Finally, it is important to recognize the shift that occurred in the late nineteenth century from traditional anti-Judaism to a more ‘modern’ anti-Semitism, linked – though not identical – to the racist ideology that had swept the nineteenth-century West. It was an apostate named Brafman who, in The Book of the Kahal, first alleged the existence of a secret Jewish organization with sinister powers. This conspiracy theory greatly appealed to new organizations like the League of the Russian People, which combined reactionary devotion to autocracy with violent anti-Semitism. It was in the League’s St Petersburg newspaper Russkoye Znamya that the Moldavian anti-Semite Pavolachi Krushevan published the fake ‘Protocols of the Elders of Zion’ (1903), a series of articles subsequently reprinted with the imprimatur of the Russian army as The Root of Our Misfortunes. Though the ‘Protocols’ would exert a greater malign influence in the inter-war years, they were Tsarist Russia’s distinctive contribution to the poisonous brew of pre-war prejudice. Once, Russia’s rulers had believed that the ‘Jewish question’ could be answered by the simple expedient of enforced conversion. The new conspiracy theorists made it clear that this simply would not suffice. In the words of Russkoye Znamya:
The government’s duty is to consider the Jews as a nation just as dangerous for the life of humanity as wolves, scorpions, snakes, poisonous spiders and other creatures which are doomed to destruction because of their rapacious-ness towards human beings and whose annihilation is commended by law… The Zhids must be put in such conditions that they will gradually die out.
As we have seen, such language was not unknown in German anti-Semitic circles. But it was in the Russian Empire that words first led to deeds.
POGROM
The pogroms of 1881 are usually seen as a response to the assassination of Tsar Alexander II; there were widespread rumours of an official order to inflict retribution on the Jews. It is no coincidence, however, that the violence began just after Easter, traditionally a time of tension between Christian and Jewish communities. On April 15, three days after Easter Sunday, a drunken Russian got himself thrown out of a Jewish-owned tavern in Elizavetgrad. This was the catalyst. Amid cries of ‘The Yids are beating our people’, a crowd formed which proceeded to attack Jewish stores in the marketplace and then moved on to Jewish residences. Few people in Elizavetgrad were killed or even injured, though one elderly Jewish man was later found dead in a tavern. Rather, there was an orgy of vandalism and looting, which left ‘many houses with broken doors and windows’ and ‘streets… covered with feathers [from looted bedding] and obstructed with broken furniture’. In the succeeding days, there were similar outbreaks in Znamenka, Golta, Aleksandriia, Anan’ev and Berezovka. The worst violence took place between April 26 and 28 in Kiev, where a number of Jews were murdered and twenty cases of rape were reported. Once again, the trouble then spread to nearby districts. In the months that followed, there were attacks on Jews in places all over the southern half of the Pale. In Odessa attacks on Jews began on May 3 and lasted nearly five days. On June 30 a new pogrom broke out in Pereyaslav and continued for three days, despite the arrival on the scene of the Governor of Poltava himself. All told, the authorities counted some 224 pogroms between April and August. Though the total number of fatalities was just sixteen, damage to property was substantial. Nor was that the end. On Christmas Day there was a pogrom in Warsaw. Easter 1882 saw further attacks on Jews in Bessarabia, Kherson and Chernigov; at the end of March there was a particularly violent pogrom in Balta, in which forty Jews were killed or seriously wounded.
What caused this unprecedented spate of attacks on Jews, variously described by past historians as a wave or an epidemic? It used to be argued that the government had instigated them. Some have blamed Nikolai Ignatiev, the Minister of the Interior, others the regime’s éminence grise, the procurator-general of the Orthodox Synod, Constantine Pobedonostsev, still others the new Tsar himself. Yet Pobedonostsev ordered the clergy to preach against pogroms, while it is clear that the new Tsar, Alexander III, deplored what was happening. The government, to be sure, argued that the pogromshchiki had legitimate economic grievances against the Jews, who were said to be ‘exploiting… the original population’, profiting from ‘unproductive labour’ and monopolizing commerce, which they were said to have ‘captured’. The Tsar himself saw ‘no end’ to anti-Jewish feeling in Russia, because: ‘These Yids make themselves too repulsive to Russians, and as long as they continue to exploit Christians, this hatred will not diminish.’ But such comments scarcely amount to evidence of official responsibility. The spurious allegations of Jewish exploitation reflected an effort by the authorities to understand more than to excuse popular motives. Other officials pointed nervously to evidence that anarchists had encouraged the pogroms. In the words of the chairman of the Committee of Ministers, Count Reutern:
Today they hunt and rob the Jews, tomorrow they will go after the so-called kulaks, who morally are the same as Jews only of Orthodox Christian faith, then merchants and landowners may be next… In the face of… inactivity on the part of the authorities, we may expect in a not too distant future the development of the most horrible socialism.
In reality the pogroms seem to have been a largely spontaneous phenomenon, eruptions of violence in economically volatile, multiethnic communities. If the pogroms had instigators they were most probably the Jews’ economic rivals: Russian artisans and merchants. Often the perpetrators were unemployed; many were drunk; overwhelmingly they were male. Of the 4,052 rioters who were arrested, only 222 were women. But otherwise the perpetrators were remarkable for their social diversity. The official investigation noted: ‘Clerks, saloon and hotel waiters, artisans, drivers, flunkeys, day labourers in the employ of the Government, and soldiers on furlough – all these joined in the movement.’ One witness of events in Kiev saw ‘an immense crowd of young boys, artisans, and labourers… [a] “barefooted brigade”’. The rioters in Elizavetgrad included 181 townspeople, 177 peasants, 130 former soldiers, six ‘foreigners’ and one honorary nobleman. Detailed occupational data survive for only 363 of those arrested, including 102 unskilled workmen, 87 day-labourers, 77 peasants and 33 domestic servants. Peasants certainly played their part, many in the sincere belief that the new Tsar had issued an ukaz to ‘beat the Jews’. Some villagers in Chernigov were so convinced of this that they asked the local ‘land captain’ for a written guarantee that they would not be punished if they failed to attack the local Jews. However, the main role of peasants was to loot Jewish property after pogroms had happened; they arrived on the scene with empty carts, not weapons. More likely to be involved in the actual violence were migrant workers, like the many unemployed Russians then seeking work in Ukraine, or the demobilized soldiers returning from the recent war with Turkey.
The key to understanding the way the violence spread lies in the role played by railway workers. It was they who transmitted the idea of attacking Jews along some of the principal railways of the Pale: from Elizavetgrad to Aleksandriia; from Anan’ev to Tiraspol; from Kiev to Brovary, Konotop and Zhmerinka; from Aleksandrovsk to Orekhov, Berdiansk and Mariupol’. Railways had seemed to be the sinews of modern imperial power; that had been the rationale behind the Trans-Siberian. Now it turned out that they could also be transmission mechanisms for public disorder. Almost as important in this regard was the role not played by local authorities. The official report noted ‘the complete indifference displayed by the local non-Jewish inhabitants to the havoc wrought before their eyes’. This indifference allied with a chronic shortage of police manpower to give the rioters free rein. In Elizavetgrad there were just eighty-seven policemen for a total population of 43,229. To make matters worse, the local police chiefs took no action for two days. In short, the 1881 pogroms illustrate the way a local ethnic riot could spread contagiously in the presence of modern communications and in the absence of modern policing.
In the aftermath of the pogroms, the government did take steps to punish those responsible. Altogether
3,675 persons were arrested for participation in pogroms in 1881, of whom 2,359 were tried, giving the lie to the notion that the pogroms were officially instigated. Yet the Tsar and his ministers largely ignored the regional commissions of inquiry it had appointed, many of which recommended a relaxation of the residential and other restrictions imposed on the Jews. Instead, an official Committee on the Jews introduced the supposedly temporary Laws of May 3, 1882 which prohibited new settlement by Jews in rural areas or villages, as well as banning Jews from trading on Sundays and Christian holidays. Plans for wholesale expulsions from the countryside were seriously considered, though not adopted. In short, the situation of the Jews was made worse, not better, in the wake of the attacks against them. Nor did the punishment of those responsible for the pogroms prevent sporadic outbreaks of anti-Jewish violence in the succeeding years. As we have seen, many Russian Jews responded by emigrating westwards, to Austria-Hungary, to Germany, to England, to Palestine and, above all, to the United States.
What happened between 1903 and 1906 was quite different in character. This second outbreak of Russian pogroms had four distinct phases. It began in Kishinev in Bessarabia on April 19, 1903, once again at the time of the Orthodox Easter. The catalyst was a classic ‘blood libel’, prompted by the discovery of the corpse of a young boy, who, so the anti-Semitic newspaper Bessarabets alleged, had been the victim of a ritual murder by local Jews. In the violence that ensued, hundreds of shops and homes were looted or burned. This time, however, many more people were killed. In Kishinev alone, forty-seven Jews lost their lives, and this was merely the first of four phases of violence. The second phase coincided with the beginning of the Russo-Japanese War: these were the so-called mobilization pogroms, which tended to occur in places where troops were preparing to depart for the East; there were forty in 1904, followed by another fifty between January and early October of 1905. The third and worst phase of the violence came in mid-October, the high point of the Revolution. On October 17, the day the Tsar published the liberal October Manifesto, Jews in Odessa once again came under attack; at a minimum, 302 were killed. Kiev erupted into violence a day later; as in 1881, there was extensive destruction of Jewish property – feathers from torn-up bedding once again littered the streets – but this time there was killing too. On October 21 it was the turn of Ekaterinoslav. Between October 31 and November 11 there were pogroms in 660 different places; more than 800 Jews were killed. The final phase happened in Białystok in June 1906 and in Siedlice three months later; in the former, eighty-two Jews were killed. Not only were these pogroms much more violent than those of 1881 (altogether, as many as 3,000 Jews may have died), they were also much more widespread. Violence against Jews happened as far away as Irkutsk and Tomsk in Siberia, though, as in 1881, there was no violence in the northernmost provinces of the Pale.
What was different? There was, no doubt, an element of escalation through repetition – those who remembered 1881 were able to proceed more quickly from violence against property to violence against persons. More important, however, was the fact that this time some Jewish communities fought back with ‘self-defence’ forces organized by local Bundists and Zionists. This was the case in Kishinev, as well as in Gomel. In Odessa there were pitched battles. Yet it was the fact that they took place in the context of a revolutionary crisis that was really crucial, for this ensured that, unlike in 1881, these pogroms were truly political events. Nicholas II told his mother that the pogromshchiki represented ‘a whole mass of loyal people’, reacting angrily to ‘the impertinence of the Socialists and revolutionaries… and, because nine tenths of the trouble-makers are Jews, the People’s whole anger turned against them.’ This analysis was accepted by many foreign observers, notably British diplomats like the ambassador at St Petersburg, Sir Charles Hardinge, his councillor, Cecil Spring Rice, and the Consul-General in Moscow, Alexander Murray. On the other hand, Jewish organizations portrayed the pogroms as officially instigated, a verdict echoed by more than one generation of scholars.
Neither view was wholly correct. The authorities certainly exaggerated the role played in the Revolution by Jews, who accounted for far less than 90 per cent of Russian socialists. On the other hand, the evidence of orchestration by the Minister for the Interior himself has been exposed as bogus. Indeed, Pleve seems to have taken steps to mitigate the situation of the Jews in the Pale in the wake of the Kishinev pogrom, holding meetings with the Zionist leader Theodor Herzl as well as with Lucien Wolf, head of the Joint Foreign Commission for the Aid of the Jews of Eastern Europe.
So who was to blame? The instigators were a mixture of rabid anti-Semites like Pavolachi Krushevan, who, in addition to publishing the ‘Protocols of the Elders of Zion’, was the editor of the inflammatory Bessarabets, and counter-revolutionary militias like the irregular Black Hundreds, who had taken up arms to combat the Revolution. There is some evidence that the perpetrators attacked Jews precisely because they saw them as pro-revolutionary. In Kiev, for example, the leading pogromshchiki shouted, ‘This is your freedom! Take that for your Constitution and revolution!’ Yet there is little evidence that Gentile socialists rallied to the side of the Jews. This can be inferred from the limited evidence we have on the social origins of the pogrom-shchiki. In Kiev, as in 1881, the looting of Jewish homes and stores was carried out mainly by ‘urchins, vagabonds and assorted riff-raff’, most of them teenagers. Elsewhere, however, the dregs of the lumpen-proletariat were joined by members of the working class, in whose name the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks claimed to be acting. According to a member of one of the Jewish self-defence organizations, the Odessa rioters included ‘nearly all classes of Russian society… not only barefoot beggars, but also factory and railroad workers, peasants, chiefs of station…’. In Ekaterinoslav the pogromshchiki were said to include ‘petty bourgeois, peasants, factory workers, day-labourers, off-duty soldiers and school children’. Moreover, these groups were joined in a number of cases by local policemen, who egged on the rioters, fired on Jewish self-defence forces and sometimes even joined in the ransacking of Jewish residences. In the aftermath of the upheaval, three Kiev police officers, including a colonel, were suspended and charged with dereliction of duty, though they never stood trial and the colonel had been reinstated by 1907. If so many different social groups were ready to assault and murder Jews, the old idea that Russia’s revolution was a manifestation of ‘social polarization’ begins to look rather doubtful. Ethnic polarization might be a more accurate description.
Violence against Jews was, after all, not the only sign of the ethnic conflict inherent in the Tsarist system. Poles, Finns and Latvians had been among the minorities most aggressively targeted for ‘Russification’ by the imperial regime; their reaction to the Revolution, predictably, was to press for political autonomy. They too were over-represented in the Social Democratic parties. By contrast, the minority most closely identified with the old order, the German aristocracy of the Baltic provinces, were the targets for ferocious attacks in 1905; around 140 manor houses in Courland (Latvia) were razed to the ground by marauding peasants. Russian socialists, in short, might talk the language of class. But other Russians – or, to be precise, other subjects of the Tsar who lived on the Russian Empire’s multi-ethnic western periphery – answered in the language of race. The pogroms of 1905 proved to be the first of an escalating series of earthquakes that would devastate and ultimately destroy the Pale of Settlement in the first half of the twentieth century. They were an intimation of much that was to follow.
RUSSIA TURNS WESTWARDS
The division between the socialist and nationalist impulses of the 1905 Revolution helped the Tsarist regime to reassert its control. By the end of December 1905 the Soviet had been shut down. Trotsky languished in jail along with the rest of its leadership.
The Tsar and his ministers might have been expected to learn prudence from the events of 1905. To avoid another defeat and another revolution, they might simply have opted to avoid another war. But th
eir assumption seems to have been that future wars with their imperial rivals were unavoidable. As General A. A. Kireyev had noted in his diary for 1900, ‘We, like any powerful nation, strive to expand our territory, our “legitimate” moral, economic and political influence. This is in the order of things.’ His greatest fear was that, as he put it nine years later, ‘We have become a second-rate power.’ The main thing was that next time Russia must be better armed – and fight closer to home. Undaunted by the danger of renewed revolution, the government embarked on a massive programme of rearmament. This time, however, the railways they built ran not eastwards to Asia, but westwards towards Germany and her ally Austria-Hungary. Nobody was in any doubt that a primary function of these railways would be to carry not goods but troops.
The European empires, and none more than Tsarist Russia, had extended and consolidated their power by building tens of thousands of miles of railway track. The ethnic conflicts of 1881 and 1905, however, had revealed that railways could transmit disorder as well as order. The summer of 1914 brought a new revelation, as millions of men were transported by rail to battlefields all over Europe. The empires, it suddenly became clear, would travel to their own destruction by train. Yet there was no predictable railway timetable for war, as A. J. P. Taylor once famously argued. When it came, war took most people by surprise. In that respect, as in others, the end of the era of European mastery resembled nothing more than the most terrific train crash.
The War of the World: History's Age of Hatred Page 13