Russian Jews Between the Reds and the Whites, 1917-1920. Oleg Budnitskii
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Название: Russian Jews Between the Reds and the Whites, 1917-1920

Автор: Oleg Budnitskii

Издательство: Ingram

Жанр: Историческая литература

Серия: Jewish Culture and Contexts

isbn: 9780812208146

isbn:

СКАЧАТЬ under the conditions of a growing nationalism (or nationalisms, as the Jews were caught between growing Russian, Ukrainian, and Polish nationalism) only served to strengthen anti-semitic tendencies. The Jews were accused of facilitating the development of industry at the expense of agriculture. Witte's introduction of the gold standard was also blamed on the Jews, as many knew it would lessen the value of agricultural goods. Such a situation, in the opinion of many journalists, would benefit only a small number of bankers and Jews who did not concern themselves with production through labor. New Times attributed the rise of the Bund, the beginnings of the Zionist movement, and increased Jewish interest in Marxism to the notion that the Jews were planning on carving out their own state from Russia. If an earlier revolutionary slogan had been “all lands to the peasants!” then in the current climate Jews were accused of transforming peasants into proletarians, thus freeing up the land for its new owners.76

      Russian business owners and journalists, particularly in Moscow, were the most fervent in attacking their foreign and non-Christian competitors. For example, the newspaper Russian Review (Russkoe Obozrenie), founded in 1890 by the merchant D. I. Morozov and edited by Prince D. N. Tsertelev, frequently targeted Jews, Poles, and Germans. The paper claimed, among other things, that Jews considered themselves to be “above the law.” Some of the articles bear an eerie resemblance to the denunciations of later eras.77

      Attempts to push Jews out of one or another sphere of social activity could not always be explained by the purely “materialist” concept of competition. The nationalist credo that the Russian land was tied to its people also served as a common theme for radical right-wing journalists, as well as certain government administrators. In 1909 N. P. Muratov, the governor of Tambov, removed S. M. Starikov from his position as head of the local music academy, basing his decision on the belief that “the state of music in Tambov has suffered in the hands of the Jews,” as well as on the more abstract idea that a city “which is truly the center of a Russian gubernia is well deserving of a ‘Russian' music academy.”78

      At the turn of the century, a small but significant portion of the Russian intelligentsia fell under the influence of European racial theory. The famous conservative journalist M. O. Menshikov popularized the racial theories of Houston Stewart Chamberlain, as well as racist German theoreticians.79 Chamberlain's The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, one of the ideological bases for Nazism, was published in Russia by A. S. Suvorin in five separate editions between 1906 and 1910 under the title The Jews: Their Origins and the Reasons for Their Influence in Europe (Evrei, ikh proiskhozhdenie i prichiny ikh vliianiia v Evrope). The neo-Slavophile S. F. Sharapov criticized “liberal dogma” for its belief that the Jews were as white as the Germans, the English, or the Slavs. In his opinion, the “Jewish question” was not a legal one, but rather a question of race. Right-wing organizations began to renew their demands that even christened Jews should be forbidden from occupying government posts. In 1912, students entering the Military Medical Academy were forced to provide proof that there were no Jews in their family in the past three generations, and those who had Jewish fathers or grandfathers were forbidden from joining the Cadet Corps. These were hardly the only cases of discrimination based on ethnicity, as opposed to religion.80

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      Overall, the Jewish population of the Russian Empire was more law-abiding than the population at large. In 1907, 144,143 people were convicted of crimes. Of these, 4,167 (2.89 percent) were Jews. There were 93.6 convicted criminals per 100,000 subjects, whereas the number for Jews was 74.3 per 100,000. The percentage of Jews convicted of political offenses was higher (10.6 percent, or 477 men and 69 women, for a total of 546). This was less than the number of Jews convicted of theft (716, 680 men and 36 women) although as a percentage of the entire population the number convicted was well within the average (4.02 percent). However, Jews were the most likely to be convicted for infractions against the Trade and Credit Code (27.12 percent), although in absolute numbers this only amounted to 32 individuals (24 men and 8 women).81

      This is not to say that the Jewish population did not contain its share of criminals, including thieves and murderers (56 men and one woman, or 1.11 percent of all those convicted), and even horse thieves (30 individuals, or 1.45 percent of Russia's total). From 1903 to 1913, the percentage of Jews convicted of crimes hovered between 3.4 and 3.9 percent, less than the rate of Russians, Poles, Latvians, and Lithuanians. In 1913, the national average was 104 convicted criminals for every 100,000 individuals, whereas the corresponding number for Jews was 97 per 100,000. However, statistics are a relative science, and the relatively high rates of conviction speak more to the effectiveness of judicial and police structures in European Russia as opposed to, say, the Central Asian territories, where conviction rates were much lower (55 per I00,000).82

      Dry statistics often contradict widespread stereotypes and myths, one of which is the belief that Odessa was the “criminal capital” of the Russian Empire. In 1913, there were 224 convicts for every 100,000 inhabitants in Odessa, compared with 353 in Baku, 384 in Kazan, and 400 in Nizhnii Novgorod. Before 1917 there were no large-scale criminal organizations in Odessa. The infamous bandit Mishka Iaponchik spent most of the decade preceding the Revolution in prison for his participation in anarchist “expropriations.”83 Even the most famous examples of Odessan banditry were more myth than fact: the prototype for Isaac Babel's Benia Krik (from his collection of short stories, entitled Odessa Tales) had far less in common with his literary counterpart than military commander S. K. Timoshenko had with his (Savitskii in Babel's Red Cavalry).

      The gulf between the “spearhead” portion of Russian Jewry, who were becoming more and more integrated into Russian society, and their less fortunate fellow Jews was steadily increasing. Soon enough they would literally be speaking different languages. In 1897, 96.9 percent (5,054,300) of all Jews claimed Yiddish as their native language,84 followed by the Russian language (1.28 percent, 67,063), Polish (0.90 percent, 47,060), and German (0.44 percent, 22,782). Less than half (45 percent) of all adult men and only 25 percent of adult women were literate in Russian.85 Though the rate of Russian literacy among the Jews was lower than that of the German minority living in Russia, it was higher than that of the Russian population. In addition, a majority of Jews living in the Pale of Settlement were conversant in either Ukrainian or Belorussian.86

      In St. Petersburg the process of assimilation occurred rapidly. In 1855 there were less than 500 Jews in the capital; by 1910 the number was 35,000. In 1869, Yiddish was the native tongue of 97 percent of St. Petersburg's Jews, but the number who spoke Russian as their native language was to grow quickly (to 28 percent in 1890, 36 percent in 1900, 42 percent in 1910). Over the same period, the percentage of native Yiddish speakers decreased to approximately 54 percent of the Jewish population.87 The children of the Jewish elite attended Russian schools and universities and began to identify more closely with Russian culture. This did not always entail a break with Jewry. Aleksei Goldenveizer (son of the lawyer A. S. Goldenveizer) studied in the First gymnazium of Kiev alongside the future theologian V. N. Ilin and Sergei Trubetskoi (son of the philosopher and journalist), as well as Petliura's future Minister of Foreign Affairs, A. Ia. Shulgin.88 A lawyer like his father, Goldenveizer took an active role in Jewish politics, and understood the language of the Jewish “street” (though he himself admitted that he didn't know Yiddish very well).89

      In the twenty years between the 1897 census and the 1917 revolution, the cultural dynamics of Russian life were to have a profound effect on Jewish assimilation. Indirect proof of this can be found in the 1926 Soviet census, in which 70.4 percent of Jews considered Yiddish to be their native language, although only 42.5 percent of literate Jews in the Ukraine and 56.4 percent of those in Belarus were literate in Yiddish. Russian had now become the literary language for more than half of the Jewish population. As one might imagine, these changes were even more evident outside of the Pale of Settlement. It is highly unlikely that this shift took place in the ten years preceding the Soviet census.90

      Jews СКАЧАТЬ