The Anxious Triumph

by Donald Sassoon

  Tsardom had failed to reform itself. Russia was more than ever in turmoil. There was an enormous increase in the publication of books, newspapers, and journals of varying political persuasions. New civic associations emerged. Capitalism, and with it the middle classes and ‘bourgeois’ society, was growing.100 Yet the Tsar was out of touch with this new Russia. The regime’s narrow basis of consensus would lead to its definitive downfall in 1917, changing the course of European and world history. The problem was that there was no political mechanism able to transform dissent into constructive opposition and the peoples of the Tsarist Empire into a nation. The people could be consulted, but could not rule.

  Reforms proceeded at a snail’s pace, particularly in the countryside, where the object was to develop agrarian capitalism. The Tsar, far from being the Tsar of all Russians (his official title was ‘Emperor and Autocrat of All the Russias’), was now little more than the Tsar of the landowners.

  Building democracy in these circumstances would have been difficult even if the regime had chosen, wholeheartedly, to trust the people, not a prevalent feeling, at the end of the nineteenth century, even in the rest of ‘civilized’ Europe. Building democracy would not have necessarily generated a stronger capitalist-industrial growth, but it would have involved the people in the construction of a more unified country. Democracy, however, would have revealed the deep splits in Russian society at a time when the throne of the Tsars was tottering. It is possible to build an industrial society in an authoritarian manner, as Stalin proved decades later, but to do so required a far stronger state than that run by the Tsars.

  12

  Keeping the ‘Outsiders’ Out

  Capitalism does not need nations, though it needs states. It needs capital and workers and cares little for the ‘national’ origins of either. Milton Friedman, in one of his most libertarian moments, concluded his 1991 Wriston Lecture by declaring that:

  The great virtue of a free market system is that it does not care what color people are; it does not care what their religion is; it only cares whether they can produce something you want to buy. It is the most effective system we have discovered to enable people who hate one another to deal with one another and help one another.1

  However, the survival of capitalism, as we have seen, requires political and social conditions, such as a functioning political system, namely a state or a legal framework, as well as social cohesion, optimism, the belief that things will get better, a certain degree of loyalty towards the state and a feeling that one will be protected by it. In a real world – capitalism or no capitalism – people are never simply buyers and sellers, indifferent to each other, to their identities, to their hopes, to their hatred, but require a feeling of national togetherness.

  Nation-building sometimes, though not always, requires exclusions since it asks the question ‘Who is in, who is out?’ Assimilation may not always be available. When it is, it may not always work. Outsiders may resist modernity, defending their culture, their traditions, and their religion. Some, within such groups, can’t wait to break out of ‘their’ culture and be like everyone else. The Jews, for instance, were and are deeply divided among themselves. In the past, when they were forced to live together enclosed or self-enclosed in their own community and ghettos, they had been united by religion, a wish to live apart, and the anti-Semitism of those around them, but with ‘emancipation’ and their acquisition of rights, matters became more complex. Some desperately wanted assimilation, others desperately wished to remain separate. Most opted for a halfway house and became ‘secular Jews’.

  Outsiders such as Jews often represented a problem for other sub-merged nationalisms. Thus in the Tsarist Empire there were those who advocated the unification of all Slavs (Russians, Ukrainians, Poles, Bulgarians, Serbs, etc.). But what to do with the Jews? Could they ever become Russians? Even a conservative ideologue like Mikhail Katkov (Pobedonostsev’s predecessor) thought that the Russianization of the Jews was a possibility since in other countries, such as France and Britain, they seemed able to be patriotic.2 Prime Minister Nikolai Bunge in his ‘Memorandum to the Tsar’ (1894) noted that there was no point blaming the Jews for not integrating, since they were so discriminated against.3

  In the Russian Empire, Jews had been traditionally confined by law to the Pale of Settlement, a territory that roughly corresponded with the old Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. This included parts of western Russia, Poland, Lithuania, Belarus, Moldova, and Ukraine, and thus cities such as Odessa, Vilnius, Warsaw, Białystok with its two-thirds Jewish population, Lublin (half-Jewish), and Łódź (one-third Jewish).4 In 1856, Tsar Alexander II, shortly after his accession, decided to review all decrees discriminating against Jews ‘with the general goal of fusing this people with the indigenous population’.5 Selected ‘valuable’ Jews were allowed to settle outside the Pale, in cities such as Moscow and St Petersburg, and discriminatory rules that drafted Jews into the armed forces at a higher rate and a younger age than non-Jews were abolished.6 By 1897 there were over 5 million Jews in the Tsarist Empire – almost 4 per cent of the total population, probably half the Jewish population on the planet. Elsewhere in Europe there were 2 million Jews in Austria-Hungary, more than half a million in Germany, including those in recently conquered Alsace, 200,000 in the United Kingdom, and 115,000 in France.7 In France, Germany, and Britain they were relatively assimilated and integrated. In the Austro-Hungarian Empire they were supporters of the empire, in the sense that they owed no allegiance to any of the nations of Austria-Hungary: not to Bohemia or Moldavia; not to Hungary or Austria; and they did not regard themselves as Czech or German. And they were, as Carl Schorske explained, ‘the supra-national people of the multi-national state’.8 They were perfectly at home in this liberal, cosmopolitan environment.

  In Russia the situation was far more complex. Drafting Jews into the Russian nation proved near-impossible. Even some members of the intelligentsia – both liberal (such as the poet Nikolay Nekrasov) and reactionary (such as Dostoyevsky) – exhibited marked anti-Semitic sentiments, assuming that most Jews were merciless exploiters of the toiling masses. In his Diary of a Writer, Dostoyevsky, after pages and pages manifesting his scorn for the Jews, while denying he was a ‘Jew-hater’, complained about ‘Judaism and the Jewish idea which is clasping the whole world’.9 Nekrasov in his 1866 poem ‘Ballet’ scorned ‘commercial’ minorities, the Jews, of course, but also the Germans and the Greeks, (he lamented there were no Russian merchants: ‘Has the bitter cold frightened them away?’), and added contempt for mercenary Russian girls whose:

  ideal is the golden calf,

  Embodied in the gray-haired Jew,

  Whose filthy hand causes these bosoms

  To quiver with gold.10

  Nekrasov was possibly thinking of the Jewish ‘capitalists’ operating successfully in Russia, for example Samuel Polyakov from Belarus, the banker Leopold Kronenberg from Poland, and members of the Ephrussi family from Berdychiv in Ukraine, all contractors who had built the Russian railways.

  The early 1880s saw a wave of pogroms, the first widespread manifestation of popular violence against Jews in the Russian Empire.11 Contrary to the widely held view that the Russian authorities inspired, or aided and abetted, anti-Jewish rioting, the government of Alexander III actually ‘feared all popular violence, including pogroms’.12 Even the arch-reactionary Konstantin Pobedonostsev sent a circular letter to the clergy in the Pale urging them to deter the population from attacking the Jews.13 When a pogrom started in Lugansk (Ukraine) in 1905 the demonstrators, carrying both the red flag and portraits of the Tsar, were stopped by government troops.14

  There had been ‘pogroms’ in Odessa previously (in 1821, 1859, 1871), initiated by the local Greek community,15 but, otherwise, pogroms were rare in Russia before 1881 (when Alexander II was assassinated).16 The new pogroms were mainly in urban centres where the Jews were often the largest group. In Kishinev (in what is now Moldova) in 1903, forty-seven Jews were murder
ed, houses burned, and shops looted.17 Many of those responsible were workers, particularly miners.18 Kishinev was followed by numerous pogroms in 1905 to 1906. One of the worst was in Odessa, where Jews constituted one-third of the population, in the wake of the Tsar’s October Manifesto of 1905 that extended fundamental rights to Jews. Hundreds of Jews were killed, perhaps as many as eight hundred.19

  These pogroms represented a novel type of anti-Semitism connected to the new governmental policy of absorbing the Jews.20 One of the outcomes was a massive Jewish emigration: between 1881 and 1914 almost two million Jews emigrated from Russia, the vast majority to the United States, very few to Palestine. Zionism held virtually no appeal for the overwhelming majority of Jews. The Second ‘Aliyah’ (1904–14), as Zionists called the migration of Jews to what was then Palestine (Aliyah means ‘ascent’, namely ascent to Israel), was in fact a dismal failure in terms of numbers. In the decade preceding the First World War only 35,000 Jews went to Palestine.21 Most left again as soon as they could and only 2,500 decided to remain.22 These became the backbone of the Zionist movement in what would become Israel; they revived Hebrew as a spoken language, founded schools, and established the first kibbutz in 1909.

  Jews had a particular advantage over other persecuted peoples: by 1917 a major power, Great Britain, looked favourably on their settlement in Palestine. The famous Balfour Declaration of 1917 (not an official document but a paragraph in a letter addressed by the Foreign Secretary, Arthur Balfour, to the Zionist Federation in Britain via Lord Rothschild) gave preferential treatment to Jewish immigration in Palestine over the wishes and interests of the local population. In the words of Arthur Koestler, ‘it was one of the most improbable political documents of all time. In it one nation solemnly promised to a second nation the country of a third.’23 After the war the Balfour Declaration was incorporated in the British Mandate over Palestine while declaring that Britain would safeguard the civil and religious rights of the non-Jewish inhabitants (i.e. 90 per cent of the resident population), but without mentioning their political rights or any organization that might represent them.24

  The relatively small numbers of victims of Russian pogroms, a few thousand at the most, moreover, suggests that the pogroms themselves were not the major cause of the emigration of 2 million Jews, though certainly they were an added incentive. There were plenty of other good reasons for Jews to leave Russia: conscription by the Tsar, lack of opportunities, and above all poverty and the prospect of a good future – just like the other millions of Europeans who emigrated to the United States not out of fear for their lives but hoping for a better life. For the vast majority of Jews the new (American) capitalist paradise was far more appealing than the ancient land of Abraham of biblical and Zionist lore.

  Many Jews in Russia joined revolutionary movements, some because they were part of a rebellious intelligentsia, some because they were proletarians, some because they felt alienated from the regime.25 Count Witte, Finance Minister and later Prime Minister (whose second wife was Jewish), was in no doubt that it was the discrimination and abuses suffered by the Jews which caused their radicalization: ‘From the pusillanimous people that the Jews were some thirty years ago there sprang men and women who threw bombs, committed political murders and sacrificed their lives for the revolution.’ He recalled that he had warned the Jewish leaders that they should show some loyalty to the regime and that ‘instead of dreaming of revolutionary freedom’ they should demand the right not to be discriminated against.26 The Ministry of Finance opposed anti-Jewish policy because of the important role Jews could play in industrialization; here it clashed with the Ministry of the Interior, for whom more Jews meant social unrest. The Russian authorities distributed circulars in Poland and Ukraine warning that pogroms might diminish production in factories.27

  Since Russian industrialization proceeded more rapidly in the western territories of the empire, the Pale, Jews appeared to benefit directly, at least in terms of employment, from industrialization. In the Donbass region in Eastern Ukraine, in particular, industry was booming in the 1890s, attracting thousands of Jews. Soon they constituted between 20 and 35 per cent of the population.28 This internal migration was partly due to the relative prosperity of the native peasantry (relative to central and northern Russia): why go down a mine or work in a factory when you have a good field to till?29

  The Donbass became an area of exceptionally high working-class militancy. However, ethnic divisions (in addition to Jews, Russians, and Ukrainians there were also Greeks, Gypsies, Tatars, Turks, and Poles) made class solidarity very difficult, and the Great Russian and Ukrainian industrial workforce increasingly resented the Jewish presence.30 If nation-building was not easy, building class consciousness was even more problematic.

  A further element complicated the situation: educated Jews chose Russification over other national identities such as Ukrainization, thus increasing anti-Semitism among non-Russian nationalists. Jewish socialists in Vilna preferred to speak Russian rather than Polish, to the dismay of Polish nationalists.31 Assimilation was one thing, but it was not clear which nation Jews should assimilate into: Russia, Poland, or Lithuania.

  The Populist (Narodnik) revolutionary Narodnaya Volya, in a proclamation of 30 August 1881 ‘To the Ukrainian People’, drafted by Gerasim Grigorevich Romanenko on behalf of its executive committee, intoned:

  The people in the Ukraine suffer worst of all from the Jews. Who takes the land, the woods, the taverns from out of your hands? The Jews. From whom does the muzhik, often with tears in his eyes, have to beg permission to get to his own field, his own plot of land? – the Jews … The Jew curses you, cheats you, drinks your blood … Soon the revolt will be taken up across all of Russia against the tsar, the pany [landlords], the Jews.32

  These sentiments were quickly condemned by other leading Narodniks, who thought that any popular enmity towards Jews should be turned into a revolutionary hatred of the ruling classes, but there is little doubt that many Narodniks held anti-Semitic feelings.33 Left-wing anti-Semitism was not unique to Russia. In Germany, for example, socialists often equated Jews with capitalism.34

  The pogroms in Russia in the late nineteenth century seemed to confirm the widely held western European view that the empire was still stuck in the Middle Ages, but, in fact, the rest of Europe conformed to the Russian pattern. Anti-Jewish riots, when they took place, originated from the people while the main protectors of Jews were the central authorities (thus the centrally directed Nazi genocide of 1941–5 was a new phenomenon and not just in its sheer scale). In 1819 an anti-Jewish riot occurred in Würzburg (Bavaria) that lasted three days and caused many Jews to flee the town in spite of the intervention of police and army. The Würzburg events seemed to be a signal for further anti-Jewish riots in other German towns such as Frankfurt and Hamburg that spread as far as Copenhagen. They were known as the ‘Hep Hep’ riots from the student slogan Hep! Hep! Jude verrecke! (‘Hep, Hep, die Jew!’).35 George Eliot called her philo-Semitic essay published in 1879, her last published work, ‘The Modern Hep! Hep! Hep!’36

  These riots, just as those in Russia in the 1880s, were not remnants of some ancient medieval antagonism: they were embedded in modernity, sparked by the fears and stress that a rapidly changing economic situation brings about. The possibility of an improvement in the legal conditions of Jews was sufficient to provoke the hostility of lower-class elements of society as well as that of journalists and professors.37 Adolf Wagner, the socially inclined Christian economist (not the far more famous composer Richard Wagner), complained in 1884 that ‘the new economic conditions have allowed a foreign race to exploit our economic relations; a race whose motto “Gain as much as possible” fits in well with the new economics.’38

  In Poland the nationalist leader Roman Dmowski raised the call to boycott Jewish businesses. This did not endear him to Jewish voters and, in 1912, he lost his seat in the Duma to a Jewish socialist.39 By 1914, however, Dmowski and his party were a major political
force in Poland.40 He advocated an alliance with Russia against the Germans designed to protect the Poles from ‘Ukrainians, Lithuanians, Jews, e tutti quanti’.41 Yet, he did not think Jews should be eliminated or expelled. In his Germany, Russia and the Polish Question (Niemcy, Rosya i kwestya polska, 1908) he described them as highly motivated and intelligent, among the most educated, the most economically entrepreneurial, and among the most revolutionary.42 But in spite of such qualities they remained ‘foreign elements’ to be tolerated only as long as they did not plot the destruction of the Polish nation.43 After the First World War, Dmowski became increasingly anti-Semitic, regarding Woodrow Wilson and David Lloyd George as puppets of ‘the Jews’ and the League of Nations as a Jewish plot.44 Yet Dmowski remained such a significant figure that in 2006 a gigantic statue of him was erected in the centre of Warsaw, an icon of Polish ultra-nationalism.45

  The age of mass politics, largely urban, gave rise not only to the politics of class, as socialists hoped and conservatives feared, but to the politics of identity. In a dynamic society where ‘fate’ or ‘the gods’ could no longer be blamed for failure, the search for scapegoats was as intense as ever and prone to manipulation by unscrupulous politicians. In previous centuries, pogroms against religious minorities and against the Jews in particular had often been connected to natural calamities, famines or pestilence. In the new age of democracy anxieties about one’s station in life could give rise to similar discontent. In Poland, middle-class frustration with the socio-economic upheavals of capitalism had by the end of the century become intertwined with political anti-Semitism.46 The urban lower-middle classes, who were mainly engaged in artisanal manufacture, were losing the economic battle with capitalists, few of whom were Polish. Industry was foreign-owned, with German, British, French, and Belgian capital playing an increasing role in the industrialization of Poland.47 Given the very high presence of Jews in Poland (Warsaw by 1904 was one of the most Jewish cities in the world with over 300,000 Jewish inhabitants), it is not entirely surprising that any anti-foreign feelings eventually led to overt manifestations of anti-Semitism particularly in the most industrialized part of Poland.48