Russian Jews Between the Reds and the Whites, 1917-1920. Oleg Budnitskii
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Leon Pinsker. A doctor from Odessa and a social activist, Pinsker published a German-language pamphlet entitled “Auto-emancipation,” which examined the living conditions of Jews in the diaspora.56 He reached the conclusion that assimilation, which he had previously supported, was impossible, and that the only possible solution for the Jewish people was the acquisition of their own territory. In 1882, a group of youths in Kharkov created the organization Bilu, which was dedicated to resettling Jews in the Promised Land. The first group of Bilu members reached Palestine in 1882. A second group, which attempted to secure rights for Jews from the Ottoman government, arrived in Palestine in 1884. Difficult physical labor and conflicts with their Jewish supervisors led several members to return to Russia, and the movement gradually petered out. At an 1884 meeting of Hovevei Zion groups in Katowice, Pinsker called for the Jews to return to Palestine and to focus on farming and agriculture, anticipating the kibbutz movement. In 1890, the Society for the Assistance of Jewish Farmers and Craftsmen in Palestine and Syria was founded.
The first Zionist Congress took place in Basel in 1897. One third (66 of 197) of the delegates came from Russia. There were 373 Zionist organizations in Russia in 1897; by 1903–4 the number had risen to 1,572. Russian Jews actively participated in the Zionist movement, whose leaders included: Ia. Bernshtein-Kogan, M. Usyshkin, V. Temkin, M. Mandelshtam, L. Motskin, I. Chlenov, H. Syrkin, B. Borokhov, V. Zhabotinskii, and others. The scale of participation on the part of Russian Jews is evident in the fact that when the Jewish Colonial Bank was established in accordance with the Second Zionist Congress in London, with 200,000 shares priced at one pound sterling (ten gold rubles) a share, 75 percent of the shares were bought by Russian Zionists. In 1897 the Odessa Zionist organization alone had 7,500 members. Russian authorities tolerated the activity of Zionist organizations at first, as they served the interests of the state. However, as it became clear that relocation to Palestine would not happen any time soon, Zionists began to agitate for the improvement of living conditions for Jews in the here and now. Five Zionists were elected to the first State Duma. At a conference of Russian Zionists in Helsingfors in November 1906, I. Grinberg, acknowledging the crisis in the Zionist movement, expressed his reluctance to fight for Jewish rights within Russia. But, at Zhabotinskii's instigation, a platform was passed that called for democratic reforms within the country, including the guarantee of civil liberties and status as a recognized minority, as well as the right for Jews to observe the Sabbath and use their native languages. This transformation of the Zionist movement into a liberal-democratic political party soon led the Senate to repeal their legal status. As a result of government persecution and the general decrease in democratic activity following 1907, by 1915 there were only 18,000 active Zionists in Russia.57
According to the 1897 Census, there were 5,215,805 Jews living in Russia. Of these, 1,965,852 (38.65 percent) were involved in trade, while 1,793,937 (35.43 percent) were in industry. Next in number were the 334,827 in the service industries (6.61 percent), 278,095 individuals who did not declare a profession (5.49 percent), and 264,683 in the civil service or “free” professions (5.22 percent), followed by 201,027 in transportation (3.98 percent) and 179,400 in agriculture (3.55 percent).
By comparison, 76.5 percent of Russians were in agriculture, as were 62.9 percent of all Poles. In industry the numbers were 10 percent and 14.1 percent, respectively; 2.2 percent of Russians, 1.7 percent of all Poles, and 7.5 percent of the Armenian population were involved in trade professions; and 1.7 percent of Russians and 2.5 percent of Poles were in the civil service or “free professions.”58
On the whole, Jews tended to live in urban areas. They composed a majority of the urban population in eight gubernias (Minsk, Grodno, Mogilev, Vitebsk, and Volynia, as well as three from the former Polish territories). In six additional gubernias, Jews were the largest ethnic group among city-dwellers. In the Kherson gubernia, Jews composed 28.4 percent of the urban population, and 25.9 percent of the urban population of Ekaterinoslav. By 1910, nine cities (Warsaw, Odessa, Lodz, Vilna, Ekaterinoslav, Kishinev, Berdichev, Bialystok, and Kiev) had a Jewish population over 50,000. The largest Jewish population was in Warsaw (310,000), followed by Odessa (172,608), while the smallest of these populations, in Kiev, numbered 51,000. Together, these cities contained nearly a million Jews, or one-fifth of the entire Jewish population of the Empire. Fifteen other cities had populations between 25,000 and 50,000, for a total of 500,000.59 From 1897 to 1910 the Jewish urban population grew by nearly a million people (38.5 percent), totaling 3,545,418 by 1910. In 1910 there were 229 towns and cities with a Jewish population above 10,000. Within the Pale of Settlement, the number of Jewish communities with a population greater than 5,000 people grew from 130 in 1897 to 180 in 1910 (communities with more than 10,000 people grew from 43 to 76).60
The number of Jewish “settlements” beyond the Pale was insignificant in comparison with the number of Jews living within it. However, the rate of growth of these populations was higher than in the Pale; Jews were more concentrated in the larger cities, and material and educational conditions were better, a result of the government's program of “voluntary integration.” In 1897, 43,000 Jews lived in cities whose populations were greater than 100,000 (Petrograd, Moscow, Nizhnii Novgorod, Tula, Samara, Kursk, Tiflis, Taganrog). By 1910 these populations had doubled to approximately 75,000–80,000 individuals. These, in the words of Ia. Leshchinskii, were the main points of concentration of “the Jewish bourgeoisie and professional intelligentsia.”61 There were a significant number of Jewish craftsmen in these cities who enjoyed a higher standard of living than their counterparts in the Pale. There were Jews living outside of these cities as well; Jews composed 7.2 percent of the population of Rostov-on-Don in 1914 (about 16,000 individuals).62
Life within the Pale was more traditional than outside of it, though the rapid modernization of cities within the Pale left little chance of preserving traditional ways of life, irrespective of religious beliefs. As Leshchinskii described the situation, “The Jewish communities of Odessa and Ekaterinoslav consisted of large numbers of Jews who had broken with the traditional patriarchal Jewish way of life, and quickly adopted both the good and bad aspects of urban civilization. Among them one can see marked contrasts, with fully assimilated Jewish bourgeois living side-by-side with the impoverished Jewish proletariat.”63
The Industrial Revolution of the late nineteenth century resulted in the financial ruin of many Jewish craftsmen, leading many of them to emigrate abroad. The “proletarianization” of the Jewish populace had reached a grand scale by the outbreak of World War I. According to Leshchinskii, 600,000 Jews (30 percent of the working population) had become part of the proletariat by the beginning of the war. Half of these were workers and apprentices in workshops, while 75,000 worked in factories, mostly concentrated in the Polish territories, in cities such as Warsaw, Bialystok, and Lodz. An additional 110,000 Jews were employed as porters, longshoremen, and in similar professions.64
By the end of the nineteenth century, 39.7 percent of those engaged in commerce in Russia were Jewish (72.8 percent in the Pale of Settlement). They owned mostly small-scale enterprises, and the profits of the Jewish “merchant class” were often barely enough to make ends meet. Löwe claims that Jews suffered as a result of industrialization, perhaps more than any other ethnic group in Russia, as they were deprived of those advantages they had earlier enjoyed. In his view, the stereotype of the Jews as the “spearhead” of capitalism (as Russian conservatives often viewed them) was more an ideological construct than a reflection of reality.65
Both industrialization and rapid population growth hit Jewish craftsmen (remeslenniki) and traders hard. In the Kursk and Yaroslav gubernias (where Jews were forbidden to live) there was less than one craftsman per 1,000 inhabitants, whereas there were 2.6 for every 1,000 in the Kiev gubernia. Of these the majority were Jews. At the turn of the century, a craftsman's income was often less than half that of a peasant (150–300 rubles, as opposed to 400–500 rubles respectively). Many would not survive market conditions and became unemployed, and turned to haunting market squares in the hope of finding work. In some communities, unemployment went as high as 40 percent. In 1898, nearly 20 percent of Jews within the Pale received charitable assistance for Passover. In 1900, nearly two-thirds of Jewish funerals in Odessa were paid for by the community. According to some sources, at the turn of the century 30–35 percent of the Jewish population was