Russian Jews Between the Reds and the Whites, 1917-1920. Oleg Budnitskii
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urbanized and literate people of the Russian Empire (along with the Germans), yet they were restricted in where they were allowed to live, their choice of profession, and their access to education as a result of their religious affiliation. It is hardly surprising that such circumstances would give rise to individuals who would eagerly devote their lives to the overthrow of the existing power structure. Boys from a traditional Jewish upbringing would study in Russian gymnaziums, then go on to study in a Russian or foreign university, and would absorb revolutionary ideology more quickly than others, being able to sympathize with such ideas not only on an intellectual level, but on an emotional one as well. Real-life experience was an important contributor in this transformation of Jewish youth into Russian revolutionaries.
Some of them would explain their dedication to the revolution as a result of “Jewish problems.” Aleksandr Brailovskii once gave a speech at a political demonstration in Rostov on March 2, 1903, that eventually resulted in a conflict with the police and the murder of a police officer (the fatal blow was delivered by Isaak Khaevskii). When asked at the ensuing trial as to why he, the son of a well-off merchant from Rostov, had joined the revolutionaries, Brailovskii responded, “I am a Jew. As such, I have experienced oppression and deprivation of freedom for all of my life. When I wanted to enter the university, I wasn't accepted because I was a Jew, and I was thrown overboard. I could not but welcome the roar of the demonstrators. That is why I joined
them.”34
Others would categorically deny any connection between their Jewishness and their revolutionary fervor. “This national moment, so vital to the life of Russia,” Trotsky once wrote, “played nearly no role at all in my personal life. From a very early age, nationalist fixations bewildered me on a rational level. This would occasionally grow into moral discomfort or even outright disgust. A Marxist education deepened these feelings, and transformed them into an active internationalism.”35
Many Jewish revolutionaries either consciously or (as was more often the case) unconsciously identified with the interests of the Russian peasants or workers, about whom they knew next to nothing. In this, they were hardly different from their Russian counterparts.
Fedor Stepun, a commissar for the Provisional Government in 1917, who had made a trip to Vilna in 1907, made some very apt observations regarding the state of Russian Jewry before the revolution. The “piercing pity” that Stepun felt for the Jewish population and deep shame in light of Tsarist policy, would have been completely at home among the radical “comrades” of Heidelberg University:
my second conviction is this: that in participating in peasants' and workers' issues Jews were simply fighting for their own equal rights, which, of course, they had a right to do. As a result of their political ideology, they didn't see themselves as being different from the Russian people.
At the time, I knew and understood very little about workers' and peasants' issues. But I always believe what my eyes tell me. And I couldn't help thinking that there was little common sense in an argument I saw between the grandson of a Vilna rabbi and the son of a Kovno banker, neither of whom had ever seen Russian land or a Russian muzhik. They were arguing heatedly with each other over the best ways for the Ryazan, Siberian, and Poltava peasantry to manage their land, pausing every minute or so to cite the works of Karl Marx.36
Although Stepun's description may seem somewhat exaggerated, he manages to grasp the essence of the matter at hand. However, where Stepun saw “little common sense,” Maksim Vinaver, one of Russia's leading Jewish liberals, saw quite the opposite. In an article dedicated to the memory of Shloime Rapoport (S. A. An-sky), a revolutionary and collector of Russian and Jewish folklore, Vinaver writes:
So many Jewish youths who had just managed to tear themselves away from the Bible and the Talmud agreed to fight to death for a peasant people who, it would seem, were completely foreign to them, knowing only that they were laboring and suffering. They believed in these people only because they were prepared by a belief in truth, goodness, and the eventual triumph of justice. Their acquaintance with the biblical prophets and testaments of Jewish culture prepared them for this. The seeds sewn by those Russian pilgrims who had struggled for truth and justice fell on fertile ground, and over the decades an unbreakable chain pulled the Jewish youth towards the ranks of those parties that were attempting to achieve the common good, in accordance with the belief in an immanent, inherently mystical aspiration on the part of all (whether of all mankind or of one nation). When the pogroms broke out, some cast stones at such dreamers, claiming that they had gone to guard the “vineyards of outsiders.” A barbarous accusation. To struggle for truth means to attempt to fulfill the commandments of the Jewish prophets, which means to work for one's own vineyards, not those of others. And in this aspect there is no difference between one's own vineyard and someone else's.37
One final example is doubly valuable for the fact that it was written by someone outside of revolutionary circles, as well as the fact that it was published in the end of the 1930s in emigration, long after sympathy towards the revolutionaries had fallen out of fashion. Oskar Gruzenberg, the well-known lawyer, wrote that he felt his Jewish heritage particularly acutely one night in 1886, during a police raid in Kiev. As he was a student at the university, the police did not harass him, whereas his mother, who had come to visit from the Pale of Settlement and had been guilty of some minor infraction, was forced to spend the rest of the night on the spittle-ridden floor of the police station in the company of drunks and prostitutes. He only managed to get her out by calling in some major favors. A still-furious Gruzenberg wrote the following, nearly fifty years after the event in question: “To forget how they humiliated my elderly mother, who had never done anything wrong to anybody in her whole entire life, would mean to forget the fact that life is only worth living when one is not a slave. What happened that night? What was decided? In short, I now saw every person who was fighting against autocratic tyranny and cruelty as an ally, as a brother whom I was obligated to assist in times of need.”38 Such an understanding of obligation and responsibility was undoubtedly the attitude of a large number of Jews, including members of the “establishment.”
Vladimir Zhabotinskii, a pronounced opponent of the Jews' participation in the Russian Revolution, nonetheless maintained that “the Jewish blood spilled on the barricades was the result of the will of the Jewish people themselves.” In response to criticism of that assertion, he stated that
all of these fashionable shrieks and cries claim that Jews do not have a national politics, only a class-based one. Jews have no class-based politics, but have had, and currently have (although only in the earliest stages), the politics of a national coalition, and those who have pursued such a politics without even suspecting it are all the more ignorant. They did this in their own fashion, with excesses and extremes, but in essence they were only expressing various aspects of the unified will of the Jewish people. If there were many revolutionaries among them, then this means no more than such was the atmosphere of the nation. Jewish barricades were raised in accordance with the will of the Jewish people. I believe this to be true, and since I do, I bow down and welcome the people's revolution.
Of course, having (rather facetiously) bowed down before the “will of the people,” Zhabotinskii then posed the following question, “But has the Revolution improved the lot of the people?” The doubts of the brilliant Russian poet and ideologue of the Jewish national movement led him to answer in the negative:
The will of the people does not always lead to the good of the people, as they are not always capable of objectively measuring the chances of success and failure. It is particularly easy to go astray when success is dependent on a belief in a powerful ally, in the belief that he will understand, stay true, that he'll help. But the fact of the matter is that none of us know this ally very well, and God only knows how he'll thank us for our efforts.39
R. A. Abramovich, a Bundist, was slightly more pragmatic. At a meeting at the Moscow State Conference in August of 1917, he declared, “[O]nly the full and complete victory of the revolution, only the full and decisive democratization of life in this country is capable of ending the oppression of Jewish people and guaranteeing autonomy for them…. this is why the Jewish workers—not only as members of the family of the international proletariat, not only as citizens of a free Russia, but as Jews—are