Russian Jews Between the Reds and the Whites, 1917-1920. Oleg Budnitskii
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either Jews or Old Believers. This fact speaks less to the inherent business acumen or capitalist mentality of either religious minority than to the reality of their persecution. Having been forced to flee persecution on a number of occasions, both groups were capable of quickly switching their professions and could adapt their knowledge and abilities to new economic climates, a skill set that was hard to come by in a country that was still very much in a feudal state. Jews were often able to build their capital through loans, alcohol sales, and trade. These moneylenders, store owners, and businessmen would eventually become titans of industry as bankers, sugar barons, and “kings of the railroads.”25 Of course, this kind of success happened only to a few. The vast majority of these small-business owners remained impoverished.
By the beginning of the 1830s, Jews owned 149 of the 528 factories in the eight gubernias of the northwestern and southwestern territories of the Empire. At around the same time, Jews controlled 30 percent of the textile industry of Ukraine. As time progressed, several entrepreneurial groups, such as the Brodskiis, Zaitsevs, Galperins, and Balakhovskiis, were to try their hand at the rapidly expanding sugar industry. By relying on technological innovations, the Jewish collectives were quickly able to take over and expand into new markets. A case in point: Israil Brodskii, the patriarch of the “sugar kings,” was able to increase his production of lump sugar from 1,500 poods in 1856 to 40,000 poods in 1861, an increase of 2,700 percent.26 By 1872, nearly a quarter of the sugar trade was controlled by Jewish companies, with the vast majority concentrated in the Ukraine. The capital for these undertakings, as was often the case for the Russian Jews, was provided by selling liquor licenses.27 Jewish businessmen were also successful in the flour trade, leather-working, brewing, tobacco sales, and a number of other spheres of business.28
I. S. Aksakov's claim that nearly all overland trade in the nineteenth century passed through the hands of the Austrian and Russian Jewry was not far from the truth. By the mid-nineteenth century Jews constituted an overwhelming majority in the Merchant Guilds in nearly all of the gubernias of the Pale of Settlement. These included Bessarabia (55.6 percent), Chernigov (81 percent), Courland (70 percent), Ekaterinoslav (24 percent, and 37 percent of the First Guild), Grodno (96 percent), Kiev (86 percent), Kovno (75 percent), Minsk (87 percent), Mogilev (76 percent), Podolia (96 percent), Poltava (55 percent), Vilna (51 percent, and 73 percent of the First Guild), Vitebsk (38 percent, 91 percent of the First Guild), and Volynia (96 percent). In the Minsk, Podolia, and Chernigov gubernias the First Merchant Guild was 100 percent Jewish, while in Vitebsk, Volynia, and Grodno the number was higher than 90 percent.29
Jews also had a large presence in the bread and timber trades. In the opinion of one scholar,30 they “led Russia into the international market.” They were responsible for 60 percent of Odessa's bread exports in 1878, and according to the 1897 Census, for every 1,000 tradesmen in the Northwestern Territories, 886 were Jews. This number rose to 930 out of every 1,000 in the case of grain traders.
Along with Poles, Jews were to dominate the western borders of Russia in the explosion of industrial activity that occurred in the years following the Great Reforms of the 1860s. Alexander II's reforms gave Russian Jews the chance to break free from the Pale of Settlement, and thus belatedly laid the foundation for the “Russification” of Russia's Jews. This time around, assimilation was more voluntary than coercive. In 1856, the Emperor ordered that the possibility of greater assimilation be examined, insofar as the “moral attributes of the Jews would make such a thing possible.” In this instance, the “liberal” tendency in official policy proved dominant, with the granting of civil rights preceding “reformation.” Of course, a relatively minor proposal such as allowing members of the Jewish First Guild to leave the Pale (a decision that probably affected only a hundred or so families) proved to be a laborious task for Tsarist bureaucrats, who took three years to decide to grant “Merchants of the First Guild, their families, stewards, and a limited number of servants” freedom of movement.31
A number of additional laws enacted over the following twenty years increased freedom of movement throughout the Empire. On November 27, 1861, Jews with a master's degree and higher were allowed to leave the Pale of Settlement. From 1865 to 1867 the law was extended to include Jewish doctors with no formal higher education. In 1872, it was further expanded to graduates of the Petersburg Technical Institute, and by 1879 all those with higher education were allowed to live beyond the Pale, including those who worked in medicine. On June 28, 1865, craftsmen were afforded the same right; and on June 25, 1867, soldiers who had fought during Nicholas's reign were given the same privilege. Jews were likewise granted the right to enter the civil service, and to participate in local governmental organizations and the new courts.32
These reforms quickly led to the establishment of a number of Jewish communities outside of the Pale. The capital, St. Petersburg, attracted a large number of energetic and successful Jewish industrialists, as did a number of other large cities. Hundreds, and then thousands, of Jewish youths flocked to local gimnaziums, universities, and institutes. This increased access to education gave numerous Russians the opportunity to succeed in careers that would have previously been closed for them; for Russian Jews there was the added incentive of overcoming the restrictions that they were subject to. A degree also gave them the chance to avoid military service, or at the very least to shorten and lighten their service.
During this same period, Jews began to play a significant role in the financial sphere and in railroad construction. The first Jewish bank outside of the Pale of Settlement, I. E. Gintsburg, was founded in Petersburg in 1859. Previously, Jewish financial institutions had been limited to Warsaw, Odessa, and Berdichev, the last of which had more than eight Jewish-run banks in 1849.33 Among the most prominent Jewish businessmen of this time were the Poliakov brothers (finance and railroads),34 I. Bilokh, the oil magnates Dembo and Kagan, and bankers such as E. Ashkenazi, I. Vavelberg, A. Varshavskii, A. Zak, the Efrussi family, and others.
Odessa served as the cultural capital for Russia's Jews in the 1860s and early 1870s. The first Jewish periodicals, such as the Hebrew-language weeklies Kha-melits (Advocate) and Khashakhar (Dawn), the Yiddish Kol-mevasser ( Voice of the Herald) (1862–71, edited by A. Tsederbaum), and the Russian-language Rassvet (Dawn), Sion (1861–62) and Den' (The Day, 1869–71),35 were all published there. However, Petersburg would soon replace Odessa as Russia's “Jewish capital.” From 1860 to 1910, twenty-one of the thirty-nine Russian-language Jewish journals and newspapers were published in Petersburg, compared to only seven in Odessa and three in Vilna. Among these were the weekly Rassvet (Dawn, 1879–83) and the monthly Voskhod (Sunrise).36 As early as the 1850s, Petersburg was also to serve as the center of Jewish politics, where the shtadlanut, the representatives to the government, were located. Among the most prominent of these were members of the Gintsburg family, who had been given the title of baron by the Duke Gessen-Darshtadtskii. The founder of this dynasty was Evzel Gintsburg, and his son Goratsii followed in his footsteps.37
The Russian government was determined to expand the number of Russian Jews studying in secular schools and universities. In 1863, the government set aside 24,000 rubles in subsidies for Jewish students, which were funded by taxes levied on Jews. The educational reforms of 1864 allowed children of “all social status and faiths” to pursue education, which greatly increased the number of Jews enrolled. In 1865, the number of Jews enrolled in gimnaziums was 990 (3.3 percent of all students), by 1870 the number was 2,045 (5.6 percent), and in 1880 the number reached 7,004 (12 percent). In certain areas, such as Odessa and Vilna educational districts, the proportion was naturally much higher. The number of Jews enrolled in universities was 129 (3.2 percent) in 1865, while in 1881 it had grown to 783 (8.8 percent). The rapid growth in numbers led the government to discontinue the stipend program in 1875.38
Although the Russian government was concerned with economic growth, it also sought to limit the role of foreigners and non-Russians in the domestic economy. The reforms of the 1860s, though they gave all subjects of the Empire the right to pursue education, simultaneously forbid Jewish merchants from registering in guilds outside of the Pale of Settlement.39
This dual approach to policy can be observed in the laws passed regarding