power.
Chapter 12. During the War (1914 1916) ‒
The First World War was undoubtedly the greatest of the follies of the twentieth century. With no real motives or purposes, three major European powers— Germany, Russia, Austria‐Hungary—clashed in a deadly battle which resulted in the first two not recovering for the duration of the century, and the third disintegrating. As for the two allies of Russia, seemingly victors, they held out for another quarter of a century, and then lost their power of domination forever. Henceforth, the whole of Europe ceased to fulfil its proud mission of guiding humanity, becoming an object of jealousy and incapable of keeping in its weakened hands its colonial possessions. None of the three emperors, and even less Nicholas II and his entourage, had realised in what war they were plunging, they could imagine neither its scale nor its violence. Apart from Stolypin and after him, Durnovo, the authorities had not understood the warning addressed to Russia between 1904 and 1906. Let us consider this same war with the eyes of the Jews. In these three neighbouring empires lived three‐quarters of the Jews of the planet (and 90% of the Jews of Europe1523) who were on top of that living in the area of future military operations, of the province of Kovno (then Livonia) up to Austrian Galicia (then Romania). And the war placed them before an interrogation as pressing as it was painful: could all, living on the front steps of these three empires, preserve their imperial patriotism under these conditions? For if, for the armies that were advancing, behind the front was the enemy, for the Jews established in these regions, behind the front lived neighbours and coreligionists. They could not want this war: could their mindset shift brutally towards patriotism? As for the ordinary Jews, those of the Pale of Settlement, they had even less reason to support the Russian army. We have seen that a century before, the Jews of western Russia had helped the Russians against Napoleon. But, in 1914, it was quite different: in the name of what would they help the Russian army? On behalf of the Pale of Settlement? On the contrary, did the war not give rise to the hope of a liberation? With the arrival of the Austrians and the Germans, a new Pale of Settlement was not going to be established, the numerus clausus would not be maintained in the educational establishments!
1523SJE, t. 2, 1982, pp. 313 314. ‒
It is precisely in the western part of the Pale of Settlement that the Bund retained influence, and Lenin tells us that its members “are in their majority Germanophiles and rejoice at the defeat of Russia.”1524 We also learn that during the war, the Jewish autonomist movement Vorwarts adopted an openly proGerman position. Nowadays, a Jewish writer notes finely that, “if one reflects on the meaning of the formula ‘God, the Tsar, the Fatherland…’, it is impossible to imagine a Jew, a loyal subject of the Empire, who could have taken this formula seriously,” in other words, in the first degree.1525 But, in the capitals, things were different. Despite their positions of 1904‒ 1905, the influential Jewish circles, like the Russian liberals, offered their support to the autocratic regime when the conflict broke out; they proposed a pact. “The patriotic fervour which swept Russia did not leave the Jews aside.”1526 “It was the time when, seeing the Russian patriotism of the Jews, Purishkevich1527 embraced the rabbis.”1528 As for the press (not Novoie Vremia, but the liberal press, “half‐Jewish” according to Witte, the same one who expressed and oriented the jolts of public opinion and who, in 1905, literally demanded the capitulation of power), it was, from the first days of the war, moved by patriotic enthusiasm. “Over the head of little Serbia, the sword is raised against Great Russia, the guarantor of the inalienable right of millions of people to work and to life!” At an extraordinary meeting of the Duma, “the representatives of the different nationalities and different parties were all, on this historic day, inhabited by the same thought, a single emotion made all the voices tremble… That no one lay a hand on Saint Russia!… We are ready for all sacrifices to defend the honour and dignity of Russia, one and indivisible… ‘God, the Tsar, the people’—and victory is assured… We, Jews, defend our country because we are deeply attached to it.” Even if, behind this, there was a well‐founded calculation, the expectation of a gesture of recognition in return—the attainment of equal rights, even if it was only once the war was over—, the government had to, by accepting this unexpected ally, decide to assume—or promise to assume—its share of obligations. And, in fact, did the achievement of equal rights necessarily have to come through the revolution? Moreover, the crushing of the insurrection by Stolypin “had led to a decline in interest in politics in Russian as well as Jewish circles,”1529—which, at the very least, meant that there was a move away from
1524V. I. Lenin, Complete Works in 55 volumes [in Russian], 1958 1965, t. 49, p. 64. ‒ 1525A. Voronel, “22”, Tel Aviv, 1986, no. 50, p. 155. 1526SJE, t. 7, p. 356. 1527Vladimir Purishkevich (1870 1920), monarchist, opponent of Rasputin, the assassination ‒ of whom he participated in. Arrested in 1917, then given amnesty, he participated in the White movement and died of typhus in Novorossiysh. 1528D. S. Pasmanik, Rousskaya revoliutsia i ievreisstvo (Bolchevizm i Ioudaizm) (The Russian Revolution and the Jews [Bolshevism and Judaism]), Paris, 1923, p. 143. 1529SJE, t. 7, p, 356.
the revolution. As Chulguine1530 declared: “Combating the Jews and the Germans simultaneously was above the forces of power in Russia, it was necessary to conclude a pact with somebody.”1531 This new alliance with the Jews had to be formalised: it was necessary to produce at least a document containing promises, as had been done for the Poles. But only Stolypin would have had the intelligence and the courage to do so. Without him, there was no one to understand the situation and take the appropriate decisions. (And, from the spring of 1915, even more serious mistakes were made.) The liberal circles, including the elite of the Jewish community, also had in view another consideration that they took for a certainty. From the year 1907 (again, without urgent necessity), Nicholas II had allowed himself to be dragged into a military alliance with England (thus putting around his neck the rope of the subsequent confrontation with Germany). And, now, all the progressive circles in Russia were making the following analysis: the alliance with the democratic powers and the common victory with them would inevitably lead to a global democratisation of Russia at the end of the war and, consequently, the definitive establishment of equal rights for the Jews. There was, therefore, a sense for the Jews of Russia, and not only for those who lived in Petersburg and Moscow, to aspire to the victory of Russia in this war. But these considerations were counterbalanced by the precipitated, massive expulsion of the Jews from the area of the front, ordered by the General Staff at the time of the great retreat of 1915. That the latter had the power to do so was the result of ill‐considered decisions taken at the beginning of the war. In July 1914, in the heat of the action, in the agitation which reigned in the face of the imminence of conflict, the Emperor had signed without reflection, as a document of secondary importance, the provisional Regulation of the field service which gave the General Staff unlimited power over all the neighbouring regions of the front, with a very wide territorial extension, and this, without any consultation with the Council of Ministers. At the time, no one had attached any importance to this document, because all were convinced that the Supreme Command would always be assured by the Emperor and that there could be no conflict with the Cabinet. But, as early as July 1914, the Emperor was persuaded not to assume the Supreme Command of the armies. As a wise man, the latter proposed the post to his favourite, the fine speaker Sukhomlinov, then Minister of Defence, who naturally declined this honour. It was the great prince Nicholas Nicolaevich who was appointed, and the latter did not consider it possible to begin by upsetting the composition of the General Staff, at the head of which was General Yanushkevich. But, at the same time, the provisional regulations were not altered, so that the administration of a third of Russia was 1530Basile Choulguine (1878 1976), leader of the right wing of the Duma with whom he ‒ breaks at the time of the Beilis affair. Participates in the Progressive Bloc. Collects with Guchkov the abdication of Nicholas II. Immigrated to Yugoslavia until 1944, he was captured there and spent twelve years in camps. Dies almost centenary. 1531V. V. Choulguine, “Chto nam v nikh ne nravitsa…” Ob Antisemitism v rossii (“What we do not like about them…” On anti‐Semitism in Russia), Paris. 1929, p. 67.
in the hands of Yanushkevich, an insignificant man who was not even a military officer by profession. From the very beginning of the war, orders were given locally for the expulsion of the Jews from the army areas.1532 In August 1914, the newspapers read: “The rights of the Jews… Telegraphic instruction to all the governors of provinces and cities to stop the acts of mass or individual expulsion of Jews.” But, from the beginning of 1915, as testified the doctor D. Pasmanik, a medic on the front during the war, “suddenly, throughout the area of the front and in all circles close to power, spread the rumour that the Jews were doing espionage.”1533 During the summer of 1915, Yanukhovich—precisely him—tried to mask the retreat of the Russian armies, which at that time seemed appalling, by ordering the mass deportation of the Jews from the front area, arbitrary deportation, without any examination of individual cases. It was so easy: to blame all the defeats on the Jews! These accusations may not have come about without the help of the German General Staff, which issued a proclamation calling on the Jews of Russia to rise up against their government. But opinion, supported by many sources, prevails that in this case it was Polish influence that was at work. As Sliosberg wrote, just before the war, there had been a brutal explosion of antiSemitism, “a campaign against Jewish domination in industry and commerce… When war broke out, it was at its zenith… and the Poles endeavoured by all means to tarnish the image of the Jewish populations in the eyes of the Supreme Command by spreading all sorts of nonsense and legends about Jewish espionage.”1534—Immediately after the promises made by Nikolai Nikolaevich in the Appeal to the Poles of 14 August, the latter founded in Warsaw the “Central Committee of the Bourgeoisie”, which did not include a single Jew, whereas in Poland the Jews represented 14% of the population. In September, there was a pogrom against the Jews in Souvalki.1535—Then, during the retreat of 1915, “the agitation which reigned in the midst of the army facilitated the spread of the calumnies made up by the Poles.”1536 Pasmanik asserts that he is “in a position to prove that the first rumours about the treason of the Jews were propagated by the Poles”, a part of which “was actively assisting the Germans. Seeking to avert suspicion, they hastened to spread the rumour that the Jews were engaged in espionage.”1537 In connection with this expulsion of the Jews,
1532SJE, t. 7, p. 356. 1533Pasmanik, op. cit., p. 144. 1534G. B. Sliosberg, op. cit., t. 3, pp. 316 317. ‒ 1535I G. Froumkine, Iz istorii ruskovo ievreistava, [Sb.] Kniga o ruskom evreïstve: Ot 1860 godov do Revolutsii 1917 g. (Aspects of the History of Russian Jews), in BJWR, pp. 85‒ 86. 1536Sliosberg, op. cit., t. 3, p. 324. 1537Pasmanik, op. cit., p. 144.
several sources emphasised the fact that Yanukhevich himself was a “Pole converted to Orthodoxy”.1538 He may have undergone this influence, but we consider these explanations insufficient and in no way justifying the attitude of the Russian General Staff. Of course, the Jews in the front area could not break their ties with the neighbouring villages, interrupt the “Jewish post”, and turn into the enemies of their co‐religionists. Moreover, in the eyes of the Jews in the Pale of Settlement, the Germans appeared as a European nation of high culture, much different from the Russians and the Poles (the black shadow of Auschwitz had not yet covered the earth or crossed the Jewish conscience…). At that time, the Times correspondent, Steven Graham, reported that as soon as the smoke of a German ship appeared on the horizon, the Jewish population of Libava “forgot the Russian language” and began to speak German. If they had to leave, the Jews preferred to go to the German side.—The hostility displayed by the Russian army, and then their deportation, could only provoke their bitterness and cause some of them to collaborate openly with the Germans. In addition to the accusations against the Jews living in these areas, the Jews were accused of cowardice and desertion. Father Georges Chavelsky, chaplain of the Russian Army, was attached to the Staff, but often went to the front and was well informed of all that was going on there; he wrote in his memoirs: “From the first days of the war, it was repeated with insistence that the Jewish soldiers were cowards and deserters, and local Jews spies and traitors. There were many examples of Jews who had gone to the enemy or fled; or Jewish civilians who had given information to the enemy, or, in the course of their offensives, had delivered to them Russian soldiers and officers who had lingered on the spot, etc., etc. The more time passed, the more our situation deteriorated, the more the hatred and the exasperation against the Jews increased. rumours were spreading from the front to the rear… they created a climate that was becoming dangerous for all Jews in Russia.”1539—Second Lieutenant M. Lemke, a Socialist who was then in Staff, recorded, in the newspaper he was secretly keeping, reports from the southwest Front, in December 1915; he noted in particular: “There is a disturbing increase in the number of Jewish and Polish defectors, not only in the advanced positions but also in the rear of the front.”1540—In November 1915, one even heard during a meeting of the Progressive Bloc bureau the following remarks, noted by Milyukov: “Which people gave proof of its absence of patriotism?—The Jews.”1541
1538For example: SJE, t. 7, p. 357. 1539Father Georgui Chavelsky, Vospominania poslednevo protopresvitera ruskoï armii i flota (Memoirs of the last chaplain of the Russian Army and Russian Hood) v. 2-kh t, t. 1, New York, ed. Chekhov, 1954, p. 271. 1540Mikhail Lemke, 250 dnei v tsarskoy Stavke (25 sentences 1915—ioulia 1916) (250 days in the General Staff (25 Sept. 1915-July 1916), PG GIZ, 1920, p. 353. 1541Progressivny blok v 1915 1916 gg (The Progressive Bloc in 1915 1916), Krasny arkhiv: ‒ ‒ Istoritcheskïï Journal Tsentrarkhiva RSFSR, M. GIZ, 1922 1941, vol. 52, 1932, p. 179. ‒
In Germany and Austria‐Hungary, the Jews could occupy high‐level positions in the administration without having to abjure their religion, and this was also true in the army. While in Russia, a Jew could not become an officer if he did not convert to orthodoxy, and Jews with higher levels of education were most often completing their military service as simple soldiers. One can understand that they did not rush in to serve in such an army. (In spite of this, Jews were decorated with the cross of Saint‐George.) Captain G. S. Doumbadze recalled a Jew, a law student, who received this decoration four times, but refused to enter the School of Officers in order not to have to convert, which would have caused his father to die of grief. Later he was executed by the Bolsheviks.1542) For all that, it would be unreliable and implausible to conclude that all these accusations were mere fabrications. Chavelsky writes: “The question is too vast and complex… but I cannot help saying that at that time there was no lack of motives for accusing the Jews… In times of peace, it was tolerated that they be assigned to civilian tasks; during the war… the Jews filled the combat units… During the offensives, they were often in the rear; when the army retreated, they were at the front. More than once they spread panic in their units… It cannot be denied that the cases of espionage, of going over to the enemy were not rare… We couldn’t avoid finding suspicious that the Jews were also perfectly informed of what was happening on the front. The ‘Jewish telephone’ sometimes worked better and faster than all the countryside’s telephones… It was not uncommon for the news of the front to be known in the small hamlet of Baranovichi, situated near the General Staff, even before they reach the Supreme Commander and his Chief of Staff.”1543 (Lemke points out the Jewish origins of Chavelsky himself.1544) A rabbi from Moscow went to the Staff to try to persuade Chavelsky that “the Jews are like the others: there are some courageous, there are some cowards; there are those who are loyal to their country, there are also the bastards, the traitors,” and he cited examples taken from other wars. “Although it was very painful for me, I had to tell him everything I knew about the conduct of Jews during this war,” “but we were not able to reach an agreement.”1545 Here is yet the testimony of a contemporary. Abraham Zisman, an engineer, then assigned to the Evacuation Commission, recalled half a century later: “To my great shame, I must say that [the Jews who were near the front] behaved very despicably, giving the German army all the help they could.”1546 There were also charges of a strictly economic nature against the Jews who supplied the Russian army. Lemke thus copied the order to the General Staff signed by the Emperor on the very day of his taking office as Supreme Commander (this order had therefore been prepared by Yanushkevich): Jewish 1542G. S. Doumbadze (Vospominania), Biblioteka‐fond “Rousskoie Zaroubejie”, f / l, A-9, p. 5. 1543Father Chavelsky, op. cit., t. 1, p. 272. 1544Lemke, op. cit., p. 37. 1545Father Chavelsky, op. cit., t. 1, pp. 272 273. ‒ 1546Novaya Zaria, San Francisco, 1960, 7 May, p. 3.
suppliers abused the orders for bandages, horses, bread given to them by the army; they receive from the military authorities documents certifying “that they have been entrusted with the task of making purchases for the needs of the army… but without any indication of quantity or place.” Then “the Jews have certified copies of these documents made and distributed to their accomplices”, thus acquiring the possibility of making purchases all over the Empire. “Thanks to the solidarity between them and their considerable financial resources, they control vast areas where are bought mainly horses and bread,” which artificially raises prices and makes more difficult the work of the officials responsible of supplies.1547 But all these facts cannot justify the conduct of Yanushkevich and the General Staff. Without making an effort to separate the good wheat from the chaff, the Russian High Command launched an operation, as massive as it was inept, for the expulsion of the Jews. Particularly striking was the attitude towards the Jews of Galicia who lived in Austro‐Hungarian territory. “From the beginning of the First World War, tens of thousands of Jews fled from Galicia to Hungary, Bohemia, and Vienna. Those who remained suffered greatly during the period of the Russian occupation of this region.”1548 “Bullying, beatings, and even pogroms, frequently organised by the Cossack units, became the daily lot of the Jews of Galicia.”1549 This is what Father Chavelsky writes: “In Galicia, hatred towards the Jews was still fuelled by the vexations inflicted under the Austrian domination of the Russian populations [in fact, Ukrainian and Ruthenian] by the powerful Jews”1550 (in other words, these same populations were now participating in Cossack arbitrariness). “In the province of Kovno all the Jews were deported without exception: the sick, the wounded soldiers, the families of the soldiers who were at the front.”1551 “Hostages were required under the pretext of preventing acts of espionage,” and facts of this kind “became commonplace.”1552 This deportation of the Jews appears in a stronger light than in 1915— contrary to what would happen in 1941—there was no mass evacuation of urban populations. The army was withdrawing, the civilian population remained there, nobody was driven out—but the Jews and they alone were driven out, all without exception and in the shortest possible time: not to mention the moral wound that this represented for each one, this brought about the ruin, the loss of one’s house, one’s property. Was it not, in another form, always the same pogrom of great magnitude, but this time provoked by the authorities and not by the populace? How can we not understand the Jewish misfortune?
1547Lemke*, op. cit., p. 325. 1548SJE, t. 2, p. 24. 1549SJE, t. 7, p. 356. 1550Father Chavelsky, op. cit., p. 271. 1551SJE, t. 7, p. 357. 1552Sliosberg, op. cit., t. 3, p. 325.
To this we must add that Yanushkevich, like the high‐ranking officers who were under his command, acted without any logical reflection, in disorder, precipitation, incoherence, which could only add to the confusion. There exists no chronicle nor account of all these military decisions. Only echoes scattered in the press of the time, and also in “The Archives of the Russian Revolution” by I. V. Hessen, a series of documents1553 collected at random, without followup; and then, as with Lemke, copies of documents made by individuals. This scattered data nevertheless allow us to form an opinion on what happened. Some of the provisions foresee expelling Jews from the area of military operations “in the direction of the enemy” (which would mean: in the direction of the Austrians, across the front line?), to send back to Galicia the Jews originating from there; other directives foresee deporting them to the rear of the front, sometimes at a short distance, sometimes on the left bank of the Dnieper, sometimes even “beyond the Volga”. Sometimes it is “cleansing the Jews of a zone of five versts from the front”, sometimes we speak of a zone of fifty versts. The evacuation timeframes are sometimes five days, with authorisation to take away one’s property, sometimes twenty‐four hours, probably without this authorisation; as for the resisters, they will be taken under escort. Or even: no evacuation, but in the event of a retreat, take hostages among the significant Jews, especially the rabbis, in case Jews denounce either Russians or Poles who are well disposed in regard to Russia; in the event of execution of these by the Germans, carry out the execution of the hostages (but how can we know, verify that there were executions in German‐occupied territory? It was truly an incredible system!). Other instruction: we do not take hostages, we just designate them among the Jewish population inhabiting our territories—they will bear responsibility for espionage in favour of the enemy committed by other Jews. Or even: avoid at all costs that the Jews be aware of the location of the trenches dug in the rear of the front (so that they cannot communicate it to the Austrians through their co‐religionists,—it was known that Romanian Jews could easily cross the border); or even, on the contrary: oblige precisely civilian Jews to dig the trenches. Or even (order given by the commander of the military region of Kazan, General Sandetski, known for his despotic behaviour): assemble all the Jewish soldiers in marching battalions and send them to the front. Or, conversely: discontent provoked by the presence of Jews in the combat units; their military ineptitude. There is a feeling that in their campaign against the Jews, Yanushkevich and the General Staff were losing their minds: what exactly did they want? During these particularly difficult weeks of fighting, when the Russian troops retreated, exhausted and short of ammunition, a flyer containing a “list of questions” was sent to the heads of units and instructed them to assemble information on “the moral, military, physical qualities of Jewish soldiers”, as
1553Dokoumenty o presledovanii ievreev (Documents on the persecution of the Jews), Arkhiv Rousskoi Revolutsii (Archives of the Russian Revolution), izdavayemy I.V. Gessenom, Berlin: Slovo, 1922 1937, t. 19, 1928, pp. 245 284. ‒ ‒
well as their relations with local Jewish populations. And the possibility was considered of completely excluding Jews from the army after the war. We also do not know the exact number of displaced persons. In The Book of the Jewish Russian World, we read that in April 1915, 40,000 Jews were expulsed from the province of Courland, and in May 120,000 of them were expelled from Kovno.1554 In another place, the same book gives an overall figure for the whole period, amounting to 250,0001555 including Jewish refugees, which means that the deportees would hardly have accounted for more than half of this digit. After the revolution, the newspaper Novoie Vremia published information according to which the evacuation of all the inhabitants of Galicia dispersed on the territory of Russia 25,000 persons, including nearly a thousand Jews.1556 (These are numbers that, for the moment, are too weak to be probable.) On 10 11 May 1915, the order was issued to put an end to the ‒ deportations, and these ceased. Jabotinsky drew the conclusion of the expulsion of the Jews from the zone of the front in 1915 by speaking of a “catastrophe probably unprecedented since the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella” in Spain in the fifteenth century.1557 But is there not also something of a move of History in the fact that this massive deportation—itself, and the indignant reactions it provoked—would make a concrete contribution to the much desired suppression of the Pale of Settlement? Leonid Andreyev had rightly observed: “This famous ‘barbarity’ of which we are accused of… rests entirely and exclusively on our Jewish question and its bloody outbursts.”1558 These deportations of Jews were resonant on a planetary scale. From Petersburg, during the war, Jews defending human rights transmitted information about the situation of their co‐religionists to Europe; “Among them, Alexander Isayevich Braudo distinguished himself by his tireless activity.”1559 A. G. Shlyapnikov relates that Gorky had sent him documents on the persecution of Jews in Russia; he brought them to the United States. All this information spread widely and rapidly in Europe and America, raising a powerful wave of indignation. And if the best among the representatives of the Jewish community and the Jewish intelligentsia feared that “the victory of Germany… would only reinforce anti‐Semitism… and, for that reason alone, there could be no question of sympathies towards the Germans or hopes for their victory,”1560 a Russian
1554A. A. Goldenweiser, Pravovoïc polojenie ievreyev v Rossii (The legal situation of Jews in Russia), BJWR-1, p. 135. 1555G. I. Aronson, V borbe za grajdanskie i nalsionainyc 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, p. 232. 1556Novoie Vremia, 1917, 13 April, p. 3. 1557Sliosberg, op. cit., t. 1, Introduction by V. Jabotinsky, p. xi. 1558L. Andreyev, Pervaya stoupen (First Step), Shchit (the Shield), 1916, p. 5. 1559Sliosberg, op. cit., t. 3, pp. 343 344. ‒ 1560Ibidem, p. 344.
military intelligence officer in Denmark reported in December 1915 that the success of anti‐Russian propaganda “is also facilitated by Jews who openly declare that they do not wish the victory of Russia and its consequence: the autonomy promised to Poland, for they know that the latter would take energetic measures with a view to the expulsion of Jews from within its borders”1561; In other words, it was Polish anti‐Semitism that was to be feared, not German antiSemitism: the fate which awaited the Jews in a Poland which had become independent would perhaps be even worse than that which they underwent in Russia. The British and French Governments were somewhat embarrassed to openly condemn the attitude of their ally. But at that time, the United States was increasingly engaged in the international arena. And in the still neutral America of 1915, “sympathies were divided…; some of the Jews who came from Germany were sympathetic to the latter, even though they did not manifest it in an active manner.”1562 Their dispositions were maintained by the Jews from Russia and Galicia, who, as the Socialist Ziv testified, wished for (it could no longer be otherwise) the defeat of Russia, and even more so by the “professional revolutionists” Russian‐Jews who had settled in the United States.1563 To this was added the anti‐Russian tendencies in the American public: very recently, in 1911, the dramatic break‐up of an eighty‐year‐old US‐Russian economic agreement took place. The Americans regarded the official Russia as a country that was “corrupt, reactionary, and ignorant”.1564 This quickly translated into tangible effects. As early as August 1915, we read in the reports that Milyukov was holding meetings of the Progressive Bloc: “The Americans pose as a condition [of aid to Russia] the possibility for American Jews to have free access to Russian territory,”1565—always the same source of conflict as in 1911 with T. Roosevelt.—And when a Russian parliamentary delegation went to London and Paris in early 1916 to apply for financial aid, it was faced to a categorical refusal. The episode is told in detail by Shingaryov1566, in the report he presented on 20 June 1916 to the Military and Maritime Commission of the Duma after the return of the delegation. In England, Lord Rothschild replied to this request: “You are affecting our credit in the United States.” In France, Baron Rothschild declared: “In America, the Jews are very numerous and active, they exert a great influence, in such a manner that the American public is very hostile to you.” (Then “Rothschild expressed himself even more brutally”, and Shingaryov demanded that his
1561Lemke, op. cit., p. 310. 1562Sliosberg, op. cit., t. 3, p. 345. 1563G. A. Ziv, Trotsky: Kharakteiistika. Po litchym vospominaniam (Trotsky: a characteristic, personal memories), New York. Narodopravstvo, 1921, 30 June, pp. 60 63. ‒ 1564German Bernsrein, Retch, 1917, 30 June, pp. 1 2. ‒ 1565Progressivny blok v 1915 1917 gg., Krasny arkhiv, 1932, vol. 50 51, p. 136. ‒ ‒ 1566Andrei Shingaryov(1869 1918), one of the leaders of the Cadet party, was a member of ‒ the first Provisional Government in 1917. Arrested by the Bolsheviks and massacred in his prison.
words not be included in the record.) This financial pressure from the Americans, the rapporteur concludes, is a continuation of a policy that has led them to break our trade agreement in 1911 (but, of course, to that was added the massive deportations of Jews undertaken in the meantime). Jakob Schiff, who had spoken so harshly of Russia in 1905, now declared to a French parliamentarian sent to America: “We will give credit to England and France when we have the assurance that Russia will do something for the Jews; the money you borrow from us goes to Russia, and we do not want that.”1567— Milyukov evoked the protests at the Duma tribune of “millions and millions of American Jews… who have met a very wide echo in American opinion. I have in my hands many American newspapers that prove it… Meetings ending with scenes of hysteria, crying jags at the evocation of the situation of the Jews in Russia. I have a copy of the provision made by President Wilson, establishing a ‘Jewish Day’ throughout the United States to collect aid for the victims.” And “when we ask for money to American bankers, they reply: Pardon, how is that? We agree to lend money to England and France, but on condition that Russia does not see the colour of it… The famous banker Jakob Schiff, who rules the financial world in New York, categorically refuses any idea of a loan to Russia…”1568 The Encyclopædia Judaica, written in English, confirms that Schiff, “using his influence to prevent other financial institutions lending to Russia…, pursued this policy throughout the First World War”1569 and put pressure on other banks to do the same. For all these upheavals provoked by the deportations, both in Russia and abroad, it was the Council of Ministers who had to pay for the broken pots even though the Staff did not consult it and gave no attention to its protests. I have already quoted a few snippets of the passionate debates that were agitating the Cabinet on this subject.1570 Here are a few others. Krivoshein1571 was in favour of temporarily granting the Jews the right to settle in all the cities of Russia: “This favour granted to the Jews will be useful not only from a political point of view, but also from an economic point of view… Up to now, our policy in this field made one think of this sleeping miser on his gold, which does not benefit from it and does not allow others to do so.” But Roukhlov replied: this proposal “constitutes a fundamental and irreversible modification of legislation which has been introduced throughout History with the aim of protecting the Russian heritage from the control of the Jews, and the Russian people of the deleterious
1567Mejdunarodnoïe polojenie tsarskoi Rossii vo vremia mirovoï voïny (The international situation of tsarist Russia during the world war), Krasny arkhiv, 1934, vol. 64, pp. 5 14. ‒ 1568Doklad P. N. Milioukova v Voïenno‐morskoï komissii Gosoud. Doumy 19 iounia 1916g., Krasny arkhiv, 1933, t. 58, pp. 13 14. ‒ 1569Encyclopædia Judaica, Jerusalem, 1971, vol. 14, p. 961. 1570A. Solzhenitsyn, Krasnoye Koleso (The Red Wheel), t. 3, M. Voïenizdat, 1993, pp. 259‒ 263, (French translation: March seventeen, t. 1, Paris: Fayard). 1571Close collaborator of Stolypin, Minister of Agriculture (1906 1915), dies in emigration ‒ (1857 1921). ‒
influence of the neighbouring of the Jews… You specify that this favour will be granted only for the duration of the war…, but we must not be in denial”: after the war, “not one government will be found” to “send the Jews back to the Pale of Settlement… The Russians are dying in the trenches and meanwhile the Jews will settle in the heart of Russia, benefit from the misfortunes endured by the people, of general ruin. What will be the reaction of the army and the Russian people?”—And again, during the following meeting: “The Russian population endures unimaginable hardships and suffering, both on the front and in the interior of the country, while Jewish bankers buy from their co‐religionists the right to use Russia’s misfortune to exploit tomorrow this exsanguinated people.”1572 But the ministers acknowledged that there was no other way out. This measure was to be “applied with exceptional speed”—“in order to meet the financial needs of the war.”1573 All of them, with the exception of Roukhlov, signed their name at the bottom of the bulletin authorising the Jews to settle freely (with the possibility of acquiring real estate) throughout the Empire, with the exception of the capitals, agricultural areas, provinces inhabited by the Cossacks and the Yalta region.1574 In the autumn of 1915 was also repealed the system of the annual passport, which had hitherto been compulsory for the Jews who were now entitled to a permanent passport. (These measures were followed by a partial lifting of the numerus clausus in educational establishments and the authorisation to occupy the functions of litigator within the limits of the representation quotas.1575) The opposition that these decisions met in the public opinion was broken under the pressure of the war. Thus, after a century and a quarter of existence, the Pale of Settlement of the Jews disappeared forever. And to add insult to injury, as Sliosberg notes, “this measure, so important in its content…, amounting to the abolition of the Pale of Settlement, this measure for which had fought in vain for decades the Russian Jews and the liberal circles of Russia, went unnoticed!”1576 Unnoticed because of the magnitude assumed by the war. Streams of refugees and immigrants were then overwhelming Russia. The Refugee Committee, set up by the government, also provided displaced Jews with funds to help settlements.1577 Until the February revolution, “the Conference on Refugees continued its work and allocated considerable sums to the various national committees,” including the Jewish Committee.1578 It goes
1572Tiajëlye dni. Sekretnye zasedania soveta ministrov. 16 ioulia sentiabria 1915 (The difficult ‒ days, the secret meetings of the Council of Ministers, 16 July September 1915). Sost. A. N. ‒ Yakhontov, Archives of the Russian Revolution, 1926, vol. 18, pp. 47 48, 57. ‒ 1573Ibidem, p. 12. 1574SJE, t. 7, pp. 358 359. ‒ 1575Ibidem, p. 359. 1576Sliosberg, t. 3, p. 341. 1577I. L Teitel, Iz moiii jizni za 40 let (Memories of 40 years of my life), Paris: I. Povolotski i ko., 1925, p. 210. 1578Sliosberg, t. 3, p. 342.
without saying that were added to this the funds contributed by many Jewish organisations that had embarked on this task with energy and efficiency. Among them was the Union of Jewish Craftsmen (UJC), created in 1880, wellestablished and already extending its action beyond the Pale of Settlement. The UJC had developed a cooperation with the World Relief Committee and the “Joint” (“Committee for the distribution of funds for aid to war‐affected Jews”). All of them provided massive aid to the Jewish populations of Russia; “The ‘Joint’ had rescued hundreds of thousands of Jews in Russia and AustriaHungary.”1579 In Poland, the UJC helped Jewish candidates for emigration or settled as farmers—because “during the war, Jews who lived in small villages had been driven, not without coercion by the German occupier, to the work of the land.”1580 There was also the Jewish Prophylactic Society (JPS), founded in 1912; it had given itself for mission not only to direct medical aid to the Jews, but also the creation of sanatoriums, dispensaries, the development of sanitary hygiene in general, the prevention of diseases, “the struggle against the physical deterioration of Jewish populations” (Nowhere in Russia there existed yet organisations of this kind). Now, in 1915, these detachments were organising for Jewish emigrants, all along their route and at their place of destination, supply centres, flying medical teams, countryside hospitals, shelters and pædiatric consultations.1581—Also in 1915, appeared the Jewish Association for the Assistance of War Victims (JAAWV); benefiting of support from the Committee for Refugees and the so generously endowed by the State “Zemgor” (association of the “Union of Zemstvos” and the “Union of Cities”), as well as credit from America, the JAAWV set up a vast network of missionaries to help the Jews during their journey and their new place of residence, with rolling kitchens, canteens, clothing distribution points, (employment agencies, vocational training centres), childcare establishments, schools. What an admirable organisation!—let us remember that approximately 250,000 refugees and displaced persons were taken care of; according to official figures, the number of these was already reaching 215,000 in August 1916.1582—and there was also the “Political Bureau” near the Jewish Deputies of the fourth Duma, which resulted from an agreement between the Jewish Popular Group, the Jewish People’s Party, the Jewish Democratic Group and the Zionists; during the war, it deployed “considerable activity”.1583 In spite of all the difficulties, “the war gave a strong impulse to the spirit of initiative of the Jews, whipped their will to take charge.”1584 During these years “the considerable forces hidden hitherto in the depths of the Jewish
1579SJE, t. 2, p. 345. 1580D. Lvovitch, L. Bramson i Soiouz ORT (L. Bramson and the UJC), JW-2, New York, 1944, p. 29. 1581I. M. Troitsky, Samodeiatetnost i camopomochtch evreiev v Rossii (The spirit of initiative and mutual help among the Jews of Russia), BJWR-1, pp. 479 480, 485 489. ‒ ‒ 1582Aronson, BJWR-1, p. 232; I. Troitsky, ibidem, p. 497. 1583Aronson, op. cit., p. 232. 1584I. Troitsky, op. cit., p. 484.
consciousness matured and revealed to the open… immense reserves of initiative in the most varied fields of political and social action.”1585—In addition to the resources allocated by the mutual aid committees, the JAAWV benefited from the millions paid to it by the government. At no time did the Special Conference on Refugees “reject our suggestion” on the amount of aid: 25 million in a year and a half, which is infinitely more than what the Jews had collected (the government paid here the wrongs of the General Staff); as for the sums coming from the West, the Committee could retain them1586 for future use. It is thus that with all these movements of the Jewish population—refugees, displaced persons, but also a good number of volunteers—the war significantly altered the distribution of Jews in Russia; important settlements were established in towns far from the front, mainly Nizhny Novgorod, Voronezh, Penza, Samara, Saratov, but also in the capitals. Although the abolition of the Pale of Settlement did not concern Saint Petersburg and Moscow, these two cities were now practically open. Often, they would go there to join relatives or protectors who had settled there long ago. In the course of memoirs left by contemporaries, one discovers for example a dentist of Petersburg named Flakke: ten‐room apartment, footman, servant, cook—well‐off Jews were not uncommon, and, in the middle of the war, while there was a shortage of housing in Petrograd, they opened up opportunities for Jews from elsewhere. Many of them changed their place of residence during those years: families, groups of families that left no trace in history, except sometimes in family chronicles of a private nature, such as those of the parents of David Azbel: “Aunt Ida… left the coldness and somnolence of Chernigov at the beginning of the First World War to come and settle in Moscow.”1587 The new arrivals were often of a very modest condition, but some of them came to influential positions, such as Poznanski, a clerk in the Petrograd Military Censorship Commission, who had the upper hand “over all secret affairs”.1588 Meanwhile, the General Staff mechanically poured out its torrents of directives, sometimes respected, sometimes neglected: to exclude Jews under the banner of all activities outside armed service: secretary, baker, nurse, telephonist, telegrapher. Thus, “in order to prevent the anti‐government propaganda supposed to be carried out by Jewish doctors and nurses, they should be assigned not to hospitals or country infirmaries, but ‘to places not conducive to propaganda activities such as, for example, the advanced positions, the transport of the wounded on the battlefield’.”1589 In another directive: expel the Jews out of the Union of Zemstvos, the Union of Cities and the Red Cross, where they concentrate in great numbers to escape armed service (as did also, we note in passage, tens of thousands of Russians), use their 1585Aronson, op. cit., p. 230. 1586Sliosberg, op. cit., t. 3, pp. 329 331. ‒ 1587D. Azbel, Do, vo vremia i posle (Before, during and after), Vremya i my, New York, Jerusalem, Paris. 1989, no. 104, pp. 192 193. ‒ 1588Lemke, op. cit., p. 468. 1589SJE, t. 7, p. 357.
advantageous position for propaganda purposes (as did any liberal, radical, or socialist who respected themselves) and, above all, spread rumours about “the incompetence of the high command” (which corresponded to a large extent to reality1590). Other bulletins warned against the danger of keeping the Jews in positions that brought them into contact with sensitive information: in the services of the Union of Zemstvos of the western front in April 1916, “all the important branches of the administration (including those under the defence secrecy) are in the hands of Jews”, and the names of those responsible for the registration and classification of confidential documents are cited, as well as that of the Director of the Department of Public Information, who, “by his functions, has free access to various services of the army at the rear of the front or in the regions”.1591 However, there is no evidence that the ranting of the General Staff on the necessity of chasing the Jews from the Zemgor had any tangible results. Always well informed, Lemke observes that “the directives of the military authorities on the exclusion of the Jews” from the Zemgor “were not welcomed”. A bulletin was published stating that “all persons of Jewish confession who are dismissed by order of the authorities shall be reimbursed for two months with salary and travel allowances and with the possibility of being recruited prioritarily in the establishments of the Zemgor at the rear of the front.”1592 (The Zemgor was the darling of the influential Russian press. It is thus that it unanimously declined to reveal its sources of financing: in 25 months of war, on 1 September 1916, 464 million rubles granted by the government—equipment and supplies were delivered directly from state warehouses—compared with only nine million collected by Zemstvos, towns, collects.1593 If the press refused to publish these figures, it is because it would have emptied of its meaning the opposition between the philanthropic and charitable action of the Zemgor and that of a stupid, insignificant, and lame government.) Economic circumstances and geographical conditions meant that among the army’s suppliers, there were many Jews. A letter of complaint expressing the anger of the “Orthodox‐Russian circles of Kiev…, driven by their duty as patriots”, points to Salomon Frankfurt, who occupied a particularly high position, that of “delegate of the Ministry of Agriculture to the supply of the army in bacon” (it must be said that complaints about the disorganisation caused by these requisitions were heard all the way to the Duma). Also in Kiev, an obscure “agronomist of a Zemstvo of the region”, Zelman Kopel, was immortalised by History because of having ordered an excessive requisition just before Christmas 1916, he deprived of sugar a whole district during the holidays
1590Archives of the Russian Revolution, 1928, t. XIX, pp. 274, 275. 1591Lemke, op. cit., p. 792. 1592Ibidem, p. 792. 1593S. Oldenburg, Tsarstvovanie Imperatora Nikolai II (the reign of Emperor Nicholas II), t. 2, Munich, 1949, p. 192.
(In this case, a complaint was also lodged against the local administration of the Zemstvos1594). In November 1916, the deputy N. Markov, stigmatising in the Duma “the marauders of the rear and trappers” of State property and National Defence, designated, as usual, the Jews in particular: in Kiev, once again, it was Cheftel, a member of the Municipal Council, who blocked the warehouses and let rot more than 2,500 tons of flour, fish, and other products that the town kept in reserve, while at the same time, “the friends of these gentlemen sold their own fish at grossly inflated prices”; it was V. I. Demchenko, elected from Kiev to the Duma, who hid “masses of Jews, rich Jews” (and he enumerates them) “to make them escape military service”; it was also, in Saratov, “the engineer Levy” who supplied “through the intermediary of the commissioner Frenkel” goods to the Military‐Industrial Committee at inflated prices.1595 But it should be noted that the military‐industrial committees set up by Guchkov1596 were behaving in exactly the same way with the Treasury. So… In a report of the Petrograd Security Department dated October 1916, we can read: “In Petrograd, trade is exclusively in the hands of Jews who know perfectly the tastes, aspirations, and opinions of the man in the street”; but this report also refers to the widespread opinion on the right according to which, among the people, “the freedom enjoyed by Jews since the beginning of the war” arouses more and more discontent; “it is true, there still exists officially some Russian firms, but they are in fact controlled by Jews: it is impossible to buy or to order anything without the intervention of a Jew.”1597 (Bolshevik publications, such as Kaiourov’s book1598 at that time in Petrograd, did not fail to disguise reality by alleging that in May 1915, during the sacking of German firms and shops in Moscow, the crowd also attacked the Jewish establishments —which is false, and it was even the opposite that happened: during the antiGerman riot, the Jews, because of the resemblance of their surnames, protected themselves by hanging on the front of their shop the placard: “This shop is Jewish”—and they were not touched, and Jewish trade was not to suffer in all the years of war.) However, at the top of the monarchy—in Rasputin’s morbid entourage—, a small group of rather shady individuals played an important role. They not only outraged the right‐wing circles—it is how, in May 1916, the French ambassador 1594Iz zapisnooi knijki arkhivista, Soob. Mr. Paozerskovo (Notebooks of an Archivist, Comm. by M. Paozerski), Krasny Arckhiv, 1926, t. 18, pp. 211 212. ‒ 1595Gosudarstvennaya Duma—Tchetvërty sozyv (Fourth Duma of the Empire), transcript of the proceedings, 22 Nov. 1916, pp. 366 368. ‒ 1596Alexander Guchkov (1882 1936), founder and leader of the Octobrist party, president of ‒ the third Duma (March 1910 March 1911), president of the All‐Russia War Industry ‒ Committee, became Minister of War and Navy in the first temporary government. Emigrated in 1918. He died in Paris. 1597Politicschkoye polojenie Rossii nakanoune Fevralskoi revoloutsii (Political situation in Russia on the eve of the February Revolution), Krasny arkhiv, 1926, t. 17, pp. 17, 23. 1598V. Kairorov, Petrogradskie rabotchie v gody imperialistitcheskoy vonny (Workers of Petrograd during the years of the imperialist war), M., 1930.
to Petrograd, Maurice Paleologue, noted in his diary: “A bunch of Jewish financiers and dirty speculators, Rubinstein, Manus, etc., have concluded an agreement with him [Rasputin] and compensate him handsomely for services rendered. On their instructions, he sends notes to ministers, to banks or to various influential personalities.”1599 Indeed, if in the past it was Baron Ginzburg who intervened openly in favour of the Jews, this action was henceforth conducted secretly by the upstarts who had clustered around Rasputin. There was the banker D. L. Rubinstein (he was the director of a commercial bank in Petrograd, but confidently made his way to the entourage of the throne: he managed the fortunes of Grand Duke Andrei Vladimirovich, made the acquaintance of Rasputin through A. Vyrubova1600, then was decorated with the order of Saint Vladimir, he was given the title of State Counsellor, and therefore of the “Your Excellency”.) But also the industrialist I. P. Manus (director of the Petrograd wagon factory, member of the Putilov factory board, the board of two banks and the Russian Transport Company, also a State Councillor). Rubinstein attached to Rasputin a permanent “secretary”, Aron Simanovich, a rich jeweller, diamond dealer, illiterate but very skilful and enterprising (but what did Rasputin need of a “secretary”, he who possessed nothing?…) This Simanovich (“the best among the Jew”, would have scribbled the “starets” on his portrait) published in immigration a little book boasting about the role he had played at that time. We find in it all sorts of gossip without interest, of fabrications (he speaks of the “hundreds of thousands of Jews executed and massacred by order of the Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich”1601); But, through this scum and those surges of boastfulness, one can glimpse real facts, quite concrete. For example, the “dentists affair”—for most Jews—which had broken out in 1913: “a veritable dentist’s diploma factory had been elaborated” which flooded Moscow,1602—their detention gave the right to permanent residence and dispensed of military service. There were about 300 of them (according to Simanovich: 200). The false dentists were condemned to one year in prison, but, on the intervention of Rasputin, they were pardoned.
1599Maurice Paleologue, Tsraskaia Rossia nakanoune revolioutsii (Imperial Russia on the eve of the revolution), M., Pd., GIZ, 1923, p. 136. 1600Anna Vyrubova (1884 1964), maid of honour of the Empress of which she was for a long ‒ time the best friend, fanatic admirer of Rasputin, permanent intermediary between the imperial couple and the starets. She was arrested in 1917, freed and re‐arrested, and managed to escape to Finland where she would live for more than 45 years, completely forgotten about. 1601A. Simanovich, Rasputin i ievrei. Vospominania litchnovo sekretaria Grigoria Rasputin (Rasputin and the Jews, Memoirs of the personal secretary of Grigory Rasputin), [Sb.] Sviatoï tchërt. Taïna Grigoria Raspoutina: Vospom., Dokoumenty, Materialy sledstv. Komissii. M. Knijnaya Palata, 1991, pp. 106 107. ‒ 1602Sliosberg, op. cit., t. 3, p. 347.
“During the war… the Jews sought protection from Rasputin against the police or the military authorities,” and Simanovitch proudly confides that “many Jewish young men implored his help to escape the army,” which, in time of war, gave them the possibility of entering the University; “There was often no legal way”—but Simanovich claims that it was always possible to find a solution. Rasputin “had become the friend and benefactor of the Jews, and unreservedly supported my efforts to improve their condition.”1603 By mentioning the circle of these new favourites, one cannot fail to mention the unparalleled adventurer Manassevich‐Manoulov. He was, in turn, an official of the Ministry of the Interior and an agent of the Russian secret police in Paris, which did not prevent him from selling abroad secret documents from the Police Department; he had conducted secret negotiations with Gapon; when Stürmer1604 was appointed Prime Minister, he was entrusted with “exceptional ‘secret missions’.”1605 Rubinstein barged into public life by buying out the newspaper Novoie Vremia (see chapter 8), hitherto hostile to the Jews. (Irony of history: in 1876, Suvorin had bought this paper with the money of the banker of Warsaw Kroneberg, and at the beginning, well oriented towards the Jews, he opened its columns to them. But, at the beginning of the war between Russia and Turkey, Novoie Vremia suddenly changed course, “went to the side of the reaction,” and, “as far as the Jewish question was concerned, no longer put a stop to hatred and bad faith.”1606) In 1915, Prime Minister Goremykin1607 and the Minister of the Interior Khvostov, Junior1608 in vain prevented Rubinstein’s buyback of the newspaper,1609 he achieved his aims a little later,—but we were already too close to the revolution, all that did not serve much. (Another newspaper on the right, the Grajdanin was also partially bought by Manus). S. Melgounov nicknamed the “quintet” the small group which treated his affairs in the “antechamber”1610 of the tsar—through Rasputin. Given the power of the latter, it was no small matter: dubious characters were in the immediate vicinity of the throne and could exert a dangerous influence on the affairs of the 1603Simanovitch, pp. 89, 100, 102, 108. 1604Rasputin’s protégé, became President of the Council of Ministers (2 February 23 ‒ November 1916), with his duties as Minister of the Interior (16 March 17 July) and ‒ Foreign Affairs (20 July 23 November). After February, he was arrested and imprisoned at ‒ the Pierre‐et‐Paul fortress where he died on 2 September 1917. 1605S. Melgunov, Legenda o separatnom mire. Kanoun revolioutsii (The Legend of the Separated Peace, The Eve of the Revolution), Paris, 1957, pp. 263, 395, 397. 1606JE, t. 11, pp. 758, 759. 1607Ivan Goremykin (1839 1917), Prime Minister first in April July 1906, then from January ‒ ‒ 1914 to January 1916. 1608Alexis Khvostov, Junior (1872 1918), leader of the rights in the fourth Duma, Minister of ‒ the Interior in 1915 1916. Shot by the Bolsheviks. ‒ 1609Pismo ministra vnoutrennikh del A. N. Khvostova Predsedateliou soveta ministrov I. L. Goremykinou ot 16 dek. 1915 (Letter from the Minister of the Interior A. N. Khvostov to the President of the Council of Ministers I. L. Goremykin, dated 16 December 1915), Delo naroda, 1917, 21 March, p. 2. 1610Melgunov, op. cit., p. 289.
whole of Russia. Britain’s ambassador, Buchanan, believed that Rubinstein was linked to the German intelligence services.1611 This possibility cannot be ruled out. The rapid penetration of German espionage into Russia, and its links with the speculators of the rear, forced General Alekseyev1612 to solicit from the emperor, during the summer of 1916, the authorisation to carry out investigations beyond the area of competence of the General Staff,—and thus was constituted the “Commission of Inquiry of General Batiushin”. Its first target was the banker Rubinstein, suspected of “speculative operations with German capital”, financial manipulation for the benefit of the enemy, depreciation of the ruble, overpayment of foreign agents for orders placed by the General Stewardship, and speculative operations on wheat in the region of the Volga. On the decision of the Minister of Justice, Rubinstein was arrested on 10 July 1916 and charged with high treason.1613 It was from the empress in person that Rubinstein received the strongest support. Two months after his arrest, she asked the Emperor “to send him discreetly to Siberia, not to keep him here, so as not to annoy the Jews”—“speak of Rubinstein” with Protopopov1614. Two weeks later, Rasputin sent a telegram to the emperor saying that Protopopov “implores that no one come to disturb him”, including counter‐espionage…; “he spoke to me of the detainee with gentleness, as a true Christian.”—Another three weeks later, the Empress: “About Rubinstein, he is dying. Send immediately a telegram [to the northwest Front]… for him to be transferred from Pskov under the authority of the Minister of the Interior”—that is, of that good and gentle Christian of Protopopov! And, the following day: “I hope you sent the telegram for Rubinstein, he’s dying.” And the next day: “Have you arranged for Rubinstein to be handed over to the Minister of the Interior? If he stays in Pskov, he will die,—please, my sweet friend!”1615 On 6 December, Rubinstein was released—ten days before the assassination of Rasputin, who had just enough time to render him a last service. Immediately afterwards, the Minister Makarov1616, whom the Empress
1611Ibidem, p. 402. 1612Mikhail Alekseyev (1857 1918), then Chief of Staff of the Supreme Commander. Will ‒ advise the tsar to abdicate. Supreme Commander until 3 June 1917. After October, organiser of the first White army, in the Don. 1613V. N. Semennikor, Politika Romanovykh nakanoune revolioutsii. Ot Antanty—k Guermanii (Politics of the Romanovs on the Eve of the Revolution: From the Agreement to Germany), M., L., GIZ, 1926, pp. 117, 118, 125. 1614Last tsarist Minister of the Interior. Accused of intelligence with Germany (perpetrated in Sweden during the summer of 1916 on the occasion of a trip to England of a delegation of the Duma). Imprisoned by the Provisional Government. Executed by the Bolsheviks. 1615Pisma imperatritsy Aleksandry Fëdorovny k Imperatorou Nikolaiou II / Per. S angi. V. D. Nabokoa (Letters of the Empress Alexandra Fecorovna to the Emperor Nicholas II / trad. from English by V. D. Nabokov), Berlin Slovo, 1922, pp. 202, 204, 211, 223, 225, 227. 1616Minister of Justice from 20 July 1916 to 2 January 1917. Executed by the Cheka in September 1918.
detested, was dismissed. (Shortly thereafter, he will be executed by the Bolsheviks.)—It is true that with the liberation of Rubinstein, the investigation of his case was not finished; he was arrested again, but during the redeeming revolution of February, along with other prisoners who languished in the tsarist gaols, he was freed of the Petrograd prison by the crowd and left ungrateful Russia, as had the time to do so Manassevich, Manus, and Simanovich. (This Rubinstein, we will still have the opportunity to meet him again.) For us who live in the 90s of the twentieth century,1617 this orgy of plundering of State property appears as an experimental model on a very small scale… But what we find in one case or another, it is a government both pretentious and lame that leaves Russia abandoned to its destiny.
Educated by the Rubinstein case, the General Staff had the accounts of several banks checked. At the same time, an investigation was opened against the sugar producers of Kiev—Hepner, Tsekhanovski, Babushkin, and Dobry. They had obtained permission to export sugar to Persia; they had made massive shipments, but very little merchandise had been reported by the customs and had reached the Persian market; the rest of the sugar had “disappeared”, but, according to some information, it had passed through Turkey—allied to Germany—and had been sold on the spot. At the same time, the price of sugar had suddenly risen in the regions of the South‐West, where Russia’s sugar industry was concentrated. The sugar deal was conducted in an atmosphere of rigour and intransigence, but the Batiushin commission did not carry out its investigation and forwarded the file to an investigative judge of Kiev, who began by expanding the accused, and then they found support alongside the throne. As for the Batiushin Commission itself, its composition left much to be desired. Its ineffectiveness in investigating the Rubinstein case was highlighted by Senator Zavadski.1618 In his memoirs, General Lukomski, a member of the Staff, recounts that one of the chief jurists of the commission, Colonel Rezanov, an indisputably competent man, was also found to be quite fond of menus, good restaurants, boozy dinners; another, Orlov, proved to be a renegade who worked in the secret police after 1917, then went to the Whites and, in emigration, would be marked by his provocative conduct. There were probably other shady figures on the committee who did not refuse bribes and had capitalised on the release of the detainees. Through a series of indiscriminate acts, the commission drew the attention of the Military Justice of Petrograd and senior officials of the Ministry of Justice.
1617Time when the writing of this present volume was completed, and allusion to the state of Yeltsinian Russia. 1618S. V. Zavadski, Na velikom izlome (The Great Fracture), Archives of the Russian Revolution, 1923, t. 8, pp. 19 22. ‒
However, there was not only the Staff to deal with the problem of speculators, in relation to the activities “of the Jews in general”. On 9 January 1916, Acting Director of the Police Department, Kafafov, signed a classified defence directive, which was addressed to all provincial and city governors and all gendarmerie commands. But the “intelligence service” of public opinion soon discovered the secret, and a month later, on 10 February, when all business ceased, Chkheidze1619 read out this document from the tribune of the Duma. And what could be read there was not only that “the Jews make revolutionary propaganda”, but that “in addition to their criminal activity of propaganda… they have set themselves two important objectives: to artificially raise the price of essential commodities and withdraw from circulation common currency”— they thus seek “to make the population lose confidence in the Russian currency”, to spread the rumour that “the Russian government is bankrupt, that there is not enough metal to make coins.” The purpose of all this, according to the bulletin, was “to obtain the abolition of the Pale of Settlement, because the Jews think that the present period is the most favourable to achieve their ends by maintaining the trouble in the country.” The Department did not accompany these considerations with any concrete measure: it was simply “for information”.1620 Here is the reaction of Milyukov: “The method of Rostopchin1621 is used with the Jews—they are presented to an overexcited crowd, saying: they are the guilty, they are yours, do what you want with them.”1622 During the same days, the police encircled the Moscow Stock Exchange, carried out identity checks among the operators and discovered seventy Jews in an illegal situation; a roundup of the same type took place in Odessa. And this also penetrated the Duma Chamber, causing a real cataclysm—what the Council of Ministers feared so much a year ago was happening: “In the current period, we can not tolerate within the Duma a debate on the Jewish question, a debate which could take on a dangerous form and serve as a pretext for the aggravation of conflicts between nationalities.”1623 But the debate really took place and lasted several months. The most lively and passionate reaction to the bulletin of the Department was that of Shingaryov1624—he had no equal to communicate to his listeners all the indignation which aroused in his heart: “there is not an ignominy, not a turpitude which the State has not been guilty towards the Jew, it which is a 1619Menshevik leader, deputy to the third and fourth Dumas; In February 1917, president of the Petrograd Soviet. Emigrated in 1921, committed suicide in 1926. 1620Archives of the Russian Revolution, 1925, vol. 19, pp. 267 268. ‒ 1621Governor of Moscow at the beginning of the nineteenth century. It was long believed that he had set fire to the city when the French armed there in 1812. Father of the Countess of Segur. 1622Stenographic record of the debates of the Fourth Duma. 10 February 1916, p. 1312. 1623Archives of the Russian Revolution, 1926, t. 18, p. 49. 1624Andrei Shingaryov(1869 1918), Zemstvo doctor, leader of the Cadet party, will be ‒ Minister of Agriculture in the first Provisional Government, and Finance in the second. Slaughtered in his hospital bed on 18 January 1918.
Christian state… spreading calumny over a whole people without any foundation… Russian society will be able to cure its evils only when you will withdraw that thorn, this evil that gangrenes the life of the country—the persecution of nationalities… Yes, we hurt for our government, we are ashamed of our State! The Russian army found itself without ammunition in Galicia —“and the Jews would be responsible for it?” “As for the rise in prices, there are many complex reasons for this… Why, in this case, does the bulletin mention only the Jews, why does it not speak of the Russians and even others?” Indeed, prices had soared all over Russia. And the same goes for the disappearance of coins. “And it is in a bulletin of the Department of Police that one can read all this!”1625 Nothing to object. Easy to write a bulletin in the back of an office, but very unpleasant to respond to a raging Parliament. Yet this was what its author, Kafafov, had to resolve. He defended himself: the bulletin did not contain any directive, it was not addressed to the population, but to local authorities, for information and not for action; it aroused passions only after being sold by “timorous” civil servants and made public from the rostrum. How strange, continued Kafafov: we are not talking here of other confidential bulletins which have also, probably, been leaked; thus, as early as May 1915, he had himself initialled one of this order: “There is a rise in hatred towards Jews in certain categories of the population of the Empire”, and the Department “demands that the most energetic measures be taken in order to prevent any demonstration going in this direction”, any act of violence of the population directed against the Jews, “to take the most vigorous measures to stifle in the bud the propaganda that begins to develop in certain places, to prevent it from leading to outbreaks of pogroms.” And even, a month earlier, at the beginning of February, this directive sent to Poltava: reinforce surveillance so as to “be able to prevent in time any attempt to pogrom against the Jews.”1626 And to complain: how is it that that bulletins such as these do not interest public opinion, that, those, they are allowed to pass in the utmost silence? In his heated speech, Shingaryov immediately warned the Duma against the danger of “engaging in debates on the boundless ocean of the Jewish question.” But that was what happened because of the publicity reserved for this bulletin. Moreover, Shingaryov himself pushed clumsily in this direction, abandoning the ground for the defence of the Jews to declare that the real traitors were the Russians: Sukhomlinov1627, Myasoedov, and General Grigoriev, who had shamefully capitulated at Kovno.1628 This provoked a reaction. Markov1629 objected that he had no right to speak of Sukhomlinov, the latter being for the moment only accused. (The Progressive 1625Stenographic Record of the Debates of the Fourth Duma, 8 March 1916, pp. 3037 3040. ‒ 1626Ibidem, pp. 3137 3141. ‒ 1627Minister of War ineffective from 1909 to 1915, arrested on 3 May 1916, released in November through Rasputin. 1628Ibidem, pp. 3036 3037. ‒
Bloc was successful in the Sukhomlinov affair, but at the end of the Provisional Government, it itself had to admit that time had been wasted, that there had been no treason there.) Myasoedov had already been convicted and executed (but some facts may suggest that it was also a fabricated affair); Markov limited himself to adding that “he had been hanged in the company of six Jewish spies” (what I did not know: Myasoedov had been judged alone) and that, here is one to six, that was the report.1630 Among certain proposals contained in the programme that the Progressive Bloc had succeeded in putting together in August 1915, “the autonomy of Poland” seemed somewhat fantastical insofar as it was entirely in the hands of the Germans; “the equality of rights for peasants” did not have to be demanded of the government, because Stolypin had made it happen and it was precisely the Duma which did not endorse it, positing precisely as a condition the simultaneous equality of the Jews; so much so that “the gradual introduction of a process of reducing the limitations of rights imposed on Jews”—even though the evasiveness of this formulation was obvious—nevertheless became the main proposal of the programme of the Bloc. The latter included Jewish deputies1631 and the Yiddish press reported: “The Jewish community wishes the Progressive Bloc a good wind!” And now, after two years of an exhausting war, heavy losses on the front and a feverish agitation in the rear, the extreme right waved its admonitions: “You have understood that you must explain yourself before the people over your silence about the military superiority of the Germans, your silence about the fight against the soaring prices, and your excessive zeal to want to grant equal rights to the Jews!” That is what you are demanding “of the government, at the present moment, in the midst of war,—and if it does not meet these demands you blow it off and recognise only one government, the one that will give equality to the Jews!” But “we are surely not going to give equality now, just now that everyone is white‐hot against the Jews; in doing so, you only raise public opinion against these unfortunates.”1632 Deputy Friedman refutes the claim that the people are at the height of exasperation: “In the tragic context of the oppression of the Jews, however, there is a glimmer of hope, and I do not want to ignore it: it is the attitude of the Russian populations of the interior provinces towards the Jewish refugees who arrive there.” These Jewish refugees “receive help and hospitality”. It is “the pledge of our future, our fusion with the Russian people.” But he insists that the
1629Nikolai Markov (1876 1945), called at the Duma “Markov‐II” to distinguish him from ‒ homonyms. Leader of the extreme right. In November 1918, he went to Finland, then to Berlin and Paris where he directed a monarchist revue, The Two Headed Eagle. He moved to Germany in 1936, where he directed an anti‐Semitic publication in Russian. Died in Wiesbaden. 1630Ibidem, p. 5064. 1631SJE, t. 7, p. 359. 1632Stenographic Record of the Debates of the Fourth Duma, February 1916, p. 1456 and 28‒ 29 February 1916, p. 2471.
responsibility for all the misfortunes of the Jews rests with the government, and he lays his accusations at the highest level: “There was never a pogrom when the government did not want it.” Through the members of the Duma, “I am addressing the 170 million inhabitants of Russia…: they want to use your hands to lift the knife on the Jewish people of Russia!”1633 To this was replied: do the deputies of the Duma only know what is thought of in the country? “The country does not write in Jewish newspapers, the country suffers, works… it is bogged down in the trenches, it is there, the country, and not in the Jewish newspapers where work John Does obeying mysterious guidelines.” It was even said, “That the press is controlled by the government is an evil, but there is an even greater evil: that the press is controlled by the enemies of the Russian State!”1634 As Shingaryov had sensed, the liberal majority of the Duma was, now, no longer interested in prolonging the debate on the Jewish question. But the process was on and nothing could stop it. And it was a never‐ending series of speeches that came in the middle of the other cases to be dealt with for four months until the end of the fall session. The right accused the Progressive Bloc: no, the Duma was not going to tackle the problem of rising prices! “You are not going to fight with the banks, the unions, against strikes in the industry, because that would be tantamount to fighting against the Jews.” Meanwhile, the Reformist Municipality of Petrograd “gave the town supply to two Israelites, Levenson and Lesman: the first the meat supply, the second the food shops—although he had illegally sold flour to Finland. Other examples of suppliers artificially inflating prices are given.1635 (None of the deputies took it upon himself to defend these speculators.) After that, it is impossible that the question not come up for discussion, so current during these years of war, of the numerus clausus! As we have seen, it had been re‐established after the revolution of 1905, but was gradually mitigated by the common practice of day school in high schools and the authorisation given to Jews who had completed their medical studies abroad to pass the State diploma in Russia; other measures were taken in this direction— but not the abrogation pure and simple—in 1915, when the Pale of Settlement was abolished. P. N. Ignatiev, Minister of Public Instruction in 1915 1916, also ‒ reduced the numerus clausus in higher education institutions. And in the spring of 1916, the walls of the Duma echoed the debate on this issue at length. The statistics of the Ministry of Education are examined, and Professor Levachev, deputy of Odessa, states that the provisions of the Council of Ministers (authorising the derogatory admission of children of Jews called up for military service) have been arbitrarily extended by the Ministry of Education to the children of Zemgor employees, evacuation agencies, hospitals, as well as persons declaring themselves [deceitfully] dependent on a parent called up for
1633Ibidem, pp. 1413 1414, 1421, 1422. ‒ 1634Ibidem, pp. 1453 1454, 2477. ‒ 1635Ibidem, p. 4518.
military service. Thus, of the 586 students admitted in 1915 in the first year of medicine at the University of Odessa, “391 are Jews”, that is to say two thirds, and that “only one third remain for the other nationalities.” At the University of Rostov‐on‐Don: 81% of Jewish students at the Faculty of Law, 56% at the Faculty of Medicine, and 54% at the Faculty of Sciences.1636 Gurevich replies to Levachev: this is proof that the numerus clausus is useless! “What is the use of the numerus clausus, when even this year, when the Jews benefited from a higher than normal arrangement, there was enough room to welcome all Christians who wanted to enter the university?” What do you want—empty classrooms? Little Germany has a large number of Jewish teachers, yet it does not die of it!1637 Markov’s objection: “Universities are empty [because Russian students are at war, and they send [to the universities] masses of Jews.” “Escaping military service,” the Jews “have overwhelmed the University of Petrograd and, thanks to that, will swell the ranks of the Russian intelligentsia… This phenomenon… is detrimental to the Russian people, even destructive,” because every people “is subject to the power of its intelligentsia.” “The Russians must protect their elites, their intelligentsia, their officials, their government; the latter must be Russian.”1638 Six months later, in the autumn of 1916, Friedman harped on about this by asking the Duma the following question: “Thus it would be better for our universities to remain empty… it would be better for Russia to find itself without an intellectual elite rather than admit Jews in too great numbers?”1639 On the one hand, Gurevitch was obviously right: why should the classrooms have been left empty? Let each one do what he has to do. But, in asking the question in these terms, did he not comfort the suspicions and bitterness of the right: therefore, we do not work together? One group to make war, the other to study? (My father, for example—he interrupted his studies at Moscow University and joined the army as a volunteer. It seemed at the time that there was no alternative: to not go to the front would have been dishonourable. Who, among these young Russian volunteers, and even among the professors who remained in the universities, understood that the future of the country was not only played on the battlefields? No one understood it neither in Russia, nor in Europe.) In the spring of 1916, the debate on the Jewish question was suspended on the grounds that it provoked undesirable agitation in public opinion. But the problem of nationalities was put back on the agenda by an amendment to the law on township Zemstvos. The creation of this new administrative structure was discussed during the winter of 1916 17 during the last months of the ‒ existence of the Duma. And then one fine day, when the main speakers had gone
1636Ibidem, pp. 3360 3363. ‒ 1637Ibidem, p. 3392. 1638Ibidem, pp. 1456, 3421, 5065. 1639Ibidem, p. 90.
for refreshments or had returned to their penates, and that there was little left for the sitting than half of the well‐behaved deputies, a peasant of Viatka, named Tarassov, managed to sneak into the tribune. Timidly, he spoke, striving to make the members of the house understand the problem of the amendment: it provides that “everyone is admitted, and the Jews, that is, and the Germans, all those who will come to our township. And to those, what will be their rights? These people who are going to be registered [in our township]… but they are going to take places, and the peasants, no one takes care of them… If it is a Jew who runs the township administration and his wife who is secretary, then the peasants, them, what are their rights?… What is going to happen, where will the peasants be?… And when our valiant warriors return, what will they be entitled to? To stay in the back; but during the war, it was on the front line that they were, the peasants… Do not make amendments that contradict the practical reality of the peasant life, do not give the right to the Jews and the Germans to participate in the elections of the township zemstvos, for they are peoples who will bring nothing useful; on the contrary, they will greatly harm and there will be disorders across the country. We peasants, we are not going to submit to these nationalities.”1640 But in the meantime, the campaign for equal rights for Jews was in full swing. It now enjoyed the support of organisations that had not previously been concerned with the issue, such as the Gvozdev Central Workers’ Group1641, which represented the interests of the Russian proletariat. In the spring of 1916, the Workers’ Group claimed to be informed that “the reaction [implied: the government and administration of the Ministry of the Interior] is openly preparing a pogrom against the Jews throughout Russia”. And Kozma Gvozdev repeated this nonsense at the Congress of Military‐Industrial Committees.—In March 1916, in a letter to Rodzianko1642, the Workers’ Group protested against the suspension of the debate on the Jewish question in the Duma; And the same Group accused the Duma itself of complacency towards the anti‐Semites: “The attitude of the majority at the meeting of 10 March is de facto to give its direct support and to reinforce the policy of anti‐Jewish pogroms led by the power… By its support of the militant anti‐Semitism of the ruling circles, the majority in the Duma is a serious blow to the work of national defence.”1643 (They had not agreed, they had not realised that in the Duma it was precisely the left who needed to end the debate.)—The workers also benefited from the support of “Jewish groups” who, according to a report by the Security Department in
1640Ibidem, pp. 1069 1071. ‒ 1641Also said Kouzma Gvozdiov (born in 1883), a worker, a Menshevik leader, a defender, president of the Central Workers’ Group; After February, member of the Central Executive Committee of the Petrograd Soviet, Minister of Labour of the Fourth Provisional Government. In camp or in prison from 1930 onwards. 1642President of the Duma from 1911 to 1917. 1643K istorii gvosdevchtchiny (Contribution to the history of the Gvozdev movement), Krasny arkhiv. 1934, t. 67, p. 52.
October 1916, “have overwhelmed the capital and, without belonging to any party, are pursuing a policy violently hostile to the power.”1644 And the power in all this? Without direct evidence, it can be assumed that within the ministerial teams that succeeded each other in 1916, the decision to proclaim equal rights for the Jews was seriously considered. This had been mentioned more than once by Protopopov, who had already succeeded, it seems, in turning Nicholas II in this direction. (Protopopov also had an interest in going quickly to cut short the campaign that the left had set in motion against him.)— And General Globachev, who was the last to direct the Department of Security before the revolution, writes in his memoirs, in the words of Dobrovolsky, who was also the last Minister of Justice of the monarchy: “The bill on equal rights for the Jews was already ready [in the months that preceded the revolution] and, in all likelihood, the law would have been promulgated for the 1917 Easter celebrations.”1645 But in 1917, the Easter celebrations were to take place under a completely different system. The ardent aspirations of our radicals and liberals would then have come true. “Everything for victory!”—Yes, but “not with that power!” Public opinion, both among the Russians and among the Jews, as well as the press, all were entirely directed towards Victory, were the first to claim it,—only, not with this government! Not with this tsar! All were still persuaded of the correctness of the simple and brilliant reasoning they had held at the beginning of the war: before it ends (because afterwards it would be more difficult) and by winning a victory over victory on the Germans, to throw down the tsar and change the political regime. And that is when the equal rights for the Jews would come.
We have examined in many ways the circumstances in which took place one hundred and twenty years of common life between Russians and Jews within the same State. Among the difficulties, some have found a solution over time, others emerged and increased in the course of the years prior to the spring of 1917. But the evolving nature of the processes in motion visibly taking over and promised a constructive future. And it was at that moment that a blast disintegrated the political and social system of Russia—and thus the fruits of evolution, but also the military resistance to the enemy, paid for with so much blood, and finally the prospects for a future of fulfilment: it was the revolution of February. 1644Politikchkoye polojenie Rossii nakanoune Fevralskoi revolioutsii (Political situation in Russia on the eve of the February Revolution), Krasny arkhiv, 1926, t. 17, p. 14. 1645K. I. Globatchev, Pravda o russkoï revolutionsii: Vospominania byvchevo Nachalnika Petrogradskovo Okhrannovo Otdelenia. Dekabr 1922 (The truth about the Russian revolution: memoirs of the former head of the Petrograd Security Department, December 1922), Khranenie Koloumbiïskovo ouniversiteta, machinopis, p. 41.
Volume 2
The Jews in the Soviet Union
Chapter 13. The February Revolution
The 123-year-old history of unequal citizenship of the Jewish people in Russia, from the Act of Catherine the Great of 1791, ended with the February Revolution. It bears looking into the atmosphere of those February days; what was the state of society by the moment of emancipation? There were no newspapers during the first week of the Revolutionary events in Petrograd. And then they began trumpeting, not looking for the ways to rebuild the state but vying with each other in denouncing all the things of the past. In an unprecedented gesture, the newspaper of the Constitutional Democrats (Kadets), Rech, announced that from now on “all Russian life must be rebuilt from the roots.”1646 (A thousand-year life! — why, all of a sudden from “the roots”?) And the Stock-Market News announced a program of action: “Yank, yank all these weed-roots out! No need to worry that there might be some useful plants among them — it’s better to weed them all even at the price of unavoidable innocent victims.”1647 (Was this really March 1917 or March 1937?) The new Minister of Foreign Affairs Milyukov bowed and scraped: “Up to now we blushed in front of our allies because of our government…. Russia was a dead weight for our allies.”1648 Rarely in those beginning days was it possible to hear reasonable suggestions about rebuilding Russia. The streets of Petrograd were in chaos, the police were non-functional and all over the city there was continuous disorderly gunfire. But everything poured into a general rejoicing, though for every concrete question, there was a mess of thoughts and opinions, a cacophony of debating pens. All the press and society agreed on one thing — the immediate legislative enactment of Jewish equality. Fyodor Sologub eloquently wrote in the Birzheviye Vedomosti: “The most essential beginning of the civil freedom, without which our land cannot be blessed, the people cannot be righteous, national achievements would not be sanctified … — is the repeal of all religious and racial restrictions.” The equality of Jews advanced very quickly. The 1st of March [old calendar style], one day before the abdication, a few hours before the infamous “Order No. 1,” which pushed the army to collapse, V. Makhlakov and M. Adzhemov, 1646Rech, 1917, March 17 1647Birzhevye Vedomosti, 1917, March 8 (here and further, the morning edition) 1648ibid, March 10, page 6
two commissars of the Duma Committee delegated to the Ministry of Justice, had issued an internal Ministry of Justice directive, ordering to enlist all Jewishassistants to attorneys-at-law into the Guild of Judicial Attorneys. “Already by the 3rd of March … the Chairman of the State Duma, M. Rodzianko, and the Prime Minister of the Provisional Government, Prince G. Lvov, signed a declaration which stated that one of the main goals of the new government is a `repeal of all restrictions based upon religion, nationality and social class.´”1649 Then, on the 4th of March, the Defense Minister Guchkov proposed to open a path for the Jews to become military officers, and the Minister of Education Manuelov proposed to repeal the percentage quotas on the Jews. Both proposals were accepted without obstacles. On the 6th of March the Minister of Trade and Manufacturing, Konovalov, started to eliminate “national restrictions in corporative legislation,” that is, a repeal of the law forbidding purchase of land by companies with Jewish executives. These measures were quickly put into practice. By the 8th of March in Moscow, 110 Jewish “assistants” were raised to the status of attorneys-at-law; by March 9th in Petrograd — 124 such Jews1650; by the 8th of March in Odessa — 60.1651 On the 9th of March the City Duma of Kiev, not waiting for the upcoming elections, included in its body five Jews with voting power.1652 And here — on March 20 the Provisional Government made a resolution, prepared by the Minister of Justice, A. Kerensky, with the participation of members of the political bureau of Jewish deputies in the 4th State Duma … legislated an act, published on March 22, that repealed “all restrictions on the rights of Russian citizens, regardless of religious creed, dogma or nationality.” This was, in essence, the first broad legislative act of the Provisional Government. “At the request of the political bureaus (of Jewish deputies), the Jews were not specifically mentioned in the resolution.”1653 But in order to “repeal all the restrictions on Jews in all of our laws, in order to uproot … completely the inequality of Jews,” G.B. Sliozberg recalls, “it was necessary to make a complete list of all the restrictions … and  the collation of the list of laws to be repealed required great thoroughness and experience.” (This task was undertaken by Sliozberg and L.M. Bramson.)1654 The Jewish Encyclopedia says: “The Act listed the statutes of Russian law that were being abolished by the Act — almost all those statutes (there were nearly 150) contained some or other anti-Jewish restrictions. Subject to repeal were, in part, all proscriptions connected to the Pale of Settlement; thereby its factual
1649Abridged Jewish Encyclopedia, (heretofore AJE) Jerusalem: Society for the Research of Jewish Community, 1994, Volume 7, Page 377 1650Rech’, March 9, 1917 Page 4: March 10, Page 5, et. al. 1651Birzheviye Vedomosti, March 9, 1917, Page 2 1652Ibid, March 10, Page 2 1653AJE, Volume 7, Page 377 1654G.B. Sliozberg, Dela Minuvshikh Dney: Zapiski Russkovo Yevreya: Paris, 1933-1934, Volume 3, Page 360