The War of the World: History's Age of Hatred (18 page)

In the aftermath of the pogroms, the government did take steps to punish those responsible. Altogether 3,675 persons were arrested for participation in pogroms in 1881, of whom 2,359 were tried, giving the lie to the notion that the pogroms were officially instigated. Yet the Tsar and his ministers largely ignored the regional commissions of inquiry it had appointed, many of which recommended a relaxation of the residential and other restrictions imposed on the Jews. Instead, an official Committee on the Jews introduced the supposedly temporary Laws of May 3, 1882 which prohibited new settlement by Jews in rural areas or villages, as well as banning Jews from trading on Sundays and Christian holidays. Plans for wholesale expulsions from the countryside were seriously considered, though not adopted. In short, the situation of the Jews was made worse, not better, in the wake of the attacks against them. Nor did the punishment of those responsible for the pogroms prevent sporadic outbreaks of anti-Jewish violence in the succeeding years. As we have seen, many Russian Jews responded by emigrating westwards, to Austria-Hungary, to Germany, to England, to Palestine and, above all, to the United States.

What happened between 1903 and 1906 was quite different in character. This second outbreak of Russian pogroms had four distinct phases. It began in Kishinev in Bessarabia on April 19, 1903, once again at the time of the Orthodox Easter. The catalyst was a classic ‘blood libel’, prompted by the discovery of the corpse of a young boy, who, so the anti-Semitic newspaper
Bessarabets
alleged, had been the victim of a ritual murder by local Jews. In the violence that ensued, hundreds of shops and homes were looted or burned. This time, however, many more people were killed. In Kishinev alone, forty-seven Jews lost their lives, and this was merely the first of four phases of violence. The second phase coincided with the beginning of the Russo-Japanese War: these were the so-called mobilization pogroms, which tended to occur in places where troops were preparing to depart
for the East; there were forty in 1904, followed by another fifty between January and early October of 1905. The third and worst phase of the violence came in mid-October, the high point of the Revolution. On October 17, the day the Tsar published the liberal October Manifesto, Jews in Odessa once again came under attack; at a minimum, 302 were killed. Kiev erupted into violence a day later; as in 1881, there was extensive destruction of Jewish property – feathers from torn-up bedding once again littered the streets – but this time there was killing too. On October 21 it was the turn of Ekaterinoslav. Between October 31 and November 11 there were pogroms in 660 different places; more than 800 Jews were killed. The final phase happened in Białystok in June 1906 and in Siedlice three months later; in the former, eighty-two Jews were killed. Not only were these pogroms much more violent than those of 1881 (altogether, as many as 3,000 Jews may have died), they were also much more widespread. Violence against Jews happened as far away as Irkutsk and Tomsk in Siberia, though, as in 1881, there was no violence in the northernmost provinces of the Pale.

What was different? There was, no doubt, an element of escalation through repetition – those who remembered 1881 were able to proceed more quickly from violence against property to violence against persons. More important, however, was the fact that this time some Jewish communities fought back with ‘self-defence’ forces organized by local Bundists and Zionists. This was the case in Kishinev, as well as in Gomel. In Odessa there were pitched battles. Yet it was the fact that they took place in the context of a revolutionary crisis that was really crucial, for this ensured that, unlike in 1881, these pogroms were truly political events. Nicholas II told his mother that the
pogromshchiki
represented ‘a whole mass of loyal people’, reacting angrily to ‘the impertinence of the Socialists and revolutionaries… and, because nine tenths of the trouble-makers are Jews, the People’s whole anger turned against them.’ This analysis was accepted by many foreign observers, notably British diplomats like the ambassador at St Petersburg, Sir Charles Hardinge, his councillor, Cecil Spring Rice, and the Consul-General in Moscow, Alexander Murray. On the other hand, Jewish organizations portrayed the pogroms as officially instigated, a verdict echoed by more than one generation of scholars.

Neither view was wholly correct. The authorities certainly exaggerated the role played in the Revolution by Jews, who accounted for far less than 90 per cent of Russian socialists. On the other hand, the evidence of orchestration by the Minister for the Interior himself has been exposed as bogus. Indeed, Pleve seems to have taken steps to mitigate the situation of the Jews in the Pale in the wake of the Kishinev pogrom, holding meetings with the Zionist leader Theodor Herzl as well as with Lucien Wolf, head of the Joint Foreign Commission for the Aid of the Jews of Eastern Europe.

So who was to blame? The instigators were a mixture of rabid anti-Semites like Pavolachi Krushevan, who, in addition to publishing the ‘Protocols of the Elders of Zion’, was the editor of the inflammatory
Bessarabets
, and counter-revolutionary militias like the irregular Black Hundreds, who had taken up arms to combat the Revolution. There is some evidence that the perpetrators attacked Jews precisely because they saw them as pro-revolutionary. In Kiev, for example, the leading
pogromshchiki
shouted, ‘This is your freedom! Take that for your Constitution and revolution!’ Yet there is little evidence that Gentile socialists rallied to the side of the Jews. This can be inferred from the limited evidence we have on the social origins of the
pogrom-shchiki
. In Kiev, as in 1881, the looting of Jewish homes and stores was carried out mainly by ‘urchins, vagabonds and assorted riff-raff’, most of them teenagers. Elsewhere, however, the dregs of the
lumpen-proletariat
were joined by members of the working class, in whose name the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks claimed to be acting. According to a member of one of the Jewish self-defence organizations, the Odessa rioters included ‘nearly all classes of Russian society… not only barefoot beggars, but also factory and railroad workers, peasants, chiefs of station…’. In Ekaterinoslav the
pogromshchiki
were said to include ‘petty bourgeois, peasants, factory workers, day-labourers, off-duty soldiers and school children’. Moreover, these groups were joined in a number of cases by local policemen, who egged on the rioters, fired on Jewish self-defence forces and sometimes even joined in the ransacking of Jewish residences. In the aftermath of the upheaval, three Kiev police officers, including a colonel, were suspended and charged with dereliction of duty, though they never stood trial and the colonel had been reinstated by 1907. If so many
different social groups were ready to assault and murder Jews, the old idea that Russia’s revolution was a manifestation of ‘social polarization’ begins to look rather doubtful. Ethnic polarization might be a more accurate description.

Violence against Jews was, after all, not the only sign of the ethnic conflict inherent in the Tsarist system. Poles, Finns and Latvians had been among the minorities most aggressively targeted for ‘Russification’ by the imperial regime; their reaction to the Revolution, predictably, was to press for political autonomy. They too were over-represented in the Social Democratic parties. By contrast, the minority most closely identified with the old order, the German aristocracy of the Baltic provinces, were the targets for ferocious attacks in 1905; around 140 manor houses in Courland (Latvia) were razed to the ground by marauding peasants. Russian socialists, in short, might talk the language of class. But other Russians – or, to be precise, other subjects of the Tsar who lived on the Russian Empire’s multi-ethnic western periphery – answered in the language of race. The pogroms of 1905 proved to be the first of an escalating series of earthquakes that would devastate and ultimately destroy the Pale of Settlement in the first half of the twentieth century. They were an intimation of much that was to follow.

The division between the socialist and nationalist impulses of the 1905 Revolution helped the Tsarist regime to reassert its control. By the end of December 1905 the Soviet had been shut down. Trotsky languished in jail along with the rest of its leadership.

The Tsar and his ministers might have been expected to learn prudence from the events of 1905. To avoid another defeat and another revolution, they might simply have opted to avoid another war. But their assumption seems to have been that future wars with their imperial rivals were unavoidable. As General A. A. Kireyev had noted in his diary for 1900, ‘We, like any powerful nation, strive to expand our territory, our “legitimate” moral, economic and political influence. This is in the order of things.’ His greatest fear was that, as
he put it nine years later, ‘We have become a second-rate power.’ The main thing was that next time Russia must be better armed – and fight closer to home. Undaunted by the danger of renewed revolution, the government embarked on a massive programme of rearmament. This time, however, the railways they built ran not eastwards to Asia, but westwards towards Germany and her ally Austria-Hungary. Nobody was in any doubt that a primary function of these railways would be to carry not goods but troops.

The European empires, and none more than Tsarist Russia, had extended and consolidated their power by building tens of thousands of miles of railway track. The ethnic conflicts of 1881 and 1905, however, had revealed that railways could transmit disorder as well as order. The summer of 1914 brought a new revelation, as millions of men were transported by rail to battlefields all over Europe. The empires, it suddenly became clear, would travel to their own destruction by train. Yet there was no predictable railway timetable for war, as A. J. P. Taylor once famously argued. When it came, war took most people by surprise. In that respect, as in others, the end of the era of European mastery resembled nothing more than the most terrific train crash.

Now comes a war and shows that we still haven’t crawled out on all fours from the barbaric stage of our history. We have learned to wear suspenders, to write clever editorials, and to make chocolate milk, but when we have to decide seriously a question of the coexistence of a few tribes on a rich peninsula of Europe, we are helpless to find a way other than mutual mass slaughter.

Leon Trotsky

On June 28, 1914 a tubercular nineteen-year-old Bosnian youth named Gavrilo Princip carried out one of the most successful terrorist acts in all history. The shots he fired that day not only severed fatally the jugular vein of the Archduke Francis Ferdinand, the Habsburg heir to the thrones of Austria and Hungary. They also precipitated a war that destroyed the Austro-Hungarian Empire and transformed Bosnia-Herzegovina from one of its colonies into a part of a new South Slav state. These were in fact more or less precisely the things Princip had hoped to achieve, even if he cannot have anticipated such far-reaching success. Yet these were only the intended consequences of his action. The war he triggered was not confined to the Balkans; it also drew broad and hideous scars across northern Europe and the Near East. Like gargantuan abattoirs, its battlefields sucked in and slaughtered young men from all the extremities of the globe, claiming in all nearly ten million lives. It brought forth new and terrible methods of destruction, hitherto the stuff of Wellsian science-fiction:
cavalry charges by armed and armoured vehicles, lethal clouds of poison gas, invisible fleets of submarines. It rained down bombs from the air and cluttered the Atlantic seabed with sunken ships. It lasted longer than any major war in Europe in living memory, dragging on for four and a quarter years. And, besides the Habsburgs, it toppled three other imperial dynasties: the Romanovs, the Hohenzollerns and the Ottomans. Even when an armistice was proclaimed, the war refused to stop; it swept eastwards after 1918, as if eluding the grasp of the peacemakers.

The First World War changed everything. In the summer of 1914 the world economy was thriving in ways that look distinctly familiar. The mobility of commodities, capital and labour reached levels comparable with those we know today; the sea lanes and telegraphs across the Atlantic were never busier, as capital and migrants went west and raw materials and manufactures went east. The war sank globalization – literally. Nearly thirteen million tons of shipping went to the bottom of the sea as a result of German naval action, most of it by U-boats. International trade, investment and emigration all collapsed. In the war’s aftermath, revolutionary regimes arose that were fundamentally hostile to international economic integration. Plans replaced the market; autarky and protection took the place of free trade. Flows of goods diminished; flows of people and capital all but dried up. The European empires’ grip on the world – which had been the political undergirding of globalization – was dealt a profound, if not quite fatal, blow. The reverberations of Princip’s shots truly shook the world.

Yet political assassinations were far from uncommon in the early twentieth century, as we have already seen in the case of the unfortunate President McKinley. His successor, Theodore Roosevelt, only narrowly escaped assassination too. Between 1900 and 1913 no fewer than forty heads of state, politicians and diplomats were murdered, including four kings, six prime ministers and three presidents. In the Balkans alone there were eight successful assassinations, the victims of which included two kings, one queen, two prime ministers and the commander-in-chief of the Turkish Army. Why did this particular political murder have such vast consequences?

Part of the answer is that when the Archduke was shot he was
driving along one of the world’s great fault lines – the fateful historical border between the West and the East, the Occident and the Orient. From the fifteenth century until the late nineteenth, Bosnia and neighbouring Herzegovina had been parts of the Ottoman Empire. Many of their inhabitants had converted to Islam, the better to serve their Turkish rulers and to reap the full benefits of Ottoman rule. But Bosnia was never an entirely Muslim country; there were also substantial populations of Orthodox Serbs and Catholic Croats, to say nothing of Vlachs, Germans, Jews and Gypsies. To one Victorian visitor, the River Sava between Bosnia and Habsburg Croatia seemed to be the dividing line between Europe and Asia. Others saw the Miljacka, which runs through Sarajevo itself, as the border; or the Drina, which runs through Višegrad to the east. In truth, with the protracted decline of Ottoman power, the whole of Bosnia became a contested frontier. In 1908 Austria-Hungary had formally annexed Bosnia, over which it had enjoyed
de facto
control since the Congress of Berlin in 1878. When Francis Ferdinand visited Sarajevo just six years later, he was touring a new imperial acquisition, in which considerable sums had been invested on new roads, railways and schools, but where thousands of Austro-Hungarian troops still had to be stationed to maintain order.