John Doyle Klier’s Russians, Jews, & the Pogroms of 1881-1882
Part 2

3,078 words

Part 2

John Doyle Klier
Russians, Jews, and the Pogroms of 1881-1882
Cambridge University Press, 2011

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:

1. leased or purchased estates to drive up the cost of peasant land rentals,
2. corrupted gentile youth by encouraging them to steal from their parents,
3. stole and smuggled livestock,
4. took great measures to avoid military service,
5. resorted to the court system to exploit the peasantry, and
6. 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:

1. Living or settling outside of towns or small towns.
2. Purchasing or leasing land outside of towns or small towns.
3. Purchasing, building, or leasing structures outside of towns or small towns.
4. Selling alcohol outside of towns or small towns.
5. Living in peasant villages outside the Pale.
6. 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?