One of the most important anti-Semitic organizations was the Soyuz Russkogo Naroda (the Union of the Russian People). Founded in October 1905, it enjoyed a spectacular
growth, and soon it had about one thousand local branches. Its virulent anti-Semitism
finds its equivalent only in Hitler’s Mein Kampf. One of its theoreticians, V. F. Zalevsky, accused the Jews of parasitism and the
secret wish to dominate the world. “The Jews are a damaging tribe,” he wrote, “they
don’t like heavy work and try to live from the labors of others, letting others work
for them.” He continued: “Even though the Jews . . . plunder the Russian people, this
still seems not to be enough; they want to completely subjugate the Russian people,
they want to be their masters.”[38] In the text of a congress resolution of the organization in 1915, prepared by a
section with the name “For the struggle against Jewish supremacy,” the word “Jews”
was consequently replaced by its pejorative equivalent zhidy (Yids). In the resolution one can read that it should be forbidden for Yids to have Orthodox
Russian employees working for them or to participate in joint-stock companies. Russian
schools should not accept Jewish children. And for Russians it should be forbidden
to visit a Jewish doctor or to eat together with Jews. The only good solution for
the “Talmudic zhidovstvo” (Yid people) is “that they be chased from Russia in the name of the imperial laws.”[39]
In the program of the anti-Semitic “Union of the Russian People” one could read that
“the Russian people, as the gatherer of Russian lands and the creator of the great
might of the state, enjoys a preferential position in national life and in national
administration.”[40] One of the demands was that the number of Jewish deputies to the State Duma be
restricted to three: “Such limitation is necessary because of the disruptive, anti-state
activity of the united Jewish masses, their unceasing hatred of everything Russian,
and the unscrupulousness which they so openly demonstrated during the revolutionary
movement [of 1905].”[41] It was added that “Jews could, of course, not be members of the Union.”[42] In September 1903 Znamya (The Banner), which would later become the official paper of the Union, was the first
to publish in nine articles the complete text of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a pamphlet about a Jewish plot to dominate the world that had been forged around
1900 by the head of the tsarist secret police in Paris at the suggestion of Pobedonostsev.[43] In October 1906 the Union founded the Black Hundreds (chornye sotnye), a terror organization with an armed wing, the Yellow Shirts—a predecessor and probably even a model for Mussolini’s blackshirts and Hitler’s
Braunhemde (brownshirts). The movement mushroomed. At the height of its influence, in the years
1906–07, it had three thousand branches,[44] which is astonishing in a country with a quasi-non-existent civil society. In effect
it was not so much a sign of a developing civil society as of an emerging uncivil society, because the movement played an important role in the wave of pogroms
that ravaged Russia in this period and in which thousands of Jews were killed. According
to Walter Laqueur there were up to seven hundred pogroms. However, these were not only perpetrated by the Black Hundred movement,
but equally by the tsarist authorities. “Various parliamentary inquiry committees
found that the local authorities were frequently involved; in some places where the
Black Hundred did not exist . . . the pogrom was carried out by the police single-handed.
. . . It was virtually impossible to establish to what extent pogroms were spontaneous
and to what degree they were carefully planned and organized.”[45]
