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CHAPTER 2

The Jews and the Russian Revolution

Soon after the assassination of Alexander II on March 1, 1881, the famous Russian historian and conservative journalist Dmitrii Ilovaiskii wrote in Sankt-Peterburgskie Vedomosti (The St. Petersburg News): “Now that the body of the martyred Tsar has been given to the earth, we, the Russians, must first and foremost fulfill our holy duty to seek out the very sources of that dark force that has taken him from Russia.” Ilovaiskii expressed the conviction that Russian “nihilists and socialists” were merely “a crude, often unconscious weapon,” that they had been led to commit the crime not so much by the “enemies of proprietorship and civil order” as by the “internal and external enemies of the Russian State, and of Russian Nationalism.”

According to Ilovaiskii, Great Russians (Velikorossy), comprising a kind of “Panurgic herd” in this “underground gang,” were the only ethnic group that did not have nationalistic motives. “The Karakozovs, Solovievs, and Rysakovs are precisely those crude unintelligent weapons that were caught up in a web of social propaganda. They themselves did not know for what goals or deeds they were serving as weapons.” Among the internal enemies of Russia, Ilovaiskii listed the Poles first. “The second element,” wrote the author of scores of enduring editions of school textbooks, “is clearly visible and even patently obvious, namely, Jewish revolutionaries. They have come forth as quite possibly the most active element in the recent actions, murders, attacks, and university disturbances.”¹

If Ilovaiskii, who was one of the first to succinctly formulate the “foreign” (inorodcheskii) character of the Russian revolution, gave Jews “only” second place among the threats to Russia, this would indicate that the Jews were not yet playing a leading role in the liberation movement. At the very least, Jews did not yet personify the central, active force of the Russian revolution in Russian public opinion, even in its “blackest” variants.²

Two decades later, this situation had changed markedly. In 1903, the Chairman of the Council of Ministers, Sergei Iulevich Witte, remarked to Theodor Herzl that Jews comprised nearly half of the membership of revolutionary parties, even though they were only six million people in a nation of a 136 million.³ If Witte exaggerated, he did so only slightly.

From 1901 to 1903, Jews composed 29.1 percent (2,269 individuals) of those arrested for political crimes. From March 1903 to November 1904 more than half of those investigated for political activity were Jews (53 percent). This fact can most easily be explained as a reaction to the Kishinev and Homel pogroms. In 1905, Jews made up 34 percent of all political prisoners; of those exiled to Siberia, 37 percent were Jews.⁴ During the calmer period from 1892 to 1902, Jews comprised 23.4 percent of the Social Democrats under investigation, fewer than the number of Russians (69.1 percent, 3,490 individuals), but slightly more than the number of Poles (16.9 percent). The number of Jews who were Social Democrats exceeded the number of Russians (according to police data) in both the southwestern (49.4 percent to 41.8 percent) and southern territories (51.3 percent to 44.2 percent). They also comprised the lion's share of those under investigation in Odessa (75.1 percent Jews versus 18.7 percent Russians). In Petersburg and Moscow the situation was reversed—10.2 percent Jews and 82.8 percent Russians in the northern capital; 4.6 percent Jews and 90.1 percent Russians in Moscow.⁵ Without a doubt, the Bund, the largest revolutionary party in Russia, contained the largest numbers of Jews involved in criminal political activity. In the summer of 1904, the Bund could claim 23,000 members; in 1905–7, 34,000; and in 1908–10, when the revolutionary movement quickly began to decline, about 2,000 members. For comparison's sake, in the beginning of 1905, the entire Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party (RSDRP) consisted of approximately 8400 members.⁶ There was also significant Jewish representation in the Russian revolutionary parties and organizations. During the time of the 1905 revolution, approximately 15 percent of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party (PSR) was Jewish, and there were a number of “maximalist and anarchist terrorist groups that were almost entirely Jewish.”⁷ Among the SR-Maximalists, 19 percent were Jewish, while 76 percent were either Russian or Ukrainian.⁸ At the Fifth Congress of the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party in London in 1907, nearly a third of the delegates were Jewish.⁹

At the same time, however, it must be noted that regardless of the extent of Jewish participation in Russian or Jewish revolutionary parties, Jewish revolutionaries comprised a minute portion of the general Russian population, as well as an extremely small percentage of Russian Jewry. In the perception of the typical Russian resident—from the lumpenproletariat to the intelligentsia—the role of Jews in revolutionary activity was greater than it actually was. A typical example can be found in a joke from the satirical liberal journal Vampir from the 1905–7 revolutionary period. Though of limited wit, it is nevertheless telling. It reads, “Warsaw. Eleven anarchists were shot in the fortress prison. Of these, 15 were Jews.”¹⁰

The urban masses responded to the freedom given to them by the Manifesto of October 17, 1905 with pogroms.¹¹ The leading participants were those very workers whom the revolutionaries (including those of Jewish origin) had wasted so much strength and energy indoctrinating. Incidentally, it should be noted that previous strikes and demonstrations, in particular those associated with May 1, which often occurs around the time of Passover and Easter, had regularly threatened to grow into pogroms. Revolutionaries spent significant effort attempting to prevent or at least localize any ethnic or religious conflicts, such as those that occurred in the Donbass region, an industrial center located at the bend of the Dniepr River.¹² Jews comprised 20 to 35 percent of the urban population of these kinds of rapidly developing regions.¹³

Despite their “love for the people” (narodoliubie), the Social Democrats in industrial centers such as Rostov-on-Don were well aware of the antisemitic tendencies of a significant portion of the working class. A leaflet entitled “To the Dockworkers” is a case in point. On one side, the leaflet called for the masses to take part in the May 1 demonstrations, while on the other side it instructed them not to beat Jews.¹⁴

All these exhortations would come to naught in October of 1905. For Russian Jews, the first fruits of the “freedom” won in the 1905 revolution were more pogroms. Particularly severe and bloody pogroms were carried out in Odessa, Rostov-on-Don, and Ekaterinoslav. In Odessa, according to police statistics, about 400 Jews were killed, and nearly 300 were seriously wounded. In addition 1,632 Jewish homes, apartments, and places of business were destroyed.¹⁵

The Rostov-on-Don pogrom, in many ways comparable to the one that occurred in Odessa, was one of the more bloody that took place during the first Russian revolution. Approximately 150 people were killed. On October 18, 1905, a confrontation took place between radicals carrying red flags with the slogans “We won!” (Nasha vziala!) and “Zion,” and participants in a “patriotic demonstration.” In the course of the conflict several people were killed. Among those murdered by the “patriots” was one Klara Reizman, who had been carrying a red banner. The “patriots” killed her by shoving the wooden pole of the banner down her throat. A pogrom ensued over the next three days. Local Jewish and worker militias opposed the pogromists. Thanks to the “neutrality” and sometimes outright support of the pogromists by the local Cossacks and police, the conflict turned out to be one-sided, although data from official sources indicate that the pogromists also suffered significant casualties.¹⁶

The biographies of Samuel Gurvich and Solomon Reizman, who played a significant role in the revolutionary events in Rostov-on-Don, were fairly typical. Gurvich was the son of Meir Gurvich, a well-known optometrist in Rostov and an active participant in Jewish circles. Samuel Gurvich started out as a Zionist, but quickly switched over to the Social Democrats. He was one of the organizers of a student group with members throughout southern Russia, and was a member of the RSDRP committee for the Don region. During the time of the famous Rostov walkout of 1902, he was one of the speakers at the massive meeting that took place outside the city, although the police agents failed to recognize him at the time. After the schism in the RSDRP in 1903, Gurvich sided with the Mensheviks. He went abroad and received further political indoctrination, and was imprisoned upon his return to Rostov in 1905. Released in accordance with the Imperial Manifesto of October 17, Gurvich, who commanded a great deal of authority in revolutionary circles, was chosen as chairman of the Rostov-on-Don Soviet of Workers' Deputies. Though he himself was an opponent of armed rebellion, an uprising nonetheless broke out in December of 1905. After the insurrection Gurvich was forced to flee, and he reappeared in Rostov only in 1917, having served several years in prison.

One of the leaders of the uprising was Gurvich's comrade in the southern Russian group, Solomon Reizman. Reizman had fled Rostov-on-Don in 1903 due to pressure from the police. In Petersburg he took part in the organization of the Soviet of Workers Deputies. He returned to Rostov after the October 17 Manifesto for personal reasons: his brother had died, and his sister had been murdered by the Black Hundreds. On November 28 he reported for work at a railroad workshop, and the next day he was elected a delegate of the railroad bureau. He became the chairman that very same evening. This twenty-year-old plumber was now in charge of running the Vladikavkaz railroad. It was here that the strike started, eventually growing into an armed rebellion. After the rebellion was put down, Reizman was arrested and handed over to be tried on charges of seizing the Rostov-on-Don station of the Vladikavkaz railroad. He was the central figure in the trial, which the government attempted to give a decidedly antisemitic character. Poalei Zion drew a lot of attention to the proceedings, even though its Rostov-on-Don organization had not played an active part in the rebellion. As a minor, Reizman received a fairly light sentence—64 months in prison. However, he did not have to serve them out; several months after the trial he died in prison.¹⁷

Of the 657 pogroms in Russia during the period from October 1905 to January 1906, 41 took place in the Ekaterinoslav gubernia. These pogroms killed 285 people, and the 13.2 million rubles of damage exceeded that in any other region. The three-day pogrom that took place October 21–23 claimed 95 lives, while 245 were severely wounded. The perpetrators raped young girls and pregnant women. They also destroyed 311 businesses and 40 apartment buildings, razing several of them to the ground. In Iuzovka, 10 Jews were killed and 28 were wounded, 84 stores and shops were destroyed, along with over 100 apartments. Overall damages amounted to nearly a million rubles. Several miners who worked in the outskirts, when they heard that a pogrom was taking place, asked the conductor of the local train to head towards the city. Along the way, they forced him to sound the whistle, in order to gather more people interested in participating in the pogrom. The miners were joined by factory workers and other members of the working class. It is readily apparent that workers in industrial regions constituted the majority of the pogromists.¹⁸

This was not the case everywhere. In Debaltsevo, Lugansk, and Shcherbinovka, miners and workers thwarted attempted pogroms. In Kamenskoe and Ekaterinoslav, groups of workers fought against the miners, peasants, and soldiers who had attacked the local Jewish population. In Krivoi Rog, Annovka, and other towns and cities in the Donbass region, soldiers opened fire on pogromists, wounding several and killing 19 people.¹⁹

The pogromists “rationale” for carrying out pogroms most often involved accusations that Jews defamed the Tsar, the Orthodox faith, and the Russian people. Occasionally added were claims that Jews organized strikes, which deprived workers of their wages. During the attacks of October 1905, Jews were not the only victims; students, members of the intelligentsia, and “people in glasses” were all in danger. In Transcaucasia, Armenians were targeted alongside the Jews.

Several scholars maintain that the workers' participation in the pogroms cannot be explained exclusively by conservative beliefs, antisemitic prejudices, or the simple desire to pillage and plunder. Many workers had become disillusioned with the general strike, which, instead of improving their standing, had benefited only the organizers and agitators (of whom many were Jewish). While the workers felt deceived, at the same time they were now aware of their political power. That is why their rage was directed at students, the intelligentsia, and the Jewish population.²⁰ Be that as it may, it is not necessary to directly connect the pogroms with any kind of disillusionment regarding the general strike. For our purposes, it is sufficient to point out the obvious connection between periods of revolutionary violence and upheaval and the marked increase in the scope of pogrom activity.

For several years, the Russian liberal intelligentsia had been consoling itself with the notion that the pogroms had been organized by the government. As contemporary historians have shown, the sins of the government have been greatly exaggerated. Government officials did not occupy themselves with the organization of pogroms. Putting aside for a moment questions of morality, it would have been irrational for the government to try to increase disorder in a country that was already in the throes of revolution. Moreover, this would hardly have been logistically feasible; the emperor's decision to sign the October Manifesto was sudden, leaving no time for government officials to organize pogroms (even if they had so desired). Antisemitic laws, however, were a completely separate issue. Government policy did contribute to an environment that allowed the pogrom activity to occur on a massive scale.²¹ Such policies included accusing Jews of creating their own misfortune, tolerating an increase in far-right organizations (and, on occasion, providing financial support for such groups), refusing to undertake any serious measures to disavow antisemitic propaganda, rejecting compensation for pogrom victims, and failing to prosecute to the full extent of the law those who participated in pogroms, as well as those who had allowed them to take place. Local authorities often failed to enact measures that would have prevented pogroms. Whether this was due to panic, incompetence, unreliable police and military forces, or any of a number of other reasons can only be discerned on a case-by-case basis.

The year 1905 served as clear example of how freedom could turn against itself in a country that lacked democratic traditions and a sufficiently strong intelligentsia. The events of the 1905 revolution were to strike terror in the heart of Mikhail Gershenzon, one of the founders of Signposts (Vekhy): “Being who we are, it is not only impossible to talk of any ‘merging with the masses.’ Rather, we should fear them more than any possible punishment that could be carried out by the authorities. We should instead praise and be thankful for the government, as it is only their bayonets and prisons that stand between us and the fury of the people.”²²

Gershenzon warned against the illusion of the intelligentsia's “love for the masses” and these warnings were particularly relevant for its Jewish contingent. Antisemitism, which up until now had been considered prevalent only among the masses and the far right, was to become more and more widespread among the Russian intelligentsia.

An incident involving Aaron Shteinberg, a well-known Jewish philosopher and social activist, serves as a case in point. Shteinberg was shocked and dismayed by a number of articles in the newspaper Zemshchina written by the Russian philosopher Vasilii Rozanov in 1913 during the Beilis trial. In them, Rozanov allowed for the possibility that a “ritual murder” had taken place. Shteinberg went to Rozanov seeking an explanation. He was received warmly, and was given a rather eye-opening explanation and justification: “ ‘You see,’ Rozanov said, ‘Whenever my daughters come home from school and talk about a new friend of theirs with great excitement and amazement, I already know ahead of time that it's some Rachel, Rebecca, or Sara. But if I were to ask them about their new acquaintances Vera or Nadezhda, they'd always say, ‘She's such a bore, she's not very pretty, her eyes are always glazed over, there's no spirit to her! We Russians just simply cannot look at you with that fire with which you're looking at me right now! You will seize power, of course. But one has to stand up for Russia!”²³

This speech deeply disappointed Shteinberg, who, by all accounts, had been prepared for a philosophical debate. As it turned out, it had nothing to do with any “ritual”; it had to do with politics. In a later article, Rozanov would “openly admit that he had been in favor of Beilis's conviction on political grounds in order to prevent Jewish dominance, the so-called Jewish “yoke.” Russia had escaped the Tartar-Mongol yoke, and now the Jewish version was to replace it. In order to prevent this, one had to fight against the Jews.”²⁴

Antisemitic attitudes were common among other members of the intellectual elite of Russia as well. Aleksandr Blok told Shteinberg of his dislike of Jews, which had started during the Beilis trial when, among other things, people who had earlier hidden their Jewish heritage began to demand his signature on letters of protest. The context of the conversation, which took place in 1919 while both Shteinberg and Blok were sharing a cell as guests of the Cheka, precludes any possibility of insincerity on the latter's part. It was at this point that Shteinberg formulated an idea that he would later relate to Andrei Bely. According to Shteinberg, Blok's dislike of the Jews was, unbeknownst to Blok himself, the “other side of the coin” of Russian patriotism. Shteinberg noted that a number his close associates in the Russian cultural elite, including Andrei Bely, Ivanov-Razumnik, Petrov-Vodkin, Karsavin, and others, shared this quality.²⁵

The liberal principles of the Kadets likewise became subject to erosion. P. B. Struve spoke of “asemitism” and a “national face” (natsional'noe litso) that the Russian intelligentsia should take vis-à-vis the Jewish community, although he did make a clear distinction between this democratic and constitutional “attitude” and “bigoted antisemitism.”²⁶ On March 17, 1910, Ariadna Tyrkova wrote in her diary, “Conversations about nationalism are everywhere. They seem to be more and more prevalent among the radicals. I was at Gredeskul's on January 6^th. We were arguing about the press. Gredeskul was there, as were Ervin Grimm and D. D. Protopopov…everyone was saying that we shouldn't tolerate the fact that we have no newspapers besides the ‘Jewish’ Rech' [Speech]. Only Rodichev and David Grimm disagreed, the latter stating that nationalism was an anti-cultural phenomenon.”²⁷

However, antisemitism was not inherent to a majority of Russia's politicized elite. Quite the opposite was true. For the majority of liberals opposition to discrimination against the Jews was compulsory, and antisemitic statements were considered unacceptable. The first point of the platform of the Constitutional Democratic Party, which was to be the most influential and long-lived Russian liberal party, states, “All Russian citizens, without regard to sex, creed, or nationality, are equal before the law. Any social discrimination or restrictions regarding the personal and property rights of Poles, Jews, and all other ethnic groups without exception must be repealed.”²⁸ The Beilis trial, which had become a litmus test for true democracy and tolerance, demonstrated the best aspects of the Russian intelligentsia. Though hardly a semitophile,²⁹ Vasilii Maklakov, whose speech at the trial was a deciding factor in the accused's acquittal, quite correctly termed the trial a “salutary warning.”³⁰ Rozanov was excluded from the Religious Philosophy Society for his antisemitism.

The problem lay elsewhere. In the period between revolutions there was an indisputable growth in antisemitism among groups that had not previously been known to exhibit it. This necessarily pushed Jews to the Left, as even among the Kadets, the “standard-bearers” of Russian liberalism, a “Janus-faced policy” towards the “Jewish question” became evident.

Before examining the role of the Jews in the fateful year of 1917, it must be determined whether the Jewish members of the Russian liberation movement can be considered as acting in concert with Jewish interests, or whether they should even be considered Jews at all. After all, a number of them had rejected their Jewish faith and heritage. The marked internationalism of many revolutionary groups, especially the Bolsheviks, gave their antagonists within the Jewish community convenient grounds on which to “excommunicate” them from Russian Jewry.

At a meeting on June 8, 1917, S. M. Dubnov said, “And from among our community there have appeared a good number of demagogues who have fallen in league with the heroes of the street and the prophets of the insurgency. They appear under Russian pseudonyms, ashamed of their Jewish heritage (Trotsky, Zinoviev, etc.), but it is their Russian pseudonyms that we will take to be their ‘Jewish’ names, [so] they have no place among our people…”³¹

One could just as easily say that revolutionaries of Russian extraction should be excluded from their people based on the fact that they did not observe the tenets of Orthodoxy. However, another interpretation is possible here. Perhaps the active participation of some Jews in the revolutionary movement was not, in fact, due to any break with Jewish identity, as so many internationalist revolutionaries claimed, but was rather because of their Jewish heritage. To accept this idea, one does not necessarily have to share the mystical musings of N. A. Berdiaev, who claimed that there was much in common between Jewish messianism and its Marxist variant.³² There are other, more objective historical and economic grounds for making such a claim.

Obvious socioeconomic and political factors were to result in a majority of Jews being pushed towards the opposite camp. It is clear that the Jewish community as a whole refused to endorse the revolutionary program of the revolutionaries of Jewish heritage, be they Bolsheviks, SRs, or from other political parties. Nor could any Jewish socialist party be taken as being representative of all of Russian Jewry. At the same time, for many the solution to the “Jewish question” appeared to be entwined with the success of the Russian revolution. It was precisely the legacy of antisemitic prejudice and discrimination in Russia that inclined, and sometimes even directly led, the children of many well-off Jewish families to join the ranks of the revolutionaries. A significant portion of the revolutionary leadership came from well-established

Jewish families. Iulii Martov, Sergei Ezhov, Vladimir Levitskii, and Lidia Dan, all grandchildren of the publisher Aleksandr Tsederbaum, were to become prominent Social Democrats. Mikhail and Abram Gots, the grandsons of the Moscow tea magnate Volf Vysotskii, and Il'ia Fondaminskii were among the leaders of the Party of Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs). Osip Minor, son of the head rabbi of Moscow, was first a member of the People's Will, then an SR,³³ and finally, in 1917, the chairman of the Moscow City Duma. Among the Bolsheviks one could find the son of well-to-do farmers (Trotsky, whose true surname was Bronshtein), dairy farmers (Zinoviev [Radomysl-skii]), as well as the son of an engineer (Lev Kamenev [Rosenfeld]), and a doctor (Grigorii Sokolnikov [Brilliant]). All of the above-mentioned individuals had the opportunity to pursue just about any career path they desired, yet they all chose instead the path of the revolutionary.

Jews were the most urbanized and literate people of the Russian Empire (along with the Germans), yet they were restricted in where they were allowed to live, their choice of profession, and their access to education as a result of their religious affiliation. It is hardly surprising that such circumstances would give rise to individuals who would eagerly devote their lives to the overthrow of the existing power structure. Boys from a traditional Jewish upbringing would study in Russian gymnaziums, then go on to study in a Russian or foreign university, and would absorb revolutionary ideology more quickly than others, being able to sympathize with such ideas not only on an intellectual level, but on an emotional one as well. Real-life experience was an important contributor in this transformation of Jewish youth into Russian revolutionaries.

Some of them would explain their dedication to the revolution as a result of “Jewish problems.” Aleksandr Brailovskii once gave a speech at a political demonstration in Rostov on March 2, 1903, that eventually resulted in a conflict with the police and the murder of a police officer (the fatal blow was delivered by Isaak Khaevskii). When asked at the ensuing trial as to why he, the son of a well-off merchant from Rostov, had joined the revolutionaries, Brailovskii responded, “I am a Jew. As such, I have experienced oppression and deprivation of freedom for all of my life. When I wanted to enter the university, I wasn't accepted because I was a Jew, and I was thrown overboard. I could not but welcome the roar of the demonstrators. That is why I joined

them.”³⁴

Others would categorically deny any connection between their Jewishness and their revolutionary fervor. “This national moment, so vital to the life of Russia,” Trotsky once wrote, “played nearly no role at all in my personal life. From a very early age, nationalist fixations bewildered me on a rational level. This would occasionally grow into moral discomfort or even outright disgust. A Marxist education deepened these feelings, and transformed them into an active internationalism.”³⁵

Many Jewish revolutionaries either consciously or (as was more often the case) unconsciously identified with the interests of the Russian peasants or workers, about whom they knew next to nothing. In this, they were hardly different from their Russian counterparts.

Fedor Stepun, a commissar for the Provisional Government in 1917, who had made a trip to Vilna in 1907, made some very apt observations regarding the state of Russian Jewry before the revolution. The “piercing pity” that Stepun felt for the Jewish population and deep shame in light of Tsarist policy, would have been completely at home among the radical “comrades” of Heidelberg University:

my second conviction is this: that in participating in peasants' and workers' issues Jews were simply fighting for their own equal rights, which, of course, they had a right to do. As a result of their political ideology, they didn't see themselves as being different from the Russian people.

At the time, I knew and understood very little about workers' and peasants' issues. But I always believe what my eyes tell me. And I couldn't help thinking that there was little common sense in an argument I saw between the grandson of a Vilna rabbi and the son of a Kovno banker, neither of whom had ever seen Russian land or a Russian muzhik. They were arguing heatedly with each other over the best ways for the Ryazan, Siberian, and Poltava peasantry to manage their land, pausing every minute or so to cite the works of Karl Marx.³⁶

Although Stepun's description may seem somewhat exaggerated, he manages to grasp the essence of the matter at hand. However, where Stepun saw “little common sense,” Maksim Vinaver, one of Russia's leading Jewish liberals, saw quite the opposite. In an article dedicated to the memory of Shloime Rapoport (S. A. An-sky), a revolutionary and collector of Russian and Jewish folklore, Vinaver writes:

So many Jewish youths who had just managed to tear themselves away from the Bible and the Talmud agreed to fight to death for a peasant people who, it would seem, were completely foreign to them, knowing only that they were laboring and suffering. They believed in these people only because they were prepared by a belief in truth, goodness, and the eventual triumph of justice. Their acquaintance with the biblical prophets and testaments of Jewish culture prepared them for this. The seeds sewn by those Russian pilgrims who had struggled for truth and justice fell on fertile ground, and over the decades an unbreakable chain pulled the Jewish youth towards the ranks of those parties that were attempting to achieve the common good, in accordance with the belief in an immanent, inherently mystical aspiration on the part of all (whether of all mankind or of one nation). When the pogroms broke out, some cast stones at such dreamers, claiming that they had gone to guard the “vineyards of outsiders.” A barbarous accusation. To struggle for truth means to attempt to fulfill the commandments of the Jewish prophets, which means to work for one's own vineyards, not those of others. And in this aspect there is no difference between one's own vineyard and someone else's.³⁷

One final example is doubly valuable for the fact that it was written by someone outside of revolutionary circles, as well as the fact that it was published in the end of the 1930s in emigration, long after sympathy towards the revolutionaries had fallen out of fashion. Oskar Gruzenberg, the well-known lawyer, wrote that he felt his Jewish heritage particularly acutely one night in 1886, during a police raid in Kiev. As he was a student at the university, the police did not harass him, whereas his mother, who had come to visit from the Pale of Settlement and had been guilty of some minor infraction, was forced to spend the rest of the night on the spittle-ridden floor of the police station in the company of drunks and prostitutes. He only managed to get her out by calling in some major favors. A still-furious Gruzenberg wrote the following, nearly fifty years after the event in question: “To forget how they humiliated my elderly mother, who had never done anything wrong to anybody in her whole entire life, would mean to forget the fact that life is only worth living when one is not a slave. What happened that night? What was decided? In short, I now saw every person who was fighting against autocratic tyranny and cruelty as an ally, as a brother whom I was obligated to assist in times of need.”³⁸ Such an understanding of obligation and responsibility was undoubtedly the attitude of a large number of Jews, including members of the “establishment.”

Vladimir Zhabotinskii, a pronounced opponent of the Jews' participation in the Russian Revolution, nonetheless maintained that “the Jewish blood spilled on the barricades was the result of the will of the Jewish people themselves.” In response to criticism of that assertion, he stated that

all of these fashionable shrieks and cries claim that Jews do not have a national politics, only a class-based one. Jews have no class-based politics, but have had, and currently have (although only in the earliest stages), the politics of a national coalition, and those who have pursued such a politics without even suspecting it are all the more ignorant. They did this in their own fashion, with excesses and extremes, but in essence they were only expressing various aspects of the unified will of the Jewish people. If there were many revolutionaries among them, then this means no more than such was the atmosphere of the nation. Jewish barricades were raised in accordance with the will of the Jewish people. I believe this to be true, and since I do, I bow down and welcome the people's revolution.

Of course, having (rather facetiously) bowed down before the “will of the people,” Zhabotinskii then posed the following question, “But has the Revolution improved the lot of the people?” The doubts of the brilliant Russian poet and ideologue of the Jewish national movement led him to answer in the negative:

The will of the people does not always lead to the good of the people, as they are not always capable of objectively measuring the chances of success and failure. It is particularly easy to go astray when success is dependent on a belief in a powerful ally, in the belief that he will understand, stay true, that he'll help. But the fact of the matter is that none of us know this ally very well, and God only knows how he'll thank us for our efforts.³⁹

R. A. Abramovich, a Bundist, was slightly more pragmatic. At a meeting at the Moscow State Conference in August of 1917, he declared, “[O]nly the full and complete victory of the revolution, only the full and decisive democratization of life in this country is capable of ending the oppression of Jewish people and guaranteeing autonomy for them…. this is why the Jewish workers—not only as members of the family of the international proletariat, not only as citizens of a free Russia, but as Jews—are deeply invested in the furthering of the revolution in Russia.”⁴⁰

Discrimination and oppression provided a natural environment that would inevitably lead to an increase in the number of revolutionaries from among the Jewish population. By October of 1906, the more rational government administrators understood this. The experience of the 1905 Revolution, among other things, led Stolypin to come up with a series of proposals to repeal restrictions on Jews in the Russian Empire.

Stolypin explained to the Tsar that the “Jewish question” was now being raised as “Jews have a legal basis to demand full equality in accordance with the civil liberties granted by the Manifesto of October 17.” Moreover, Stolypin sought to “placate the non-revolutionary elements of the Jewish population in order to rid our government of a situation that has served as a source of countless opportunities for abuse.” However, Stolypin's initiatives ran up against the inexplicable mystical inclinations of the Emperor, who returned the set of proposals on December 10, 1906 without approving them. “Long before I received these proposals,” Nicholas II would later write, “I thought about them day and night. And despite the most convincing arguments in favor of approving the matter, an inner voice continues to repeat to me ever more insistently that I should not take this decision upon myself.”⁴¹

A large portion of the Russian population was convinced that if another revolution were to occur, then Jews would be active participants. The far right claimed that Jews served as the “backbone” of the revolutionary movement, and that without their support no revolution would be possible. It comes as somewhat of a surprise, then, that Jews who had participated so actively in struggles against the autocracy, or who were at least extremely sympathetic to such actions, were such minor participants in its downfall. This “strange” fact is of course rather easy to explain. The revolution in Russia was predominantly Russian, and could not be the sole result of a well organized minority. It was instead the result of the decay of the state on the one hand, and the coincidence of a number of disparate factors on the other. In any case, its goal was not a solution to the “Jewish question.” The February Revolution of 1917 demonstrated this. There was no talk of any kind of Jewish conspiracy; the only conspiracy to be found was in the actions of the generals who refused to support the Russian Tsar, their commander-in-chief.

Although Jews would go on to play a more significant role in the Russian revolution, they never played a decisive one. Many Russian nationalist writers were fully aware of this. Ten years after the revolution, Lev Karsavin would write, “It's time to get rid of this stupid fairy tale…that Jews thought up and carried out the Russian revolution. One would have to be extremely uneducated and ignorant of history, as well as having a hatred of the Russian people, to believe that the Jews were capable of destroying the Russian state. This is a philosophy of history worthy of Ataman Krasnov, and apparently borrowed from Dumas-père, who likewise blamed Count Caliostro for the French revolution!”⁴²

“After all, didn't our revolution start with the most typical of Russian rebellions, ‘unthinking and ruthless’ at first, but bearing deep inside it some kind of moral depth, some kind of idiosyncratic truth?” asked Nikolai Ustrialov, in an article tellingly entitled “Patriotica.” “No, neither we [the intelligentsia] nor the people can deny responsibility for the current crisis, whether with regard to its better or its darker aspects. This crisis is ours, it is genuinely Russian, it is from our psychology, from our past…And even if one day it is mathematically proven—whereas in the current situation it is yet not mathematically proven [The article was published in 1921]—that 90 percent of Russian revolutionaries were foreigners or that they were mostly Jews, that would take nothing away from the purely Russian character of the movement. Even if ‘foreign hands’ have joined in, the movement's soul, its ‘interior,’ is Russian for better or worse, is of the Russian intelligentsia, and is refracted through the psyche of its people.”

Nikolai Ustrialov, speaking of the ideological roots of the Russian revolution, blamed everything from the broken spirit of Slavophilia, to Chaadaev's pessimism, Hertzen's revolutionary romanticism, and the atmosphere captured in Dostoevsky's characters such as Petrusha Verkhovenskii and Alyosha Karamazov. “Or perhaps they [Verkhovenskii and Karamazov] aren't Russian?” he would note acidly, “And what of the Marxism of the 1890s, headed by people like Bulgakov, Berdiaev, and Struve, who we now consider to be the bearers of the true Russian Idea? It is not foreign [inorodtsy, non-Russian] revolutionaries who are now leading the Russian revolution, but the Russian revolution that is leading foreign revolutionaries to come to know the ‘Russian spirit’ in its current condition.”⁴³

Let us return to March 1917. Before the return of exiles and emigrants from abroad, there were relatively few Jews in the Executive Committee (Ispolkom) of the Petrograd Soviet. In fact, there was only one, Yuri Steklov. The lack of Jewish members pleased Semion Dubnov. On March 17, he wrote in his diary, “The Jews are not at the forefront of this revolution…a tactical move, and a lesson learned from 1905.”⁴⁴

On March 11, 1917, Vinaver called upon Russia's Jews to be patient, brave, and measured, not to “stick out in high or visible positions,” and to serve the motherland and the revolution without calling attention to themselves. Nirenberg, a Bund member, was of the opposite opinion: “Let Jews become senators, officers, and so on. If we do not take these rights now, they won't be given to us tomorrow.”⁴⁵ Vinaver's humility did not last long. As if following the recommendation of his opponent on the left, Vinaver accepted the post of Senator, along with O. Gruzenberg, former Duma deputy I. Gurevich, and Odessa attorney G. Blumenfeld.⁴⁶

On the evening of March 22, 1917, Dubnov wrote, “A remarkable day. Today the Provisional Government published its decision to remove all restrictions on nationalities and religion. In other words, it published its decision to emancipate the Jews of Russia. After forty years fighting and suffering, my life's dream has come true. I still cannot actually comprehend all the greatness of the moment. Later, when the fearful satellites of this new sun on the historical horizon disappear, and the German Hannibal at the gate with the ghosts of counterrevolution and anarchy melt away, we will be able to feel the light and warmth of a new world.”⁴⁷

Dubnov's misgivings would soon turn out to be justified. In another entry, he writes, “I just came back home. Early today I saw people on the street running with their pound or so of ‘daily bread.’ I couldn't help but think that we are standing on the edge of a precipice. The majesty of the revolution and the absolute impotence in the face of famine, every political freedom but an utter lack of bread. How will these contrasts influence the dark masses?”⁴⁸

The absence of Jews from the predominantly Russian revolutionary political elite did not last long. As mentioned earlier, the lack of Jews in revolutionary leadership was largely due to the physical absence of the large number of leaders who had been exiled or voluntarily emigrated. As Jewish revolutionaries made their way back to the capitals, their numbers would increase rapidly.

On October 16, 1917, in the newspaper Obschee Delo (Common Cause), V. Burtsev published a list of 159 emigrants who had returned to Russia in the infamous “sealed wagons” via Germany. The list was given to him by the Special Commissar of the Provisional Government, S. G. Svatikov. There were no fewer than 99 Jews on the list. In the group of 29 people who accompanied Lenin to Petrograd, 17 were Jews. The number of Jews who returned to Russia by less exotic means was also significant.

However, the vast majority of Russian Jews were not affiliated with Lenin and his followers. The February Revolution, and the repeal of restrictions enacted by the Provisional Government, were met with elation and enthusiasm among Russia's Jews. “The rebirth of Jewish cultural and political life,” aptly notes Zvi Gitelman, “created an institutional barrier against the penetration of Bolshevik ideas and organizations.”⁴⁹ Jewish communities were reestablished, and busied themselves not only with religious tasks, but with cultural and educational ones as well. Jewish schools, charities, newspapers, musical societies, and reading circles began to thrive. At the same time, this blossoming of Jewish culture took place against the background of ever-deepening economic problems, including the bankruptcy of most small businesses and high unemployment (particularly among young people), problems that were caused by, or at the very least exacerbated by, the hardships of life in wartime.

The “political geography” of Russia's Jews in 1917 looked something like the following. The most popular parties by far were Zionist in orientation, with a total membership of approximately 300,000 in 1,200 local party organizations by October of 1917.⁵⁰ They were also victorious in nearly all of the elections that would take place in 1917–18. In a certain sense, the quickly growing number of Zionist adherents paralleled a nearly equal increase in the number of SRs. If Russian peasants voted for the SRs in order to gain ownership of their land, then Jews did so in order to realize their dream of going to the Land of Israel (Eretz Yisrael), the land of their fathers.

The spring and summer of 1917 saw the formation of religious parties that often acted as a united front, demanding in their platforms that Saturday be a non-working day and funding for community institutions; and also an eight hour workday, the right for workers to strike, freedom of religion, rights to religious education, and land reform according to the SR platform. One such party appeared in the summer of 1917 after the merger of a number of Moscow and Petrograd groups under the name Ahdut (Unity). The same moniker was adopted somewhat later by Jewish religious groups in Ukraine. Such groups considered themselves to be representative of the religious majority of Russian Jewry, “the true people, silent and scattered” in the words of one of the founders of the party Netsakh Israel.⁵¹

Among the socialist parties, the largest, most influential and most involved in Russian politics was the Bund, which had 33,700 members in December of 1917. The Bund's politics fell largely along Menshevik lines. In terms of Jewish policy, the Bund opposed the “romanticized utopia” of the Zionists and the “clerical aiders and abettors” of the bourgeoisie, and declared the language of the Jewish working masses to be Yiddish rather than Hebrew.

In 1917, the Bund took a fiercely anti-Bolshevik stance. Soon after the February Revolution, the Bund newsletter Arbeiter Shtime declared Leninism to be a disease that was weakening the revolution.⁵² They would later depict Lenin as an anarcho-syndicalist, mocking his slogan for the immediate realization of the socialist revolution.⁵³

In May of 1917, the Jewish Socialist Workers' Party (SERP) and the Zionist-Socialists (Zionist-Socialist Workers' Party) combined, creating the United Jewish Socialist Workers' Party (OESP), or, in Yiddish, Fareynikte. The party had a significant influence in Ukraine. They were close to the SRs, whom they later joined in a bloc during the parliamentary elections. SERP's founder, Kh. O. Zhitlovskii, had been one of the founders of the Social Revolutionaries, as well as the ideological protégé of its leader, V. M. Chernov. The new party collaborated with the Mensheviks in the organized labor movement.

Poalei Zion, with its idiosyncratic ideology a hybrid of Marxism and Zionism, was more proletarian in character. Though the party had only 2,500 members on the eve of the February Revolution, by the summer of 1917 its membership had grown to between 12,000 and 16,000. Politically, they were close to the Menshevik-Internationalists. Some members of the party sympathized with the Bolsheviks, but the Zionist roots of their platform presented an insurmountable obstacle to a full merger. As in the Bund, there was no unanimity with regard to policy concerning the war. In the Ukraine they supported the Central Rada.

Dubnov's Folkspartei, which was comprised mostly of Jewish intellectuals, was a “party for those who don't belong to any party,” as a contemporary once wittily remarked.⁵⁴

The final major participants, though they did not enjoy widespread support among the Jewish working masses, were the “Jewish Kadets.” They advocated full civil rights for all Jews, as well as the maintenance of religious and educational rights, including the use of Yiddish and Hebrew as languages for instruction, and the preservation of the religious character of most Jewish schools. This Jewish People's Group did not, however, agitate for autonomy from the Russian Empire. The group's influence was most easily defined in terms of the personalities of their leaders, such as Vinaver, G. B. Sliozberg, and Gruzenberg (in as much as the latter was any kind of party politician).

In both Russia and Ukraine, the Jewish population was fragmented. A local Jewish Congress which took place in Kiev May 9–11, 1917, quickly degenerated, in the words of one participant, “into an occasion of constant contention and strife among the Russian Jews.” The breakers of the peace turned out to be members of the Bund, who were clearly in the minority. On the second day of the conference, a rabbi from Berdichev asked all present to stand in honor of the Torah. The Bund members refused. The scandal shocked the writer S. A. An-sky, who claimed that the Torah “is not only a religious symbol, but also a symbol of Jewish culture, which has persisted for centuries.” It was in honor of this culture that everyone had been asked to stand. The incident ended there, though the Bund members nonetheless left the conference on the final day, with its leader, M. G. Rafes, calling the remaining attendees the “black and blue Jewish bloc.”⁵⁵

Disputes between members of differing political tendencies would continue until the last days of the Provisional Government. Several days before the Bolshevik coup, M. L. Goldshtein (representing the Jewish People's Group) gave a series of reservedly patriotic speeches in the Council of the Russian Republic, which were met with withering criticism from N. Baru (Poalei Zion) and G. M. Erlikh (Bund). One author's account of this soon-to-be-defunct organ of power sadly noted that “only the Jews found it necessary to use the Council of the Republic for the settling of scores between each other.”⁵⁶

Thus it is impossible to speak of any kind of united Jewish politics. The politicized sections of Jewish society were torn by the same contradictions present in Russian society. Any hope of creating a kind of all-Jewish party that would put forth a united political program proved to be illusory. The political differences, and corresponding social and culture differences, proved to be too great.⁵⁷

Elections in Jewish communities, including those for delegates to the All-Russian Jewish Congress and the Russian Constituent Assembly showed the following preferences. On the local level, ten gubernia elections in Ukraine had the following breakdown: Zionists (36 percent), the Bund (14.4 percent), Ahdut (10 percent), the United Jewish Socialist Workers' Party (OESRP, 8.2 percent), Poalei Zion (6.3 percent), the Folkspartei (3 percent), the Jewish People's Group (1 percent) with all other local organizations comprising the remaining 20 percent. In the elections to the Jewish Congress, the results demonstrated even greater support for the Zionists, who won 60 percent of the positions, whereas socialist parties won 25 percent, with religious parties winning 12 percent.⁵⁸ In Petrograd and the surrounding areas in January of 1918, only one-third of eligible voters participated. The Zionists' successes were impressive, with eight races won, while the Bund, the Jewish People's Group, Orthodox parties, and the Folkspartei won one race each.⁵⁹

Elections to the Constituent Assembly were even more indicative. The Jewish National Bloc, which included Zionist and religious parties, received 417,215 votes out of the 498,198 total cast for Jewish parties. The other parties did not fare as well (the Bund received 31,123 and Poalei Zion 20,538, with 29,332 votes going to other socialist parties). In Minsk, the National Bloc received 65,046 votes, whereas other parties managed only 11,064; in Kiev the results were 24,790 for the National Bloc versus 12,471 for the Bund and Menshevik coalition.⁶⁰ From the National Bloc list the following members were elected to the Constituent Assembly: The Zionists Iu. D. Brutskus, A. M. Goldstein, the Moscow rabbi Ia. I. Maze, V. I. Temkin, D. M. Kogan-Bernshtein, N. S. Syrkin, and O. O. Gruzenberg, who at the time was close with Zionist circles. D. V. Lvovich was elected from the party list of the SRs and OESRP, along with the Bundist G. I. Lure, who was chosen from the party list of the Bund and the RSDRP (SDs). A number of Jews were also elected to the Assembly from other parties (for the most part the socialist parties). The Secretary of the Constituent Assembly for the one day of its existence was the Socialist Revolutionary M. V. Vishniak.⁶¹

The overwhelming majority of Jewish voters voted for Jewish parties. Determining the number of Jews who voted for Russian political parties, and which parties they voted for, is a difficult task. How many Jews followed the plea of Vinaver, who asked them to vote for the People's Freedom Party (Kadets), “Not one Jewish vote should be thrown away in this struggle for culture and order against anarchy and backwardness”? How many instead voted for the Bolsheviks, who promised a quick end to the war, but who Vinaver and his allies had identified as forces of this same anarchy? Unfortunately, we may never know the answer.⁶²

The overwhelming successes of the Zionists in numerous elections facilitated the publication on November 2, 1917, of a declaration by the British foreign minister, A. G. Balfour. Written in the form of a letter addressed to Lord L. Rothschild, the Balfour Declaration stated the intention of the British government to assist in the creation of a “national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine. The declaration was met with great optimism on the part of Russian Zionists. It seemed as if the centuries-old dream of the Jewish people was finally closer to becoming a reality. It is somewhat strange that in the future the Zionist parties in Russia were to play much less of a role in the lives of the Jews than the socialist ones. Gitelman attributes this change to the departure (both voluntary and forced) of many Zionists as a result of Soviet persecution.⁶³ This is quite true, but it is only part of the picture. Voting for the Zionists in 1917 was the same as voting for a dream. It would have been impossible for even 10 percent, let alone 100 percent, of the Jewish population to move to Palestine. People were forced by circumstances to live in the “here and now,” already under the conditions of early Sovietization, threatened by the violence that was to accompany the civil war. The Jewish socialist parties were more capable of addressing the threats of physical annihilation presented by the current day. The “Zionist project,” on the other hand, seemed unrealistic.

Most Russians were unaware of the internal conflicts in the Jewish community. Leaders of the Jewish political parties or movements were well-known mostly among members of their own community. Those Jewish politicians who found success on the national stage beyond the Jewish political parties tended to identify according to class lines or social group. They often either completely ignored “Jewish” issues, or treated them as being of secondary importance (with some rare exceptions). Among the deputies of the Constituent Assembly, the number of Jews elected on the Soviet of Peasant Deputies list outnumbered those of all Jewish national organizations combined by a factor of four to one. In the Executive Committee of the All-Russia Soviet of Peasant Deputies, 20 percent of the members elected at the First All-Russian Congress of the Soviets of Peasant Deputies were Jewish.

By our admittedly rough estimate, the Soviet elite at the end of 1917 and the beginning of 1918 could be said to comprise a little over 3,000 individuals.⁶⁴ This number includes members of the Constituent Assembly, members of the Provisional Central Election Committee, members of the Democratic Congress, members of the Council of the Russian Republic, and the Central Committees of the main Russian political parties. The period in question runs from the February Revolution until the establishment of one-party dictatorship in Soviet Russia in July of 1918. Of these 3,000 or so, nearly 300 were Jews of all political stripes and colors, from the anarchists and Bolsheviks on the left to right-wing Kadets.

The central committees of nearly all of the significant political parties of Russia had members of Jewish origin, and in the Bolshevik and Social Revolutionary parties the leadership was anywhere from a quarter to a third Jewish. At the Sixth Congress of the RSDRP, there were six Jews among the twenty-one members of the Central Committee (Zinoviev, Trotsky, L. B. Kamenev, Ia. M. Sverdlov, G. Ia. Sokolnikov, and M. S. Uritsky). A. A. Ioffe was one of eight candidates for the Central Committee. The Central Committee of the Menshevik coalition was nearly 50 percent Jewish. Three of the sixty-seven members of the Kadet Central Committee elected at the Eighth Congress were Jewish, including Vinaver, who was elected second from the list, after V. I. Vernadskii. Nearly one-fifth of the membership of the first five Provisional Central Election Committees was Jewish.

While Jewish revolutionaries did a lot of work behind the scenes, they were eager to take the stage as well, and there were a large number of Jews among the orators in various political arenas. In this respect, they refused to follow the model of behavior espoused by Vinaver and Dubnov, and made their presence felt. This fact was noticed by those who tended to see only Jews among the revolutionary parties, as well as those who were slightly more objective.

For the memoirists of 1917 among the most striking orators were Steklov (Nakhamkes), the Menshevik Fedor Dan, and the Bundist Meir Liber. Fedor Stepun would write, “In those days [the first weeks after February] the imposing, deafening figure of the bearded Steklov would appear on stage more often than any other. He was a zealous Anarcho-Marxist.”⁶⁵ Liber and Dan appeared so often before the Petrograd Soviet that the verb “to Liberdanize” soon appeared in public discourse.

In Odessa, the most prominent speakers and social critics of the time included the Bolsheviks Aleksandr Khmelnitskii (the future People's Commissar for Justice in Ukraine in 1919), Ian Gamarnik, Sergei Ingulov (Reizer), Leonid Isaakovich Ruzer, and the SRs Rikhter and S. S. Zak (along with the “iconic” SR N. N. Kuliabko-Koretskii). Khaim Ryt served as the leader of Odessa's anarchists from 1917 to 1918.⁶⁶

A similar picture could be found in Kiev, Minsk, Vitebsk, and any other city with a significant Jewish population, as well as in a few locales outside of the confines of the Pale of Settlement. In Rostov-on-Don the Social Democrats S. M. Gurvich, and A. S. Lokerman, as well as the SRs Shraiber, Freid, Berdichevskii and others, were elected to the city Duma and the Soviet of Workers' Deputies. At some points debate in both of these organizations would go on nearly exclusively between Jews.

The local summer elections of 1917 provided some intriguing results. Within the territory of the Pale, they demonstrated who controlled the sympathies of the local population. Yet even in territories outside of the Pale, Jews would become members of the government by election through party lists. This would seem to indicate that Jewish heritage was not a “deal-breaker” for the local Christian population, at least at this particular moment in history.

Seven Bund members joined the socialist coalition in the Kiev Duma, which also included the SRs and Social Democrats. Three deputies were elected on the united ticket of the OESRP and Poalei Zion. The Jewish Democratic Bloc, which included Zionists, members of Agudat Yisrael, and the unaffiliated Soviet of United Jewish Organizations, received five seats total.

In Minsk twenty-eight representatives of Jewish parties were elected to the city Duma, which amounted to more than 25 percent of the total number of voting deputies. Sixteen of these came from the Jewish National Bloc composed of non-socialist parties, whereas the Bund managed only ten seats as part of the Social Democratic Bloc, and Poalei Zion and Zionist Socialists won one seat each.

In Vitebsk, the Bund came out ahead, winning eleven seats as part of a coalition with the SRs and Mensheviks, while Zionist and Orthodox parties won nine seats, with one seat being held by the Folkspartei.

The dominance of the Bund in heavily Jewish territories can be explained by the fact that they gained votes by forming coalitions, allowing them to get extra support from non-Jews. This option wasn't a possibility for the Zionist or Orthodox parties, or for those Jewish socialist parties that decided to enter the elections on their own.⁶⁷

In several cities, Jews were to assume leadership roles in local government structures and legislatures. A. Vainshtein (Rakhmiel) was elected chairman of the city Duma in Minsk, and the Menshevik Ilia Polonskii was elected to lead Ekaterinoslav, while his fellow party member A. M. Ginzburg (Naumov) became the second-in-command in Kiev. Bund member D. Chertkov was elected chairman of the Duma in Saratov.⁶⁸ Later on, the Bolsheviks would be blamed for placing the two capitals in the hands of Jews (Zinoviev in Petrograd and Kamenev in Moscow). However, Jews were already leading the city governments as early as June 1917, with the SR G. I. Shreider being democratically elected to govern Petrograd,⁶⁹ while his fellow party member O. S. Minor was elected chairman of the Moscow city Duma.

The Jewish population of Rostov served as a microcosm for the Jewish political experience in the year 1917. Like many other Jewish communities, Rostov Jews were split into a multitude of political parties and organizations. Zionists, Poalei Zion, SERP, the Bund, and a number of Jewish organizations sympathetic to the Kadets united to form the “United Committee of Jewish Social Organizations” (OKO). But the most politically active members of the Jewish community were to be found in the Russian political parties, ranging from the Kadets to the Bolsheviks.

The city Duma elections neatly illustrated the political sympathies of Rostov's Jews and their role in the political life of the city. Elections were conducted according to party lists. Mikhail Rabinovich was elected on the Zionist ticket, while the Bund and the SERP joined a coalition with the SRs, Mensheviks, and the Armenian party Dashnaktsutiun. The local representatives of Poalei Zion endorsed the socialist bloc, even as Poalei Zion accused the Bund and SERP of preventing them from joining. Explaining their stance towards the activities of the OKO, Poalei Zion passed a resolution stating that “the OKO does not represent the interests of the Jewish population of Rostov.”⁷⁰

A most interesting discussion was to take place at a meeting of the Kadet party, which also included prominent members of the Jewish community such as Abram Chernikov, Lev Volkenshtein, and Abram Gorodisskii. Chernikov claimed that it was a mistake not to form a coalition with local Jewish parties, which were entering the elections separately.

The local Kadet leader V. F. Zeeler replied that “the Party of People's Freedom did not consider it necessary to isolate the ‘Jewish question’ and talk of forming a coalition. The Party believes that it has always marched in solidarity with the Jews, feels their pain and suffering, and will continue to march on with them.”

Volkenshtein claimed that he didn't understand, “Who are these Jews and what are these Jewish organizations that Chernikov is talking about? Such horrible things! Are we not full-fledged citizens? What use do we have for such distinctions? Is it not true that there are 400,000 Jewish soldiers fighting alongside their Russian comrades? What difference does it make if there are only Christians in our party list, we would vote for them any way, as we believe this party has always been with us and for us. Leibs and Ivans are now equal. Tell all of our fellow Jews that the membership of the Party of People's Freedom has always defended us and has given us freedom and equality. We believe in them, and will continue to support them.”

Gorodisskii disagreed with Volkenshtein, and expressed surprise at the fact that the Jewish population was not supporting the Kadets, or the Jewish Kadet members. He reminded those gathered, “As long as nationalities exist, questions of nationality will also exist. But a split would be a grave error, harming both the parties and the nationalities in question.”

As a result, an overwhelming majority of Kadets voted in favor of ordering the central committee to form a coalition with the OKO.⁷¹ In turn the OKO called upon its fellow Jewish citizens to vote for the Kadet ticket, which “includes our members of the OKO, who have taken upon themselves the responsibility of achieving the national and cultural interests of Jews as well as the beginnings of cultural autonomy.”⁷²

Jews were widely represented in the party lists leading up to the elections. They comprised nearly one-third of the socialist bloc, 10 percent of the Bolshevik party list, 25 percent of the Kadet party list, and nearly half of the list of the People's Socialist Party of Labor.

The socialists claimed a decided victory in the elections, winning eighty seats, as compared to sixteen for the Kadets and thirteen for all other parties. Nearly 33 percent of all voters were of Jewish heritage. The city administration was to include Vulf Pleskov, a member of the Don committee of the RSDRP in the early 1900s, along with Aleksandr Lokerman, one of the most popular politicians in Rostov, who was elected secretary. Lokerman was the head of the Don RSDRP from 1902 to 1903, and the main organizer of the 1902 strikes and 1903 demonstrations. One of the “founding fathers” of the RSDRP, he was a delegate to the Second Congress, and sided with the Mensheviks. He was a brilliant publicist and orator, a well-known party member on the national level and a leading figure in the organized labor movement. Arrested several times in the past, he reappeared in Rostov in 1917 and was immediately elected to the Soviet of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies.⁷³

After those first few euphoric weeks that followed the February Revolution, it soon became clear that freedom was only freedom and nothing more; that for victory in war one must fight, and that to build civil society one must work. In other words, things were not going to simply take care of themselves. As a result, those seized by revolutionary fervor began to search for the cause of their worsening material conditions. A new search for enemies was underway. For some it was the Kadets, for others the Bolsheviks, for still others the bourgeoisie. But for an even greater number, these enemies were to be the Jews. The open and active work of politicians of Jewish heritage, no matter what their position or ideological orientation might be, now seemed to confirm the writings of antisemitic thinkers and journalists.

The growth in antisemitic sentiment that began in the summer of 1917 was universally noted by contemporaries of every political conviction and creed.

It should be noted that the disappearance of parties to the “right” of the Kadets from the Russian political scene after the February Revolution did not mean the disappearance of those newspapers that liked to publish articles written in the spirit of the Black Hundreds. Likewise it did not entail the disappearance of the admittedly significant readership of said publications. One such publication, A. A. Suvorin's Malen'kaia Gazeta (Little Newspaper), claimed that it was “for Jewish equality, but against Jewish dominance,” to quote the title of one of its articles. Denying any charges of antisemitism, it implored: “good Jews, good Russian citizens, cast out your reckless, evil tribesmen yourselves, for they will bring great harm to your people in Russia.” The newspaper published articles that would make claims along the lines of “the second army is under the command of the ‘Bolshevik,’ Rabinovich.” Authors of such articles would call attention to the ethnic heritage of their political opponents, playing on the nationalistic sympathies of their readers. According to contemporaries, Little Newspaper would “sell out in minutes,” was “vulgar and illiterate, but contained true life, and its readers were addicted to it.” Its popularity can be measured by the increase in its print runs, from 20,000–60,000 copies in 1916 up to 109,000 copies in June of 1917.⁷⁴

In the beginning of June 1917, Jewish Week already noted with some concern that “among the masses Leninism is beginning to be associated with the idea of a specifically Jewish kind of agitation, and though this demagogic tendency is refuted every day, it still calls forth more and more hatred. In this fertile soil…. will a wave of antisemitic pogroms grow.” The paper associated this rise with the yellow press, publications such as Vechernee Vremia (Evening Times) and Little Newspaper, which were dedicated to trashing the “Bolshevik Jews, who appear in public using Russian last names.” Little Newspaper in particular, “the mouthpiece of that journalistic villain, Aleksei Suvorin” would “day in and day out” prominently display a list of all Jewish Bolsheviks, both their real names and their pseudonyms.⁷⁵ Jewish Week's contention that taking on a Russian last name in a country where Russian is the dominant language is completely natural—and that such complaints could just as easily apply to the Russian “Ulianov”—would probably have done little to convince the readers of these tabloids. The success of Little Newspaper was due in no small part to the fact that it had its finger on the pulse of a certain segment of Russian society, who considered their misfortunes to be the result of the sudden arrival of “foreigners” in positions of power.

By June, Jewish circles in Petrograd were extremely concerned as to what form the “Christian masses' response to Jewish ‘activity’” would take. Alarmed by the lack of tact displayed by Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Kamenev, the author of the “Notes” section of Jewish Week feared that should a time of troubles ensue, the Jews would be blamed for “the anarchy brought into Russian life as a result of Marxism and maximalism.”⁷⁶

On June 8 a meeting took place in the hall of the Petrograd stock exchange. The topic of conversation was the response of Jewish society to the current political climate. Vinaver, Sliozberg, and Dubnov all spoke, with the latter “disowning” the “Bolshevik demagogues” from the Jewish community.⁷⁷

At approximately the same time Maksim Gorky remarked in an article from the cycle Untimely Thoughts (Nesvoevremennye Mysli) that “antisemitism is still alive, and is slowly and carefully rearing its wretched head once more, hissing, slandering, splattering with the poisonous spittle of hatred”:

How did this happen? It turns out there were two Jews among the more anarchic Bolsheviks. Or maybe the number was even as high as three. Some even count as many as seven and are firmly convinced that these seven Samsons will reduce the 170-million-strong Russian temple to rubble.

It would be funny and stupid, if it weren't so despicable…

There are…thousands of proofs demonstrating that the equation Jew = Bolshevik is a stupid one, the result of the zoological tendencies of agitated Russian citizens.

I, of course, will not take the trouble to provide these proofs—honorable people have no need of them, while those lacking honor would find them unconvincing.

Idiocy is a disease that cannot be cured by means of suggestion. To the person suffering from this incurable condition it crystal clear: since there are seven and a half Jews among the Bolsheviks, the Jews are to blame for everything…

And after all of this, the honest and sane Russian man will once more begin to feel alarmed, and will experience a tormenting shame for his Rus', and for the Russian blockhead who in times of trouble immediately looks for an enemy from without, instead of in the depths of his own stupidity.⁷⁸

Stupidity, however, is an international phenomenon. After all, the belief on the part of many Jewish activists that a mere change in the external power structure of the country would solve the “Jewish question” could also be attributed to stupidity or naïveté. The Russian Revolution gave the Jews the March 22 declaration of equal rights, passed by the Provisional Government. However, it would also later give them an explosion of pogrom activity and an indescribable amount of suffering. As is often the case with such tragedies, all this would happen to a group of people who were, to a large extent, apolitical in nature.

After the events of July 1917 (the “dress rehearsal” for the Bolshevik coup), Stepun recalled how “janitors, shop-owners, cabbies, and barbers, all of the unwashed masses of the Petrograd petit bourgeoisie were dying for the opportunity to attack ‘comrades, Jews, and traitors.’”⁷⁹

The renowned literary historian Boris Eichenbaum recorded a conversation he overheard in a bookshop on August 23, where an elderly sailor said “The revolution is insane, it was carried out by a minority, there aren't any Russians in the Soviet of Workers Deputies, they are all traitors that should be hanged.” The owner of the book shop agreed with him, saying, “The Jews did everything.”⁸⁰

Dubnov writes the following on September 20: “the shops are filled with the most scandalous conversations about how the Yids are evil, how they made themselves rich during the war at the expense of the people's misfortune, how Jews have seized power in the city Dumas and government institutions.”⁸¹

It is somewhat curious that some far-right journalists, as well as a good portion of the military rank-and-file that the Bolsheviks were dependent on, would all agree that the Bolshevik struggle was a fight against the Jews. One possible explanation is that a number of the Bolsheviks' opponents in the Soviets and other organizations in Petrograd were Jews such as Iu. O. Martov, G. I. Shreider, and A. R. Gots (who would later head the anti-Bolshevik Committee for Saving the Motherland and the Revolution). Another possible explanation was the pronounced tendency of the political “base” to associate any hostile force with Jewishness.

At the same time, the rank-and-file would quickly forget the nationality of those speakers whose slogans were supportive of their own goals. Thus a battalion stationed in Mogilev were willing to “benevolently forgive” a female Bolshevik agitator who called for a quick end to the war, but nearly beat to death S. Ia. Lur'e, who, as a representative of the Soviet, claimed that any peace, even a separate one, could only be achieved through a long period of negotiations.⁸² The Ukrainian peasantry could also engage in such “internationalism” if it served their interests. Thus in Odessa, the Social Revolutionary S. S. Zak was wildly popular following the February Revolution and was considered an expert on the “agrarian question.” In fact, he became so popular, that it was said that peasants would come to the city and ask, “Where's the Yid who's giving out land?”⁸³

“How fast are these changes in the psychological state of the masses!” wrote V. I. Vernadskii, a member of the Kadet Central Committee as well as Deputy Minister of Education for the Provisional Government. “Jews now command the military. Who could have dreamed of that even twelve or eighteen months ago?”⁸⁴ A week earlier, he had written that some of the socialist Deputy Ministers reported, “among the crowds of Smolny monastery the word zhid is heard at every step.”⁸⁵

The Cossacks, who had come to the defense of the Winter Palace, at first claimed that Lenin and “his whole gang were a bunch of Yids.” However, realizing the weak position of the defenders of the Provisional Government, they soon changed their minds and departed. As it turned out, according to a certain Cossack officer (Podkhorunzhii), the Provisional Government was only supported by “women and Yids” and “half the government are Yids too.” “But the Russian people stayed with Lenin” said the same officer, explaining his betrayal.⁸⁶

Kerensky's decline in popularity led to a rumor that he was actually Jewish. Upon leaving the Winter Palace on the eve of the Bolshevik coup, he happened to catch a glimpse of the following piece of graffiti: “Down with the Jew Kerensky, long live Trotsky!”⁸⁷

Contemporaries often remarked upon the “Jewishness” of this or that political actor during the Revolutionary period. This was especially true when the person in question belonged to the opposing camp. The Kadet V. D. Nabokov, a member of the All-Russian Commission for the Elections to the Constituent Assembly, was arrested towards the end of November 1917 for refusing to recognize the authority of the Soviet of People's Commissars. Sentenced to five days in Smolny, Nabokov was apparently indifferent to the Jewish heritage of his colleagues L. M. Branson, M. V. Vishniak, and V. M. Gessen, the last of whom had come to Smolny voluntarily in support of his fellow Kadets. However, Nabokov could not help but note the “repulsive, shabbily dressed figure” of M. S. Uritsky, who had “brazen, Jewish facial features.” Uritsky was the commissar of Tavricheskii Palace; Nabokov would have to deal with him later after his release from prison.⁸⁸

The only newspaper of a more “traditional” antisemitic orientation that continued to publish after the February Revolution was Groza (Thunder-storm).89 After the Bolshevik coup, it claimed, “The Bolsheviks have seized power. The Jew Kerensky, lackey to the British and the world's bankers, having brazenly assumed the title of commander-in-chief of the armed forces and having appointed himself Prime Minister of the Orthodox Russian Tsardom, will be swept out of the Winter Palace, where he had desecrated the remains of the Peace-Maker Alexander III with his presence. On October 25, the Bolsheviks united all the regiments who refused to submit to a government composed of Jew bankers, treasonous generals, traitorous land-owners, and thieving merchants.”⁹⁰

A week later, Groza evaluated the Bolsheviks' actions in much the same terms. “A remarkable order has been established by the Bolsheviks over the past eight days. There have been no robberies, nor any instances of violence!” “The Bolsheviks have an enemy in the Jewish [zhidovskii] kahals, the traitors from among the land-owners, generals, merchants, and government workers…. In Petrograd the Jewish Rescue Committee under the leadership of the Yid Gots transmitted a secret order from Kerensky on October 28 to Yids in military academies to resist turning in their arms, promising to return to the capital the next day. The Latvians and Armenians listened to the Jews, but many Russians refused.”⁹¹

The newspaper was closed by the Bolsheviks following the publication of this edition, their support for the new regime notwithstanding. The Bolsheviks were hardly in need of such “defenders.”

Ilia Ehrenburg wrote M. A. Voloshin from Moscow in November of 1917, soon after the Bolsheviks seized power:

The worst began after their triumph. It is strangely desolate. Moscow has been tortured, crippled, and left empty. The Bolsheviks are on a rampage. I find myself thinking more and more about going abroad; as soon as the opportunity appears, I will leave. I am doing this to save Russia for myself, to leave open the possibility of someday living here. These hideous abominations are truly “crayfish caviar.”⁹² I would really like to work, but this is impossible here. Yesterday I was standing in line, waiting to vote for the Constituent Assembly. People were saying, “Whoever's against the Yids, vote for number 5! (meaning the Bolsheviks),” “whoever's for world-wide revolution, vote for number 5!” The patriarch rode by, sprinkling holy water; everyone removed their hats. A group of soldiers passing by started to belt out the Internationale in his direction. Where am I? Or is this truly hell?⁹³

S. Ia. Lur'e was shocked by the combination of Bolshevik propaganda and antisemitism prevalent in the campaign period leading up to the elections for the Constituent Assembly in Petrograd. In the Okhta area of the city where he lived, Bolshevik agitators assured voters that Kerensky was, in fact, a Jew.⁹⁴

In a diary entry dated November 16, 1917, the publicist D. V. Filosofov recorded a story recounted to him by I. I. Manukhin, who had been serving as a doctor in the Peter and Paul Fortress, where the ministers of the Provisional Government were imprisoned:

Today in the fortress there was a curious incident. A group of Red Guards came to the Commandant's office quarters. One of them was drinking water, having grown tired of talking. He had been at Andreev's coffee house, “beating up Yids.”

—Are you a Bolshevik?

—Yes!

—Then why are you beating up Yids?

—I don't know, they told us to go to the coffee house, there were Yids there. What do I have to do with it? I don't know…. etc.⁹⁵

Similar incidents could be found outside of the capitals. As the masses that the Bolsheviks depended on grew more radicalized, their antisemitic tendencies were noticed by the Jewish bourgeoisie as well as by socialist politicians of Jewish heritage, especially as they repeatedly spoke out against the Bolsheviks.

The first “shot” was fired in a meeting of the Rostov-on-Don Soviet on October 14, 1917, which was dedicated to preparations for the All-Russian Congress of Soviets. First Lokerman, and then Shraiber attempted to convince those gathered that the Congress would lead to the end of democracy, and criticized the tactics of the Bolsheviks. They were interrupted by whistles and cries of “Down with the Jewish [zhidovskikh] deputies! Get the Yid off the stage!”⁹⁶ At the next meeting of the Soviet, where it was clear that a majority had sided with the Bolsheviks, Gdalii Freid, “taking note of the Bolshevik majority of the Soviet, expressed the desire that the comrade Bolsheviks would take measures to prevent the shouting of pogromistic sentiments such as were heard at the last meeting.”⁹⁷

The “comrade Bolsheviks” promised to do so. But how could the Bolshevik leadership possibly control the dark masses on which they were so dependent?

All of the Jewish parties and groups took a negative view of the Bolshevik coup. The Zionist newspaper Togblat (Daily Newspaper) made a careful distinction between the two revolutions of 1917. “In March the revolution was of the people, in the fullest sense of the word. Now it presents itself as a conspiracy among the soldiers.” The Bund newspaper Arbeiter Shtime (Worker's Voice) called the Bolshevik coup “insanity.”⁹⁸

An emergency session of the Central Committee of the Bund took place in Minsk after the Bolshevik coup. Attendees included A. I. Vainshtein, A. Litvak, Ester (M. Ia. Frumkina), M. G. Rafes, and A. I. Chemerinskii. A resolution was passed placing “full political responsibility” on the Bolsheviks for the “insurrection and civil war that was begun by them against the will of the majority of the revolutionary democratic parties during the two weeks before elections to the Constituent Assembly, where the problem of reorganizing the structures of power could have been achieved through peaceful means in concert with all of the revolutionary democratic forces.” The resolution claimed that the Bolsheviks had isolated themselves from the rest of “revolutionary democracy” and were forced to act “in means that would suppress democratic freedoms and condone unchecked terror, which is always a characteristic of government by a minority. The Bolshevik terror, which based itself on the military dictatorship of the armed forces, presents a great danger to the revolution and opens the path for the establishment of a military dictatorship of the counterrevolution.”⁹⁹

One of the Bund's proclamations during the election period called upon the citizens of the Vitebsk and Mogilev gubernias not to vote for the Bolsheviks, “who were responsible for the civil war, who had led the revolution to the precipice by their insurrection, and who made use of oppression, persecution, and violence.”¹⁰⁰ Their publications called upon people to engage in sabotage against Bolshevik power.¹⁰¹ At the same time R. Abramovich warned against armed resistance to Bolshevism, as this could push the masses, who were capable only of seeing in black and white, into the arms of the Bolsheviks. G. Erlikh foresaw that enthusiasm for Bolshevism would also come to the “Jewish street,” but also that such interest would be short-lived, as Jewish workers could not support a party that lived “next door” to the Black Hundreds.¹⁰²

The leading articles of Jewish Week for the middle of November 1917 carried typical titles: “In the Chaos of Destruction” and “Waiting for Catastrophe.” The author of the latter wrote, “Russian Jewry, unlike the Ukrainians, Cossacks, or people of the Caucuses, cannot fence themselves off territorially from brazen experimenters. Their political and economic interests are too entwined with the native Russian population; we are compelled to undertake the most active and energetic part in saving Russia from the Bolshevik attack.”¹⁰³

Russian citizens of Jewish heritage undertook armed struggle against the “Bolshevik attack” from the very beginning of the Revolution and the Civil War. Stereotypes in the social consciousness and historical literature somehow “automatically” place Jews in the Bolshevik camp. In reality, however, Jews fought on both sides of the barricade, at least at first.

“For the past several days the Jewish community in Petrograd has been mourning its numerous victims in the same way as if a pogrom had been taking place” noted the article “Funerals of the Jewish Cadets,” published in Vecherniaia pochta (The Evening Post) on November 6, 1917. “More than 50 victims were buried in the Jewish section of Preobrazhensky cemetery. Among those were 35 cadets who died during the siege of the Vladimir Academy and telephone station.”¹⁰⁴ Before joining the academy, most of these victims were students enrolled in the Psychoneurological Institute.¹⁰⁵ Jewish cadets also took part in the defense of the Winter Palace.¹⁰⁶

The number of Jewish officers in the army should not come as a surprise. After Jews received full civil rights, many Jewish youths, who had early viewed military service somewhat indifferently, enthusiastically joined the ranks of the Russian army and joined in her defense. The relatively high levels of education among the Jewish population led to many being accepted to officers' school. They rushed to defend the democratic government, which they quite rightly considered to be their own.

Another Petrograd newspaper, Volia Naroda (Will of the People), published a brief article on November 5, 1917 entitled “In the Peter and Paul Fortress,” which listed a number of officers who had ended up in the prison. It included the names of thirty-five officers, including names such as Lifshits, Mirochnik, Berman, Levin, Soloveichik, and others. There were a total of twelve Jewish names.¹⁰⁷

Nevertheless Jewish circles attempted to deny the Jewish heritage of many of the Bolshevik leaders. On November 26, 1917, a Zionist meeting took place in Petrograd. It had been called to celebrate the long-awaited liberation of Jerusalem by British forces; though those gathered had no way of knowing this, troops under the command of General Allenby were to enter Jerusalem on that very day. At the meeting, M. S. Shvartzman, a doctor, remarked, “We do not want Russian Jewry as a whole to be held responsible for the actions of these repulsive butchers, these renegades of Jewry. Rather, we would hope that they themselves will be held responsible for their actions before our entire people.”

The author of the short article “On the Threshold of the Promised Land,” published in Vechernii Chas (Evening Hour) on November 27, 1917, which quoted Shvartzman's words, commented, “The speaker chose not to name names. But the perceptive audience knew who he was talking about, the Na-khamkises, Bronshteins, and others.”¹⁰⁸

Yet it was to prove difficult to disassociate the Bolshevik leadership from the rest of Russia's Jewry. Unlike the Jewish officers who perished in relative anonymity, the names of Trotsky, Zinoviev and others were on everyone's lips.

On January 7, 1918, the chronicler of Russian Jewry Semen Dubnov, wrote, “They won't forget about the participation of Jewish revolutionaries during the Bolshevik Terror. Lenin's comrades, the Trotskys, Zinovievs, Uritskys, etc., will end up screening him from criticism. Even now I can already hear how people quietly call Smolny ‘Yid Central’ [tsentrozhid] under their breath. Soon they'll start saying it out loud, and judeophobia will take deep root in all sectors of Russian society. They won't forgive us. The earth is fertile for antisemitism.”¹⁰⁹

Dubnov was wrong on the last count. The stage had been set for antisemitism at a much earlier date.

On May 10, upon hearing of the pogrom being carried out by Red Army units in Novgorod-Severskii, he wrote, “We are perishing because of the Bolsheviks, and will die at their hands.”¹¹⁰

On July 7, 1918, “For 35 years I cursed Tsarist despotism, now I curse its reverse side, the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’”¹¹¹

And so we have come full circle.

Discrimination against the Jews in Tsarist Russia inexorably pushed a certain portion of the Jewish populace into the ranks of the revolutionaries. In addition to bringing long-awaited civil rights, the revolution was inevitably to bring countless tragedies and misfortunes to Russian Jewry. It was a set of problems with no “correct” solution. Attempts to find such a solution were paid for by the blood of tens of thousands of victims.