John Doyle Klier
Russians, Jews, and the Pogroms of 1881-1882
Cambridge University Press, 2011
Introduction
Pivotal moments in history are always interesting to pinpoint. Major wars often emerge as top contenders, but not always. They could also be some great tragedy or moment of radical change. The assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand comes to mind. Late in his comprehensive and fascinating history, Russians, Jews, and the Pogroms of 1881-1882, author John Klier finds another such moment: the emancipation of the Russian serfs in 1861. After this moment, nothing in Western history would ever be the same again.
He writes:
Prior to the acquisition of personal freedom, the peasant had the protection of the feudal system, which at least safeguarded their personal property. Now, the livestock, tools, and the very homes of peasants were threatened by Jewish depredations. This was especially the case where the Jews put down roots in the countryside. Then peasants watched with hatred as Jewish malefactions went unpunished. The explosion of 1881 was a direct consequence: The peasants destroyed Jewish property because they saw it as goods stolen from them.
Yes, you read that correctly. John Klier, writing for the Cambridge Press in the early 2000s, does not so much justify the famous anti-Jewish pogroms of the 1880s as validate their reasons. This will be quite shocking for those of us raised on the widespread Jewish narrative of universal gentile culpability. As the story goes, pogroms sprung mainly from brutish peasants who got drunk and took out their frustrations on a vulnerable and easily identifiable alien presence. Of course, no pogrom can be complete without deeper, more systemic causes which implicate all gentiles. Thus, these peasants had been encouraged behind the scenes by sympathetic Russian authorities and a Russian middle class which couldn’t compete economically with Jews. This is the narrative which dominated the twentieth-century in the West. Fortunately for us in the twenty-first, John Klier has blasted it into shrapnel.
In his work, he make three main points:
- Neither the Tsar nor the Russian government desired, incited, or tolerated pogroms. Indeed, they made vigorous efforts to punish the guilty, protect potential victims, and deter Russian peasants from engaging in such atrocious acts.
- Powerful Jewish propagandists in the West wildly exaggerated the damage caused by the pogroms in order to discredit the Russian government and inflict real harm upon it on the world stage.
- Anti-Jewish grievances, commonly dismissed as anti-Semitic tropes, were at least partially based in fact. Jews did exploit the Russian peasant, mostly through usury and the alcohol trade, to say nothing of the kahal, an intra-ethnic governing body which enabled Jews to out-compete gentiles in the free market.
In this review, I seek to address the 1880s pogroms, as filtered through Klier, as a cautionary tale to describe what happens when ethnocentric concerns are ignored or downplayed, and genetically distinct peoples are crowded together in the same geographic area. It can be argued that many of the twentieth century’s great conflicts, disasters, and atrocities—as well as Western man’s overarching view of the world—came as a result of the Russian pogroms of 1881 and 1882.
The Pogroms
Despite whatever exoneration Klier offers the Russian populace, he does not let the Russian local authorities off the hook for their laziness and corruption. Quite a few disturbances could have been prevented by firm and disciplined leadership. As a result, many local authorities falsely blamed Jews for instigating the riots in order to save their own skins. Klier also points out how sometimes the Jews didn’t help matters by hoaxing Russian calls to violence in order to prompt the government to grant them greater—and often unnecessary—protection.
Understaffed law enforcement in many places in the territories were a muddle as well. This presented dangerous circumstances after the assassination of Tsar Alexander II on March 13, 1881, wherein much of the Russian populace was plunged into panic and suspicion, notwithstanding the speedy execution of the perpetrators. Despite the Jewish connection to the regicide being tenuous at best—and possibly even non-existent—many peasants in the Jewish Pale of Settlement in southwestern Russia began to look askance at this foreign presence in their midst. It was not uncommon for the authorities to post troops in areas where Jews and Russians intermingled in order to keep the peace. This often resulted in soldiers not only protecting Jews and their property but intimidating peasants into leaving them alone. And if they didn’t, mass floggings were in the offing, and—more rarely—lethal force.
But troops had other priorities and could only do so much. Thus, a strong police presence was crucial, especially on Christian holidays when peasants would likely take greater offence at Jewish slights. One common complaint was the Jews desecrated the Christian Sabbath by lording it over gentiles during this time and hawking their wares in the marketplace.
The pogroms of 1881 occurred in three waves, with the causes of the first one being quite murky. In the Kherson province city of Elisavetgrad, just north of the Black Sea, the governor had called for the local military to reinforce the police during the first three days of Bright Week (the Orthodox holy week following Easter Sunday). Unfortunately, on April 15, after the reinforcements had left, a scuffle at a Jewish-owned tavern involving a Russian simpleton sparked the first wave of pogroms. What caused the scuffle? Did Jews in the tavern manhandle the simpleton after he broke a glass worth three kopeks? Did they attack him for loudly singing “Khristos Voskres” (“Christ is Risen”)? Or perhaps fellow Russians beat him up, with the growing crowd thinking it had been the Jews? In any case, the crowd shouted, “The Yids are beating our people!” and then began rampaging through Jewish shops and homes, despite the efforts of the overwhelmed police. In later disturbances, rumor alone could have set things off, such as when troublemakers doctored official pronouncements, claiming that the Tsar himself approved of anti-Jewish violence. And this despite the Tsar mandating the distribution of posters declaring that the rights of Jews were protected by law.
The following two paragraphs from Klier are quite telling:
On 17 April, three corpses were discovered in the city. One was a Jew, Zolotarev, who had been beaten to death by a mob in the courtyard of his residence. The other two were pogromshchiki who had died of alcohol poisoning. A number of Jews had been beaten and one Christian suffered gunshot wounds, apparent confirmation of the rumor that some Jews were armed. Despite the claim, widely advanced in 1881, that rioters avoided physical violence, there were several episodes of extreme brutality, as when Jews were reportedly thrown from the upper stories of houses. There were, however, no reports, of rapes.A total of 418 Jewish homes were attacked, and 290 shops and stalls were wrecked. The damage done was estimated by the Jews at R2 million. The provincial authorities complained, as they would do after every pogrom, that the Jews wildly exaggerated their losses.
Overall, the Russian authorities claimed they had arrested more than 6,800 pogromists, sentenced over two-thirds of that number, and sent over a thousand into internal exile. According to Klier, “25-odd” Jews had been killed, with an unclear yet possibly greater number of Russians killed as well. As a result of the pogroms, many thousands of Jews were also evicted from Russia proper and deported back to the Pale since they were illegally living outside of it. The Jews saw this as discriminatory, of course, while the Russians claimed it was the best way to prevent future disorders. Another way was to resort to military trials due to the much greater likelihood of civil courts delivering acquittals. Obviously, the Russian government was serious about preventing pogroms. As with all of these disturbances, there was much property damage and many injuries, yet very few incidents of rape. Other than in the Balta pogrom of late March 1882, rapes were simply not a commonplace occurrence. This is important to remember, given how Jews greatly exaggerated the incidence of rape in their ensuing propaganda war against Russia. Notably, the only pogroms in which there was serious loss of life involved Jewish use of firearms.
The Press Responds
The word “pogrom” entered the lexicon of European languages in 1881 when the Russian—and later the international—press began frantically reporting on the unrest in western Russia. Klier notes that regardless of the ideological bent of a press organ, it was difficult to manage the spread of information during this critical period. Coverage ranged from atrocity propaganda, to Jew-baiting, to rumor-mongering, to pointing fingers in every conceivable direction. All attempted bans on a certain kind of coverage proved completely futile.
News of ongoing pogroms spread rapidly throughout the provinces thanks to communication along railways and rivers, as well as, ironically, from official printed pronouncements and warnings. This put the Tsarist authorities in a tricky position since official notices condemning pogroms ran the risk of spreading the word about them and increasing the number of people involved. Klier dedicates much time on all the contradictory ways the Russian press and government censorship bodies handled the ongoing chaos.
For one, the provincial press tended to be sympathetic to the pogromists. Often they were, as Klier calls them, “Judeophobic,” in that they were quite disparaging of Jews in general, suspicious of their proclaimed innocence, and highly critical of the harsh measures implemented to prevent pogroms. One such newspaper had even “reprinted, as a news item, a revolutionary proclamation calling for attacks upon Jews.” Of course, this would not do for the Tsarist government, which naturally abhorred pogroms and tried to censor such instances. But when this act of censoring also became news, the authorities were embarrassed. Censorship thus proved to be useless when attempting to solve this thorny problem. Klier concludes that the best the government could do was to “use private newspapers which were friendly to it to counter criticism and exaggerated reporting at home and abroad.”
Second, it seemed that a free national press could only make matters worse. On one hand, liberal newspapers were often accused of dishonest reporting and protecting Jews. Yes, they were reasonable when decrying violence and expanding on the economic drawbacks of pogroms. They may have had a point when claiming that gentile economic competitors of Jews had self-serving reasons to promote the boogeyman of Jewish exploitation. They may also have been sincere in their desire to reform the Jews by loosening rather than tightening the legal strictures placed upon them. In some of their more unguarded moments however they actually welcomed the deaths of pogromists. Klier provides an example in which one newspaper referred to pogromists as “riffraff that never does any work” and “rioting scum.” Of course, this served only to anger the populace and further dim their already dim opinion of Jews.
On the other hand, the reactionary press often resorted to outright Jew-baiting, which also enflamed the people. Some tended to castigate Jews non-stop in their everyday reporting, and then condemn violence only after the pogroms took place. Such behavior exasperated the government and led to accusations that such press organs had been instigating pogroms all along. Yet were they wrong for reporting on Jews in the first place? Klier doesn’t really say, and instead includes a quote from a prominent Judeophobic paper from Odessa:
The Jews are guilty of much, but their guilt is only economic; they beat us with the ruble, sucking the juices from the people among whom they live, yet their exploitation should not be countered with the fist, nor should we defend ourselves with violence, but by the force of the ruble, by obstructing their means of exploitation, and by the diminution of their field of activity as much as possible. Russians ought to join together tightly for such a struggle, and support each other as the Jews support each other; buy any honorable person and any true patriot should stand opposed to physical violence, for such violence is directed by the anarchists for whom there is only one goal—to sow discord wherever possible.
Finally, Klier reports upon a fascinating individual named Ivan Sergeevich Aksakov, who may have been the Russian Kevin MacDonald of the late Tsarist period. A staunchly Judeophobic journalist with a strong philosophical bent, Aksakov framed the Jew-Gentile divide in Russia as “rival spiritual-moral systems” and saw pogroms as “a form of moral protest, rather than blind violence.” The peasants were not so much plundering as destroying property which they felt had been deceitfully taken from them. By publishing excerpts from Iakov Brafman’s famous tract Book of the Kahal, Aksakov exposed the Jewish kahal to Russian readers. In response to the Judeophilic press, which loudly called for the abolition of the Pale, Aksakov reminded his readers why the Pale was instituted to begin with. There should be no talk of emancipating Jews, he claimed; rather we should discuss how to emancipate the Russian people from the Jewish yoke. This, by the way, coincides nicely with Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s brief coverage of Aksakov in chapter 5 of his 200 Years Together.
In one prescient passage, Aksakov effectively predicts the rise of the Soviet Union as a direct result of Jewish integration into Russian society.
Liberalism in regard to the Jews means placing the Russian population in a cabal; an action which conforms to the requirements of “contemporary progress” means taking down a dam, letting flow the Jewish stream over the rest of Russia, which will lead only to the regression of the Russian population, which will have its own economic growth cut off.
Klier points out the irony of two opposite sides of this issue decrying the same thing, and yet accusing one another of instigating the very thing they were decrying in the first place.
The Causes of the Pogroms
John Klier states in chapter three of Russians, Jews, and the Pogroms of 1881-1882 that contemporaneous Russian sources unanimously blamed the Jews for the disturbances. From a modern dissident’s perspective, the way in which Klier actually states this on the page is so elegant, I feel the need to reproduce it here. Enjoy:
It will suffice to note that every non-Jewish assessment of the pogroms, without exception, relied on the concept of Jewish exploitation. This can best be demonstrated by citing the words of elected and appointed officials at the grass roots, of elected judicial personnel, of the agents of the police and the security police, of the army, and of the echelons of the higher administration, including vice-governors, governors, and governors-general. All asserted, with one voice, that the Jews themselves were to blame for the disorders.
Of course, this is not to say that Klier himself agreed with any of this. Nor is this to say that the Russian perspective on the pogroms was necessarily correct. But given that Klier expends little energy comprehensively debunking these claims, he leaves the reader with that burden—which is a good thing. The reader can then dive down the rabbit hole of Klier’s Cyrillic sources, or he can take the common sense approach by assuming that 100 million Russians could not all be wrong. Even the Tsar stated before an audience of Jews one month after the first wave of pogroms that they were caused, at least in part, by the “economic exploitation of the peasant by the Jew.” So, if all Russian sources blame the Jews for the pogroms, how can they all be wrong? The Judeophilic perspective would have us believe exactly that while giving the Jews the benefit of the doubt at every turn. That John Klier doesn’t do this is nothing short of remarkable for a recent work of mainstream history.
For point of comparison, consider Robert Wistrich’s dishonest assessment of the 1881-1882 pogroms in his Antisemitism: the Longest Hatred:
The Tsarist regime, by constantly imposing economic disabilities on the Jews and driving them into insecure middleman occupations which involved direct, often unpleasant contact with the poorer peasants, itself contributed to the exacerbation of popular Judeophobia. When pogroms occurred in 1881 in about 160 cities and villages of Russia, the government did not intervene to stop the murder and pillage.
In Wistrich’s jaundiced view, the Russians, from the top down, bear most if not all the blame for the pogroms.
It should be noted that never once does Klier or the sources he cites absolve the pogromists of their violent, destructive actions. The Jews may have brought the pogroms on themselves, but it was the Russian peasantry that brought it to them, often in an alcohol-fueled rage.
For completeness’ sake, Klier rules out ways in which pogroms weren’t brought about. Christianity is off the hook, largely because the riots never occurred on Easter Sunday or similarly important days of worship. Church doctrine, of course, anathematizes such behavior. Further, Klier finds no evidence of classic Christian anti-semitism contributing to any of the pogroms. Peasants were more likely to receive anti-pogrom sermons in church than anywhere else. The Holy Synod, in fact, had required that clergy members preach against pogroms. Klier writes of how some clergy had actually diffused tensions while pogroms were in progress, often at great risk to themselves. Some even received medals for their bravery. It seems that since pogroms often occurred during weeks of revelry after religious holidays, Christianity “provided not so much the cause but the occasion for anti-Jewish violence.”
Another red herring is the revolutionary movement. With the Tsar’s assassination being so fresh in everyone’s memory, the first possible cause nearly everyone leaped at was the nascent revolutionary movement. This was a cabal of anarchists, nihilists, and proto-Marxists which at the time contained some Jews. But most of them were hardly influential. Authorities on all levels searched for evidence of revolutionary involvement, but none was ever uncovered. More often than not, pogroms took the revolutionaries by surprise. Of course, some attempted to use the pogroms to their advantage after the fact, for example by sowing seeds of dissatisfaction among the populace against their wealthy oppressors. And pigeonholing Jews in such a way wasn’t exactly a stretch.
Klier quotes several left-wing revolutionaries from the time period, and in light of the past 140 years, their frank anti-Semitism is astonishing. A decree from a Ukrainian socialist group called The People’s Will includes the following ripe lines of rhetoric:
Who has seized from your hands the lands, the forests, and the taverns? The Jews. From whom must the peasant beg, through his tears, for access to his land allotment, to his field? The Jews. Wherever one looks, wherever one goes, the Jews are there. The Jew curses you, cheats you, drinks your blood. . .
Klier goes on to write:
Debates on the Jewish Question took place among Kiev socialists in the early 1870s, pitting the members of the so-called Kiev Commune against the Buntari, who were followers of [Mikhail] Bakunin. The memoirs of one contemporary, Ben Ami, recount that the regicide A.I. Zheliabov was very hostile to the Jews, while the Kiev revolutionary Ivanov was firmly convinced of the reality of the Blood Libel.
Bakunin himself often lashed out at Jewish socialists in ethnic terms and once claimed that they were all part of a “restless, intriguing, profiteering, bourgeois-nationality.” Klier then wryly points out that the butt of these insults happened to be Bakunin’s rivals in the revolutionary movement, namely Karl Marx and Ferdinand Lassalle. So that might have informed some of his animus against the Jews as well.
Finally, Klier dismisses purely economic causes of the pogroms. He notes how some historians have attempted to link the disturbances to concurrent crop failures, unemployment, or other economic downturns. But this model doesn’t predict the much deadlier pogroms of the early twentieth century, such as in Kishinev and Gomel, which did not coincide with periods of economic difficulty. It also fails to explain why pogroms didn’t occur during periods of hardship in the intervening years. (It is noteworthy, however, that Klier mentions Gomel since the 1903 pogrom in that city was, according to Solzhenitsyn in 200 Years Together, instigated by Jews.)
As for the actual causes, we all know what they were by now: the Jewish refusal to assimilate, the Jewish engagement in exploitative activities such as usury and tavern keeping, and the Jewish use of the kahal as a deceitful means to economically compete against gentiles.
Klier writes:
The mayors of two other small towns in Kherson province which suffered disorders, Anan’ev and Ol’viopolsk, explained in their report that “it was only exploitation by the Jews and their intoxication of the people with vodka which prepared the ground for the explosion of disorders.” JPs [Justices of the Peace] in Kerson province also pointed to the evils of Jewish tavern-keeping. The JP of Tiraspol district divided the entire Jewish population of 13,000 into two categories: a few hundred pursuing useful crafts and all the rest who exploited the peasantry through usury and tavern keeping. His colleague in Aleksandriia district characterized Jewish taverns as “dens of thieves ready for any outrage.” The municipal government of three of the principal cities of the province complained of the “permanent malfeasance” of the Jews and “the unbearable yoke carried by all the productive elements of the region, from rich to poor.”
The local police agreed with these assessments by the way. Here’s more:
In the city of Pereiaslav, several weeks before the pogrom, representatives of the Christian townspeople called for the expulsion of Jews from the city, explaining that “Jews, unaccustomed to heavy labor, have sought to earn money by easier kinds of work, especially trade, through which the resourcefulness and pushiness of the Jewish nation, as well as their effrontery and disposition for fraudulent practice, have given these aliens a wide arena for exploitative activity.”
Branching off from this, Klier gives voice to Russians who complained that Jews:
- leased or purchased estates to drive up the cost of peasant land rentals,
- corrupted gentile youth by encouraging them to steal from their parents,
- stole and smuggled livestock,
- took great measures to avoid military service,
- resorted to the court system to exploit the peasantry, and
- didn’t seem to care much about the national interest.
Klier also discusses how the swiftness in which Jews transformed formerly Russian villages and towns shocked and disoriented the peasantry. In some places, Jews had managed to change a city’s entire identity, with Kiev on the eve of the pogroms being a prime example.
On a more personal level, Russians also complained about Jewish slights and insults and their overall boastful and impudent manner, especially when they felt sufficiently protected by the police or the army. In a highly telling passage, Klier shares how a committee studying the pogroms came to the depressing conclusion that despite having been given greater freedom under the late Tsar, the Jews still refused to assimilate and instead used their expanded rights to further defraud the state and the gentile population. International societies which included wealthy European Jews such as Moses Montefiore, Adolphe Crémieux, and the Rothschilds greatly aided them in these efforts. According to Klier, the committee also noted that the Talmud “not only permitted but urged Jews to act towards non-believers ‘by fraud or force, usury, or theft.’ The inchoate response of the Russian masses to exploitation took the form of pogroms.”
By letting these anti-Jewish charges go largely unchallenged, John Klier offers up nothing less than a smorgasbord of pre-Soviet counter-Semitism. One can practically bibliomance through first half of his book and stumble across gems like the ones above. Yes, Klier reserves much blame for Russian authorities in creating an atmosphere in which general sympathy and “social support” for the rioters could have been interpreted as a “ukase to beat the Jews.” But this is a weak claim in the face of the thousands of arrests, as well as public floggings and lethal action taken upon the rioters by the authorities. Whether he realized it or not, Klier as a historian gave air time to traditional anti-Jewish grievances, which for the longest time in the West had been suppressed or vilified.
Oddly enough, many of his Jewish colleagues were onboard with this when he was writing in the early 2000s. (Klier sadly died in 2007 at the relatively young age of 62.) In his Acknowledgements page, he thanks the following people with undeniably Jewish names—Jonathan Frankel, Moshe Rosman, Marcos Silber—as well as a number of others who likely are Jewish, such as Gerald Surh, Viktor Kel’ner, and Tsila Ratner.
Here is a screenshot of the back cover of my copy, which includes glowing praise from scholars named Antony Polonsky, Bob Weinberg, and Ezra Mendelsohn:
I have no explanation for this other than these folks are simply being honest, given that Klier sticks so closely to the facts. That he is undressing the central underpinnings of anti-gentilic Jewish mythology, which flourished for more than a century since the pogroms, seems to matter less than the truth.
And for this all readers should be grateful.
The Russian Response
Neither the Russian governing elite nor society wanted pogroms, but they believed that they understood them and they certainly empathized with them. This led to sympathy, whether it was intended or not. The message which Ignatiev’s government sent to the masses was: We sympathize with your ends, but not your means. The acts of the government discussed in the second part of this book, such as the mass expulsions from Kiev and Orel, the charge to the Ignatiev commissions, the well-publicized planning of the May Laws, and rhetoric about the open western border, constantly reinforced this theme.
Aside from taking swift measures to prevent future pogroms, one of the very first things the Russian government did in the wake of the 1881 pogroms was to form commissions to study them. Leading this effort was the new minister of internal affairs, Nikolai Ignatiev. His first act was to send a circular to all affected governors warning them that pogroms would not be tolerated and ordering them to take swift, preventive measures. He also demanded harsh punishments for all pogromists. Aside from seeking calm in the provinces, however, his overarching goal was to end Jewish exploitation by rewriting the law. This is essentially why Ignatiev is so disparaged by Judeophilic historians like Paul Johnson who dismisses him as a “Slavophile” in his History of the Jews—as if that’s a bad thing. Ignatiev certainly did not want to see Jewish subjects of the Tsar killed, harmed, or despoiled. On the other hand, he never gave up his ethnic and cultural allegiance with the Russian masses whom he felt were being despoiled by the Jews.
The problem was that Ignatiev was not always honest and lacked discipline as an administrator. From my reading of Klier, it appears he made things up as he went along, and often rambled carelessly during interviews. This predictably caused panic and overreaction among Jews and gentiles alike—especially when he floated contradictory ideas of Jewish emigration. Ignatiev’s commissions recommended banning a great deal of Jewish activity, as well as abolishing the kahal. Oddly, they remarked little on the Jewish practice of usury. Instead, they noted the Jews’ refusal to assimilate, their stubborn resistance to reform, and how they employ “Talmudic casuistry” in order to “placate their consciences for the guilt of their unbridled rapacity.” The commissions also noted the futility of altering the Jewish character through education.
As a counterweight, some attendees did remind the commissions of the sizeable economic contributions of Jewish communities—the taxes they paid, the business they generated, the people they employed. Banning Jews from various activities would come at a cost. For example, the liquor trade made up a large proportion of the state budget. This all but guaranteed that these commissions would move slowly at best when it came to banning Jews from distilling and tavern keeping.
Much of these commissions involved the kind of nature-versus-nurture debates we witness all the time today. Actually, it’s quite fascinating how these kinds of discussions never seem to grow old among certain types of people:
The two basic responses to this issue serve as the clearest criteria for differentiating Judeophiles from Judeophobes in Russia. Did these abuses derive from within or without? Were they essential, elemental components of the Jewish national character or were they accidental characteristics resulting from centuries of persecution and anti-Jewish fanaticism on the part of Christian society? These questions formed the crux of the debate in a number of commissions.
These commissions had difficulty reaching a consensus. Some Judeophobes wanted to strengthen the Pale, others wanted to abolish it and disperse the Jews across the empire. Some called for out-migration. Regardless of what occurred during these meetings, however, Ignatiev misrepresented their conclusions among the Tsar’s ministers in order to push his own agenda. Whether this agenda was pro-Russian or anti-Jewish is open to interpretation. But in either case, the final result, known as the May Laws, was a complete muddle.
In the six main points of the Laws as they were first drafted, Jews were banned from:
- Living or settling outside of towns or small towns.
- Purchasing or leasing land outside of towns or small towns.
- Purchasing, building, or leasing structures outside of towns or small towns.
- Selling alcohol outside of towns or small towns.
- Living in peasant villages outside the Pale.
- Doing business on Sundays or Christian holidays.
Ignatiev’s proposals suffered a good deal of editing by the Tsar’s ministers until they emerged as temporary measures alongside a stern announcement that pogroms would not be tolerated. After this, Ignatiev retired as minister of internal affairs and was replaced by the more responsible Dmitrii Tolstoi.
The May Laws were frankly an embarrassment. Rushed and poorly worded, they were quite malleable depending on how narrowly or expansively one chose to interpret them. For example, provincial governments would often interpret the laws narrowly when determining the rights of Jews in their jurisdiction, and expansively when determining which Jew was considered illegally resident. This led to some absurd adjudications in local courts, such as when a Jew lost his home in a fire and was evicted from his village because rebuilding his home “outside of towns or small towns” would have violated the May Laws.
Jews also quickly became adept at circumventing them, either through collusion with local officials or with the peasants themselves. For example, many Jewish tavern proprietors simply became de facto tavern proprietors after the Laws, often with a drunken, disheveled, and perfectly compliant peasant now being the holder of tavern’s deed. Further, Jews as skilled legalists were often able to use the courts to stall or stay the Laws’ implementation.
Klier relays one humorous anecdote, which involves the newspapers Ekho and Kievlianin:
How could the effects of the Laws be judged, for good or evil, queried Ekho, when they were so thoroughly evaded by the Jews? The fear of evasion became an obsession for the most influential Judeophobe organ, Kievlianin. The columns of the paper ranged from enumerating episodes of Jewish evasion to lengthy analyses of how the Jews could theoretically evade the Laws. Indeed, one reader intervened to plead with the paper to stop giving the Jews so much practical advice.
In the end, many were unhappy with the May Laws. They did not work as intended, they were easily subverted, quite often ignored, and introduced grotesque jurisprudential complications into the Russian legal system. After the Laws were promulgated, however, no pogrom on the level of 1881 and 1882 occurred for another two decades. It is impossible to know if this was merely coincidence. In any event, all of the provincial governors of the day supported the Laws. Just the fact that the Tsar and his government were doing something—anything—on behalf of the peasantry seemed to have a calming effect on thousands of would-be pogromists. Further, while the Jews were still able to embark upon their usual shenanigans and finagling, the May Laws required that they work a little harder at it, and step a little more carefully. As a result, they were a little less arrogant and obnoxious to the Russian peasant.
Could this have been what curtailed the Russian pogroms for twenty years? Could the May Laws have ended up working despite themselves?
The Jewish Response
Klier makes it clear early on that the Jews themselves viewed the 1881-1882 pogroms as a pivotal moment in their history. It remains so today with a consensus of historians. The pogroms began to dash whatever optimism Jews had at the time of being able to live unmolested in the galut—or under foreign rule. The pogroms also gave way to “the new Jewish politics,” which preached emigration and ethnonationalism rather than the shtetl-nationalism of the then-current Jewish leadership, which sought stability for a distinct, Semitic diaspora in the sometimes turbulent sea of Orthodox Russia.
Klier reports on the mainstream Jewish reactions to the pogroms—something which naturally obsessed nearly all of Russian Jewry at the time—as well various eccentric, and subcultural responses. In many cases, Jews dove into religiosity with fasting, recitation of scripture, and special services at their synagogues. Politically speaking, however, mainstream Jewish leaders had three primary responses. They bombarded the authorities with requests for special protection, they defended themselves against the various charges of exploitation, and they appealed to international Jewry for aid. The primary goal behind all of this was the eventual attainment of greater civil rights for Russian Jews. This was their holy grail. The Gintsburg family in St. Petersburg exemplified the kind of secular, plutocratic leadership the Jews could rely upon in Russia at the time.
Younger Jews quickly lost patience with this course of “passivity and petition,” however, and began promoting emigration as a possible solution. The two main camps of the new Jewish politics diverged on their ultimate destination: either the United States or Palestine. This is why the 1881-1882 pogroms were so pivotal not just for Jewish history but for world history as well. They accelerated Jewish globalism as well as kick-started the Zionist movement. Furthermore, many of the Russian Jews who managed to emigrate to the United States participated in the American Jewish labor movement, thereby becoming major players in twentieth century American politics. Klier writes that “‘emigration mania’ consumed Russian Jewry for the better part of eighteen months.” Lending fuel to this fire was Ignatiev’s often contradictory statements about the desirability of Jewish emigration. Putting the issue front and center, however, was the prosecutor of the Kiev Military District V.S. Strelnikov. Klier writes:
Strelnikov denied that socialist agitation was the cause of the pogroms (the preferred Jewish explanation), attributing them rather to Jewish vices such as the evasion of civil obligations and economic exploitation. If the Jews were unable to live without exploiting their neighbors, Strelnikov proclaimed, “the western border is open to them.” This was the decisive moment in bringing the debate over emigration to a mass audience. If a state official could speak so casually about emigration, and have it widely and uncritically reported in the press, publicists could assume that emigration was a concrete reality and a legitimate matter for public debate.
As with Solzhenitsyn in 200 Years Together, Klier also unearths self-aware Jews who appreciated the gentile perspective and sought true rapprochement with them. Where Solzhenitsyn writes glowingly of twentieth-century Jews such as Josef Biekerman, Isaak Levin, and Danil Pasmanik—who believed Jews had much to do with the rise of Communism—Klier tells us of Iakov Goldin and his Spiritual Biblical Brotherhood, who were willing to point the finger of blame inward, rather than outward. They rejected Jewish materialism and exploitation (which Goldin called “a moral illness”) and believed in spiritual reawakening through agriculture and strict Mosaic Judaism. They had much in common with Christian rationalists in Ukraine known as the Stundists, and sought to productively bridge gaps between the Christian and Jewish populations. Klier quotes Goldin:
Our greed, insatiability, covetousness, cupidity, our persistence, pushiness, our extreme willingness to flaunt ourselves, our extravagance, our slavish and stupid imitation of proud and unbridled Russian haughtiness, our usury, tavern-keeping, go-between activity, and similar shortcomings arouse the Russian people against us, stirring up the envy of the merchant and the contempt of the noble.
Well! That about says it all, doesn’t it? Sadly, however, Goldin’s was a voice in the wilderness amid the more strident ones among Russian Jews. Despite being praised by many Russians, Goldin was accused by his co-religionists of sympathizing with or even inciting pogroms. His Spiritual Biblical Brotherhood did not survive as a result.
The International Response
The most far-reaching and instructive impact of the pogroms was undoubtedly the decisive reaction among European Jews, which was based on frankly dishonest reporting coming from the Jews themselves. In Russians, Jews, and the Pogroms of 1881-1882, Klier pulls off the coup of dismantling the lugubrious Jewish narrative of universal Jewish victimhood and gentile culpability by catching Jewish propagandists in flagrante delicto, if you will, atrocity-mongering the pogroms in a vicious and self-serving vendetta against the state of Russia itself. Klier offhandedly refers to such people as “Russophobes,” either unaware of or indifferent to the fact that prominent Jewish intellectuals such as Wistrich, Walter Lacquer, and Josephine Woll had linked this term with anti-Semitism thanks to the writings of Igor Shafarevich. Such positioning from the author goes well beyond exonerating the Tsarist government and vindicating the Jewish exploitation narrative, as valuable as these revelations are. Indeed, the lies and exaggerations spread by international Jewry surrounding the pogroms of 1881 and 1882 evince the same hatred of gentile Christians that the Bolsheviks possessed decades later when they initiated the greatest murder-campaign in history up until that point.
Right away, the Russians found themselves plunged into a foreign policy crisis by the pogroms, despite their vigorous pleas on the world stage. Yes, the Russians pointed to the thousands of arrests and indictments of pogromists as well as their stiff and often draconian punishments. But this did little to persuade foreigners—especially influential Jewish ones—that the Russians weren’t somehow at fault by oppressing and alienating their Jews to begin with. Accompanying this were many pro-Russian explanations which were too frankly Judeophobic for most Westerners to stomach—largely because Westerners had less experience living alongside Jews than the Russians did. (Compare the Jewish population of France, which could be counted in the tens of thousands to Russia’s four million.) A great example comes from Zenaide Ragozin, a Russian expatriate living in the United States who tried to persuade Americans that Jews were “a parasitical race” which chokes the life of commerce and industry “as the creeper throttles the tree that upholds it.”
This tack backfired, and soon world leaders were feeling the pressure from the Western Jewish elite, which included lawmakers, to retaliate against Russia itself. For example, after The Times of London published sensationalist and unsubstantiated pogrom stories in January 1882—which included lurid and entirely fictitious accounts of rape—British Prime Minister William Gladstone was forced to address demands of intervention by outraged Jewish MPs. Not only this, but the Anglo-Jewish leadership in England attempted to drum up public protest over “Russian barbarism,” which the Russians saw as a “weapon to poison the good relations between Britain and Russia.” In December of 1881, Nathaniel Rothschild, acting on behalf of the Russo-Jewish Committee, approached the Russian embassy with a demarche demanding legal equality for Jews and the abolishment of the Pale. The Russians rightly saw this as foreign interference and refused. The subsequent publishing of the demarche in the British press further deteriorated public perception of Russia in the West.
Fortunately, Gladstone held his ground against all of this, and pointed to how the consular reports on the pogroms collected by the British government directly contradicted the coverage from The Times and other periodicals. It turns out that the pogrom coverage in the English press was not merely wrong, but wildly so:
In response to the horror stories contained in The Times account, Odessa consul-general [G.E.] Stanley declared on 18 January 1882 NS that “amongst the riots described are the disturbances which took place at Odessa last May, and the description is so incorrect and exaggerated, and the descriptions of what took place at some other of the places mentioned so far exceed in horrors the descriptions given to me by eye-witnesses at those places, that I think very little faith can be given to any part of it, more especially to the accounts of the violations of women.”
Finding all of this quite rich was Frank Hugh O’Donnell, an Irish MP, who was quick to point out how the MPs who were leaping with great urgency to solve the humanitarian crisis in Russia had moved with much less alacrity when it came to resolving similar problems with the Empire’s own Irish and Indian subjects. He also said something quite telling: “[I]n the hands of the Jews themselves rested the control of the money markets of the world; and, so long as that was the fact, a government like Russia must depend largely upon the favor of the rulers of the money market.”
This was correct. As a result of the gruesome lies spread about the pogroms, Russia lost an estimated 152 million rubles on the stock exchange. Trade decreased dramatically as British and Austrian firms ended their shipments of goods to southern Russia. The Rothschilds announced that they would no longer buy Russian state bonds, which had profound rippling effects across global finance. In 1882, when a Russian emissary had requested a meeting with the Paris Rothschilds to discuss the possibility of reversing their ban, he was rebuffed—as was Nathaniel Rothschild before him—being told that “it can’t be done because of the persecution of our co-religionists in Russia.”
Conclusion
Klier provides space for both the Jewish and Russian perspectives on the pogroms. He frames much of the dispute as a duel between Ignatiev and the Gintsburg circle, with the former representing the growingly archaic notion of gentile ethnocentrism and the latter the more ascendant notion of civic or pluralistic nationalism. He is also quite cagey in his representation of these perspectives. He seems to refrain entirely from drawing definitive conclusions, and instead allows these conflicting perspectives to assert themselves. He condemns neither, and effectively champions each side when presenting them.
For example, in chapter eight, when paraphrasing a manifesto written by “Palestinophile” Jews seeking to emigrate to the Holy Land, he writes [emphasis mine]:
Faced with persecution in the past, the Jews had lacked the mental or moral qualities of resistance. Now they were served by a contingent of people who possessed both a higher education and strong moral convictions. It was true that this elite had been tempted by the lure of assimilation and had sought to spread Russian language and culture among their people. Events in Russia—and also in Germany—now demonstrated their mistake. Judeophobes claimed that both the pogroms and antisemitism were responses to Jewish exploitation. This was demonstrably untrue. “They beat us because we are Jews, who despite various sorts of persecution, degrading laws, the Pale of Settlement, have nonetheless remained true to our religion, our national traditions, which are sanctified by age-old suffering.”
Yet in chapter six, when summarizing the debates surrounding the final draft of the May Laws, Klier provides oxygen for a classic anti-Semitic stereotype [again, emphasis mine]:
It was thus the consensus of the committee that the proposal should not be ratified. Legislation of this nature should be passed through the State Council. The minister of internal affairs had insisted the Jews be forbidden to buy or sell estates in the countryside, where they were genuine vampires. Such a regulation had to be put into statutory law.
So which is it? Are Jews innocent victims of persecution? Or are they genuine vampires? Was it Klier speaking in these passages? Or was he merely using evocative prose to embody the voices of people from the past? It’s hard to say. But what isn’t hard to say is that Klier is quite evenhanded in his approach and, if anything, provides more real estate on the page to the Russian perspective than the Jewish one.
ORDER IT NOW
This is highly unusual, especially for a work of history dealing with such an explosive topic as the Jewish Question. Yes, Klier explicitly establishes points 1 and 2 described in Part 1 of this series. He exonerates the Russian leadership of inciting or encouraging pogroms, and he uncovers Jewish mendacity in their atrocity reporting. Thanks to research from people like Klier, these have become matters of fact rather than opinion. If the blurbs on the back cover of Russians, Jews, and the Pogroms of 1881-1882 are any indication, Jewish historians seem to agree—which is a very good thing. But one wonders if these Jewish historians had read to the final two pages of the book in which Klier compares the false mythology surrounding the pogroms to The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. This is hitting the mainstream narrative of the pogroms where it hurts, which is also a very good thing, not least because it puts Klier in the same camp as those who are skeptical of the lugubrious narrative of Jewish victimhood to begin with. This is where you will also find today’s Dissident Right.
As for point 3 and the veracity of Jewish exploitation, Klier is much hard to pin down. Did the Jews really exploit the Russian peasantry enough to incur their violent hatred? Were they really that corrupt and malevolent? Well, the Russians certainly thought so. And with four million Jews living inside their borders, it’s not like they were speaking out of ignorance like many in the West. Regardless of John Klier’s personal opinions on the matter and whatever conclusions he had hoped to draw in his wonderful Russians, Jews, and the Pogroms of 1881-1882, the fact that the Russian perspective emerged out of good faith concern for the peasantry comes through loud and clear.
For most of us searching for a clearer understanding of the Jewish Question, that’s all we need.
