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

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СКАЧАТЬ 1.98 million Jews left the Empire, with 1.5 million heading for the United States.⁵¹ A small number emigrated to Palestine; other destinations included Argentina, Europe, and South Africa. The government was in favor of emigration, which it viewed as a way to solve the “Jewish question.” The Minister of Internal Affairs, N. P. Ignatiev, declared in January of 1882 that “the western border of Russia was open for the Jews [to leave].” K. P. Pobedonostsev foresaw the following resolution to the “Jewish question”: “One third of them will die out, another third will emigrate, and the remainder shall dissolve into the surrounding population.”⁵² Jews who left Russia were forbidden from ever returning.

      B. Nathans has recently called attention to the use of the term crisis in historical studies of Eastern European Jewry. “If such a large number of historical events are interpreted as ‘crises,' then the term begins to acquire static properties which then lose their multi-faceted relationship to other dimensions of historical experience.”⁵³ Theoretically, such a formulation is certainly correct, but it is equally correct, in my opinion, that from 1881 onwards the Russian Jewish population had truly reached a stage of crisis. Ten years after the pogroms of the 1880s, Jews were deported from Moscow, and the Kishinev pogrom would take place soon after, in 1903. These events affected the entire Jewish population of the Russian Empire, first and foremost psychologically. The ensuing revolution of 1905, and the European crisis from 1914 to 1921, would lead to a fundamental shift in the fate of Jews living within the Russian Empire.

      One objective indicator of the severity of the conditions for Russian Jews was emigration. In 1904, 77,500 Jews emigrated to the United States, 30,000 more than in the previous year. This increase would continue (in 1905, 92,400 would emigrate; in 1906, 125,200; in 1907, 114,900), decreasing only after 1907.⁵⁴ During the period 1903–7, 482,000 Jews would emigrate to the United States at an average of 96,400 per year, the highest number for any period to that point in the history of the Jews in Russia. Immigration to the United States would spike again in 1914 (102,600) with many leaving to avoid military service or to escape the growing threat of military conflict.⁵⁵

      The pogroms led to a renewed interest in emigration to Palestine. One such response to the pogroms was the formation of Hovevei Zion, which was led by Leon Pinsker. A doctor from Odessa and a social activist, Pinsker published a German-language pamphlet entitled “Auto-emancipation,” which examined the living conditions of Jews in the diaspora.⁵⁶ He reached the conclusion that assimilation, which he had previously supported, was impossible, and that the only possible solution for the Jewish people was the acquisition of their own territory. In 1882, a group of youths in Kharkov created the organization Bilu, which was dedicated to resettling Jews in the Promised Land. The first group of Bilu members reached Palestine in 1882. A second group, which attempted to secure rights for Jews from the Ottoman government, arrived in Palestine in 1884. Difficult physical labor and conflicts with their Jewish supervisors led several members to return to Russia, and the movement gradually petered out. At an 1884 meeting of Hovevei Zion groups in Katowice, Pinsker called for the Jews to return to Palestine and to focus on farming and agriculture, anticipating the kibbutz movement. In 1890, the Society for the Assistance of Jewish Farmers and Craftsmen in Palestine and Syria was founded.

      The first Zionist Congress took place in Basel in 1897. One third (66 of 197) of the delegates came from Russia. There were 373 Zionist organizations in Russia in 1897; by 1903–4 the number had risen to 1,572. Russian Jews actively participated in the Zionist movement, whose leaders included: Ia. Bernshtein-Kogan, M. Usyshkin, V. Temkin, M. Mandelshtam, L. Motskin, I. Chlenov, H. Syrkin, B. Borokhov, V. Zhabotinskii, and others. The scale of participation on the part of Russian Jews is evident in the fact that when the Jewish Colonial Bank was established in accordance with the Second Zionist Congress in London, with 200,000 shares priced at one pound sterling (ten gold rubles) a share, 75 percent of the shares were bought by Russian Zionists. In 1897 the Odessa Zionist organization alone had 7,500 members. Russian authorities tolerated the activity of Zionist organizations at first, as they served the interests of the state. However, as it became clear that relocation to Palestine would not happen any time soon, Zionists began to agitate for the improvement of living conditions for Jews in the here and now. Five Zionists were elected to the first State Duma. At a conference of Russian Zionists in Helsingfors in November 1906, I. Grinberg, acknowledging the crisis in the Zionist movement, expressed his reluctance to fight for Jewish rights within Russia. But, at Zhabotinskii's instigation, a platform was passed that called for democratic reforms within the country, including the guarantee of civil liberties and status as a recognized minority, as well as the right for Jews to observe the Sabbath and use their native languages. This transformation of the Zionist movement into a liberal-democratic political party soon led the Senate to repeal their legal status. As a result of government persecution and the general decrease in democratic activity following 1907, by 1915 there were only 18,000 active Zionists in Russia.⁵⁷

      According to the 1897 Census, there were 5,215,805 Jews living in Russia. Of these, 1,965,852 (38.65 percent) were involved in trade, while 1,793,937 (35.43 percent) were in industry. Next in number were the 334,827 in the service industries (6.61 percent), 278,095 individuals who did not declare a profession (5.49 percent), and 264,683 in the civil service or “free” professions (5.22 percent), followed by 201,027 in transportation (3.98 percent) and 179,400 in agriculture (3.55 percent).

      By comparison, 76.5 percent of Russians were in agriculture, as were 62.9 percent of all Poles. In industry the numbers were 10 percent and 14.1 percent, respectively; 2.2 percent of Russians, 1.7 percent of all Poles, and 7.5 percent of the Armenian population were involved in trade professions; and 1.7 percent of Russians and 2.5 percent of Poles were in the civil service or “free professions.”⁵⁸

      On the whole, Jews tended to live in urban areas. They composed a majority of the urban population in eight gubernias (Minsk, Grodno, Mogilev, Vitebsk, and Volynia, as well as three from the former Polish territories). In six additional gubernias, Jews were the largest ethnic group among city-dwellers. In the Kherson gubernia, Jews composed 28.4 percent of the urban population, and 25.9 percent of the urban population of Ekaterinoslav. By 1910, nine cities (Warsaw, Odessa, Lodz, Vilna, Ekaterinoslav, Kishinev, Berdichev, Bialystok, and Kiev) had a Jewish population over 50,000. The largest Jewish population was in Warsaw (310,000), followed by Odessa (172,608), while the smallest of these populations, in Kiev, numbered 51,000. Together, these cities contained nearly a million Jews, or one-fifth of the entire Jewish population of the Empire. Fifteen other cities had populations between 25,000 and 50,000, for a total of 500,000.⁵⁹ From 1897 to 1910 the Jewish urban population grew by nearly a million people (38.5 percent), totaling 3,545,418 by 1910. In 1910 there were 229 towns and cities with a Jewish population above 10,000. Within the Pale of Settlement, the number of Jewish communities with a population greater than 5,000 people grew from 130 in 1897 to 180 in 1910 (communities with more than 10,000 people grew from 43 to 76).⁶⁰

      The number of Jewish “settlements” beyond the Pale was insignificant in comparison with the number of Jews living within it. However, the rate of growth of these populations was higher than in the Pale; Jews were more concentrated in the larger cities, and material and educational conditions were better, a result of the government's program of “voluntary integration.” In 1897, 43,000 Jews lived in cities whose populations were greater than 100,000 (Petrograd, Moscow, Nizhnii Novgorod, Tula, Samara, Kursk, Tiflis, Taganrog). By 1910 these populations had doubled to approximately 75,000–80,000 individuals. These, in the words of Ia. Leshchinskii, were the main points of concentration of “the Jewish bourgeoisie and professional intelligentsia.”⁶¹ There were a significant number of Jewish craftsmen in these cities who enjoyed a higher standard of living than their counterparts in the Pale. There were Jews living outside of these cities as well; Jews composed 7.2 percent of the population of Rostov-on-Don in 1914 (about 16,000 individuals).⁶²

      Life within the Pale was more traditional than outside of it, though the rapid modernization of cities within the Pale left little chance of preserving traditional ways of life, irrespective of religious beliefs. СКАЧАТЬ