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

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      Even under the “constitutional monarchy” Jews did not receive full civil rights. According to Russian law, Shmariagu Levin, a Jewish Duma deputy, did not have the right to live in Petersburg. Attempts to address the issue of Jewish rights met with little success. The persistence of the Pale of Settlement and the numerous restrictions on Jews in this newly “free” country seemed barbaric to Western countries, whose own citizens were not immune from persecution while in Russia. In 1911, the United States government withdrew from its trade agreement with Russia, due to the fact that its citizens of Jewish heritage were subjected to the same restrictions as local Jews.¹⁰⁶

      In 1913, an event occurred that seemed to come straight out of the annals of medieval history. Menahem Mendel Beilis, a resident of Kiev, was indicted for the murder of a 13-year-old Ukrainian Christian boy. A number of antisemitic organizations and far-right Duma deputies called for his conviction based on the accusation that Beilis had engaged in ritual murder, though there was no evidence to support the ludicrous claim. Though he was eventually acquitted, the very possibility of such a show trial speaks volumes as to how the Jewish populace was treated in the last years of the Russian Empire.¹⁰⁷

      Despite the numerous restrictions in place, the number of Jews in the Russian elite continued to grow. German, Jewish, and Polish subjects comprised 20 percent, 11 percent, and 11 percent (respectively) of all founders of corporations from 1896 to 1900.¹⁰⁸ The Imperial government, for whom nationalism was a matter of policy, introduced measures aimed at limiting the presence of “foreign” actors in the domestic economy. In 1911, Stolypin instructed the Ministry of Industry to push Jews out of the bread trade. From 1913 to 1914, laws were enacted that prohibited Jews from controlling real estate or serving as directors of corporations.¹⁰⁹ In 1914, the Ministry was shocked to discover that in the Northwestern Territory only 8 percent of those employed in banks and corporations were Russian, compared to 35 percent Jews, 26 percent Germans, and 19 percent Poles. The Ministry insisted on the imposition of quotas based on ethnicity in order to redress the situation, both in the Northwestern Territories and in the rest of the Empire.¹¹⁰ Despite these measures, Jews would continue to comprise approximately 20 percent of the “business elite” in Russia.¹¹¹

      As we can see, during these three decades government policy towards the Jews was more concerned with the placing of restrictions than with any kind of “emancipation,” even though the government considered the latter its official policy and would occasionally take steps in that direction. According to J. Klier, Jews were persecuted because of their connection to the “Polish question.” His claim rests on the notion that the government considered Jews to be in league with the Poles due to their close economic ties, and, as the latter presented a threat to the Empire as a whole, both groups were subjected to discrimination. The result was that Russia's Jews, who could have become “obedient” subjects much like the Jews of Austria-Hungary or Germany, were instead pushed towards the opposition, eventually joining liberal or revolutionary movements in accordance with their social position or temperament.¹¹²

      Even if the government initially associated the Jews and the Poles, the situation had changed drastically by the outbreak of the First World War. Soon after the beginning of the war, Grand Duke Nicholas's manifesto to the Poles promised the creation of a Polish state, whereas Jews were automatically considered to be potential traitors.

      By the beginning of the twentieth century, only two countries (Russia and Romania) had placed legal restrictions upon their Jewish citizens. Of course, Russia had no monopoly on antisemitism, which had been growing in other countries such as France, Germany, and Austria-Hungary. Nevertheless, the first pogrom of the twentieth century was to occur in Russia. The Kishinev tragedy, which took place during a time of peace under the delinquent watch of a negligent government, exposed Russia's treatment of its Jews to the world, as did the show trial of Mendel Beilis. While the latter was not the only antisemitic show trial of the era to gain notoriety, it is worth remembering that the Alfred Dreyfus case involved an accusation of espionage, not ritual murder. And although Dreyfus was convicted, he was eventually pardoned. Beilis, however, was exonerated by the jury on the basis that he had not killed the boy in question. This did not mean that the Russian population at large did not believe the accusations against the Jews.

      One can only guess as to what course the Jews of the Russian Empire would have taken had the Russian Empire continued its existence. Given the rate of emigration, it is quite possible that the Jews would have largely abandoned the country. On the other hand, it is also possible that “voluntary integration” would have eventually succeeded, and the Russian Jews could have come to resemble their French and German counterparts as “Russian keepers of the Torah.” Yet such thoughts are outside of the realm of history, existing only in the kingdom of hypothetical speculation.

      The World War—which at the time nobody thought to call “the first”—did take place. It is highly unlikely that in the patriotic furor of August 1914 (or, in the Russian context, July, according to the Gregorian calendar still used at the time) anybody could have considered the possibility that the three-hundred-year history of the Romanov Empire was drawing to a close, that it had only three years to live. And it seemed just as impossible that the man in charge of negotiating the peace, the Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Republic (called “the people's commissar” according to the French tradition), would turn out to be a certain Lev Trotsky, a former exile and a Jew.

      CHAPTER 2

      The Jews and the Russian Revolution

      Soon after the assassination of Alexander II on March 1, 1881, the famous Russian historian and conservative journalist Dmitrii Ilovaiskii wrote in Sankt-Peterburgskie Vedomosti (The St. Petersburg News): “Now that the body of the martyred Tsar has been given to the earth, we, the Russians, must first and foremost fulfill our holy duty to seek out the very sources of that dark force that has taken him from Russia.” Ilovaiskii expressed the conviction that Russian “nihilists and socialists” were merely “a crude, often unconscious weapon,” that they had been led to commit the crime not so much by the “enemies of proprietorship and civil order” as by the “internal and external enemies of the Russian State, and of Russian Nationalism.”

      According to Ilovaiskii, Great Russians (Velikorossy), comprising a kind of “Panurgic herd” in this “underground gang,” were the only ethnic group that did not have nationalistic motives. “The Karakozovs, Solovievs, and Rysakovs are precisely those crude unintelligent weapons that were caught up in a web of social propaganda. They themselves did not know for what goals or deeds they were serving as weapons.” Among the internal enemies of Russia, Ilovaiskii listed the Poles first. “The second element,” wrote the author of scores of enduring editions of school textbooks, “is clearly visible and even patently obvious, namely, Jewish revolutionaries. They have come forth as quite possibly the most active element in the recent actions, murders, attacks, and university disturbances.”¹

      If Ilovaiskii, who was one of the first to succinctly formulate the “foreign” (inorodcheskii) character of the Russian revolution, gave Jews “only” second place among the threats to Russia, this would indicate that the Jews were not yet playing a leading role in the liberation movement. At the very least, Jews did not yet personify the central, active force of the Russian revolution in Russian public opinion, even in its “blackest” variants.²

      Two decades later, this situation had changed markedly. In 1903, the Chairman of the Council of Ministers, Sergei Iulevich Witte, remarked to Theodor Herzl that Jews comprised nearly half of the membership of revolutionary parties, even though they were only six million people in a nation of a 136 million.³ If Witte exaggerated, he did so only slightly.

      From 1901 to 1903, Jews composed СКАЧАТЬ