Pogrom

by Steven J. Zipperstein

  Ever since embarking on this book, I have found myself keenly intrigued by Krushevan. Capable of producing the vilest, most contemptible trash, Krushevan also wrote work of distinction, even beauty. He was rightly depicted during his lifetime as a sensitive, yielding man and a hysteric; a rank pogrom monger and yet also Bessarabia’s most distinguished intellectual. His evocation of Bessarabia’s landscape in a full-length book on the region—the first of its kind and released shortly before the Kishinev pogrom in 1903—is skillfully executed, a moving depiction of the quiet, undramatic wonders of the province’s meadows, rivers, and woods. The most celebrated of his novels—he wrote several—Delo Artabanova, a psychological crime thriller, was recently reissued in a handsome Russian edition. A Russian-language novel picturing him as The Protocols’ author appeared in the late 1980s. Umberto Eco’s villain in his 2010 novel, The Prague Cemetery, built around the writing of The Protocols, is undoubtedly modeled on him. (“And who are the capitalists? The Jews, the rulers of our time,” Eco has his character muse. “. . . I shall write a book about it. Who are the Jews? They’re all those who suck the blood out of the defenseless, the people. They’re Protestants, Freemasons. And of course, the people of Judah.”) An oversize edition of a substantial part of Krushevan’s extensive, long-neglected nonfiction, accompanied by a book-length introduction in which charges of antisemitism are blithely dismissed, appeared in Moscow in 2015. Here and elsewhere in recent Russian-language descriptions he is identified as a seminal pro-Russian intellectual whose reputation was unfairly savaged by those, particularly Jews, unsympathetic to Russia and its destiny. “I have heard so many diverse views of him,” wrote Sergei Urussov in his memoirs, “that his moral physiognomy is not clear in my mind.”9

  Just months before completing this book, I found it possible to clarify at least some of these mysteries. This is because of my discovery of a cache of Krushevan’s personal papers, including a startlingly frank adolescent diary, brought from Moldova years ago by the journalist Mikhail Khazin and kept since the mid-1990s on a shelf in his Brookline, Massachusetts, apartment a few blocks from Fenway Park. When I asked Khazin—a handsome, earnest, gentle man of eighty-five—whether he had ever visited Fenway, he looked at me with some surprise.

  Khazin was also a remarkably trusting man: After I spent a few hours with him and his wife, Luda, Khazin suggested that I take the papers with me—they were bunched together in an oversize white folder—and seek to find them a suitable archival home. On my way the next evening to Chişinău, I was soon faced with the need to estimate the value of the personal papers of the likely author of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion at a FedEx shop, where I packed them up for shipping back to California.

  How Khazin was given these papers is part and parcel of the stormy story, the mayhem of the last years of Soviet rule. Born in Soroki near Krushevan’s birthplace, he had long been fascinated by the man. (It was common practice among Jews during his childhood, Khazin told me, to call dogs “Krushevany.”) Writing in the 1980s about the history of a psychiatric hospital just outside Chişinău, where he lived most of his adult life, he discovered that among the inmates was the nephew of Krushevan, described as suffering from hereditary insanity. On the nephew’s death, the director of the sanitarium offered the documents to Khazin, who then brought them with him to the United States when he left Chişinău—along with most of the region’s Jews—in the 1990s.

  Stuffed into the folder was a mass of documents among which were several singularly embarrassing ones. How the nephew came to have them remains unclear, but it seems plausible that as a trusted relative—the orphaned nephew idolized Krushevan, something of a surrogate parent who died when he was fifteen—his uncle gave him these items for safekeeping once he knew that he was nearing his end. Included was correspondence as to why he had so resisted marriage, a diary with startling confessions that would likely have caused considerable discomfort if made public, and proof of financial chicanery, serial bankruptcy, and the like. Alongside this mass of documents detailing near-fiscal ruin and sexual secrets was an ornate letter of commendation from the tsar’s clerk complimenting Krushevan on the publication of his 1903 Bessarabia volume.

  Portrait of Mikhail Khazin.

  Drawing on this rich, previously unknown material, the recent scholarship of De Michelis and Hagemeister, and little-used sources in Hebrew and Yiddish, we can now open up Krushevan’s career on the road to Kishinev and its immediate aftermath in ways impossible before. It is now clearer why his shadow would loom so large in the pogrom’s immediate wake, and how intimate a link there was between composition of The Protocols, in which he played a central role, and the 1903 massacre. Even as the details of Krushevan’s culpability for the Kishinev pogrom or The Protocols fell into obscurity, his name retained its capacity to elicit the greatest contempt.

  Hence when Sholem Aleichem sought in 1905 to capture the quintessence of antisemitic fanaticism, it was Krushevan and his infamous newspaper Bessarabets that he used as the most obvious and extreme examples. His short story “Two Anti-Semites” is built around the machinations of an all-too-clever Jewish traveling salesman with an undeniably Jewish face who has so tired of the intrusions of other Jewish train passengers that he hits on the idea of hiding himself behind Bessarabets. He finds a copy of the paper and then drapes it across his face as a sure way of keeping all, Jews as well as Russians, from talking to him. Sholem Aleichem reminds his readers that this newspaper is the handiwork of “a certain ugly anti-semite named Krushevan . . . a man who never rests nor sleeps in his tireless search for new ways to warn the world against the dreaded disease Judaism—and who is loathed by nearly everyone.” The ploy works at first until, unsurprisingly, the paper slips off the sleeping man’s face, revealing the Jew beneath it.10

  In the privacy of his diary at the age of seventeen, written in a florid hand (he would always pride himself on his splendid penmanship), Krushevan acknowledged having overpowering obsessions: despair over his poverty; envy of the rich; nightmares of crabs devouring humans. At that time, he was living with relatives in Odessa, having dropped out of school, and was eyeing the local rich with a mixture of disdain and intense envy.11

  He wished, according to his diary, that he had been “born a lady.” He was passionately in love with a Cossack whom he described as his krasavitsa (the beautiful one).12 On these pages he alternated between despair little short of manic—and dreams of grandeur. Fame, he declared, he desperately needed yet feared it would always be beyond his reach:

  Suffering souls, unfortunate desires

  And the relentless swarm of heavy, black doom. . . .

  When I die—I will die—I will die completely without a trace. . . .

  In my coffin with a nasal voice I will be reproached for a worthless life.13

  Krushevan was born in 1860 to an impoverished nobleman in the village of Gindeshty, near the town of Soroki in northwestern Bessarabia on the Dniester River—the same rustic, remote region described so poignantly by a contemporary of Krushevan’s, Shlomo Hillels, in his Hebrew novel. Urussov wrote: “I know of no town in Russia to be compared with Soroki. . . . The varying shades of light, and the picturesque indentations in the gradually ascending river-bank.” With little if any formal education until his adolescence, Krushevan mastered French and read widely, embarking at the age of fourteen on a “literary journal”—as he titled it on its cover—a notebook that included a sampling of his unfinished essays and fiction. Leo Tolstoy was his earliest inspiration—literary as well as political—whom he eventually rejected as he moved rightward: His politics well into his twenties were conventionally liberal, his cultural inclinations unremarkable.14

  From the start, however, his favored themes were financial decline, family humiliation, and above all the terrible, mysterious forces that undermine the best of intentions. He was essentially self-taught, tutored in his childhood, it seems, but with the bulk of his learning picked up on his own. By the time that he started gym
nasium in Kishinev, he showed little capacity for patience; schoolmates would remember him as a “maniac.” (One of them was Jacob Bernstein-Kogan, whom Krushevan would later identify as a key figure in that most nefarious of plots, the Jewish design to overthrow the world.) At sixteen or seventeen Krushevan left school, moving to Odessa (he would later insist that the city, despite its multiethnic reputation, was unambiguously Russian) and returning to Kishinev a few years later. There he worked as clerk for the city duma, or council.15

  In his writings he described his early home life only fleetingly. His father seems to have been a distant figure, and his mother died when he was still quite young. He treasured his memory of her and was raised by a stepmother, along with a younger stepsister named Anastasia. In an unfinished memoir written in old age by his nephew, it is mentioned—though this appears nowhere else in work on Krushevan—that his stepmother was Jewish.16

  The nephew, Pavel Epiminovdovich Krushevan, who was fifteen at the time of his uncle’s death, remained deeply devoted to him, continuing to see Krushevan as a model and a hero. His memoir was designed as no less an exculpation of Krushevan’s legacy than a tale of the nephew’s life under Romanian and Soviet rule. (He served in the Romanian army, worked later as an engineer, and loathed the Soviets.) It seems inconceivable that he would include information about Krushevan’s intimate Jewish links if it was untrue. Yet no one else familiar with Krushevan, including the Jews acquainted with him at his Kishinev gymnasium who later wrote about him so disparagingly, ever mentioned his father’s remarriage to a Jewish woman. It is not unlikely that they never knew of it, and that although he often aired details of his unhappy childhood, he excluded all mention of this odd, discordant detail.17

  There is no doubt, however, that Krushevan spent his life well into his twenties surrounded by Jews. Soroki at the time of his youth was 60 percent Jewish, with nearly all its retail stores in Jewish hands and many of them sporting Yiddish signs. The region’s larger commercial concerns too were intimately linked with those of Odessa; many Jews traveled between the two towns, negotiating the purchase of local produce and arranging for its transport. Soroki’s liquor shops and taverns (much like those in Kishinev) were nearly all owned by Jews and packed with peasants and laborers during the long winter months.18

  Later, too, once Krushevan set out to work as a journalist (after leaving the clerkship at Kishinev’s city duma), he was hired by newspapers—at most of them doing hack jobs such as reporting on crime and local scandals—in Vilna and Minsk, two of the most densely populated Jewish towns in the Pale of Settlement. True, at the time Krushevan’s political views were progressive, and he did much to seek the attention of Russia’s leading liberal-leaning journals. His stepsister, Anastasia, would later insist that Krushevan’s hatred of Jews only started after he was jilted by a Jewish girl—though this seems unlikely in view of his passionate declaration of love for the Odessa Cossack. Others ascribed his antisemitism to utilitarianism, the desire to prevail as a newspaperman once he gained control of Bessarabets.19

  Krushevan in his twenties.

  Neither argument, however, explained the ferocity and overall toxicity of his antisemitism. Krushevan’s turn in the early 1890s or so was in line with a general embrace of Russian conservatism on the part of many intellectuals who would also show a new antipathy for Jews, appalled as they were by Jewish radicalism’s excesses. Many now expressed fear of the empire spiraling into anarchy and the doubt that Jews, so numerous among its fiercest radical opponents, would ever be capable of true integration.20

  Still, Krushevan’s loathing of Jews stood out as his most singularly defining belief. Perhaps his stepmother’s origins were a cause. His sister’s marriage saga—this, too, overlooked in treatments of Krushevan—may well have reinforced these convictions: Anastasia, eventually renamed Sarah, would marry a Jewish student in Kishinev and run away with him to the United States.

  The story of his sister’s marriage was first mentioned briefly in an American Russian-language newspaper in 1934, revealing that she was living in Baltimore as a Jew. Soon Forverts followed up with a fuller—perhaps also rather embellished—version. There it was described how Anastasia met a Jew named Efim (or Efraim) Borenstein at a Kishinev student ball, soon fell in love, and fled to the United States, settling in Baltimore. She was pictured with her head covered in the traditional mode of a religious Jewish woman, smiling broadly, and describing thirty years of marital bliss. Why she decided to tell her story at that point, she did not say. Perhaps it had to do with the Bern trial at much the same time, during which Krushevan’s name was suddenly, and after so many years, frequently cited.21

  The Jewish press accounts were packed with readily disprovable details, however. It was claimed that she was born into wealth and that Krushevan’s father had divorced his first wife. Once Anastasia fell in love, according to Forverts, she escaped with her beloved, hiding in a forest. The family insisted that Jews had kidnapped her for ransom, and Krushevan placed a notice in the press, threatening to murder her Jewish kidnappers. This reportedly was what persuaded the young couple to escape abroad. Settling first in New York, they finally married. The husband worked running a synagogue as a sexton (despite the couple having lived together out of wedlock in the forest). Fearful of Anastasia being recognized as Krushevan’s sister, they decided to move to a mixed neighborhood in Baltimore with few Jews, where they had lived ever since.22

  After Krushevan returned to Kishinev in 1897 to take control of the struggling daily Bessarabets—eight pages in length, produced at first in his apartment—he would enjoy the most productive period of his life. Though nearly always in debt and often unable to pay his paper suppliers, he managed to put out the multipage daily, sprinkled generously with articles written by himself under various pen names, and a weekly literary magazine also full of his own writings.23

  By the time he took charge of Bessarabets, Krushevan had published in 1896–97 the most ambitious of his books, Chto takoe Rossiia? (What Is Russia?). Traveling by train and reporting on conversations with other passengers, he sought to capture the full expanse of western Russia’s social and cultural landscape on the cusp of the new century, with special attention to the region’s many Jews. Krushevan’s antisemitism was here in full view. At the heart of the book’s many lengthy disquisitions about Jews was the message that the Jewish march toward world hegemony clashed with Russia’s existence and must be stopped. This battle was nothing less than a struggle for Russia’s survival—a viewpoint all but identical to the one espoused in The Protocols.24

  The book’s unnamed narrator—clearly Krushevan himself—is affable, a touch naive, and prone to sudden outbursts that disarm and never alienate. He is a man of strongly held beliefs, eager to draw people into conversation and candid on all topics, and especially his feelings about Jews. And he manages to sway most of those he meets, including Jews, with the most objectionable of his opinions.

  Map of western provinces.

  His travels take him across Russia’s western provinces, crisscrossing by train the Pale of Settlement. He takes these journeys reluctantly, he admits, and always feels an alien, eager to leave the region as quickly as possible to rejoin “his own.” Musing as the train nears the Pripet Marshes outside Pinsk, he finds himself in conversation with a landowner, and the talk turns to whether either Jews or Poles might ever fit into Russia. As they speak the narrator revels in the glorious countryside in an area nonetheless swarming with Jews. The contrast between nature’s overwhelming beauty and its relentless pollution by Jews is stark: “On the west, an entire lake spills out, decorated with a purple sunset. On the north, lapping at the distant shores, the Dnieper reflects this purple with scarlet shimmers. The boundless steppe, shrouded in rose-colored fog, sinks into the approaching twilight of autumn evening.”25

  Others are soon drawn into the exchange, including an artilleryman and two Jewish businessmen from Gomel. The traveler expresses pleasure that the other passengers are
willing to speak about these matters candidly, since the press has either been bought off by Jews to hide their misdeeds or has decided to ignore the issue entirely out of despair that it could ever be aired honestly. Truthfulness about Jews tends to be avoided, he says, because it is so often criticized as “savage” or “disgusting,” but such conversation is more necessary now than ever before.26

  The narrator continues, insisting that energy and resources have been expended on resolving the Jewish question with no concrete results. Russia has sought so hard to address it honestly, but Jews and their sympathizers have done all in their power to obstruct such efforts. The fact, he says, that this issue continues to loom large—indeed, that it remains intractable—sickens Russians, since all that is required for the problem to be resolved is for the Jews to allow themselves to be absorbed into Russia. Their sliianie, or assimilation, would settle the issue for all time. Had Russia employed (as it could have) the fullest and most vigorous range of options, he argues, the dilemma would have been solved long ago. But Russians are peaceful and refuse to resort to brutal methods even when justified. This may well now need to be reassessed, because Jews constitute the empire’s only sizable group that insists on separation from all others.27

  One of the Gomel businessmen, the owner of a large pharmaceutical concern, interrupts. He admits that he is the beneficiary of the ready access to higher education Russia provides to Jews. Speaking with a “solid, rich baritone, nearly without an accent,” he makes the case for lifting restrictions on Jews, including those limiting their ability to purchase land. Only then, when they are given the opportunity to “utilize the land [on] which they stand and the air that others are permitted to breathe freely,” can they be expected to embrace Russia without reservation.28