Encyclopedia of Russian History

by James Millar

  Russo-Japanese relations did not improve markedly after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Russian president Boris Yeltsin’s 1993 meeting with Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa produced the Tokyo Declaration, in which the two sides pledged to negotiate the territorial issue on the basis of historical facts and the principles of law and justice. But the two sides interpreted these terms differently. Prime Minister Ryutaro Hashimoto (1996-1998) tried a package approach to relations, bundling a wide range of issues including trade, energy, security, and cultural exchanges, and he came closer to reaching an accord than had any previous JapanJEWS ese leader. But the flurry of informal summits and intensified diplomatic activity in the late 1990s failed either to deliver a peace treaty or to enhance economic cooperation.

  Prospects for trade and investment improved early in the twenty-first century as Tokyo urged Moscow to approve a Siberian oil pipeline to the eastern coast, competing with a Chinese bid for a route to Daqing. Relations were said to be entering a new, businesslike phase following the January 2003 summit between President Vladimir Putin and Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi. But as in the latter half of the twentieth century, the territorial dispute remained the touchstone for Russo-Japanese relations. See also: KURIL ISLANDS; RUSSO-JAPANESE WAR

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Ivanov, Vladimir I., and Smith, Karla S., eds. (1999). Japan and Russia in Northeast Asia: Partners in the 21st Century. Westport, CT: Praeger. Kimura, Hiroshi. (2000). Distant Neighbors, Vol. 1: Japanese-Russian Relations under Brezhnev and Andropov; Vol. 2: Japanese-Russian Relations under Gorbachev and Yeltsin. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe. Nimmo, William F. (1994). Japan and Russia: A Reeval-uation in the Post-Soviet Era. Westport, CT: Greenwood. Rozman, Gilbert, ed. (2000). Japan and Russia: The Tortuous Path to Normalization, 1949-1999. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Potemkin died before the treaty was signed on January 9, 1792, but his absence did not affect the outcome. Russia agreed to withdraw its troops from south of the Danube, and Turkey recognized Russian annexation of the Crimea and lands between the Bug and Dniester rivers. Both parties recognized the Kuban River as their mutual boundary in the foothills of the Caucasus, while Turkey agreed to restrain raids on Georgia and Russia’s Kuban territories. The southern steppe now came under full Russian control, with a subsequent blossoming of settlement and commercial activities. The Russians now also had both naval bases on the Black Sea and a territorial springboard for further military action, either in the Caucasus or in the Balkans. The Treaty of Jassy thus marked a major milestone in the titanic struggle between Russia and Turkey for empire in the Black Sea basin. See also: POTEMKIN, GRIGORY ALEXANDROVICH; RUSSO-TURKISH WARS; TURKEY, RELATIONS WITH

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Alexander, John T. (1989). Catherine the Great: Life and Legend. New York: Oxford University Press. Menning, Bruce W. (2002). “Paul I and Catherine II’s Military Legacy, 1762-1801.” In The Military History of Tsarist Russia, eds. Frederick W. Kagan and Robin Higham. New York: Palgrave.

  BRUCE W. MENNING

  CHARLES E. ZIEGLER

  JASSY, TREATY OF

  During the eighteenth century, Russia and Turkey fought repeatedly for hegemony on the Black Sea and in adjacent lands, including the Pontic steppe. Russia’s growing power became truly dominant during Catherine II’s Second Turkish War, when the military-administrative talents of Grigory Alexandrovich Potemkin and the generalship of Alexander Vasilievich Suvorov and Nikolay Vasi-lyevich Repnin finally brought Turkey to its knees. In a treaty negotiated successively by Potemkin and Aleksandr Andreyevich Bezborodko at Jassy in modern Romania, Sultan Selim III’s representative, Yusof Pasha, agreed with terms that essentially acknowledged Russia’s stature as a Black Sea power.

  JEWS

  The Russian Empire acquired a Jewish population through the partitions of Poland in 1772, 1793, and 1795. By 1800 Russia’s Jewish population numbered more than 800,000 persons. During the nineteenth century the Jews of the Russian Empire underwent a demographic explosion, with their population rising to more than five million in 1897 (a number that does not include the approximately one million persons who emigrated from the empire prior to 1914). Legislation in 1791, 1804, and 1835 required most Jews to live in the provinces acquired from Poland and the Ottoman Empire in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the so-called Pale of Jewish Settlement. There were also some residence restrictions within the Pale, such as a ban on settlement in most districts of the city of Kiev, and restrictions on settlement within fifty kilometers of the foreign borders. The Temporary

  701

  JEWS

  Laws of May 1882 forbade new Jewish settlement in rural areas of the Pale. Before 1882 the Russian state progressively permitted privileged categories of Jews (guild merchants, professionals, some army veterans, students, and master-craftsmen) to reside outside the Pale. Larger in size than France, the Pale included areas of dynamic economic growth, and its restrictions were widely evaded,

  Jewish bystanders are attacked by an angry mob after someone throws a bomb during the Christian Corpus Domini procession in Bielostok, June 1906. © MARY EVANS PICTURE LIBRARY

  JEWS

  but it was nonetheless considered the single greatest legal liability on Russian Jews. The regulations of the Pale, including the May Laws, did not apply to Jews in the Kingdom of Poland, although they too were barred from settlement in the Great Russian provinces.

  ECONOMIC LIFE

  Jews were primarily a trade-commercial class, serving in the feudal economy as the link between the peasants and the market, and as agents of the noble landowners and leasees of the numerous monopolies on private estates. They were particularly active in the production and sale of spirits, as agents of noble and state monopolies on this trade. Individual Jewish families lived in peasant villages, while larger communities were found in market towns, the shtetl of Jewish lore.

  The Jewish population increase and internal migration contributed to the growth of urban centers such as Odessa, Kiev, Vilna, Warsaw, and Lodz. In the second half of the nineteenth century, Jews moved into occupations in urban-based factory work. A small elite gained prominence as tax farmers, bankers, railway contractors, and industrial entrepreneurs. A number of Jews had successful careers in the professions, chiefly law, medicine, and journalism. Most Jews, however, lived lives of relative poverty.

  RELIGION AND CULTURE

  The vernacular of Jews in the empire comprised various dialects of Yiddish, a Germanic language with a substantial admixture of Hebrew and Slavic languages. Hebrew and Aramaic were languages of prayer and study. In the all-Russian census of 1897 more than 97 percent of Jews declared Yiddish their native language, although this figure obscures the high level of multi-lingualism among East European Jewry.

  The empire’s Jews were, with very few exceptions, Ashkenazi-a Yiddish-speaking cultural community that shared common rituals and traditions. It was a highly literate culture that valorized learning and the study of legal and homiletic texts, the Talmud. Ashkenazi culture also included elements of the Jewish mystical tradition, the Kabbalah. The main division between adherents to religious traditionalism in Eastern Europe was between the so-called Mitnagedim, (The Opponents) and the Hasidim (The Pious Ones). The latter contained many strands, each grouped around a charismatic leader, or tzaddik (righteous man). There was also a small band of maskilim, the adherents of Haskalah, which was the Jewish version of the European Enlightenment movement. They advocated religious reform and intellectual and linguistic acculturation.

  In an effort to reach the non-acculturated masses, followers of the Russian Haskalah wrote literary works in Yiddish and Hebrew, helping to create standardized and modernized versions of both languages. The most notable of these writers were Abraham Mapu, Perez Smolenskin, and Reuven Braudes in modern Hebrew; Sholem Yakov Abramovich (pen name, Mendele Moykher-Sforim) in Hebrew and Yiddish; and Sholem Rabinovich (Sholem Aleichem) and Yitsak Leybush Perets in Yiddish. Avraam Goldfaden was the foremost creator of a Yiddish-language theat
er, although its growth was stunted by a governmental ban in 1883. The turn of the century saw the emergence of a number of outstanding Hebrew poets, most notably Khaim Nakhman Bialik and Shaul Chernikhovsky. There was a vigorous Jewish press in Hebrew, Yiddish, Russian, and Polish.

  In response to the challenges of modernity, religious movements such as Israel Lipkin Salanter’s Musar Movement, which penetrated traditional study centers (yeshivas), sought ways to preserve a vigorous traditional style of life. While women were not expected to be scholars, many were literate. Both religious and secular literature aimed at a female audience was published in Yiddish.

  All young males were expected to study in religious schools known as the cheder. A state initiative of 1844 created a state-sponsored Jewish school system with primary and secondary levels, offering a more modern curriculum. Total enrollment was low, but the schools served Jews as a point of entry into Russian culture and higher education. Most maskilim and acculturated Jews in the mid-nineteenth century had some connection with this school system. By the 1870s Jews in urban areas began to enter Russian schools in large numbers. Concerned that the Jews were swamping the schools, the state imposed quotas on the admission of Jews to secondary and higher education. A number of Jews became prominent artists in Russia, most notably the painter Isaac Levitan and the sculptor Mark Antokolsky.

  INTERNAL GOVERNMENT

  Until 1844 the internal government of the Jews comprised the kahal (kagal in Russian), a system of autonomous local government inherited from

  JEWS

  Russian Jews under assault while police look on with indifference, 1880s. © BETTMANN/CORBIS the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. The kahal, dominated by local elites, exercised social control, selected the religious leadership (rabbis), and assessed and collected taxes under a system of collective responsibility. After 1827 the kahal also oversaw the selection of recruits for the army. A number of taxes were unique to the Jews, most notably a tax on kosher meat (korobochka) and a tax on sabbath candles. Jews in Poland and Lithuania created a number of national bodies, the va’adim (the singular form is va’ad), which assessed taxes on communities, negotiated with the secular authorities, and attempted to set social standards. Although similar bodies were abolished in Poland in 1764, the Russian state allowed Jews to create them on a regional basis. These included provincial ka-hals, and the institution of Deputies of the Jewish People, which lasted until 1825. Seen as an obstacle to Jewish integration, the kahal system was technically abolished in 1844, but virtually all of its functions endured unchanged.

  Within each community existed a wide variety of societies (hevrah, plural: hevrot) that oversaw an extensive range of devotional, educational, and charitable functions. The most important of these was the burial brotherhood, the hevrah kad-disha.

  LEGAL STATUS

  The defining characteristic of a Jew in Russian law was religious confession; a convert from Judaism to any other faith ceased legally to be a Jew. In other respects Russian law possessed numerous and contradictory provisions that applied only to Jews. In Russia’s social-estate based system, almost all Jews were classed as townspeople (meshchane) or merchants (kuptsy), and the general regulations for these groups applied to them, but with many exceptions. Confusingly, all Jews were also placed in the social category of aliens (inorodtsy), which included groups such as Siberian nomads, who were under the special protection of the state. A huge body of exceptional law existed for all aspects of Jewish life, including tax assessment, military recruitment, residence, and religious life. Jewish

  JOAKIM, PATRIARCH

  emancipation in Russia would have had to encompass the removal of all such special legislation.

  THE “JEWISH QUESTION” IN RUSSIA

  The guiding principles of Russia’s Jewish policy were not based on traditional Russian, Orthodox Christian anti-Semitism, nor was there ever a sustained and coordinated effort to convert all Jews to Russian Orthodoxy, with the exception of conversion-ary pressures on Russian army recruits. Russian policy was influenced by the Enlightenment-era critique of the Jews and Judaism that saw them as a persecuted minority, but also isolated and backward, economically unproductive, and religious fanatics prone to exploit their Christian neighbors. In 1881 Russian policy was broadly aimed at the acculturation and integration of the Jews into the broader society. The anti-Jewish riots (pogroms) of 1881 and 1882 led to a reversal of this policy, inspiring efforts to segregate Jews from non-Jews through residence restrictions (the May Laws of 1882) and restricted access to secondary and higher education. Much of Russian legislation towards the Jews after 1889 lacked a firm ideological basis, and was ad hoc, responding to the political concerns of the moment.

  Following the emancipation of the serfs in 1861, Russian public opinion, fearful of Jewish exploitation of the peasantry, grew increasing critical of the Jews. These critical attitudes were characterized as Judeophobia. Originally based on concrete, albeit exaggerated, socioeconomic complaints (exploitation, intoxication of the peasantry), Russian Judeophobia acquired fantastic elements by the end of the century, exemplified by forgeries like The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which claimed to expose a Jewish plot bent on world domination. The presence of Jews in the revolutionary movement led the state to attribute political disloyalty to Jews in general. Right-wing political parties were invariably anti-Semitic, exemplified by their rallying cry, “Beat the Yids and Save Russia!”

  Jews made significant contributions to all branches of the Russian revolutionary movement, including Populism, the Social Revolutionaries, and Marxist Social Democracy, which included a Jewish branch, the Bund, that concentrated on propaganda among the Jewish working class. Lev Pinsker, author of the 1882 pamphlet Auto-Emancipation!, and Ahad Ha’am were major ideologues of the early Zionist movement. East European Jews were the mainstay of Theodor Herzl’s movement of political Zionism. See also: BUND, JEWISH; JUDAIZERS; NATIONALITIES POLICIES, SOVIET; NATIONALITIES POLICIES, TSARIST PALE OF SETTLEMENT; POGROMS

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Aronson, I. Michael. (1990). Troubled Waters: The Origins of the 1881 Anti-Jewish Pogroms in Russia. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press. Dubnow, S. M. (1916-1920). History of the Jews in Russia and Poland, 3 vols. Philadelphia, PA: Jewish Publication Society of America. Frankel, Jonathan. (1981). Prophecy and Politics: Socialism, Nationalism, and the Russian Jews, 1862-1917. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Klier, John D. (1985). Russia Gathers Her Jews: The Origins of the Jewish Question in Russia. DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press. Klier, John D. (1995). Imperial Russia’s Jewish Question, 1885-1881. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Klier, John D., and Lambroza, Shlomo, eds. (1991). Pogroms: Anti-Jewish Violence in Modern Russian History. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Mendelsohn, Ezra. (1970). Class Struggle in the Pale. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Miron, Dan. (1996). A Traveler Disguised: The Rise of Modern Yiddish Fiction in the Nineteenth Century. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press. Nathans, Benjamin. (2002). Beyond the Pale: The Jewish Encounter with Late Imperial Russia. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Rogger, Hans. (1986). Jewish Policies and Right-Wing Politics in Imperial Russia. London and New York: Macmillan. Stanislawski, Michael. (1983). Tsar Nicholas I and the Jews: The Transformation of Jewish Society in Russia, 1825-1855. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America. Tobias, Henry J. (1972). The Jewish Bund in Russia. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Zipperstein, Steven J. (1986). The Jews of Odessa: A Cultural History. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

  JOHN D. KLIER

  JOAKIM, PATRIARCH

  (1620-1690), Ivan “Bolshoy” Petrovich Savelov (as a monk, Joakim) was consecrated Patriarch Joakim of Moscow and All Russia on July 26, 1674.

  JOB, PATRIARCH

  When Patriarch Joakim assumed the post, the Russian Church was experiencing increasing opposition. Joakim moved firmly but tactfully to rationalize the administrative structure of the church,
to bolster patriarchal finances, and to bring the institution under his control. Joakim’s administrative reforms were complemented by efforts to revitalize the reform program begun at mid-century, which included both liturgical and spiritual reform. During Joakim’s tenure, liturgical reform continued, and sermons and other simple religious tracts were composed, printed, and distributed in increasing numbers. Joakim was also committed to a program of education, under the control of the church. Joakim’s ardent conviction that the church alone could define doctrine and should control education generated opposition. Individuals and groups, ranging from the original opponents of Patriarch Nikon and their followers to disparate dissenters who did not conform to new practices, vocally and sometimes violently opposed the liturgical and administrative changes effected by Patriarch Joakim and the church he led. When teaching, preaching, and persuasion failed to convince opponents, the state stepped in to persecute and repress. In the 1680s Joakim’s determination that a proposed academy of higher learning be under patriarchal control led to a clash with the monk Sylvester Medvedev and a faction that enjoyed the sympathy of the regent, Sophia Alexeyevna. This conflict ripened into a dispute about the Eucharist that drew in learned members of the clerical elite in Ukraine. The debate threatened plans to subordinate the Kievan see to the Moscow patriarchate. Quickly it degenerated into polemics. The palace coup of 1689 that brought Peter to the throne ended the dispute. Patriarch Joakim’s support of Peter assured his victory in this affair. Sylvester Medvedev was arrested, then, almost a year after Patriarch Joakim’s death, tried and executed. This was a crude political resolution to what had begun as a learned debate. As such, it undermined the legitimacy of the church in the eyes of the educated. Joakim died on March 17, 1690, shortly after the coup, leaving a testament that manifested profound anxiety for the future of both church and state.