John Doyle Klier’s Russians, Jews, & the Pogroms of 1881-1882
Part 1

2,289 words

Part 1

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:

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.