The Russian Revolution полностью

The day after the proclamation of the October Manifesto, anti-Jewish pogroms broke out throughout the Empire, accompanied by attacks on students and intellectuals. Panic spread among Jews in the Pale of Settlement and in cities like Moscow where many of them resided on temporary permits: Jews had not experienced such fear since the Middle Ages. There were beatings and killings, accompanied by the looting and burning of Jewish properties. Odessa, which had a record of extreme violence, witnessed the most savage pogrom, in which around five hundred Jews perished. It was common for thirty, forty, or more Jews to lose their lives in a medium-sized city.¹³⁴

Although subjecting Jews to severe discriminations, the Russian Government had in the past not encouraged pogroms; it had even repressed them, from fear that anti-Jewish violence would get out of control and victimize Russian landlords and officials. Indeed, the two kinds of violence had a common psychological basis: for although radical intellectuals considered anti-Jewish pogroms “reactionary” and assaults on landlords “progressive,” their perpetrators made no such distinction. The spectacle of policemen and Cossacks standing by while mobs beat and robbed Jews the peasants interpreted to mean that the authorities condoned assaults on all non-communal properties and their owners. In 1905–6, in many localities, peasants attacked landed estates of Christian owners under the impression that the Tsar who tolerated anti-Jewish pogroms would not object to pogroms of landlords.* So that, in preventing anti-Jewish violence, the establishment acted in its own best interests.

11. After an anti-Jewish pogrom in Rostov on Don—the burnt out shells of a prayer house and private residence: October 1905.

But in their frustration with the course of events, the monarchists now lost sight of these realities: they not only tolerated anti-Jewish excesses but actively promoted them. After assuming the premiership Witte learned that the Department of Police, using equipment which it had seized from the revolutionaries, secretly printed and distributed appeals for anti-Jewish pogroms—a practice which he stopped but not before it had claimed many lives.¹³⁵ Unable to explain what had happened to their idealized Russia in any other way than by blaming alleged villains, among whom Jews occupied the place of honor, the monarchists vented their fury in a manner that encouraged generalized violence. Nicholas shared in this self-destructive delusion when he wrote his mother on October 27 that “nine-tenths of the revolutionaries are Yids [zhidy].” This explained and presumably justified popular wrath against them and the other “bad people,” among whom he included “Russian agitators, engineers, lawyers.”¹³⁶* In December 1905, Nicholas accepted the insignia of the Union of Russian People (Soiuz Russkogo Naroda), a newly formed monarchist organization which wanted the restoration of autocracy and persecution of Jews.

The main cause of the unrest now, however, was not Jews and intellectuals but peasants. The peasantry completely misunderstood the October Manifesto, interpreting it in its own manner as giving the communes license to take over the countryside. Some rural disorders occurred in the spring of 1905, more in the summer, but they exploded only after October 17.¹³⁷ Hearing of strikes and pogroms in the cities going unpunished, the peasants drew their own conclusions. Beginning on October 23, when large-scale disorders broke out in Chernigov province, the wave of rural disorders kept on swelling until the onset of winter, reemerging in the spring of 1906 on an even vaster scale. It would fully subside only in 1908 following the adoption of savage repressive measures by Prime Minister Stolypin.