Russian Jews Between the Reds and the Whites, 1917-1920. Oleg Budnitskii
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we should fear them more than any possible punishment that could be carried out by the authorities. We should instead praise and be thankful for the government, as it is only their bayonets and prisons that stand between us and the fury of the people.”22
Gershenzon warned against the illusion of the intelligentsia's “love for the masses” and these warnings were particularly relevant for its Jewish contingent. Antisemitism, which up until now had been considered prevalent only among the masses and the far right, was to become more and more widespread among the Russian intelligentsia.
An incident involving Aaron Shteinberg, a well-known Jewish philosopher and social activist, serves as a case in point. Shteinberg was shocked and dismayed by a number of articles in the newspaper Zemshchina written by the Russian philosopher Vasilii Rozanov in 1913 during the Beilis trial. In them, Rozanov allowed for the possibility that a “ritual murder” had taken place. Shteinberg went to Rozanov seeking an explanation. He was received warmly, and was given a rather eye-opening explanation and justification: “ ‘You see,’ Rozanov said, ‘Whenever my daughters come home from school and talk about a new friend of theirs with great excitement and amazement, I already know ahead of time that it's some Rachel, Rebecca, or Sara. But if I were to ask them about their new acquaintances Vera or Nadezhda, they'd always say, ‘She's such a bore, she's not very pretty, her eyes are always glazed over, there's no spirit to her! We Russians just simply cannot look at you with that fire with which you're looking at me right now! You will seize power, of course. But one has to stand up for Russia!”23
This speech deeply disappointed Shteinberg, who, by all accounts, had been prepared for a philosophical debate. As it turned out, it had nothing to do with any “ritual”; it had to do with politics. In a later article, Rozanov would “openly admit that he had been in favor of Beilis's conviction on political grounds in order to prevent Jewish dominance, the so-called Jewish “yoke.” Russia had escaped the Tartar-Mongol yoke, and now the Jewish version was to replace it. In order to prevent this, one had to fight against the Jews.”24
Antisemitic attitudes were common among other members of the intellectual elite of Russia as well. Aleksandr Blok told Shteinberg of his dislike of Jews, which had started during the Beilis trial when, among other things, people who had earlier hidden their Jewish heritage began to demand his signature on letters of protest. The context of the conversation, which took place in 1919 while both Shteinberg and Blok were sharing a cell as guests of the Cheka, precludes any possibility of insincerity on the latter's part. It was at this point that Shteinberg formulated an idea that he would later relate to Andrei Bely. According to Shteinberg, Blok's dislike of the Jews was, unbeknownst to Blok himself, the “other side of the coin” of Russian patriotism. Shteinberg noted that a number his close associates in the Russian cultural elite, including Andrei Bely, Ivanov-Razumnik, Petrov-Vodkin, Karsavin, and others, shared this quality.25
The liberal principles of the Kadets likewise became subject to erosion. P. B. Struve spoke of “asemitism” and a “national face” (natsional'noe litso) that the Russian intelligentsia should take vis-à-vis the Jewish community, although he did make a clear distinction between this democratic and constitutional “attitude” and “bigoted antisemitism.”26 On March 17, 1910, Ariadna Tyrkova wrote in her diary, “Conversations about nationalism are everywhere. They seem to be more and more prevalent among the radicals. I was at Gredeskul's on January 6th. We were arguing about the press. Gredeskul was there, as were Ervin Grimm and D. D. Protopopov…everyone was saying that we shouldn't tolerate the fact that we have no newspapers besides the ‘Jewish’ Rech' [Speech]. Only Rodichev and David Grimm disagreed, the latter stating that nationalism was an anti-cultural phenomenon.”27
However, antisemitism was not inherent to a majority of Russia's politicized elite. Quite the opposite was true. For the majority of liberals opposition to discrimination against the Jews was compulsory, and antisemitic statements were considered unacceptable. The first point of the platform of the Constitutional Democratic Party, which was to be the most influential and long-lived Russian liberal party, states, “All Russian citizens, without regard to sex, creed, or nationality, are equal before the law. Any social discrimination or restrictions regarding the personal and property rights of Poles, Jews, and all other ethnic groups without exception must be repealed.”28 The Beilis trial, which had become a litmus test for true democracy and tolerance, demonstrated the best aspects of the Russian intelligentsia. Though hardly a semitophile,29 Vasilii Maklakov, whose speech at the trial was a deciding factor in the accused's acquittal, quite correctly termed the trial a “salutary warning.”30 Rozanov was excluded from the Religious Philosophy Society for his antisemitism.
The problem lay elsewhere. In the period between revolutions there was an indisputable growth in antisemitism among groups that had not previously been known to exhibit it. This necessarily pushed Jews to the Left, as even among the Kadets, the “standard-bearers” of Russian liberalism, a “Janus-faced policy” towards the “Jewish question” became evident.
Before examining the role of the Jews in the fateful year of 1917, it must be determined whether the Jewish members of the Russian liberation movement can be considered as acting in concert with Jewish interests, or whether they should even be considered Jews at all. After all, a number of them had rejected their Jewish faith and heritage. The marked internationalism of many revolutionary groups, especially the Bolsheviks, gave their antagonists within the Jewish community convenient grounds on which to “excommunicate” them from Russian Jewry.
At a meeting on June 8, 1917, S. M. Dubnov said, “And from among our community there have appeared a good number of demagogues who have fallen in league with the heroes of the street and the prophets of the insurgency. They appear under Russian pseudonyms, ashamed of their Jewish heritage (Trotsky, Zinoviev, etc.), but it is their Russian pseudonyms that we will take to be their ‘Jewish’ names, [so] they have no place among our people…”31
One could just as easily say that revolutionaries of Russian extraction should be excluded from their people based on the fact that they did not observe the tenets of Orthodoxy. However, another interpretation is possible here. Perhaps the active participation of some Jews in the revolutionary movement was not, in fact, due to any break with Jewish identity, as so many internationalist revolutionaries claimed, but was rather because of their Jewish heritage. To accept this idea, one does not necessarily have to share the mystical musings of N. A. Berdiaev, who claimed that there was much in common between Jewish messianism and its Marxist variant.32 There are other, more objective historical and economic grounds for making such a claim.
Obvious socioeconomic and political factors were to result in a majority of Jews being pushed towards the opposite camp. It is clear that the Jewish community as a whole refused to endorse the revolutionary program of the revolutionaries of Jewish heritage, be they Bolsheviks, SRs, or from other political parties. Nor could any Jewish socialist party be taken as being representative of all of Russian Jewry. At the same time, for many the solution to the “Jewish question” appeared to be entwined with the success of the Russian revolution. It was precisely the legacy of antisemitic prejudice and discrimination in Russia that inclined, and sometimes even directly led, the children of many well-off Jewish families to join the ranks of the revolutionaries. A significant portion of the revolutionary leadership came from well-established
Jewish families. Iulii Martov, Sergei Ezhov, Vladimir Levitskii, and Lidia Dan, all grandchildren of the publisher Aleksandr Tsederbaum, were to become prominent Social Democrats. Mikhail and Abram Gots, the grandsons of the Moscow tea magnate Volf Vysotskii, and Il'ia Fondaminskii were among the leaders of the Party of Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs). Osip Minor, son of the head rabbi of Moscow, was first a member of the People's Will, then an SR,33 and finally, in 1917, the chairman of the Moscow City Duma. Among the Bolsheviks one could find the son of well-to-do farmers (Trotsky, whose true surname was Bronshtein), dairy farmers (Zinoviev [Radomysl-skii]), as well as the son of an engineer (Lev Kamenev [Rosenfeld]), and a doctor (Grigorii Sokolnikov [Brilliant]). All of the above-mentioned individuals had the opportunity to pursue just about any career path they desired, yet they all chose instead the path of the revolutionary.