Читать книгу Vladimir Jabotinsky's Russian Years, 1900-1925 - Brian J. Horowitz - Страница 12

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IN REVOLUTION AND COUNTERREVOLUTION, 1905–1906

THE 1905 REVOLUTION PRODUCED A GROWTH SPURT IN Jabotinsky. He developed as a Zionist theorist, a thinker on nationalism, and a leader in the movement. He rightfully calculated that the revolution could help him promote his role as a propagandist and also a devoted activist, and he worked hard on his self-presentation to attain a new status in the eyes of Russian Zionists and, without exaggerating, Russian politicians too. The upheaval in the country was breaking down ossified hierarchies and advancing new leaders. Chlenov stated, “Zionism has ceased being a hobby, fashion, and has become a question of life, shapes one’s worldview.”¹

In later days, Jabotinsky described himself as part of the generation shaped by the Revolution of 1905.² Known as “Russia’s first revolution,” it began as a struggle for political reform among liberals, but then passed into the hands of radicals. Russia’s defeat in the 1904 Russo-Japanese War had shaken the entire system and elicited calls for change that intensified after Bloody Sunday in January 1905.³ The revolution was extinguished thanks mainly to the tsar’s concession in October 1905, his Manifesto on the Improvement of the State Order, in which he outlined political reforms, including elections to a parliament, dubbed the State Duma, and the rights to political assembly and public expression without censorship.⁴ Some of these rights were ignored in reality and were partially reversed in 1907.

The year 1905 offered unexpected opportunities for the establishment of democratic politics generally and Jewish politics in particular. For decades, the government had resisted political change. It jailed revolutionaries and battled liberals; anyone who wanted change was targeted as an enemy. The government of Nicholas II had little trust in society; it censored the press and expected submission from the people.⁵ Regarding Jews, the government continued, and at times intensified, discriminatory decrees. To deal with Jews, government officials were comfortable with the traditional institution of Jewish intercession (Shtadlanut)—wealthy Jews made private requests and deals with government officials on behalf of the Jewish community.⁶

However, in the years before 1905, a new kind of politics was emerging, led by the intelligentsia. Lawyers tried to use trials as public forums to show the injustice of the current system and embarrass the government.⁷ Scholars and writers had long used cryptic, or “Aesopian,” language to express their discontent. Gradually a new politics broke with the past: instead of private requests or trading favors, a system of pressure politics was taking shape. The revolutionary parties and public opinion began to matter more. Although the revolution failed to attain all its goals, the October Manifesto extended the franchise (voting) to Jews, and that concession triggered legal Jewish political activism across a broad spectrum. In 1906, elections to the First Duma took place.

The revolution transformed people. Jabotinsky followed the same emotional arc as many other Russians: ecstasy in the spring of 1905, cautious hope after the publication of the tsar’s manifesto in October, and distrust after the dispersal of the First Duma in June 1906. Like other Jews, Jabotinsky was appalled by the anti-Jewish pogroms, including a major one in his native Odessa, in October 1905. These were particularly painful: hundreds were killed; Jews were singled out for violence; the revolution, which had promised to unify the multiethnic population, had failed to do so. In October 1905 especially, it appeared to many Jews that the revolutionaries would accept a bargain with the government: liberation for Russians, but the denial of rights for others.

The revolution made an indelible impression on Jabotinsky because it showed that reactionary forces, while powerful, would not necessarily win. The possibility of a different Russia, characterized by freedom, equality, democracy, and unity between Russians and the country’s national minorities, had emerged, and now that it had emerged, it would be hard to put the genie back in the bottle.⁸

In Story of My Life, Jabotinsky poetically describes the general attitude at the time. “Youth was not only inside us—it was in the air; the youth of the entire country, the youth of the whole of Europe. Such periods in the history of the world do not occur often—periods when many peoples quiver with hopeful expectancy, like a young boy waiting for his girl. Such was the case for Europe before the year 1848, as it was also at the beginning of the twentieth century, that deceitful century that frustrated so many of our hopes.”⁹ Now comes his self-conscious confession:

To say that we were naïve then, without experience, that we believed in easy and cheap progress—like an instantaneous leap from darkness to light—would be incorrect. We had already witnessed murder on the cusp of the holiday [the October pogroms of 1905], and especially then, precisely that winter, we already knew that all the reactionary elements were shaping their ranks into a huge, mighty, and powerful army. But in spite of all these facts, faith, the charm of the nineteenth century, had not died in our hearts. We were certain in our belief in abstract principles, in sacred slogans—freedom, fraternity, justice—and despite everything, we were certain that the day of their triumph had come and would overcome all obstacles.¹⁰

It is important to remember that Jews were a small minority in Russia, just 4 percent of the population; despite being overrepresented in the revolutionary movement, they were still only minor partners. Although Zionist revolutionary groups were emerging at this time, most Zionists, especially non-Marxists, aligned themselves with Russian liberals.¹¹ They viewed themselves as struggling for essential rights that could be attained only through the transformation of the tsarist regime from a monarchy with limitless powers to a government restrained by a constitution. Therefore, although previously Zionists tended to regard Jewish members of the Kadet (Constitutional Democratic) party as “assimilators” (a word they bandied about to disparage their opponents), now there was reconciliation.¹² Zionists realized that, to have any impact, they would need allies, and liberals were the best they could find, since the Kadets supported equal rights for Jews. In fact, they supported equal rights for all the national minorities in Russia.

During the revolution not only the Zionists but all the Jewish political organizations to the right of the Bund joined liberal Russia. Viktor Kel’ner has written, “By the beginning of the new century a considerable part of the Jewish intelligentsia fully associated itself with the general Russian liberal movement. They saw the fate of the Jews of Russia only through the prism of their active, shared participation in the political struggle with autocracy.”¹³

During 1905, Jabotinsky was active on a number of fronts. In addition to advocating a political struggle, he also defended Jewish rights.¹⁴ During 1905 and 1906, Jabotinsky participated in the League for the Attainment of Full Rights among the Jews of Russia, the body that sought to unify the Jewish political parties to the right of the Bund into a single coalition that could influence political life in the Duma. At the same time, he wrote about a future Jewish politics in Russia, modifying ideas of “autonomy” that he gleaned from Austro-Marxists such as Otto Bauer, Karl Renner, and Max Adler, who sharply critiqued capitalism and advanced ideas of national autonomy.

During the revolution, the Jewish Workers’ Party of Russia, Poland, and Lithuania—the Bund—was the most popular Jewish political organization. It had a membership of fifty thousand; its sympathizers were many times that. Formed in 1897, its mission was to represent the Jewish worker by organizing strikes for higher wages and by promoting revolutionary political activity.¹⁵ Bund leaders sought to overthrow the tsarist regime and construct a new society based on socialism. The Bund had been part of the Russian Social Democrats until 1903, but they decided to leave the party because of the attacks on the Bund’s national dimension and the claim that non-Bundists could not understand the true needs of the Jewish worker.¹⁶

The Bund had advantages over Zionism. For a time, its alliance with the revolutionary parties seemed to promise political transformation and the end of tsarism. Additionally, the Bund had come to be associated with Jewish self-defense. That helped its popularity during the summer and especially the fall of 1905, when Jews were under attack by elements hostile to the revolution.

The Bund’s success appeared to mirror Zionism’s failure. Fewer people were paying the single shekel membership. With Russia up in arms, Zionism, with its emphasis on settlement in Palestine, seemed irrelevant. It also did not help that Zionism was considered a plaything of the well-to-do that had little in common with the working class. Jabotinsky responded by reaching out to workers and explaining to them that Zionists were the original defenders of Jewish interests and remained uncompromising advocates, whereas Bundists were divided in their loyalties.

In The Bund and Zionism (1906), Jabotinsky presented a simple argument. Instead of belittling the Bund, he praised its work, but compared it to a step on an evolutionary ladder in which Zionism represented a higher rung. To justify this hierarchy, Jabotinsky claimed that Zionism provided the Bund with its original inspiration: the consciousness of a Jewish nation and the desire to serve the nation’s interests. Later, Bundist leaders grew that original seed into something different: a Jewish workers’ party. However, Zionism differed from the Bund because the latter inevitably veered toward “assimilation”; “inevitably,” because its calls for national self-renewal were subordinate to socialist unity and the denial of Jewish separatism. According to Jabotinsky, even the announcement in favor of national autonomy at the Bund’s Fourth Conference (1901) reflected a promise that the leaders could not keep.

Comparing the Bund with the government’s program to allow wage strikes but not politically motivated work stoppages (Zubatovshchina), Jabotinsky writes: “I do not place an equal sign between the Bund and the agents of autocracy, but the proclamation of national autonomy at the Bund’s 4th Conference was an act of national Zubatovshchina. And in the same way that real Zubatovshchina was conceived subjectively for the elimination of Social Democracy, but objectively signified the subordination of aristocracy under the impact of Social Democracy—in exactly the same way the nationalization of the Bund program, undertaken for a struggle with Zionism, was in reality a concession to Zionism.”¹⁷

“Zubatovshchina,” named after the tsarist official who designed it—Sergei Zubatov—was a government policy intended to separate legitimate economic demands from revolutionary activity, and thereby isolate the revolutionaries from the ordinary workers. In the government’s view, the policy was successful as a political strategy but went against its own economic goals. Simultaneously, many believed that the policy was dangerous since the success of “economic” strikes might whet a desire for increased political rights. Jabotinsky’s point was that the Bund initiated the national policy in order to stave off Zionism, the party truly devoted to Jewish national interests. Jabotinsky further claimed that there was no need to compromise between Jewish nationalism and socialism. Only Zionism was designed to advance national politics without compromise or half-measures.

One should not get the impression from Jabotinsky’s argumentation that he actually respected the Bund. His argument hung on the premise that the Bund and Zionists were not antipodes, as Bundists argued, but rather “two plants with a single root,” each operating according to its own inner logic.¹⁸ Thus, the Bund actually promoted Zionism’s ideals. Jabotinsky writes, “When the future scholar writes a comprehensive history of the Zionist movement, one chapter in his work, perhaps, will draw the reader’s special attention. It will immediately follow the chapters about Palestine immigration and Ahad-Ha’am’s philosophy. At the beginning, its reader will encounter a repetition of Pinsker’s ideas, at the end, the first proclamation of Poale Tsion. In this chapter, one of the episodes of Zionism will be recounted, and this chapter will be entitled ‘Bund.’”¹⁹ Incidentally, it is hard not to recall here the argument of Grigory Plekhanov that “Bundists are Zionists who fear sea sickness.”²⁰

However, for Jabotinsky the tactic of connecting the Bund and Zionists made sense since support taken from the Bund was a net win for Zionism. In the context of the Bund’s boycott of the elections to the First Duma, Jabotinsky’s Zionism filled the absence. He was saying, in essence: If you care about Jewish interests, you need not worry about the Bund’s boycott of the Duma, since Zionism has stepped into the space that belonged to the Bund. Therefore, a vote for Zionism was actually a vote for Jewish nationalism in its superior form.

In his criticisms, Jabotinsky unabashedly pilfered from the enemy. Jonathan Frankel explains, “It was typical of the period that, in attacking the socialists, Jabotinsky tended to adopt their historico-philosophical modes of thought and even their vocabulary. He, too, spoke of the inevitably unfolding of historical necessities; of the logical development from revolution to Jewish national autonomy in Russia and from autonomy as a penultimate stage to final and maximal goals. This ideological framework was shared by all the Jewish socialist parties in 1906. More specifically, Jabotinsky adopted the incrementalist or quasi-evolutionist approach to revolution and territorialism first advanced in coherent ideological form by the Vozrozhdentsy in the years 1903–4.”²¹

Jabotinsky’s polemic against the Bund also reflected a degree of cynicism, since the two organizations clashed on every issue. Bundists rejected Jabotinsky’s arguments as entirely divorced from reality because he willfully ignored the main differences: class conflict, coalitions with Russian parties, integration in Russia, and the question of Palestine. To a degree, the two movements appealed to different constituencies. The Bund courted the working class and intellectuals who supported the workers. Zionists rejected class conflict and stressed collective national unity. The Bund maintained that “unity” concealed the true interests of the Jewish bourgeoisie: to exploit the workers.²² In addition, the Bund desired to link the Jewish masses to the international workers’ movement, and asserted that Jews would remain in Eastern Europe.²³ For their part, Zionists rejected the Diaspora and envisioned a new society in Palestine. They also clashed on the language issue: the Bund embraced Yiddish and Jewish folk culture, whereas Zionists valorized Hebrew, the language of the Bible and the upper class (rabbis and the elite, for example).²⁴

Bund representatives did not ignore Jabotinsky’s attacks. At the Bund’s Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Conferences, representatives denounced Zionism as “bourgeois politics” that distracted the Jewish working class from its proper role.²⁵ In fact, the Bund apparently used its conflict with Zionism to score points with Russian radicals. Jabotinsky took note of the struggle. In response to a pro-Bund article in Iskra, he wrote: “The ‘Bund’ responded to this with an unprecedented intensification, so to speak, of repression against Zionists of every stripe. Every scrap of printing paper was to be utilized for the ‘struggle.’”²⁶

Apparently hostilities between the Bund and the other Jewish parties grew to such a degree that a Bund member killed a fellow Jew on ideological grounds.²⁷ Jabotinsky feigned disbelief, expressing hope that the killer had another motivation. “I would like to believe that a personal hatred existed between Bussel (the victim) and the gentleman from the ‘Bund,’ so that, actually, the confrontation was motivated by some secondary reason. Let it be a bad one, even dirty—just let it not turn out to be true that one person killed another person because of a difference in political beliefs. That would be too disgusting.”²⁸

Jabotinsky expressed his disdain for the Jewish political left in 1905–6, and held them in contempt in later years as well. Generally speaking, he distrusted left-wing leaders who were committed to Jewish nationalism; they would betray the people, he thought, if a deal were brokered to join a non-Jewish revolutionary party. Vladimir Medem, the Bund leader, admitted as much.²⁹ Despite what one would expect, Jabotinsky was not against socialism in theory—in fact, he admired syndicalism, another economic system based on what he considered collective consent—but he maintained that the Bund’s national program was only an anodyne front for its real goal: assimilation in the international workers’ movement.³⁰

Although the Zionist-Bund feud continued, the pogrom violence unleashed in October 1905 showed the Jews’ essential weakness. Jabotinsky used the violence to launch an attack. Making an allusion to Bundist position that Jews were part of Russia, Jabotinsky questioned worker cohesion:

We live in a foreign country, we are in the hands of a foreign people. If they wish it, there will be pogroms, and we can die as courageous fighters, but we cannot interfere. If they do not wish it, they will not give us even a basic measure of civic equality, and we cannot force them to because we make up a tiny minority. But one thing is in our power: we can summon the Jewish people, separate them from the surrounding peoples, and shape the people into a beautiful unity and cultivate a consciousness of national necessity and work.³¹

Highlighting anti-Jewish attitudes within the Russian working class, which precluded solidarity, Jabotinsky hoped to exploit the pogroms on behalf of Zionism.

When political assembly became possible, some Jewish leaders in Russia organized a coalition of political groups to the right of the revolutionaries. The organization called itself The League for the Attainment of Full Rights for the Jewish People in Russia, or the “League” for short.³² The League was formed in spring 1905, impelled by the belief that Jews, as a small minority, had little influence over the country’s political path. Thus, it made sense for Jewish political groups to join together. Of course, even a coalition could not attain power on its own— Jews would still need non-Jewish allies—but the goal was to make the best of a politically weak position. With regard to specific issues, coalitions could produce powerful lobbies. In fact, some Kadets complained about “unreasonable Jewish demands.”³³

Although other ethnic and religious groups faced government discrimination, Jews were the worst off. Thus, they had much to gain from political reforms that granted them the right to vote. Although the government had failed them, perhaps they could attain equal rights through democracy by lobbying among other (voting) groups in society.

However, the organization’s leaders chose to use the appellation “full rights” in the League’s title because, in addition to equal rights as citizens, they hoped to acquire additional national rights.³⁴ Those included government schools for Jews in a Jewish language, and other institutions: a Jewish theater, libraries, and so forth. Leaders wanted the government to fund these from general tax revenues in addition to the special Jewish taxes.

The League reflected an alliance of liberals and nationalists that was not uncommon. From the mid-1890s through the second Duma, Jewish non-Marxists made common cause with Russian liberals. Marxists were the internal political enemy. The goal of the League was to offer the Jewish masses an alternative to Marxism (the Bund as well as the Russian Socialist Democratic Labor Party). Thus the first meeting in Vilna brought together uncomfortable allies and produced a platform that was reluctantly agreed to in the face of the common foes.

Until October 1905, the word on the street had been “no enemies on the left”—everyone fought tsarism. Nicholas II drove a wedge into the broad camp in October with his manifesto. Jewish liberals (Maxim Vinaver) and Zionists (Shmarya Levin) stayed with the Kadets, but broke over the question of whether the twelve Jews elected to the first Duma would be a single, united faction, or merely an interest group, each member free to vote as he wished on any issue. Still, Kadets were seen as supporting Jewish rights. For example, Kadet leaders wanted to send a delegation to Bialystok in the summer of 1906 to investigate the pogrom that had taken place there but were thwarted by the government.

Because its members had different goals, the League was vulnerable to dissolution. Indeed, the breakup occurred in late 1906, when it became clear that the organization’s basic goals could not be fulfilled.³⁵ The mission to find common cause ran aground on the shoals of ideological and tactical disagreement. For starters, the parties to the left of the Trudoviki (a small non-Marxist, pro-agrarian party) such as the Bund, did not participate because they opposed any non-class-based political actions. But even without them, liberals and so-called nationalists (including Zionists) faced challenges. Foremost was the question of compromise: What kinds of compromises could be justified, and which issues would lead to endless squabbles that risked the life of the League?

The League met four times in the course of nearly two years, and its membership rose from five thousand to almost ten thousand. The first meeting, in Vilna, in March 1905, set the tone for the future. Sixty-seven Jewish representatives from over thirty different Jewish communities gathered “to participate in organizing a Jewish political lobby that would advocate Jewish interests and concerns before the bar of progressive Russian opinion.”³⁶ Alexander Orbach explains the organization’s two goals: “(1) The relationship of the Jews to general society—here, of course, the need for full and equal rights for Jews became the central plank of the League’s program—and (2) The nature of Jewish identity and Jewish communal structure within a newly democratized, reformed Russia.”³⁷

The largest group in the League, Jewish liberals, emphasized the need for unity under their leadership. The revolution was proceeding apace, and since liberals appeared to have the most popular support, it made sense to follow their lead. The liberal position was best articulated in the speeches and writings of the Jewish leader Maxim Vinaver. According to Viktor Kel’ner, “During the course of his entire life he defended the idea that Russian Jewry could attain equal rights only on condition of the complete support of Russian liberalism.”³⁸

However, by the League’s second meeting, in November 1905, much had changed. Although Nicholas II’s manifesto on October 15, 1905, had confirmed new political rights for the state’s subjects, including the establishment of a legislative Duma, mass pogroms had broken out in the Pale of Settlement. A description is offered by Nahum Sokolow:

[It] was one of the ans terribles in the annals of Jewish history. It was a year of bloodshed and terror. Not even the dark ages extracted so heavy a toll of Jewish blood: something like 1,400 pogroms took place all over the Ghetto. In many districts the Jewish population was completely exterminated. The number of persons directly affected, that is to say of those whose houses, shops, or factories were the objects of attack and pillage, reached a total of some 200,000 to 250,000. To this number must be added that of the clerks, workmen, etc., indirectly affected by the destruction of factories and shops, which could not be ascertained. The casualty list was estimated at approximately 20,000 murdered and 100,000 injured.³⁹

The violence led many Jews to question the value of an alliance with Russians, even with Russian liberals. Orbach describes the atmosphere: “Emotions were running high, and the mood was extremely bitter and angry as some seventy representatives from thirty different locations gathered in St. Petersburg for the second Congress of the League for the Attainment of Full Rights for the Jews of Russia on November 22, 1905 (O.S.). In fact, the expectation was that many more delegates would have come, but the fear of traveling through the countryside in those violent days kept attendance down.”⁴⁰

Jabotinsky’s attitude toward liberals was mixed. During the revolution he had complained that the Russian intelligentsia had abandoned Jews. Although Jews had supported the liberals in the struggle against the ruling power, they had received little in return. In fact, as Ahad-Ha’am had claimed, it seemed that the tsarist government had offered the Russian people a deal: they were permitted to beat Jews in exchange for withdrawing demands for political reform.⁴¹ Semyon Dubnov agreed, saying that 1905 resembled 1648 more than 1848.⁴² (1648 was the tragic year of the Chmelnitsky rebellion in Ukraine; 1848 was the year of the Spring of Nations, the partially successful revolutions in France, Germany, and Hungary.) In this complicated time, Jabotinsky gave a talk in St. Petersburg, where he chastised the Russian intelligentsia.⁴³ He said that he could bear the violence against Jews by the reactionaries but was disturbed by the workers’ abandonment.⁴⁴ “People have tried to comfort us by telling us that there were no workers among those who murdered us. Perhaps. Perhaps it was not the proletariat who made pogroms on us. But what the proletariat did to us was something worse than that: they forgot us. That is the real pogrom.”⁴⁵

Once again Jabotinsky tried to separate Jews and non-Jews, to break the domination of the workers’ movement, and point out that the promises of the proletariat were empty because the interests of Jews and non-Jews differed. However, it was something of a topos to claim, as Jews often did, that the lack of support from liberal Russia hurt more than the actual violence committed by antisemitic thugs and political reactionaries.⁴⁶ Incidentally, the revolutionary press of the time wrote a lot against the pogroms; they assumed that this would stop the revolution. The intelligentsia protested as well. Some non-Jewish revolutionary workers took a very active part in self-defense. On the other hand, there was a general feeling of embarrassment, since the pogromists were in fact mainly workers and peasants, who also attacked students, revolutionary workers, and anybody wearing glasses.

This speech presaged the soon-to-be screaming matches over the Jewish-liberal alliance. At the League’s second meeting, in November 1905, Jabotinsky proposed negotiating a new compact to reflect the realization that Russian society had promoted pogroms. He described a trade-off: “The Russian Revolution will cost us a river of Jewish blood; we do not want to buy Russian freedom at such an expensive price! And what then? Are there really those among you, respectable people and friends, who are honest, who are unafraid to look at truth directly and have the courage to announce that this has not happened?”⁴⁷ According to Jabotinsky, the relationship of Jews and the revolution could be compared to two works of Russian literature, “Attalea Princeps” by Vsevolod Garshin and Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin’s The Golovlev Family.

In the Garshin story, the protagonist, Attalea Princeps, has a dream of freedom, but when she shatters the glass ceiling, she is stung with thousands of shards. “For years we ran towards the light, towards open space, into the sunshine. And when the dawn of liberation flickered for the Russian people, an overcast and gloomy day met us Jews. Before us appeared dark and bloody clouds, eclipsing the last ray of the sun.”⁴⁸ The Saltykov-Shchedrin tale is a little different and depicts a suicide pact in which Yudushka’s cousins take poison, while the other backs out. The Jews, in this conceit, are like the latter: they do not commit suicide despite having promised to do so. In both of these stories, Jabotinsky expresses the view that the alliance with Russians and support for the revolution have left Jews worse off than they were before.

Jews were indeed paying a high price, but they were not a sacrificial lamb. The situation was more complex, and I suspect Jabotinsky knew this. For one thing, his interpretation makes the Jews unwitting victims of the revolution and denies the fact that Jews willingly joined, hoping to attain freedom. Additionally, part of his approach was calculated to gain political advantage for Zionism from whatever circumstances arose. If the Jewish public lost confidence in the revolutionaries, perhaps they would defect to the Zionists.

On the question of political direction, the main difference was that now, after the October pogroms, Jabotinsky rejected the position that only a coalition with Russians would ameliorate the Jewish condition. Jabotinsky proposed an “internal politics,” a go-it-alone strategy to improve those aspects of life that Jews do, in fact, control. “Our main and primary task is to assemble and come to an agreement to receive orders from the whole Jewish people. We need to focus our entire strength on the only brand of politics accessible to us, internal politics. I do not insist upon a name, but above all we need a genuine, nationwide Jewish assembly, not a surrogate. The call for the constituent assembly must come first and must be, perhaps, the only task that we need to lay before the new central bureau.”⁴⁹

Jabotinsky conceived of Jewish political autonomy as a voluntary institution in which members would fulfill essential state functions. In contrast to cultural autonomy, as understood by the Bund, Jabotinsky’s was closer to national “self-management.”⁵⁰ Jewish autonomy enjoyed popularity, and every Jewish political group took a stab at constructing its own ideas. Semyon Dubnov, the Jewish historian and leading theorist of the Folkspartey, had his version, the Bund had their version, and the Vozrozhdentsy had theirs.⁵¹ Jabotinsky, inspired by fellow Zionists—Idel’son, Ussishkin, Shmarya Levin—offered his as well.⁵²

At the February 1906 meeting, discussions circled around the question of whether Jews should participate in elections to the first Duma. The leftist parties boycotted the elections. What would the League do? Despite his refrain about “internal politics,” Jabotinsky favored participation because he believed that it would be wrong not to try to win power.⁵³ After all, Jews made up 4 percent of the population: they had a right to representation. With the Duma containing over five hundred seats, if Jews won proportionately, the number of Duma seats would be over twenty. At the same time, Jabotinsky reported the threats of antisemites in Odessa, who promised pogroms if Jewish candidates ran and if Jews came out to vote. But, he noted, they might use violence in any case. Therefore, he saw nothing to gain by yielding to threats. Jabotinsky was in the majority; most, if not all, of the leaders concurred, and League members encouraged Jews to vote.

The Jewish representatives elected to the Duma in 1905–6 were faced with a more divisive issue. Of course, they should consult on questions affecting Jews, but were they free to vote their conscience on other legislation? And what about alliances with parties of the right; would those be permitted? A heated debate ensued, with liberals aghast at the idea of Jewish collaboration with “pogrom-makers” and Zionists defending any alliance that would produce positive results. Zionists justified their position by noting that the real goal was not to form permanent relationships, but to leave Russia and build a national home in Palestine. The controversy died down somewhat when the results of the elections to the First Duma appeared, showing that Jews had finished with only twelve seats. Moreover, not a single Jew was elected from Congress Poland.⁵⁴

The liberals were blamed for the lackluster results, since they dominated the League and had pushed hard for a Russian-Jewish alliance. At the League’s last meeting, in November 1906, after the tsar’s closing of the First Duma, Zionists called for the abrogation of the Russian-Jewish pact, insisting on going it alone. The League fell apart.

In the historical literature, most scholars have accused Zionists of seeking the League’s dissolution until they attained it.⁵⁵ Zionists launched the “fatal” blow to the Union for Full Rights when, at their congress in Helsingfors, they decided to act independently in Russian political life—and in elections as well.⁵⁶ However, according to Viktor Kel’ner, a historian of Russian liberalism, the Zionists were merely a symptom; the League was breaking apart because all the groups chose party interests over collective goals. He writes, “Zionist tactics only nudged the League towards dissolution. In fact, at its core there had long been several groups that had their own conception of the correct path for the struggle to attain equal rights. Practically at the same time, the Jewish People’s Group, the Jewish Democratic Group, and the Volkspartei were formed.” In other words, “The split was caused by general political tendencies inherent . . . in the period of the defeat of democracy during the events of 1905–07.”⁵⁷ As a result of the League’s failure to achieve its goals, each group lost interest in the coalition and went its own way. In contrast, Vladimir Levin argues that the prospects to win elections to the second Duma caused Zionists to go it alone, and liberals could not allow Zionists to speak in the name of Russian Jews and began to organize as well. This led to the final split in the League.⁵⁸

The breakup of the League, however, did not end Zionist-Kadet cooperation, because in campaigns for seats in subsequent Dumas, Zionists would have to coordinate with liberals to maximize their chances of getting elected. For example, as already mentioned, Jabotinsky ran for a seat in the second Duma from Rovno, Ukraine, but was asked by Ussishkin to withdraw his candidacy to enable a non-Jewish liberal to get elected.⁵⁹ Incidentally, neither Jabotinsky nor the liberal won the seat.

In his study, Kel’ner exaggerated the League’s significance, asserting that it made a legacy that mattered. “The activities of the Union for the Attainment of Full Rights of the Jewish People in Russia became a colorful page in the history of Russian Jewry.⁶⁰ [These] activities reflected all the contradictions of the national development of Jews in Russia. At the same time, it became a political school for the generation that would be fated to play an important role in the future history of the Jewish people, and in the history of Russia as a whole.”⁶¹

It is hard to agree. Jewish liberals, and liberals generally, became weaker after 1910. However, it would be wrong to characterize the liberals as “assimilators,” as Zionists often did. Liberals had a national program that was close in spirit to Dubnov’s cultural nationalism, offering a vision of a future Russia based on law, democracy, and equality for the national minorities.⁶² One can acknowledge that Jabotinsky learned a great deal from the liberals, especially his vision of democracy as a powerful tool for change. Moreover, his, and the Zionists’, struggle with the liberals should not imply a rejection of liberalism as much as a demand to reshape liberalism for national purposes.

In an article from January 1906, Jabotinsky expressed skepticism about the revolution, noting that, at least for Zionists, little had been achieved, and it was already over. Nonetheless, he expressed the positive side. “Without a doubt, the Revolution gave me one victory. That victory deals with morality. The role of our youth in the historic events of the Russian Revolution stimulated an entirely new opinion about our people, especially in Europe.”⁶³ But that advantage paled before the more significant one, the change within Jews themselves:

There is nothing to hide: certainly a change occurred not only in the way others viewed our nation—a change occurred within ourselves as well. A Jew today no longer resembles a Jew of 25 years ago or even of 10 years ago. Of course, it would be comical to think that the Russian Revolution caused this advance. It was born in the course of Jewish life, which led to an awakening of national independence, of active historical creativity. But the Russian Revolution was a school for this new spirit. It taught the Jew “through fire,” as army men express it, and this instruction will prove necessary for us again and again in the future.⁶⁴

What is interesting is what Jabotinsky left unsaid. He undoubtedly uttered under his breath that the revolution was not a worthy goal, that a victory might not benefit Zionism, and that Jews could now leave the Bund knowing in full conscience that they had given the revolution their best shot and lost. The future, therefore, begged for reorientation. Jews should not rely on others but should commit themselves to an internal struggle and focus their energies on achieving Zionism’s goal of a national home in Palestine.

It is interesting to note that most liberals at the time (in January 1906, before the first Duma had met) were optimistic. Pavel Miliukov had high hopes that a Kadet majority would lead to serious reforms.⁶⁵ Additionally, the revolution had promised a good deal, such as the legalization of political parties, the end of prepublication censorship, and the Duma itself. But some things Jabotinsky wished for had not come into being, such as the Jewish Congress called for by the League in March 1905. But the paradox was that Jabotinsky realized that even the achievement of a democratic and prosperous Russia would not benefit Zionism.