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

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СКАЧАТЬ youth towards the ranks of those parties that were attempting to achieve the common good, in accordance with the belief in an immanent, inherently mystical aspiration on the part of all (whether of all mankind or of one nation). When the pogroms broke out, some cast stones at such dreamers, claiming that they had gone to guard the “vineyards of outsiders.” A barbarous accusation. To struggle for truth means to attempt to fulfill the commandments of the Jewish prophets, which means to work for one's own vineyards, not those of others. And in this aspect there is no difference between one's own vineyard and someone else's.³⁷

      One final example is doubly valuable for the fact that it was written by someone outside of revolutionary circles, as well as the fact that it was published in the end of the 1930s in emigration, long after sympathy towards the revolutionaries had fallen out of fashion. Oskar Gruzenberg, the well-known lawyer, wrote that he felt his Jewish heritage particularly acutely one night in 1886, during a police raid in Kiev. As he was a student at the university, the police did not harass him, whereas his mother, who had come to visit from the Pale of Settlement and had been guilty of some minor infraction, was forced to spend the rest of the night on the spittle-ridden floor of the police station in the company of drunks and prostitutes. He only managed to get her out by calling in some major favors. A still-furious Gruzenberg wrote the following, nearly fifty years after the event in question: “To forget how they humiliated my elderly mother, who had never done anything wrong to anybody in her whole entire life, would mean to forget the fact that life is only worth living when one is not a slave. What happened that night? What was decided? In short, I now saw every person who was fighting against autocratic tyranny and cruelty as an ally, as a brother whom I was obligated to assist in times of need.”³⁸ Such an understanding of obligation and responsibility was undoubtedly the attitude of a large number of Jews, including members of the “establishment.”

      Vladimir Zhabotinskii, a pronounced opponent of the Jews' participation in the Russian Revolution, nonetheless maintained that “the Jewish blood spilled on the barricades was the result of the will of the Jewish people themselves.” In response to criticism of that assertion, he stated that

      all of these fashionable shrieks and cries claim that Jews do not have a national politics, only a class-based one. Jews have no class-based politics, but have had, and currently have (although only in the earliest stages), the politics of a national coalition, and those who have pursued such a politics without even suspecting it are all the more ignorant. They did this in their own fashion, with excesses and extremes, but in essence they were only expressing various aspects of the unified will of the Jewish people. If there were many revolutionaries among them, then this means no more than such was the atmosphere of the nation. Jewish barricades were raised in accordance with the will of the Jewish people. I believe this to be true, and since I do, I bow down and welcome the people's revolution.

      Of course, having (rather facetiously) bowed down before the “will of the people,” Zhabotinskii then posed the following question, “But has the Revolution improved the lot of the people?” The doubts of the brilliant Russian poet and ideologue of the Jewish national movement led him to answer in the negative:

      The will of the people does not always lead to the good of the people, as they are not always capable of objectively measuring the chances of success and failure. It is particularly easy to go astray when success is dependent on a belief in a powerful ally, in the belief that he will understand, stay true, that he'll help. But the fact of the matter is that none of us know this ally very well, and God only knows how he'll thank us for our efforts.³⁹

      R. A. Abramovich, a Bundist, was slightly more pragmatic. At a meeting at the Moscow State Conference in August of 1917, he declared, “[O]nly the full and complete victory of the revolution, only the full and decisive democratization of life in this country is capable of ending the oppression of Jewish people and guaranteeing autonomy for them…. this is why the Jewish workers—not only as members of the family of the international proletariat, not only as citizens of a free Russia, but as Jews—are deeply invested in the furthering of the revolution in Russia.”⁴⁰

      Discrimination and oppression provided a natural environment that would inevitably lead to an increase in the number of revolutionaries from among the Jewish population. By October of 1906, the more rational government administrators understood this. The experience of the 1905 Revolution, among other things, led Stolypin to come up with a series of proposals to repeal restrictions on Jews in the Russian Empire.

      Stolypin explained to the Tsar that the “Jewish question” was now being raised as “Jews have a legal basis to demand full equality in accordance with the civil liberties granted by the Manifesto of October 17.” Moreover, Stolypin sought to “placate the non-revolutionary elements of the Jewish population in order to rid our government of a situation that has served as a source of countless opportunities for abuse.” However, Stolypin's initiatives ran up against the inexplicable mystical inclinations of the Emperor, who returned the set of proposals on December 10, 1906 without approving them. “Long before I received these proposals,” Nicholas II would later write, “I thought about them day and night. And despite the most convincing arguments in favor of approving the matter, an inner voice continues to repeat to me ever more insistently that I should not take this decision upon myself.”⁴¹

      A large portion of the Russian population was convinced that if another revolution were to occur, then Jews would be active participants. The far right claimed that Jews served as the “backbone” of the revolutionary movement, and that without their support no revolution would be possible. It comes as somewhat of a surprise, then, that Jews who had participated so actively in struggles against the autocracy, or who were at least extremely sympathetic to such actions, were such minor participants in its downfall. This “strange” fact is of course rather easy to explain. The revolution in Russia was predominantly Russian, and could not be the sole result of a well organized minority. It was instead the result of the decay of the state on the one hand, and the coincidence of a number of disparate factors on the other. In any case, its goal was not a solution to the “Jewish question.” The February Revolution of 1917 demonstrated this. There was no talk of any kind of Jewish conspiracy; the only conspiracy to be found was in the actions of the generals who refused to support the Russian Tsar, their commander-in-chief.

      Although Jews would go on to play a more significant role in the Russian revolution, they never played a decisive one. Many Russian nationalist writers were fully aware of this. Ten years after the revolution, Lev Karsavin would write, “It's time to get rid of this stupid fairy tale…that Jews thought up and carried out the Russian revolution. One would have to be extremely uneducated and ignorant of history, as well as having a hatred of the Russian people, to believe that the Jews were capable of destroying the Russian state. This is a philosophy of history worthy of Ataman Krasnov, and apparently borrowed from Dumas-père, who likewise blamed Count Caliostro for the French revolution!”⁴²

      “After all, didn't our revolution start with the most typical of Russian rebellions, ‘unthinking and ruthless’ at first, but bearing deep inside it some kind of moral depth, some kind of idiosyncratic truth?” asked Nikolai Ustrialov, in an article tellingly entitled “Patriotica.” “No, neither we [the intelligentsia] nor the people can deny responsibility for the current crisis, whether with regard to its better or its darker aspects. This crisis is ours, it is genuinely Russian, it is from our psychology, from our past…And even if one day it is mathematically proven—whereas in the current situation it is yet not mathematically proven [The article was published in 1921]—that 90 percent of Russian revolutionaries were foreigners or that they were mostly Jews, that would take nothing away from the purely Russian character of the movement. Even if ‘foreign hands’ have joined in, the movement's soul, its ‘interior,’ is Russian for better or worse, is of the Russian intelligentsia, and is refracted through the psyche of its people.”

      Nikolai Ustrialov, speaking of the ideological roots of the Russian revolution, blamed everything from the broken spirit of Slavophilia, to СКАЧАТЬ