The War of the World: History's Age of Hatred (17 page)

Table 2.1: Principal locations of the 1881–2 pogroms

It would be quite wrong to think of Jews in the Pale as an ethnic minority within a predominantly Russian population. Rather, the Pale was a patchwork of different ethnic groups, inhabited not only by Jews and Russians but also by Poles, Lithuanians, Ukrainians, Byelorussians, Germans, Romanians and others. In Elizavetgrad, Jews in fact were the largest single group in an ethnically mixed population, despite accounting for less than two-fifths of the total. Although there were slightly more Russians in Ekaterinoslav, they accounted for just 42 per cent of the population, only slightly more than the Jews. Around 16 per cent of the population were Ukrainians, while a significant proportion of the remainder were Poles or Germans. Indeed, the 1897 census revealed that the city’s population included natives of every province of European Russia, as well as people from the ten provinces of the Caucasus, the ten of Central Asia and the seven of Siberia – to say nothing of twenty-six foreign countries. This helps to explain why Jews in the Pale were generally not confined to ghettos. Though there were sometimes distinct Jewish quarters, these were not products of an imposed segregation. On the contrary, there was a high degree of social integration, especially among upper-income groups. Wealthy Jewish families, like the Brodsky family of Kiev, were
respected local notables who did not confine their philanthropic generosity to their own religious community. In Ekaterinoslav, too, the Jews were an integral part of the local elite.

The second, and not unrelated, point was the extraordinary economic success achieved by some (not all) Jews living under Russian rule. The late nineteenth century was a time of enormous economic opportunity as the Tsarist regime, having abolished serfdom, embarked on an ambitious programme of agrarian reform and industrialization. Trade, international and domestic, flourished as never before. Excluded by law from the ownership of land, schooled to be more literate and more numerate than their Gentile neighbours, the Jews of the Pale were well situated to seize the new commercial opportunities that presented themselves. By 1897 Jews accounted for 73 per cent of all merchants and manufacturers in Russian-controlled Poland and were establishing comparable positions of dominance in urban areas further east. At around the same time, they accounted for around 13 per cent of the population of Kiev, but 44 per cent of the city’s merchants, handling around two-thirds of its commerce. They accounted for just over a third of the population of Ekaterinoslav in 1902, but 84 per cent of the merchants of the first guild and 69 per cent of those of the second guild. That is not to imply that all Jews in the Pale were wealthy merchants. Many continued to play their traditional role as ‘middle men’ between peasants and the market economy, or as innkeepers and artisans. A considerable number of Jews were miserably poor. The ‘pestilent’ cellars of Vilna (modern Vilnius), renowned as the cultural capital of East European Jewry, and the ‘crammed’ slums of industrial Łódź, supposedly the Manchester of Poland, appalled one British MP who toured the Pale in 1903. The polarization of fortunes within the Jewish communities of the Pale was in fact a crucial factor in the violence of the pogroms, which may have been inspired by the riches of the merchant elite, but were almost always directed against the property and persons of the poor.

A third and crucial factor, much exaggerated at the time but nevertheless undeniable, was the disproportionate involvement of Jews in revolutionary politics. Trotsky was no anomaly. To be sure, the Jewish woman Hesia Helfman played only a minor role in the assassination
of Alexander II, which was the catalyst for the 1881 pogroms. Yet there is no question that Jews were over-represented in the various left-wing parties and revolutionary organizations that spearheaded the 1905 Revolution, against which the pogroms of that year were directed. For example, Jews accounted for 11 per cent of the Bolshevik delegates and 23 per cent of the Menshevik delegates at the 5th Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Party in 1907. A further fifty-nine delegates, out of a total of 338, were from the socialist Jewish Workers’ League, the
Bund
. In all, 29 per cent of the delegates at the Congress were Jewish – as against 4 per cent of the Russian population. The
Bund
’s rhetoric in the wake of the Kishinev pogrom did nothing to allay the suspicion that the revolutionary movement had a Jewish character. One Yiddish flysheet explicitly linked the struggle against capitalism and Tsarism with the struggle against anti-Semitism: ‘With hatred, with a threefold curse, we must weave the shroud for the Russian autocratic government, for the entire anti-Semitic criminal gang, for the entire capitalist world.’

Finally, it is important to recognize the shift that occurred in the late nineteenth century from traditional anti-Judaism to a more ‘modern’ anti-Semitism, linked – though not identical – to the racist ideology that had swept the nineteenth-century West. It was an apostate named Brafman who, in
The Book of the Kahal
, first alleged the existence of a secret Jewish organization with sinister powers. This conspiracy theory greatly appealed to new organizations like the League of the Russian People, which combined reactionary devotion to autocracy with violent anti-Semitism. It was in the League’s St Petersburg newspaper
Russkoye Znamya
that the Moldavian anti-Semite Pavolachi Krushevan published the fake ‘Protocols of the Elders of Zion’ (1903), a series of articles subsequently reprinted with the imprimatur of the Russian army as
The Root of Our Misfortunes
. Though the ‘Protocols’ would exert a greater malign influence in the inter-war years, they were Tsarist Russia’s distinctive contribution to the poisonous brew of pre-war prejudice. Once, Russia’s rulers had believed that the ‘Jewish question’ could be answered by the simple expedient of enforced conversion. The new conspiracy theorists made it clear that this simply would not suffice. In the words of
Russkoye Znamya
:

The government’s duty is to consider the Jews as a nation just as dangerous for the life of humanity as wolves, scorpions, snakes, poisonous spiders and other creatures which are doomed to destruction because of their rapacious-ness towards human beings and whose annihilation is commended by law… The
Zhids
must be put in such conditions that they will gradually die out.

As we have seen, such language was not unknown in German anti-Semitic circles. But it was in the Russian Empire that words first led to deeds.

The pogroms of 1881 are usually seen as a response to the assassination of Tsar Alexander II; there were widespread rumours of an official order to inflict retribution on the Jews. It is no coincidence, however, that the violence began just after Easter, traditionally a time of tension between Christian and Jewish communities. On April 15, three days after Easter Sunday, a drunken Russian got himself thrown out of a Jewish-owned tavern in Elizavetgrad. This was the catalyst. Amid cries of ‘The Yids are beating our people’, a crowd formed which proceeded to attack Jewish stores in the marketplace and then moved on to Jewish residences. Few people in Elizavetgrad were killed or even injured, though one elderly Jewish man was later found dead in a tavern. Rather, there was an orgy of vandalism and looting, which left ‘many houses with broken doors and windows’ and ‘streets… covered with feathers [from looted bedding] and obstructed with broken furniture’. In the succeeding days, there were similar outbreaks in Znamenka, Golta, Aleksandriia, Anan’ev and Berezovka. The worst violence took place between April 26 and 28 in Kiev, where a number of Jews were murdered and twenty cases of rape were reported. Once again, the trouble then spread to nearby districts. In the months that followed, there were attacks on Jews in places all over the southern half of the Pale. In Odessa attacks on Jews began on May 3 and lasted nearly five days. On June 30 a new pogrom broke out in Pereyaslav and continued for three days, despite the arrival on the scene of the Governor of Poltava himself. All told, the authorities counted some
224 pogroms between April and August. Though the total number of fatalities was just sixteen, damage to property was substantial. Nor was that the end. On Christmas Day there was a pogrom in Warsaw. Easter 1882 saw further attacks on Jews in Bessarabia, Kherson and Chernigov; at the end of March there was a particularly violent pogrom in Balta, in which forty Jews were killed or seriously wounded.

What caused this unprecedented spate of attacks on Jews, variously described by past historians as a wave or an epidemic? It used to be argued that the government had instigated them. Some have blamed Nikolai Ignatiev, the Minister of the Interior, others the regime’s
éminence grise,
the procurator-general of the Orthodox Synod, Constantine Pobedonostsev, still others the new Tsar himself. Yet Pobedonostsev ordered the clergy to preach against pogroms, while it is clear that the new Tsar, Alexander III, deplored what was happening. The government, to be sure, argued that the
pogromshchiki
had legitimate economic grievances against the Jews, who were said to be ‘exploiting… the original population’, profiting from ‘unproductive labour’ and monopolizing commerce, which they were said to have ‘captured’. The Tsar himself saw ‘no end’ to anti-Jewish feeling in Russia, because: ‘These Yids make themselves too repulsive to Russians, and as long as they continue to exploit Christians, this hatred will not diminish.’ But such comments scarcely amount to evidence of official responsibility. The spurious allegations of Jewish exploitation reflected an effort by the authorities to understand more than to excuse popular motives. Other officials pointed nervously to evidence that anarchists had encouraged the pogroms. In the words of the chairman of the Committee of Ministers, Count Reutern:

Today they hunt and rob the Jews, tomorrow they will go after the so-called kulaks, who morally are the same as Jews only of Orthodox Christian faith, then merchants and landowners may be next… In the face of… inactivity on the part of the authorities, we may expect in a not too distant future the development of the most horrible socialism.

In reality the pogroms seem to have been a largely spontaneous phenomenon, eruptions of violence in economically volatile, multiethnic communities. If the pogroms had instigators they were most
probably the Jews’ economic rivals: Russian artisans and merchants. Often the perpetrators were unemployed; many were drunk; overwhelmingly they were male. Of the 4,052 rioters who were arrested, only 222 were women. But otherwise the perpetrators were remarkable for their social diversity. The official investigation noted: ‘Clerks, saloon and hotel waiters, artisans, drivers, flunkeys, day labourers in the employ of the Government, and soldiers on furlough – all these joined in the movement.’ One witness of events in Kiev saw ‘an immense crowd of young boys, artisans, and labourers… [a] “barefooted brigade”’. The rioters in Elizavetgrad included 181 townspeople, 177 peasants, 130 former soldiers, six ‘foreigners’ and one honorary nobleman. Detailed occupational data survive for only 363 of those arrested, including 102 unskilled workmen, 87 day-labourers, 77 peasants and 33 domestic servants. Peasants certainly played their part, many in the sincere belief that the new Tsar had issued an
ukaz
to ‘beat the Jews’. Some villagers in Chernigov were so convinced of this that they asked the local ‘land captain’ for a written guarantee that they would not be punished if they
failed
to attack the local Jews. However, the main role of peasants was to loot Jewish property after pogroms had happened; they arrived on the scene with empty carts, not weapons. More likely to be involved in the actual violence were migrant workers, like the many unemployed Russians then seeking work in Ukraine, or the demobilized soldiers returning from the recent war with Turkey.

The key to understanding the way the violence spread lies in the role played by railway workers. It was they who transmitted the idea of attacking Jews along some of the principal railways of the Pale: from Elizavetgrad to Aleksandriia; from Anan’ev to Tiraspol; from Kiev to Brovary, Konotop and Zhmerinka; from Aleksandrovsk to Orekhov, Berdiansk and Mariupol’. Railways had seemed to be the sinews of modern imperial power; that had been the rationale behind the Trans-Siberian. Now it turned out that they could also be transmission mechanisms for public disorder. Almost as important in this regard was the role
not
played by local authorities. The official report noted ‘the complete indifference displayed by the local non-Jewish inhabitants to the havoc wrought before their eyes’. This indifference allied with a chronic shortage of police manpower to give the rioters
free rein. In Elizavetgrad there were just eighty-seven policemen for a total population of 43,229. To make matters worse, the local police chiefs took no action for two days. In short, the 1881 pogroms illustrate the way a local ethnic riot could spread contagiously in the presence of modern communications and in the absence of modern policing.