Chapter 10
The Period of the Duma
The Manifesto of 17 October marked the
beginning of a qualitatively new period in Russian history, which was
later consolidated by a year of Stolypin’s government: the period of the
Duma or of limited Autocracy, during which the previous principles of
government—the absolute power of the tsar, the opacity of the
ministries, the immutability of the hierarchy—were rapidly and sensibly
restricted. This period was very difficult for all the higher spheres,
and only men with a solid character and an active temperament could
enrol with dignity in the new era. But public opinion also found it
difficult to get accustomed to the new electoral practices, to the
publicity of the debates in the Duma (and even more to the
responsibility of the latter); and, in its left wing, the enraged
Leninists as well as the enraged of the Bund simply boycotted the
elections to the first Duma: we have nothing to do with your
parliaments, we will achieve our ends by bombs, blood, convulsions! And
so “the attitude of the Bund towards the Jewish deputies of the Duma was
violently hostile.”1
But the Jews of Russia, led by the Union for
the integrality of rights, were not mistaken and, expressing their
sympathy for the new institution, “participated very actively in the
elections, voting most often for the representatives of the [Cadet]
party who had placed the equality of rights for the Jews on its agenda.”
Some revolutionaries who had regained their spirits shared the same
dispositions. Thus Isaac Gurvitch, who had emigrated in 1889—an active
supporter of the Marxist left, was the co‐founder of the American
Social‐Democratic Party—, returned to Russia in 1905, where he was
elected to the Duma Electoral College.2—There
were no limitations on the Jews in the elections, and twelve of them
sat in the first Duma; it was true that most of them came from the Pale
of Settlement, while the Jewish leaders of the capital, who did not have
the property qualifications, could not be elected: only Winaver, L.
Bramson3, and the converted Jew M. Herzenstein (to whom Prince P. Dolgorukov had given his place).
As the number of Jews in the Duma was
significant, the Zionist deputies proposed forming an “independent
Jewish group” abiding by “the discipline of a real political party”, but
the non‐Zionist deputies rejected this idea, contenting itself “to meet
from time to time to discuss matters of direct concern to Jewish
interests,”4
agreeing however, to comply already to “a genuine discipline in the
sense of strictly abiding by the decisions of a college composed of
members of the Duma and those of the Committee for the integrality of
rights”5 (the “Political Bureau”).
At the same time a solid alliance was formed
between the Jews and the Cadet party. “It was not uncommon for the
local chapters of the Union [for the integrality of rights] and the
constitutional‐democratic party to be composed of the same people.”6
(Some teased Winaver by calling him the “Mosaic Cadet”.) “In the Pale
of Settlement, the overwhelming majority of the [Cadet] party members
were Jews; in the interior provinces, they represented in number the
second nationality… As Witte wrote, ‘almost all Jews who graduated from
higher education joined the party of People’s Freedom [that is, The
Cadets]… which promised them immediate access to equal rights.’ This
party owes much of its influence on the Jews who provided it with both
intellectual and material support.”7 The Jews “introduced coherence and rigour… into the Russian ‘Liberation Movement’ of 1905.”8
However, A. Tyrkova, an important figure in
the Cadet party, notes in his memoirs that “the chief founders and
leaders of the Cadet party were not Jews. There were not, among the
latter, any personality sufficiently prominent to drive the Russian
liberals behind it, as the Jew Disraeli had done for the English
Conservatives in the middle of the nineteenth century… The people that
mattered most within the Cadet party were Russians. This does not mean
that I deny the influence of these Jews who have joined our masses. They
could not fail to act upon us, if only by their inexhaustible energy.
Their very presence, their activity, did not allow us to forget them, to
forget their situation, to forget that they had to be helped.” And,
further on: “Reflecting on all these networks of influence of the Jews
[within the Cadet party], one cannot overlook the case of Miliukov. From
the beginning, he became their favourite, surrounded by a circle of
admirers, more precisely feminine admirers… who cradled him in muted
melodies, cajoled him, covered him without restraint of praise so
excessive that they were comical.”9
V. A. Obolensky, also a member of the party,
describes a Cadet club during the time of the First Duma at the corner
of Sergevskaya and Potmekinskaya streets. The elite of the secularised
Jewish society and the elite of the Russian politicised intelligentsia
were mingled: “There were always a lot of people, and the public,
composed mostly of wealthy Jewish Petersburgers, was very elegant: the
ladies wore silk robes, shiny brooches and rings, the gentlemen had the
airs of well‐nourished and self‐satisfied bourgeois. Despite
our democratic convictions, we were somewhat shocked by the atmosphere
that prevailed in this ‘Cadet club’. One can imagine the embarrassment
experienced by the peasants who came to attend the meetings of our
parliamentary group. A ‘party of gentlemen’, that is what they said to
each other when they ceased to attend our meetings.”10
At the local level, cooperation between the
Union for the integrality of rights and the Cadet Party was manifested
not only in the presence of “as many Jewish candidates as possible”, but
also in the fact that “the local factions of the Union [for the
integrality of rights] was instructed to support [non‐Jews] who promised
to contribute to the emancipation of the Jews.”11 As explained in 1907 the cadet newspaper Retch, in reply to questions repeatedly asked by other newspapers: “Retch
has, in its time, formulated very precisely the conditions of the
agreement with the Jewish group… The latter has the right to challenge
the electoral college and to oppose nominations to the Duma.”12
During the parliamentary debates, the Duma,
following the logic of the Imperial Manifesto, raised the question of
equal rights for Jews within the general framework of granting the same
rights to all citizens. “The State Duma has promised to prepare a ‘law
on the full equalisation of the rights of all citizens and the
abrogation of any limitations or privileges associated with membership
to a social class, nationality, religion or sex’.”13
After adopting the main guidelines of this law, the Duma lost itself in
debates for another month, multiplying “thunderous declarations
followed by no effect”14, to be ultimately dissolved. And the law on civil equality, especially for the Jews, remained pending.
Like most Cadets, the Jewish deputies of the
First Duma signed Vyborg’s appeal, which meant that it was now
impossible for them to stand for elections; Winaver’s career
particularly suffered from it. (In the First Duma, he had made violent
remarks, although he would later advise the Jews not to put themselves
too much in the spotlight to prevent a recurrence of what had happened
in the revolution of 1905.)
“The participation of the Jews in the
elections of the second Duma was even more marked than during the first
election campaign… The Jewish populations of the Pale of Settlement
showed the strongest interest in this election. The political debate
reached all levels of society.” Nevertheless, as the Jewish Encyclopædia
published before the Revolution indicates, there was also an important
anti‐Jewish propaganda carried out by right‐wing monarchist circles,
particularly active in the western provinces; “the peasants were
persuaded that all progressive parties were fighting for the equal
rights of the Jews to the detriment of the interests of the ethnic
population”15;
that “behind the masquerade of the popular representation, the country
was governed by a Judeo‐Masonic union of spoliators of the people and
traitors to the fatherland”; that the peasant should be alarmed at the
“unprecedented number of new masters unknown to the elders of the
village, and whom he henceforth had to nourish with his labour”; that
the Constitution “promised to replace the Tatar yoke by that, injurious,
of the international Kahal.” And a list of the existing rights
to be abrogated was drawn up: not only were Jews not to be elected to
the Duma, but they all had to be relegated to the Pale of Settlement;
prohibiting them from selling wheat, grain and timber, working in banks
or commercial establishments; confiscating their properties; prohibiting
them from changing their names; to serve as publisher or editor of news
organisation; to reduce the Pale of Settlement itself by excluding the
fertile regions, to not grant land to the Jews within the province of
Yakutsk; in general, to regard them as foreigners, to substitute for
them military service by a tax, etc. “The result of this anti‐Semitic
propaganda, spread both orally and in writing, was the collapse of
progressive candidates in the second Duma throughout the Pale of
Settlement.”16 There were only four Jewish deputies in the second Duma (including three Cadets).17
But even before these elections, the
government addressed the issue of equal rights for Jews. Six months
after taking office as Prime Minister in December 1906, Stolypin had the
government adopt a resolution (the so‐called “Journal of the Council of
Ministers”) on the continuation of the lifting of restrictions imposed
on Jews, and this in essential areas, thus orienting itself towards
integral equality. “They considered to eliminate: the prohibition of
Jews from residing in rural areas within the Pale of Settlement; the
prohibition of residing in rural areas throughout the Empire for persons
enjoying the right of universal residence”; “the prohibition of
including Jews in the directory of joint stock companies holding land.”18
But the Emperor replied in a letter dated 10
December: “Despite the most convincing arguments in favour of adopting
these measures… an inner voice dictates with increasing insistence not
to take this decision upon myself.”19
As if he did not understand—or rather forgot—that the resolution proposed in the Journal was the direct and inescapable consequence of the Manifesto he had signed himself a year earlier…
Even in the most closed bureaucratic world,
there are always officials with eyes and hands. And if the rumour of a
decision taken by the Council of Ministers had already spread to the
public opinion? And here we are: we will know that the ministers want to
emancipate the Jews while the sovereign, he, stood in its way…
On the same day, 10 December, Stolypin
hastened to write to the Emperor a letter full of anxiety, repeating all
his arguments one by one, and especially: “The dismissal of the Journal
is for the moment not known by anyone,” it is therefore still possible
to conceal the equivocations of the monarch. “Your Majesty, we have no
right to put you in this position and shelter ourselves behind you.”
Stolypin would have liked the advantages accorded to the Jews to appear
as a favour granted by the tsar. But since this was not the case, he now
proposed to adopt another resolution: the Emperor made no objections on
the merits, but did not want the law to be promulgated over the head of
the Duma; it must be done by the Duma.
Secretary of State S. E. Kryjanovski said
that the emperor then adopted a resolution which went along in this
direction: that the representatives of the people take responsibility
both for raising this issue as well as resolving it. But, no one knows
why, this resolution received little publicity, and “on the side of the
Duma, absolutely nothing happened.”20
Widely to the left, penetrated by
progressive ideas and so vehement towards the government, the second
Duma was free! Yet, in the second Duma, there was still less talk of the
deprivation of rights suffered by the Jews than in the first.”21 The law on equal rights for Jews was not even discussed, so, what can be said about its adoption…
Why then did the second Duma not take
advantage of the opportunities offered to it? Why did it not seize them?
It had three entire months to do it. And why did the debates, the
clashes, relate only to secondary, tangential issues? The equality of
the Jews—still partial, but already well advanced—was abandoned. Why,
indeed, why? As for the “Extra‐Parliamentary Extraordinary Commission”,
it did not even discuss the plan to repeal the restrictions imposed on
Jews, but circumvented the problem by focusing on integral equality “as quickly as possible.”22
Difficult to explain this other than by a
political calculation: the aim being to fight the Autocracy, the
interest was to raise more and more the pressure on the Jewish question,
and to certainly not resolve it: ammunition was thus kept in reserve.
These brave knights of liberty reasoned in these terms: to avoid that
the lifting of restrictions imposed on the Jews would diminish their
ardour in battle. For these knights without fear and without reproach,
the most important, was indeed the fight against the power.
All this was beginning to be seen and
understood. Berdyaev, for example, addressed the whole spectrum of
Russian radicalism with the following reproaches: “You are very
sensitive to the Jewish question, you are fighting for their rights. But
do you feel the ‘Jew’, do you feel the soul of the Jewish people?… No,
your fight in favour for the Jews does not want to know the Jews.”23
Then, in the third Duma, the Cadets no
longer had the majority; they “did not take any more initiatives on the
Jewish question, fearing that they would be defeated… This caused great
discontent among the Jewish masses, and the Jewish press did not deprive
itself of attacking the party of the People’s Freedom.”24
Although “the Jews had participated in the electoral campaign with the
greatest ardour and the number of Jewish voters exceeded that of the
Christians in all the cities of the Pale of Settlement,” they were
beaten by the opposing party, and in the third Duma there were only two
Jewish deputies: Nisselovitch and Friedman.25
(The latter succeeded to remain up to the fourth Duma.)—Beginning in
1915, the Council of State included among its members a Jew, G. E.
Weinstein, of Odessa. (Just before the revolution, there was also
Solomon Samoylovich Krym, a Karaim.26)
As for the Octobrists*
whose party had become a majority in the third Duma, on the one hand
they ceded, not without hesitation, to the pressure of public opinion
which demanded equal rights for the Jews, which led to the criticism of
Russian nationalist deputies: “We thought that the Octobrists remained
attached to the defence of national interests”—and now, without warning,
they had relegated to the background both the question of “the granting
of equal rights to the Russians of Finland” (which meant that this
equality did not exist in this “Russian colony”…) and that of the
annexation by Russia of the Kholm region in Poland, with all Russians
that inhabit it—but “they have prepared a bill to abolish the Pale of
Settlement.”27
On the other hand, they were attributed statements “of manifestly
anti‐Semitic character”: thus the third Duma, on the initiative of
Guchkov, issued in 1906 “the wish… that Jewish doctors not be admitted
to work in the army health services”28; likewise, “it was proposed to replace the military service of the Jews by a tax.”29
(In the years preceding the war, the project of dispensing the Jews
from military service was still largely and seriously debated; and I. V.
Hessen published a book on this subject entitled The War and the Jews.)
In short, neither the second, third, nor
fourth Dumas took it upon themselves to pass the law on the integral
equality of rights for the Jews. And every time it was necessary to
ratify the law on equality of rights for peasants (promulgated
by Stolypin as of 5 October 1906), it was blocked by the same Dumas,
under the pressure of the left, on the grounds that the peasants could
not be granted equal rights before they were granted to the Jews (and
the Poles)!
And thus the pressure exerted upon this
execrated tsarist government was not relieved, but doubled, quintupled.
And not only did this pressure exerted on the government not be
relieved, not only were these laws not voted upon by the Duma, but it
would last until the February Revolution.
While Stolypin, after his unfortunate
attempt in December 1906, quietly took administrative measures to
partially lift the restrictions imposed on the Jews.
An editorialist from Novoie Vremia, Menshikov, condemned this method: “Under Stolypin, the Pale of Settlement has become a fiction.”30
The Jews “are defeating the Russian power by gradually withdrawing all
its capacity to intervene… The government behaves as if it were a Jew.”31
Such is the fate of the middle way.
The general outcry of the parties of the
left against a policy of progressive measures, this tactical refusal for
a smooth evolution towards equal rights, was strongly supported by the
Russian press. Since the end of 1905, it was no longer subject to prior
censorship. But it was not only a press that had become free, it was a
press that considered itself a full‐fledged actor in the political
arena, a press, as we have seen, that could formulate demands, such as
that of withdrawing the police from the streets of the city! Witte said it had lost its reason.
In the case of the Duma, the way in which
Russia, even in its most remote provinces, was informed of what was
going on there and what was said there, depended entirely on
journalists. The shorthand accounts of the debates appeared late and
with very low circulation, so there was no other source of information
than the daily press, and it was based on what they read that the people
formed an opinion. However, the newspapers systematically distorted the
debates in the Duma, largely opening their columns to the deputies of
the left and showering them with praise, while to the deputies of the
right they allowed only a bare minimum.
A. Tyrkova says that in the second Duma,
“the accredited journalists formed their own press office,” which
“depended on the distribution of places” among the correspondents. The
members of this office “refused to give his card of accreditation” to
the correspondent of the Journal the Kolokol (favourite
newspaper of the priests of the countryside). Tyrkova intervened, noting
that “these readers should not be deprived of the possibility of being
informed about the debates in the Duma by a newspaper in which they had
more confidence than those of the opposition”; but “my colleagues, among
whom the Jews were the most numerous…, got carried away, began
shouting, explaining that no one was reading the Kolokol, that that newspaper was of no use.”32
For the Russian nationalist circles,
responsibility for this conduct of the press was simply and solely the
responsibility of the Jews. They wanted to prove that almost all
journalists accredited to the Duma were Jews. And they published
“whistle‐blowing” lists listing the names of these correspondents. More
revealing is this comical episode of parliamentary life: one day,
answering to the attacks of which he was the object, Purishkevich
pointed, in the middle of his speech, the box of the press, located near
the tribune and delimited by a circular barrier, and said: “But see
this Pale of Settlement of the Jews!”—Everyone turned
involuntarily to the representatives of the press, and it was a general
burst of laughter that even the Left could not repress. This “Pale of
Settlement of the Duma” became an adopted wording.
Among the prominent Jewish publishers, we have already spoken of S. M. Propper, owner of the Stock Exchange News
and unfailing sympathiser of the “revolutionary democracy”. Sliosberg
evokes more warmly the one who founded and funded to a large extent the
cadet newspaper Retch, I. B. Bak: “A very obliging man, very
cultured, with a radically liberal orientation.” It was his passionate
intervention at the Congress of the Jewish mutual aid committees at the
beginning of 1906 that prevented a conciliation with the tsar. “There
was no Jewish organisation devoted to cultural action or beneficence, of
which I. Bak was not a member”; he was particularly distinguished by
his work in the Jewish Committee for Liberation.33 As for the Retch
newspaper and its editor‐in‐chief I. V. Hessen, they were far from
limiting themselves to Jewish questions alone, and their orientation was
more generally liberal (Hessen subsequently proved it in emigration
with the Roul and the Archives of the Russian Revolution). The very serious Russkie Vedomosti
published Jewish authors of various tendencies, both V. Jabotinsky and
the future inventor of war communism, Lourie‐Larine. S. Melgounov noted
that the publication in this body of articles favorable to the Jews was
explained “not only by the desire to defend the oppressed, but also by
the composition of the newspaper’s managing team.”34 “There were Jews even among the collaborators of the Novoie Vremia of Suvorin”; the Jewish Encyclopædia quotes the names of five of them.35
The newspaper Russkie Vedomosti was
long dominated by the figure of G. B. Iollos, called there by
Guerzenstein who had been working there since the 80s. Both were
deputies to the First Duma. Their lives suffered cruelly from the
atmosphere of violence engendered by political assassinations—these
being the very essence of the revolution—a “rehearsal” of 1905‐06.
According to the Israeli Jewish Encyclopædia, the responsibility for their assassination would rest with the Union of the Russian People.* For the Russian Jewish Encyclopædia,
if the latter bore responsibility for the assassination of Guerzenstein
(1906), Iollos, him, was killed (1907) by “Black Hundreds Terrorists.”36
Jewish publishers and journalists did not
restrict their activities to the capital or to highly intellectual
publications, but they also intervened in the popular press, such as the
Kopeika, a favourite reading of the concierges—a quarter of a
million copies in circulation, it “played a major role in the fight
against anti‐Semitic denigration campaigns.” (It had been created and
was led by M. B. Gorodetski.37) The very influential Kievskaya Mysl
(to the left of the Cadets) had as editor‐in‐chief Iona Kugel (they
were four brothers, all journalists), and D. Zaslavski, a wicked rascal,
and, what seems to us very moving, Leo Trotsky! The biggest newspaper
of Saratov was edited by Averbakh‐senior (brother‐in‐law of Sverdlov).
In Odessa appeared for some time the Novorossiysky Telegraf, with strong right‐wing convictions, but measures of economic suffocation were taken against it—successfully.
The Russian press also had “migrant” stars.
Thus L. I. Goldstein, an inspired journalist who wrote in the most
diverse newspapers for thirty‐five years, including the Syn Otetchestva, and it was also he who founded and directed the Rossia,
a clearly patriotic newspaper. The latter was closed because of a
particularly virulent chronicle directed against the Imperial family:
“These Obmanovy gentlemen”. The press was to celebrate Goldstein’s
jubilee in the spring of 1917.38—As
well as the discreet Garvei‐Altus, who had a moment of glory for his
chronicle “The Leap of the Passionate Panther”, in which he poured a
torrent of calumnies on the Minister of the Interior, N. A. Maklakov.
(But all this was nothing compared to the unheard‐of insolence of the
“humouristic leaflets” of the years 1905‐1907 which covered in muck, in
unimaginable terms, all the spheres of power and of the State. The
chameleon Zinovi Grjebine: in 1905 he published a satirical leaflet, the
Joupel; in 1914‐1915 he directed the right-minded Otetchestvo, and in 1920 he set up a Russian publishing house in Berlin in collaboration with the editions of the Soviet State.39)
But if the press reflected all sorts of
currents of thought, from liberalism to socialism, and, as far as the
Jewish thematic was concerned, from Zionism to Autonomism, it was a
position deemed incompatible with journalistic respectability: which
consisted in adopting a comprehensive attitude towards power. In the
70s, Dostoyevsky had already noted on several occasions that “the
Russian press is out of control.” This was even to be seen on the
occasion of the meeting of 8 March 1881, with Alexander III, newly
enthroned emperor, and often afterwards: the journalists acted as
self‐proclaimed representatives of society.
The following statement was attributed to
Napoleon: “Three opposition papers are more dangerous than one hundred
thousand enemy soldiers.” This sentence applies largely to the
Russo‐Japanese war. The Russian press was openly defeatist throughout
the conflict and in each of its battles. Even worse, it did not conceal
its sympathies for terrorism and revolution.
This press, totally out of control in 1905,
was considered during the period of the Duma, if we are to believe
Witte, as essentially “Jewish” or “semi‐Jewish”40;
or, to be more precise, as a press dominated by left‐wing or radical
Jews who occupied key positions. In November 1905, D. I. Pikhno,
editor‐in‐chief for twenty‐five years of the Russian newspaper The Kievian
and a connoisseur of the press of his time, wrote: “The Jews… have bet
heavily on the card of the revolution… Those, among the Russians, who
think seriously, have understood that in such moments, the press
represents a force and that this force is not in their hands, but in
that of their adversaries; that they speak on their behalf throughout
Russia and have forced people to read them because there is nothing else
to read; and as one cannot launch a publication in one day, [the
opinion] has been drowned beneath this mass of lies, incapable of
finding itself there.”41
L. Tikhomirov did not see the national
dimension of this phenomenon, but he made in 1910 the following remarks
about the Russian press: “They play on the nerves… They cannot stand
contradiction… They do not want courtesy, fair play… They have no ideal,
they do not know what that is.” As for the public formed by this press,
it “wants aggressiveness, brutality, it does not respect knowledge and
lets itself be deceived by ignorance.”42
At the other end of the political spectrum,
here is the judgement that the Bolshevik M. Lemke passed on the Russian
press: “In our day, ideas are not cheap and information is sensational,
self‐assured and authoritative ignorance fills the columns of the
newspapers.”
More specifically, in the cultural sphere,
Andrei Bely—who was anything but a right‐wing man or “chauvinist”—wrote
these bitter lines in 1909: “Our national culture is dominated by people
who are foreign to it… See the names of those who write in Russian
newspapers and magazines, literary critics, musical critics: they are
practically nothing but Jews; there are among them people who have
talent and sensibility, and some, few in number, understand our national
culture perhaps better than the Russians themselves; but they are the
exception. The mass of Jewish critics is totally foreign to Russian art,
it expresses itself in a jargon resembling Esperanto, and carries on a
reign of terror among those who try to deepen and enrich the Russian
language.”43
At the same time, V. Jabotinsky, a
perspicacious Zionist, complained of “progressive newspapers financed by
Jewish funds and stuffed with Jewish collaborators,” and warned: “When
the Jews rushed en masse into Russian politics, we predicted that
nothing good would come of it, neither for Russian policy nor for the
Jews.”44
The Russian press played a decisive role in
the assault of the Cadets and the intelligentsia against the government
before the revolution; the deputy in the Duma A. I. Chingariov expresses
well the state of mind that reigned there: “This government only has to
sink! To a power like this we cannot even throw the smallest
bit of rope!” In this regard, it may be recalled that the First Duma
observed a minute of silence in memory of the victims of the Bialystok
pogrom (refusing to admit, as we have seen, that it was an armed
confrontation between anarchists and the army); the second Duma also
paid tribute to Iollos, murdered by a terrorist; but when Purishkevich
offered to observe a minute of silence in memory of the officers and
soldiers who had died in the course of their duty, he was removed from
the sitting and the parliamentarians were so manic that they thought it
unthinkable to pity those who ensured security in the country, that
elementary security which they all needed.
A. Koulicher drew up a fair assessment of
this period, but too late, in 1923, in emigration: “Before the
revolution there were, among the Jews of Russia, individuals and groups
of individuals, the activity could be characterised… precisely by the
lack of sense of responsibility in the face of the confusion that
reigned in the minds of the Jews… [through] the propagation of a
‘revolutionary spirit’ as vague as it was superficial… All their
political action consisted in being more to the left than the others.
Confined to the role of irresponsible critics, never going to the end of
things, they considered that their mission consisted of always saying:
‘It is not enough!’… These people were ‘democrats’… But there was also a
particular category of democrats—moreover, they referred to themselves
as the ‘Jewish Democratic Group’—who attached this adjective to any
substantive, inventing an unsustainable talmud of democracy… With the
only end to demonstrate that the others were not yet sufficiently
democrats… They maintained an atmosphere of irresponsibility around
them, of contentless maximalism, of insatiable demand. All of which had
fatal consequences when the revolution came.”45
The destructive influence of this press is undoubtedly one of the
weaknesses, of great vulnerability, of Russian public life in the years
1914‐1917.
But what became of the “reptilian press”,
the one that laid down in front of the authorities, the press of the
Russian nationalists? The Russkoye Znamya of Dubrovin—it was
said that things fell from your hands so much he was rude and bad. (Let
us note, in passing, that it was forbidden to circulate it in the army
at the request of certain generals.) The Zemshchina was hardly better—I do not know, I have not read any of these papers. As for the Moskovskiye Vedomosti, out of breath, they no longer had readers after 1905.
But where were the strong minds and sharp
pens of the conservatives, those who were concerned about the fate of
the Russians? Why were there no good newspapers to counterbalance the
devastating whirlwind?
It must be said that, in view of the agile
thought and writing of the liberal and radical press, so accountable for
its dynamism to its Jewish collaborators, the Russian nationalists
could only align slow, rather soft, spirits who were not at all prepared
to fight this kind of battle (but what is there to say about this state
of affairs today!). There were only a few literary types exasperated by
the left press, but totally devoid of talent. Moreover, right‐wing
publications were facing serious financial difficulties. While the
newspapers financed by “Jewish money”—as Jabotinsky used to say—offered
very good wages, hence the profusion of wordsmiths; and, above all, all
these journals without exception were interesting. Finally, the
left‐wing press and the Duma demanded the closure of the “subsidised
newspapers”, that is to say, supported in secret and rather weakly by
the government.
State Secretary S. E. Kryjanovski
acknowledged that the government was providing financial support to more
than 30 newspapers in various parts of Russia, but without success,
both because the right lacked educated people, prepared for journalistic
activity, and because the power itself did not know how to do it
either. More gifted than others was I. I. Gourland, a Jew of the
Ministry of the Interior, a unique case—who, under the pseudonym of
“Vassiliev”, wrote pamphlets sent in sealed envelopes to prominent
public figures.
Thus the government had only one organ which merely enumerated the news in a dry and bureaucratic tone, the Pravitelstvenny Vestnik.
But to create something strong, brilliant, convincing, to openly go to
the conquest of public opinion even in Russia—let us not even talk about
Europe!—that, the imperial government either did not understand the
necessity of it, or was incapable of doing so, the enterprise being
beyond its means or intelligence.
The Novoie Vremia of Suvorin long
maintained a pro‐governmental orientation; it was a very lively,
brilliant and energetic newspaper (but, it must be said, equally
changing—sometimes favourable to the alliance with Germany, sometimes
violently hostile to it), and, alas, not always knowing how to make the
difference between national revival and attacks on the Jews. (Its
founder, old Suvorin, sharing his property among his three sons before
dying, gave them as a condition to never yielding any of their shares to
Jews.) Witte ranked Novoie Vremia among the newspapers which,
in 1905, “had an interest to be of the left…, then turned right to
become now ultra‐reactionaries. This very interesting and influential
journal offers a striking example of this orientation.” Although very
commercial, “it still counts among the best.”46
It provided a great deal of information and was widely
disseminated—perhaps the most dynamic of the Russian newspapers and,
certainly, the most intelligent of the organs of the right.
And the leaders of the right? And the deputies of the right in the Duma?
Most often they acted without taking into
account the real relationship between their strengths and their
weaknesses, showing themselves both brutal and ineffective, seeing no
other means of “defending the integrity of the Russian State” than
calling for more bans on Jews. In 1911, the deputy Balachov developed a
programme that went against the current and the times: reinforcing
the Pale of Settlement, removing Jews from publishing, justice, and the
Russian school. Deputy Zamyslovski protested that within the
universities, the Jews, the S.‐R.s, the Social Democrats enjoyed a
“secret sympathy”—as if one could overcome by decree a “secret
sympathy”—In 1913 the Congress of the Union of the nobility demanded (as
had already been done in 1908 under the third Duma) that more Jews be
taken into the army, but that they be symmetrically excluded from public
functions, the territorial and municipal administration, and justice.
In the spring of 1911, Purishkevich,
striving with others against an already weakened Stolypin, proposed to
the Duma these extreme measures: “Formally forbid the Jews to take any
official duty in any administration… especially in the periphery of the
Empire… The Jews convicted of having tried to occupy these functions
will have to answer before justice.”47
Thus the right reproached Stolypin for making concessions to the Jews.
When he had taken office in the spring of 1906, Stolypin had had to consider the Manifesto of 17 October as a fait accompli,
even if it had to be slightly amended. That the Emperor had hastily
signed it without sufficient reflection—it no longer mattered, it had to
be applied, the State had to be rebuilt in the midst of difficulties,
in accordance with the Manifesto and in spite of the hesitations of the
tsar himself. And this implied equal rights for the Jews.
Of course, the restrictions imposed on the
Jews continued, not only in Russia. In Poland, which was considered—as
well as Finland—to be oppressed, these limitations were even more
brutal. Jabotinsky writes: “The yoke that weighs heavily on Jews in
Finland is beyond measure even with what is known of Russia or Romania…
The first Finnish man, if he surprises a Jew out of a city, has the
right to arrest the criminal and take him to the police station. Most
trades are forbidden to Jews. Jewish marriages are subject to compulsory
and humiliating formalities… It is very difficult to obtain permission
to build a synagogue… The Jews are deprived of all political rights.”
Elsewhere in Austrian Galicia, “the Poles do not hide that they see in
the Jews only a material used to strengthen their political power in
this region… There have been cases where high school students were
excluded from their establishment ‘for cause of Zionism’, one hinders in
a thousand and one ways the functioning of Jewish schools, manifests
hatred towards their jargon (Yiddish), and the Jewish Socialist Party
itself is boycotted by the Polish Social‐Democrats.”48
Even in Austria, although a country of Central Europe, hatred towards
the Jews was still alive, and many restrictions remained in force, such
as the Karlsbad baths: sometimes they were simply closed to the Jews,
sometimes they could only go there in the summer, and the “winter Jews”
could only access it under strict control.49
But the system of limitations in Russia itself fully justified the grievances expressed in the Jewish Encyclopædia
as a whole: “The position of the Jews is highly uncertain, inasmuch as
it depends on how the law is interpreted by those responsible for
applying it, even at the lowest level of the hierarchy, or even simply
their goodwill… This blur… is due to… the extreme difficulty of
achieving uniform interpretation and application of the laws limiting
the rights of the Jews… Their many provisions have been supplemented and
modified by numerous decrees signed by the emperor on the proposal of
various ministries… and which, moreover, were not always reported in the
General Code of Laws”; “Even if he has an express authorisation issued
by the competent authority, the Jew is not certain that his rights are
intangible”; “A refusal emanating from a junior official, an anonymous
letter sent by a competitor, or an approach made in the open by a more
powerful rival seeking the expropriation of a Jew, suffice to condemn
him to vagrancy.”50
Stolypin understood very well the absurdity
of such a state of affairs, and the irresistible movement that then
pushed for a status of equality for the Jews, a status that already
existed to a large extent in Russia.
The number of Jews established outside the
Pale of Settlement increased steadily from year to year. After 1903, the
Jews had access to an additional 101 places of residence, and the
number of these was still significantly increased under Stolypin, which
implemented a measure which the tsar had not taken in 1906 and which the
Duma had rejected in 1907. The former Jewish Encyclopædia indicates that the number of these additional places of residence amounted to 291 in 1910‐191251; As for the new Encyclopædia, it puts the number to 299 for the year 1911.52
The old Encyclopædia reminds us
that from the summer of 1905 onwards, in the wake of revolutionary
events, “the governing bodies [of educational establishments] did not
take into account the numerus clausus for three years.”53
From August 1909 onwards, the latter was reduced from what it was
before in the higher and secondary schools (now 5% in the capitals, 10%
outside the Pale of Settlement, 15% within it54),
but subject to compliance. However, since the proportion of Jewish
students was 11% at the University of Saint Petersburg and 24% at that
of Odessa55, this measure was felt to be a new restriction. A restrictive measure was adopted in 1911: the numerus clausus was extended to the outside world56
(for boys only, and in girls’ institutions the real percentage was
13.5% in 1911). At the same time, artistic, commercial, technical and
vocational schools accepted Jews without restrictions. “After secondary
and higher education, the Jews rushed into vocational education” which
they had neglected until then. Although in 1883 “Jews in all municipal
and regional vocational schools” accounted for only 2% of the workforce,
12% of boys and 17% of girls in 1898.57
In addition, “Jewish youth filled private higher education
institutions”; thus, in 1912, the Kiev Institute of Commerce had 1,875
Jewish students, and the Psycho‐Neurological Institute, “thousands”.
Beginning in 1914, any private educational institution could provide
courses in the language of its choice.58
It is true that compulsory education for all was part of the logic of the time.
Stolypin’s main task was to carry out the
agrarian reform, thus creating a solid class of peasant‐owners. His
companion in arms, Minister of Agriculture A. V. Krivoshein, who was
also in favour of abolishing the Pale of Settlement, insisted at the
same time that be limited “the right of anonymous companies with shares”
to proceed with the purchase of land, to the extent that it was likely
to result in the formation of a “significant Jewish land capital”;
indeed, “the penetration into the rural world of Jewish speculative
capital risked jeopardising the success of the agrarian reform” (at the
same time he expressed the fear that this would lead to the emergence of
anti‐Semitism unknown until then in the countryside of Greater Russia59).
Neither Stolypin nor Krivoshein could allow that the peasants remain in
misery due to the fact of not owning land. In 1906, Jewish agricultural
settlements were also deprived of the right to acquire land belonging
to the State, which was now reserved for peasants.60
The economist M. Bernadski cited the
following figures for the pre‐war period: 2.4% of Jews worked in
agriculture, 4.7% were liberal professionals, 11.5% were domestic
servants, 31% worked in commerce (Jews accounted for 35% of merchants in
Russia), 36% in industry; 18% of the Jews were settled in the Pale of
Settlement.61
In comparing the latter figure to the 2.4% mentioned above, the number
of Jews residing in rural areas and occupied in agriculture had not
increased significantly, while according to Bernadski, “it was in the
interest of the Russians that Jewish forces and resources were
investing themselves in all areas of production”, any limitation imposed
on them “represented a colossal waste of the productive forces of the
country.” He pointed out that in 1912, for example, the Society of
producers and manufacturers of an industrial district in Moscow had
approached the President of the Council of Ministers so that the Jews
would not be prevented from playing their role of intermediary link with
Russian industrial production centres.62
B. A. Kamenka, chairman of the Board of
Directors of Azov Bank and the Don, turned to the financing of the
mining and metallurgical industry and sponsored eleven important
enterprises in the Donets and Urals region.63—There
was no restriction on the participation of Jews in joint‐stock
companies in the industry, but “the limitations imposed on joint‐stock
companies wishing to acquire property triggered an outcry in all
financial and industrial circles.” And the measures taken by Krivoshein
were to be abrogated.64
V. Choulguine made the following comparison:
“The ‘Russian power’ seemed very ingenuous in the face of the perfectly
targeted offensive of the Jews. The Russian power reminded one of the
flood of a long and peaceful river: an endless expanse plunged into a
soft sleepiness; there is water, oh my God there is, but it is only
sleeping water. Now this same river, a few versts farther away, enclosed
by strong dikes, is transformed into an impetuous torrent, whose
bubbling waters precipitate itself madly into turbines.”65
It is the same rhetoric that is heard on the
side of liberal economic thought: “Russia, so poor… in highly skilled
workforce…, seems to want to further increase its ignorance and its
intellectual lagging in relation to the West.” Denying the Jews access
to the levers of production “amounts to a deliberate refusal to use…
their productive forces.”66
Stolypin saw very well that this was
wasteful. But the different sectors of the Russian economy were
developing too unevenly. And he regarded the restrictions imposed on
Jews as a kind of customs tax that could only be temporary, until the
Russians consolidated their forces in public life as well as in the
sphere of the economy, these protective measures secreted an unhealthy
greenhouse climate for them. Finally (but after how many years?), the
government began to implement the measures for the development of the
peasant world, from which were to result a true and genuine equality of rights
between social classes and nationalities; a development which would
have made the Russians’ fear of the Jews disappear and which would have
put a definitive end to all the restrictions of which the latter were
still victims.
Stolypin was considering using Jewish
capital to stimulate Russia’s economy by welcoming their many
joint‐stock companies, enterprises, concessions and natural resource
businesses. At the same time, he understood that private banks, dynamic
and powerful, often preferred to agree among themselves rather than
compete, but he intended to counterbalance this phenomenon by
“nationalising credit”, that is, the strengthening of the role of the
State Bank and the creation of a fund to help entrepreneurial peasants
who could not obtain credit elsewhere.
But Stolypin was making another political
calculation: he thought that obtaining equal rights would take some of
the Jews away from the revolutionary movement. (Among other arguments,
he also put forward: at the local level, bribery was widely used to
circumvent the law, which had the effect of spreading corruption within
the State apparatus.)
Among the Jews, those who did not give in to
fanaticism realised that, despite the continued restrictions, in spite
of the increasingly virulent (but impotent) attacks on right‐wing
circles, those years offered more and more favourable conditions to the
Jews and were necessarily leading to equal rights.
Just a few years later, thrown into
emigration by the “great revolution”, two renowned Jewish figures
meditated on pre‐revolutionary Russia:
Self‐taught out of poverty at the cost of
the greatest efforts, he had passed his bachelor’s degree as an external
candidate at the age of thirty and obtained his university degree at
thirty‐five; he had actively participated in the Liberation Movement and
had always regarded Zionism as an illusory dream—his name was Iosif
Menassievich Bikerman. From the height of his fifty‐five years of age he
wrote: “Despite the regulations of May [1882] and other provisions of
the same type, despite the Pale of Settlement and numerus clausus,
despite Kishinev and Bialystok, I was a free man and I felt as such, a
man who had before him a wide range of possibilities to work in all
kinds of fields, who could enrich himself both materially and
spiritually, who could fight to improve his situation and conserve his
strength to continue the fight. The restrictions… were always
diminishing under the pressure of the times and under ours, and during
the war a wide breach was opened in the last bastion of our inequality.
It was necessary to wait another five or fifteen years before obtaining
complete equality before the law; we could wait.”67
Belonging to the same generation as
Bikerman, he shared very different convictions and his life was also
very different: a convinced Zionist, a doctor (he taught for a time at
the Faculty of Medicine in Geneva), an essayist and a politician, Daniil
Samoylovich Pasmanik, an immigrant as well, wrote at the same time as
Bikerman the following lines: “Under the tsarist regime, the Jews lived
infinitely better and, whatever may be said of them, their conditions of
life before the war—both materially as well as others—were excellent.
We were then deprived of political rights, but we could develop intense
activity in the sphere of our national and cultural values, while the
chronic misery that had been our lot disappeared progressively.”68—“The
chronic economic slump of the Jewish masses diminished day by day,
leaving room for material ease, despite the senseless deportations of
several tens of thousands of Jews out of the Front areas. The statistics
of the mutual credit societies… are the best proof of the economic
progress enjoyed by the Jews of Russia during the decade preceding the
coup. And so it was in the field of culture. Despite the police
regime—it was absolute freedom in comparison with the present Bolshevik
regime—Jewish cultural institutions of all kinds prospered. Everything
was bursting with activity: organisations were booming, creation was
also very alive and vast prospects were now open.”69
In a little more than a century, under the
Russian crown, the Jewish community had grown from 820,000 (including
the Kingdom of Poland) to more than five million representatives, even
though more than one and a half million chose to emigrate,70—an
increase of a factor of eight between 1800 and 1914. Over the last 90
years, the number of Jews had multiplied by 3.5 (going from 1.5 million
to 5,250,000), whereas during the same period the total population of
the Empire (including the new territories) had multiplied by only 2.5.
However, the Jews were still subject to
restrictions, which fuelled anti‐Russian propaganda in the United
States. Stolypin thought he could overcome it by explaining it,
inviting members of Congress and American journalists to come and see,
in Russia itself. But in the autumn of 1911, the situation became so
severe that it led to the denunciation of a trade agreement with the
United States dating back eighty years. Stolypin did not yet know what
the effect of a passionate speech of the future peacemaker, Wilson,
might be, nor what the unanimity of the American Congress could mean. He
did not live enough to know.
Stolypin, who imprinted its direction, gave
its light and name to the decade before the First World War,—all the
while he was the object of furious attacks on the part of both the
Cadets and the extreme right, when deputies of all ranks dragged him in
the mud because of the law on the Zemstvo reform in the western
provinces—was assassinated in September 1911.
The first head of the Russian government to
have honestly raised and attempted to resolve, in spite of the Emperor’s
resistance, the question of equality for the Jews, fell—irony of
History!—under the blows of a Jew.
Such is the fate of the middle way…
Seven times attempts had been made to kill
Stolypin, and it was revolutionary groups more or less numerous that had
fermented the attacks—in vain. Here, it was an isolated individual who
pulled it off.
At a very young age, Bogrov did not have
sufficient intellectual maturity to understand the political importance
of Stolypin’s role. But from his childhood he had witnessed the daily
and humiliating consequences of the inequality of the Jews, and his
family, his milieu, his own experience cultivated his hatred for
imperial power. In the Jewish circles of Kiev, which seemed
ideologically mobile, no one was grateful to Stolypin for his attempts
to lift the restrictions imposed on the Jews, and even if this feeling
had touched some of the better off, it was counterbalanced by the memory
of the energetic way in which he had repressed the revolution of
1905‐1906, as well as by the discontent with his efforts to “nationalise
credit” in order to openly compete with private capital. The Jewish
circles in Kiev (but also in Petersburg where the future murderer had
also stayed) were under the magnetic influence of a field of absolute radicalism, which led young Bogrov not only to feel entitled, but to consider it his duty to kill Stolypin.
This field was so powerful that it
allowed the following combination: Bogrov‐senior rose in society, he is a
capitalist who prospers in the existing system; Bogrov‐junior works at
destroying this system and his father, after the attack, publicly
declares that he is proud of him.
In fact, Bogrov was not so isolated: he was
discreetly applauded in the circles which once manifested their
unwavering fidelity to the regime.
This gunshot that put an end to the hope
that Russia ever recovered its health could have been equally fired at
the tsar himself. But Bogrov had decided that it was impossible, for (as
he declared himself) “it might have led to persecution against the
Jews,” to have “damaging consequences on their legal position.” While
the Prime Minister would simply not have such effects, he thought. But
he was deceived heavily when he imagined that his act would serve to
improve the lot of the Jews of Russia.
And Menshikov himself, who had first
reproached Stolypin with the concessions he had made to the Jews, now
lamented his disappearance: our great man, our best political leader for
a century and a half—assassinated! And the assassin is a Jew! A Jew who
did not hesitate to shoot the Prime Minister of Russia!? “The gunshot
of Kiev… must be considered as a warning signal… the situation is very
serious… we must not cry revenge, but finally decide to resist!”71
And what happened then in “Kiev the
reactionary” where the Jews were so numerous? In the first hours after
the attack, they were massively seized with panic and began to leave the
city. Moreover, “the Jews were struck with terror not only in Kiev, but
in the most remote corners of the Pale of Settlement and of the rest of
Russia.”72
The Club of Russian Nationalists expressed its intention to circulate a
petition to drive out all the Jews of Kiev (which remained at the stage
of intentions). There was not the start of a beginning of pogrom. The
President of the youth organisation “The Two‐Headed Eagle”, Galkin,
called for destroying the offices of the local security and for busting
some Jew: he was immediately neutralised. The new Prime Minister,
Kokovtsov, urgently recalled all Cossack regiments (they were manœuvring
away from the city) and sent a very firm telegram to all the governors:
to prevent pogroms by any means, including force. The troops were
concentrated in greater numbers than during the revolution. (Sliosberg:
if pogroms had broken out in 1911, “Kiev would have been the scene of a
carnage comparable to the horrors of the time of Bogdan Khmelnitsky.”73)
No, nowhere in Russia there was the
slightest pogrom. (Despite this, there has been much written, and
insistently, that the tsarist power had never dreamed of anything but
one thing: to organise an anti‐Jewish pogrom.)
Of course, the prevention of public disorder
is one of the primary duties of the State, and when this mission is
fulfilled, it does not have to expect recognition. But that under such
extreme circumstances—the assassination of the head of government—, that
it was possible to avoid pogroms, the threat of which caused panic
among the Jews, it nevertheless merited a small mention, if only in
passing. Well, no, we did not hear anything like that and no one spoke about it.
Difficult to believe, but the Kiev Jewish
community did not publicly express condemnation nor regret regarding
this assassination. On the contrary. After the execution of Bogrov, many
Jewish students were ostensibly in mourning.
However, all this, the Russians noted it.
Thus, in December 1912, Rozanov wrote: “After [Stolypin’s assassination]
something broke in my relationship [to the Jews]: would a Russian ever
have dared to kill Rothschild or any other of ‘their great men’?”74
If we look at it from a historical point of
view, two important arguments prevent the act committed by Bogrov from
being considered on behalf of the “powers of internationalism”. The
first and most important: it was not the case. Not only the book written
by his brother75,
but different neutral sources suggest that Bogrov really believed that
he could work this way to improve the lot of the Jews. And the second:
to return to certain uncomfortable episodes in history, to examine them
attentively to deplore them, is to assume one’s responsibilities; but to
deny them and wash one’s hands, that’s just low.
Yet this is what happened almost
immediately. In October 1911, the Duma was arrested by the Octobrists on
the murky circumstances of the assassination of Stolypin. This provoked
an immediate protest from the deputy Nisselovitch: why, when
formulating their interpellation, did the Octobrists not conceal the fact that the murderer of Stolypin was Jewish? It was there, he declared, anti‐Semitism!
I shall have to endure this incomparable
argument myself. Seventy years later, I was the object of a heavy
accusation on the part of the Jewish community in the United States:
why, in my turn, did I not conceal, why did I say that the assassin of Stolypin was a Jew*?
It does not matter if I have endeavoured to make a description as
complete as possible. It does not matter what the fact of being Jew
represented in the motivations of his act. No, non‐dissimulation betrayed my anti‐Semitism!!
At the time, Guchkov replied with dignity:
“I think that there is much more anti‐Semitism in Bogrov’s very act. I
would suggest to the Deputy Nisselovitch that he should address his
passionate words not to us but to his fellow co‐religionists. Let him
use all the force of his eloquence to convince them to keep away from
two profane professions: that of spy in the service of the secret police
and that of terrorist. He would thus render a much greater service to
the members of his community!”76
But what can one ask of the Jewish memory
when Russian history itself has allowed this murder to be effaced from
its memory as an event without great significance, as a smear as
marginal as it is negligible. It was only in the 80s that I started to
pull it out of oblivion—for seventy years, to mention it was considered
inappropriate.
As the years go by, more events and meanings come to our eyes.
More than once I have meditated on the whims of History: on the unpredictability of the consequences
it raises on our path—I speak of the consequences of our actions. The
Germany of William II opened the way for Lenin to destroy Russia, and
twenty‐eight years later it found itself divided for half a
century.—Poland contributed to the strengthening of the Bolsheviks in
the year 1919, which was so difficult for them, and it harvested 1939,
1944, 1956, 1980.—With what eagerness Finland helped Russian
revolutionaries, she who could not bear, who did not suffer from the
particular freedoms at her disposal—but within Russia—and, in return,
she suffered forty years of political humiliation (“Finlandisation”).—In
1914, England wanted to put down the power of Germany, its competitor
on the world stage, and it lost its position of great power, and it was
the whole of Europe that had been destroyed. In Petrograd, the Cossacks
remained neutral both in February and in October; a year later, they
underwent their genocide (and many of the victims were these same
Cossacks).—In the first days of July 1917, the S.‐R. of the left
approached the Bolsheviks, then formed a semblance of a “coalition”, a
broad platform; a year later they were crushed as no autocracy could
have had the means to do so.
These distant consequences, none of us are
capable of foreseeing them, ever. The only way to guard against such
errors is to always be guided by the compass of divine morality. Or, as
the people say: “Do not dig a pit for others, you will fall into it
yourself.”
Similarly, if the assassination of Stolypin had cruel consequences for Russia, the Jews neither derived any benefit from it.
Everyone can see things in his own way, but I
see here the giant footsteps of History, and I am struck by the
unpredictable character of its results.
Bogrov killed Stolypin, thus thinking of
protecting the Jews from oppression. Stolypin would in any case have
been removed from office by the Emperor, but he would surely have been
recalled again in 1914‐16 because of the dizzying deficiency in men able
to govern; and under his government we would not have had such a
lamentable end neither in the war nor in the revolution. (Assuming that
with him in power we would have engaged in this war.)
First footstep of History: Stolypin is killed, Russia works its last nerves in war and lies under the heel of the Bolsheviks.
Second footstep: however fierce they are,
the Bolsheviks reveal themselves as being more lame than the imperial
government, abandoning half of Russia to the Germans a quarter of a
century later, including Kiev.
Third footstep: the Nazis invest in Kiev without any difficulty and annihilate its Jewish community.
Again the city of Kiev, once again a month of September, but thirty years after Bogrov’s revolver shot.
And still in Kiev, still in 1911, six months
before the assassination of Stolypin, had started what would become the
Beilis affair*.
There is good reason to believe that under Stolypin, justice would not
have been degraded as such. One clue: one knows that once, examining the
archives of the Department of Security, Stolypin came across a note
entitled “The Secret of the Jews” (which anticipated the “Protocols”**),
in which was discussed the “International Jewish plot”. Here is the
judgement he made: “There may be logic, but also bias… The government
cannot use under any circumstance this kind of method.”77 As a result, “the official ideology of the tsarist government never relied on the ‘Protocols’.”78
Thousands and thousands of pages have been
written about the Beilis trial. Anyone who would like to study closely
all the meanders of the investigation, of the public opinion, of the
trial itself, would have to devote at least several years to it. This
would go beyond the limits of this work. Twenty years after the event,
under the Soviet regime, the daily reports of the police on the progress
of the trial were published79; they can be commended to the attention of amateurs. It goes without saying that the verbatim record of the entire proceedings was also published. Not to mention the articles published in the press.
Andrei Yushchinsky, a 12‐year‐old boy, pupil
of a religious institution in Kiev, is the victim of a savage and
unusual murder: there are forty‐seven punctures on his body, which
indicate a certain knowledge of anatomy—they were made to the temple, to
the veins and arteries of the neck, to the liver, to the kidneys, to
the lungs, to the heart, with the clear intention of emptying him of his
blood as long as he was still alive, and in addition—according to the
traces left by the blood flow—in a standing position (tied and gagged,
of course). It can only be the work of a very clever criminal who
certainly did not act alone. The body was discovered only a week later
in a cave on the territory of the factory of Zaitsev. But the murder was
not committed there.
The first accusations do not refer to ritual
motives, but the latter soon appears: the connection is made with the
beginning of Jewish Passover and the construction of a new synagogue on
the grounds of Zaitsev (a Jew). Four months after the murder, this
version of the accusation leads to the arrest of Menahem Mendel Beilis,
37, employed at the Zaitsev factory. He is arrested without any real
charges against him. How did all this happen?
The investigation into the murder was
carried out by the criminal police of Kiev, a worthy colleague,
obviously, of the Security section of Kiev, which had gotten tangled up
in the Bogrov affair*
and thus caused the loss of Stolypin. The work was entrusted to two
nobodies in all respects similar to Kouliabko, Bogrov’s “curator”,
Michtchouk, and Krassovsky, assisted by dangerous incompetents (they
cleaned the snow in front of the cave to facilitate the passage of the
corpulent commissioner of police, thus destroying any potential
indications of the presence of the murderers). But worse still, rivalry
settled between the investigators—it was to whom the merit of the
discovery of the guilty person would be attributed, by whom the best
version would be proposed—and they did not hesitate to get in each
other’s way, to sow confusion in the investigation, to put pressure on
the witnesses, to stop the competitor’s indicators; Krassovksy went so
far as to put makeup on the suspect before introducing him to a witness!
This parody of inquiry was conducted as if it were a trivial story,
without the importance of the event even crossing their minds. When the
trial finally opened, two and a half years later, Michtchouk had run off
to Finland to escape the charge of falsification of material evidence, a
significant collaborator of Krassovsky had also disappeared, and as for
the latter, dismissed of his duties, he had switched sides and was now
working for Beilis’s lawyers.
For nearly two years, we went from one false
version to another; for a long time the accusation was directed to the
family of the victim, until the latter was completely put out of the
question. It became clearer and clearer that the prosecution was moving
towards a formal accusation against Beilis and towards his trial.
He was therefore accused of murder—even
though the charges against him were doubtful—because he was a Jew. But
how was it possible in the twentieth century to inflate a trial to the
point of making it a threat to an entire people? Beyond the person of
Beilis, the trial turned in fact into an accusation against the Jewish
people as a whole—and, since then, the atmosphere around the
investigation and then the trial became superheated, the affair took on
an international dimension, gained the whole of Europe, and then
America. (Until then, trials for ritual murders had taken place rather
in the Catholic milieu: Grodno (1816), Velij (1825), Vilnius, the
Blondes case (1900), the Koutais affair (1878) took place in Georgia,
Doubossar (1903) in Moldavia, while in Russia strictly speaking, there
was only the Saratov affair in 1856. Sliosberg, however, does not fail
to point out that the Saratov affair also had also a Catholic origin,
while in Beilis’s case it was observed that the band of thieves who had
been suspected at one time was composed of Poles, that the ritual crime
expert appointed at the trial was a Catholic, and that the attorney
Tchaplinski was also Polish.80)
The findings of the investigation were so
questionable that they were only retained by the Kiev indictment chambre
by three votes to two. While the monarchist right had sparked an
extensive press campaign, Purishkevich expressed himself in the Duma in
April 1911: “We do not accuse the Jews as a whole, we cry for the truth”
about this strange and mysterious crime. “Is there a Jewish sect that
advocates ritual murders…? If there are such fanatics, let them be
stigmatised”; as for us, “we are fighting against many sects in Russia,”
our own81,
but at the same time he declared that, according to him, the affair
would be stifled in the Duma by fear of the press. Indeed, at the
opening of the trial, the right‐wing nationalist Chulguine declared
himself opposed to it being held and to the “miserable baggage” of the
judicial authorities in the columns of the patriotic Kievian
(for which he was accused by the extreme Right to be sold to the Jews).
But, in view of the exceptionally monstrous character of the crime, no
one dared to go back to the accusation in order to resume the
investigation from scratch.
On the other side, the liberal‐radicals also
launched a public campaign relayed by the press, and not only the
Russian press, but that of the whole world. The tension had reached a
point of no return. Sustained by the partiality of the accusation, it
only escalated, and the witnesses themselves were soon attacked.
According to V. Rozanov, every sense of measure had been lost,
especially in the Jewish press: “The iron fist of the Jew… falls on
venerable professors, on members of the Duma, on writers…”82
However, the ultimate attempts to get the
investigation back on track had failed. The stable near the Zaitsev
factory, which was initially neglected by Krassovsky and then assumed to
have been the scene of the crime, burned down two days before the date
fixed for its examination by hasty investigators. A brazen journalist,
Brazul‐Brouchkovsky, conducted his own investigation assisted by the
same Krassovsky, now released from his official duties. (It must be
remembered that Bonch‐Bruevich* published a pamphlet accusing Brazoul of venality.83)
They put forward a version of the facts according to which the murder
was allegedly committed by Vera Cheberyak, whose children frequented
Andrei Yushchinsky, herself flirting with the criminal underworld.
During their long months of inquiry, the two Cheberyak sons died under
obscure circumstances; Vera accused Krassovsky of poisoning them, who in
turn accused her of killing her own children. Ultimately, their version
was that Yushchinsky had been killed by Cheberyak in person with the
intention of simulating a ritual murder. She said that the lawyer
Margoline had offered her 40,000 rubles to endorse the crime, which he
denied at the trial even though he was subject at the same moment to
administrative penalties for indelicacy.
Trying to disentangle the innumerable
details of this judicial imbroglio would only make the understanding
even more difficult. (It should also be mentioned that the “metis” of
the revolution and the secret police were also involved. In this
connection, mention should be made of the equivocal role and strange
behaviour during the trial of Lieutenant‐Colonel Gendarmerie Pavel
Ivanov—the very one who, in defiance of all laws, helped Bogrov, already
condemned to death, to write a new version of the reasons which would
have prompted him to kill Stolypin, a version in which the full weight
of responsibility fell on the organs of Security to which Ivanov did not
belong.) The trial was about to open in a stormy atmosphere. It lasted a
month: September‐October 1913. It was incredibly heavy: 213 witnesses
summoned to the bar (185) presented themselves, still slowed down by the
procedural artifices raised by the parties involved; the prosecutor
Vipper was not up to the standard of the group of brilliant
lawyers—Gruzenberg, Karabtchevski, Maklakov, Zaroudny—who did not fail
to demand that the blunders he uttered be recorded in the minutes, for
example: the course of this trial is hampered by “Jewish gold”; “they
[the Jews in general] seem to laugh at us, see, we have committed a
crime, but no one will dare to hold us accountable.”84
(Not surprisingly, during the trial, Vipper received threatening
letters—on some were drawn a slipknot—and not just him, but the civil
parties, the expert of the prosecution, probably also the defence
lawyers; the dean of the jury also feared for his life.) There was a lot
of turmoil around the trial, selling passes for access to hearings, all
of Kiev’s educated people were boiling. The man in the street, him,
remained indifferent.
A detailed medical examination was carried
out. Several professors spread their differences as to whether or not
Yushchinsky had remained alive until the last wound, and how acute were
the sufferings he had endured. But it was the theological‐scientific
expertise that was at the centre of the trial: it focused on the very
principle of the possibility of ritual murders perpetrated by Jews, and
it was on this that the whole world focused its attention.85
The defence appealed to recognised authorities in the field of
Hebraism, such as Rabbi Maze, a specialist in the Talmud. The expert
appointed by the Orthodox Church, Professor I. Troitsky of the
Theological Academy of Petersburg, concluded his intervention by
rejecting the accusation of an act of cold blood attributable to the
Jews; he pointed out that the Orthodox Church had never made such
accusations, that these were peculiar to the Catholic world. (Bikerman
later recalled that in Imperial Russia the police officers themselves
cut short “almost every year” rumours about the Christian blood shed
during the Jewish Passover, “otherwise we would have had a ‘case of
ritual murder’ not once every few decades, but every year.”86
The main expert cited by the prosecution was the Catholic priest
Pranaitis. To extend the public debate, the prosecutors demanded that
previous ritual murder cases be examined, but the defence succeeded in
rejecting the motion. These discussions on whether the murder was ritual
or not ritual only further increased the emotion that the trial had
created through the whole world.
But it was necessary that a judgment should
be pronounced—on this accused, and not another—and this mission went to a
dull jury composed of peasants painfully supplemented by two civil
servants and two petty bourgeois; all were exhausted by a month
of trials, they fell asleep during the reading of the materials of the
case, requested that the trial be shortened, four of them solicited
permission to return home before its conclusion and some needed medical
assistance.
Nevertheless, these jurors judged on the
evidence: the accusations against Beilis were unfounded, not proved. And
Beilis was acquitted.
And that was the end of it. No new search
for the culprits was undertaken, and this strange and tragic murder
remained unexplained.
Instead—and this was in the tradition of
Russian weakness—it was imagined (not without ostentation) to erect a
chapel on the very spot where the corpse of young Yushchinsky had been
discovered, but this project provoked many protests, because it was
judged reactionary. And Rasputin dissuaded the tsar from following up on
it.87
This trial, heavy and ill‐conducted, with a
white‐hot public opinion for a whole year, in Russia as in the rest of
the world, was rightly considered a battle of Tsou‐Shima.*
It was reported in the European press that the Russian government had
attacked the Jewish people, but that it was not the latter that had lost
the war, it was the Russian State itself.
As for the Jews, with all their passion, they were never to forgive this affront of the Russian monarchy. The fact that the law had finally triumphed did nothing to change their feelings.
It would be instructive, however, to compare
the Beilis trial with another that took place at the same time
(1913‐15) in Atlanta, USA; a trial which then made great noise: the Jew
Leo Frank, also accused of the murder of a child (a girl raped and
murdered), and again with very uncertain charges. He was condemned to be
hung, and during the proceedings of cassation an armed crowd snatched
him from his prison and hanged him.88 On the individual
level, the comparison is in favour of Russia. But the Leo Frank affair
had but little echo in public opinion, and did not become an object of
reproach.
*
There is an epilogue in the Beilis case.
“Threatened with revenge by extreme
right‐wing groups, Beilis left Russia and went to Palestine with his
family. In 1920 he moved to the United States. He died of natural
causes, at the age of sixty, in the vicinity of New York.89
Justice Minister Shcheglovitov (according to
some sources, he had “given instructions for the case to be elucidated
as a ritual murder”90) was shot by the Bolsheviks.
In 1919 the trial of Vera Cheberyak took
place. It did not proceed according to the abhorred procedures of
tsarism—no question of popular jury!—and lasted only about forty minutes
in the premises of the Cheka of Kiev. A member of the latter, who was
arrested in the same year by the Whites, noted in his testimony that
“Vera Cheberyak was interrogated exclusively by Jewish Chekists,
beginning with Sorine” [the head of the Blumstein Cheka]. Commander
Faierman “subjected her to humiliating treatment, ripped off her clothes
and struck her with the barrel of his revolver… She said: ‘You can do
whatever you want with me, but what I said, I will not come back on it…
What I said at the Beilis trial, nobody pushed me to say it, nobody
bribed me…’” She was shot on the spot.91
In 1919, Vipper, now a Soviet official, was
discovered in Kaluga and tried by the Moscow Revolutionary Tribunal. The
Bolshevik prosecutor Krylenko pronounced the following words: “Whereas
he presents a real danger to the Republic… that there be one Vipper less
among us!” (This macabre joke suggested that R. Vipper, a professor of
medieval history, was still alive.) However, the Tribunal merely sent
Vipper “to a concentration camp… until the communist regime be
definitively consolidated.”92 After that, we lose his track.
*
Beilis was acquitted by peasants, those
Ukrainian peasants accused of having participated in the pogroms against
the Jews at the turn of the century, and who were soon to know the
collectivisation and organised famine of 1932‐33—a famine that
journalists have ignored and that has not been included in the
liabilities of this regime.
Here is yet another of these footsteps of History…
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