Russian Jews Between the Reds and the Whites, 1917-1920. Oleg Budnitskii
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initially associated the Jews and the Poles, the situation had changed drastically by the outbreak of the First World War. Soon after the beginning of the war, Grand Duke Nicholas's manifesto to the Poles promised the creation of a Polish state, whereas Jews were automatically considered to be potential traitors.
By the beginning of the twentieth century, only two countries (Russia and Romania) had placed legal restrictions upon their Jewish citizens. Of course, Russia had no monopoly on antisemitism, which had been growing in other countries such as France, Germany, and Austria-Hungary. Nevertheless, the first pogrom of the twentieth century was to occur in Russia. The Kishinev tragedy, which took place during a time of peace under the delinquent watch of a negligent government, exposed Russia's treatment of its Jews to the world, as did the show trial of Mendel Beilis. While the latter was not the only antisemitic show trial of the era to gain notoriety, it is worth remembering that the Alfred Dreyfus case involved an accusation of espionage, not ritual murder. And although Dreyfus was convicted, he was eventually pardoned. Beilis, however, was exonerated by the jury on the basis that he had not killed the boy in question. This did not mean that the Russian population at large did not believe the accusations against the Jews.
One can only guess as to what course the Jews of the Russian Empire would have taken had the Russian Empire continued its existence. Given the rate of emigration, it is quite possible that the Jews would have largely abandoned the country. On the other hand, it is also possible that “voluntary integration” would have eventually succeeded, and the Russian Jews could have come to resemble their French and German counterparts as “Russian keepers of the Torah.” Yet such thoughts are outside of the realm of history, existing only in the kingdom of hypothetical speculation.
The World War—which at the time nobody thought to call “the first”—did take place. It is highly unlikely that in the patriotic furor of August 1914 (or, in the Russian context, July, according to the Gregorian calendar still used at the time) anybody could have considered the possibility that the three-hundred-year history of the Romanov Empire was drawing to a close, that it had only three years to live. And it seemed just as impossible that the man in charge of negotiating the peace, the Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Republic (called “the people's commissar” according to the French tradition), would turn out to be a certain Lev Trotsky, a former exile and a Jew.
CHAPTER 2
The Jews and the Russian Revolution
Soon after the assassination of Alexander II on March 1, 1881, the famous Russian historian and conservative journalist Dmitrii Ilovaiskii wrote in Sankt-Peterburgskie Vedomosti (The St. Petersburg News): “Now that the body of the martyred Tsar has been given to the earth, we, the Russians, must first and foremost fulfill our holy duty to seek out the very sources of that dark force that has taken him from Russia.” Ilovaiskii expressed the conviction that Russian “nihilists and socialists” were merely “a crude, often unconscious weapon,” that they had been led to commit the crime not so much by the “enemies of proprietorship and civil order” as by the “internal and external enemies of the Russian State, and of Russian Nationalism.”
According to Ilovaiskii, Great Russians (Velikorossy), comprising a kind of “Panurgic herd” in this “underground gang,” were the only ethnic group that did not have nationalistic motives. “The Karakozovs, Solovievs, and Rysakovs are precisely those crude unintelligent weapons that were caught up in a web of social propaganda. They themselves did not know for what goals or deeds they were serving as weapons.” Among the internal enemies of Russia, Ilovaiskii listed the Poles first. “The second element,” wrote the author of scores of enduring editions of school textbooks, “is clearly visible and even patently obvious, namely, Jewish revolutionaries. They have come forth as quite possibly the most active element in the recent actions, murders, attacks, and university disturbances.”1
If Ilovaiskii, who was one of the first to succinctly formulate the “foreign” (inorodcheskii) character of the Russian revolution, gave Jews “only” second place among the threats to Russia, this would indicate that the Jews were not yet playing a leading role in the liberation movement. At the very least, Jews did not yet personify the central, active force of the Russian revolution in Russian public opinion, even in its “blackest” variants.2
Two decades later, this situation had changed markedly. In 1903, the Chairman of the Council of Ministers, Sergei Iulevich Witte, remarked to Theodor Herzl that Jews comprised nearly half of the membership of revolutionary parties, even though they were only six million people in a nation of a 136 million.3 If Witte exaggerated, he did so only slightly.
From 1901 to 1903, Jews composed 29.1 percent (2,269 individuals) of those arrested for political crimes. From March 1903 to November 1904 more than half of those investigated for political activity were Jews (53 percent). This fact can most easily be explained as a reaction to the Kishinev and Homel pogroms. In 1905, Jews made up 34 percent of all political prisoners; of those exiled to Siberia, 37 percent were Jews.4 During the calmer period from 1892 to 1902, Jews comprised 23.4 percent of the Social Democrats under investigation, fewer than the number of Russians (69.1 percent, 3,490 individuals), but slightly more than the number of Poles (16.9 percent). The number of Jews who were Social Democrats exceeded the number of Russians (according to police data) in both the southwestern (49.4 percent to 41.8 percent) and southern territories (51.3 percent to 44.2 percent). They also comprised the lion's share of those under investigation in Odessa (75.1 percent Jews versus 18.7 percent Russians). In Petersburg and Moscow the situation was reversed—10.2 percent Jews and 82.8 percent Russians in the northern capital; 4.6 percent Jews and 90.1 percent Russians in Moscow.5 Without a doubt, the Bund, the largest revolutionary party in Russia, contained the largest numbers of Jews involved in criminal political activity. In the summer of 1904, the Bund could claim 23,000 members; in 1905–7, 34,000; and in 1908–10, when the revolutionary movement quickly began to decline, about 2,000 members. For comparison's sake, in the beginning of 1905, the entire Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party (RSDRP) consisted of approximately 8400 members.6 There was also significant Jewish representation in the Russian revolutionary parties and organizations. During the time of the 1905 revolution, approximately 15 percent of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party (PSR) was Jewish, and there were a number of “maximalist and anarchist terrorist groups that were almost entirely Jewish.”7 Among the SR-Maximalists, 19 percent were Jewish, while 76 percent were either Russian or Ukrainian.8 At the Fifth Congress of the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party in London in 1907, nearly a third of the delegates were Jewish.9
At the same time, however, it must be noted that regardless of the extent of Jewish participation in Russian or Jewish revolutionary parties, Jewish revolutionaries comprised a minute portion of the general Russian population, as well as an extremely small percentage of Russian Jewry. In the perception of the typical Russian resident—from the lumpenproletariat to the intelligentsia—the role of Jews in revolutionary activity was greater than it actually was. A typical example can be found in a joke from the satirical liberal journal Vampir from the 1905–7 revolutionary period. Though of limited wit, it is nevertheless telling. It reads, “Warsaw. Eleven anarchists were shot in the fortress prison. Of these, 15 were Jews.”10
The urban masses responded to the freedom given to them by the Manifesto of October 17, 1905 with pogroms.11 The leading participants were those very workers whom the revolutionaries (including those of Jewish origin) had wasted so much strength and energy indoctrinating. Incidentally, it should be noted that previous strikes and demonstrations, in particular those associated with May 1, which often occurs around the time of Passover and Easter, had regularly threatened to grow into pogroms. Revolutionaries spent significant effort attempting to prevent or at least localize any ethnic or religious conflicts, such as those that occurred in the Donbass region, an industrial center located at the bend of the Dniepr River.12 Jews comprised 20 to 35 percent of the urban population of these kinds of rapidly developing regions.13
Despite their “love for the