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

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СКАЧАТЬ at the trial was a deciding factor in the accused's acquittal, quite correctly termed the trial a “salutary warning.”³⁰ Rozanov was excluded from the Religious Philosophy Society for his antisemitism.

      The problem lay elsewhere. In the period between revolutions there was an indisputable growth in antisemitism among groups that had not previously been known to exhibit it. This necessarily pushed Jews to the Left, as even among the Kadets, the “standard-bearers” of Russian liberalism, a “Janus-faced policy” towards the “Jewish question” became evident.

      Before examining the role of the Jews in the fateful year of 1917, it must be determined whether the Jewish members of the Russian liberation movement can be considered as acting in concert with Jewish interests, or whether they should even be considered Jews at all. After all, a number of them had rejected their Jewish faith and heritage. The marked internationalism of many revolutionary groups, especially the Bolsheviks, gave their antagonists within the Jewish community convenient grounds on which to “excommunicate” them from Russian Jewry.

      At a meeting on June 8, 1917, S. M. Dubnov said, “And from among our community there have appeared a good number of demagogues who have fallen in league with the heroes of the street and the prophets of the insurgency. They appear under Russian pseudonyms, ashamed of their Jewish heritage (Trotsky, Zinoviev, etc.), but it is their Russian pseudonyms that we will take to be their ‘Jewish’ names, [so] they have no place among our people…”³¹

      One could just as easily say that revolutionaries of Russian extraction should be excluded from their people based on the fact that they did not observe the tenets of Orthodoxy. However, another interpretation is possible here. Perhaps the active participation of some Jews in the revolutionary movement was not, in fact, due to any break with Jewish identity, as so many internationalist revolutionaries claimed, but was rather because of their Jewish heritage. To accept this idea, one does not necessarily have to share the mystical musings of N. A. Berdiaev, who claimed that there was much in common between Jewish messianism and its Marxist variant.³² There are other, more objective historical and economic grounds for making such a claim.

      Obvious socioeconomic and political factors were to result in a majority of Jews being pushed towards the opposite camp. It is clear that the Jewish community as a whole refused to endorse the revolutionary program of the revolutionaries of Jewish heritage, be they Bolsheviks, SRs, or from other political parties. Nor could any Jewish socialist party be taken as being representative of all of Russian Jewry. At the same time, for many the solution to the “Jewish question” appeared to be entwined with the success of the Russian revolution. It was precisely the legacy of antisemitic prejudice and discrimination in Russia that inclined, and sometimes even directly led, the children of many well-off Jewish families to join the ranks of the revolutionaries. A significant portion of the revolutionary leadership came from well-established

      Jewish families. Iulii Martov, Sergei Ezhov, Vladimir Levitskii, and Lidia Dan, all grandchildren of the publisher Aleksandr Tsederbaum, were to become prominent Social Democrats. Mikhail and Abram Gots, the grandsons of the Moscow tea magnate Volf Vysotskii, and Il'ia Fondaminskii were among the leaders of the Party of Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs). Osip Minor, son of the head rabbi of Moscow, was first a member of the People's Will, then an SR,³³ and finally, in 1917, the chairman of the Moscow City Duma. Among the Bolsheviks one could find the son of well-to-do farmers (Trotsky, whose true surname was Bronshtein), dairy farmers (Zinoviev [Radomysl-skii]), as well as the son of an engineer (Lev Kamenev [Rosenfeld]), and a doctor (Grigorii Sokolnikov [Brilliant]). All of the above-mentioned individuals had the opportunity to pursue just about any career path they desired, yet they all chose instead the path of the revolutionary.

      Jews were the most urbanized and literate people of the Russian Empire (along with the Germans), yet they were restricted in where they were allowed to live, their choice of profession, and their access to education as a result of their religious affiliation. It is hardly surprising that such circumstances would give rise to individuals who would eagerly devote their lives to the overthrow of the existing power structure. Boys from a traditional Jewish upbringing would study in Russian gymnaziums, then go on to study in a Russian or foreign university, and would absorb revolutionary ideology more quickly than others, being able to sympathize with such ideas not only on an intellectual level, but on an emotional one as well. Real-life experience was an important contributor in this transformation of Jewish youth into Russian revolutionaries.

      Some of them would explain their dedication to the revolution as a result of “Jewish problems.” Aleksandr Brailovskii once gave a speech at a political demonstration in Rostov on March 2, 1903, that eventually resulted in a conflict with the police and the murder of a police officer (the fatal blow was delivered by Isaak Khaevskii). When asked at the ensuing trial as to why he, the son of a well-off merchant from Rostov, had joined the revolutionaries, Brailovskii responded, “I am a Jew. As such, I have experienced oppression and deprivation of freedom for all of my life. When I wanted to enter the university, I wasn't accepted because I was a Jew, and I was thrown overboard. I could not but welcome the roar of the demonstrators. That is why I joined

      them.”³⁴

      Others would categorically deny any connection between their Jewishness and their revolutionary fervor. “This national moment, so vital to the life of Russia,” Trotsky once wrote, “played nearly no role at all in my personal life. From a very early age, nationalist fixations bewildered me on a rational level. This would occasionally grow into moral discomfort or even outright disgust. A Marxist education deepened these feelings, and transformed them into an active internationalism.”³⁵

      Many Jewish revolutionaries either consciously or (as was more often the case) unconsciously identified with the interests of the Russian peasants or workers, about whom they knew next to nothing. In this, they were hardly different from their Russian counterparts.

      Fedor Stepun, a commissar for the Provisional Government in 1917, who had made a trip to Vilna in 1907, made some very apt observations regarding the state of Russian Jewry before the revolution. The “piercing pity” that Stepun felt for the Jewish population and deep shame in light of Tsarist policy, would have been completely at home among the radical “comrades” of Heidelberg University:

      my second conviction is this: that in participating in peasants' and workers' issues Jews were simply fighting for their own equal rights, which, of course, they had a right to do. As a result of their political ideology, they didn't see themselves as being different from the Russian people.

      At the time, I knew and understood very little about workers' and peasants' issues. But I always believe what my eyes tell me. And I couldn't help thinking that there was little common sense in an argument I saw between the grandson of a Vilna rabbi and the son of a Kovno banker, neither of whom had ever seen Russian land or a Russian muzhik. They were arguing heatedly with each other over the best ways for the Ryazan, Siberian, and Poltava peasantry to manage their land, pausing every minute or so to cite the works of Karl Marx.³⁶

      Although Stepun's description may seem somewhat exaggerated, he manages to grasp the essence of the matter at hand. However, where Stepun saw “little common sense,” Maksim Vinaver, one of Russia's leading Jewish liberals, saw quite the opposite. In an article dedicated to the memory of Shloime Rapoport (S. A. An-sky), a revolutionary and collector of Russian and Jewish folklore, Vinaver writes:

      So many Jewish youths who had just managed to tear themselves away from the Bible and the Talmud agreed to fight to death for a peasant people who, it would seem, were completely foreign to them, knowing only that they were laboring and suffering. They believed in these people only because they were prepared by a belief in truth, goodness, and the eventual triumph of justice. Their acquaintance with the biblical prophets and testaments of Jewish culture prepared them for this. The seeds sewn by those Russian pilgrims who had struggled СКАЧАТЬ