Pogroms as a Cautionary Tale

2,286 words

There is so much to unpack regarding the topic of the 1881-1882 pogroms that I felt my personal reactions and insights deserved their own essay. This isn’t part of my recent review of John Klier’s Russians, Jews, and the Pogroms of 1881-1882. Rather, it’s a reflection on the review and a discussion of how the pogroms of that period have become a cautionary tale for our times.

In her three partitions of Poland—dating from 1772, 1793, and 1795—Russian Empress Catherine the Great took in around a million Jews who had previously been Polish subjects. Members of the Polish nobility were also now part of Russia. This greatly complicated lawmaking in the Russian Empire at the time, as well as initiated a vicious cycle of human vice which by 1917 consumed Russia in its entirety. When you cram large numbers of ethnically dissimilar peoples together in a single geographic space, friction is bound to occur. And when these peoples are dissimilar enough in terms of IQ and temperament, as with Jews and gentiles, you will end up with uneven power dynamics, economic exploitation, crime, and sometimes war.

The Russian peasant, with his general low intelligence and likely genetic weakness for alcohol, presented an irresistible temptation to the Polish landowners and their Jewish middlemen. As it was written at the time, Polish landowners typically leased their properties to Jews who operated taverns on them. These Jews often served alcohol to peasants on credit, thus feeding their patrons’ addictions and having them accrue debts they could never repay. This resulted in both the landowners and Jews getting wealthy, while the peasantry became impoverished. The Jewish tavern keepers were known even to convert peasant grain into alcohol, thereby reducing their food supply and causing famines, such as the one in Minsk in the late eighteenth century. The Jewish lack of concern for the welfare of the peasants shocked most gentile observers at the time and set them off to discern ingenious and abstruse solutions to what was rapidly becoming known as the Jewish Question.

This, in a nutshell, explains the Jewish exploitation narrative as attested to by the gentile subjects found in Klier’s work. It also explains the simmering resentment Russian peasants felt towards Jews, especially during the time of the pogroms. In order to keep the peace among conflicting groups of wildly different natures, Russian authorities had to resort to complex, epicyclical laws which would apply to one group and not another, and during one particular time versus another.

It is my personal theory that complexity in law correlates directly with the amount of racial and ethnic diversity a society must suffer. There are ways to determine the complexity of a legal system, while racial bean counting can be accomplished by a well-designed census. So this could one day be the topic of political science study on the level of The Limits of Democratization by Tatu Vanhanen, which draws a connection between climate and a nation’s average IQ on one hand, and a nation’s proclivity towards democracy on the other. In the meantime, it must suffice to explain that convolution of law is a rational yet insufficient response to enforce cohesion among disparate parts of a society. And these laws could be de jure as much as they can be de facto. Consider how whites today, while interacting with non-whites, must navigate a shark tank of political correctness in order not to offend their swarthy interlocutors. These are social complexities of which our ancestors from over a century ago knew next to nothing. Harold Covington seemed to have had a similar idea in his novel The Hill of the Ravens in which the entire legal code of his fictitious, White Nationalist Northwest American Republic was only slightly more than twenty pages long.

Using Russians, Jews, and the Pogroms of 1881-1882 as well as chapter 1 of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s 200 Years Together as sources, I would like to present examples of the absurd lengths to which the Russians warped their own laws in order to protect peasants from Jews and likewise Jews from peasants. For someone accustomed to economy and elegance in such matters, I hope these examples appear suitably hideous.

Solzhenitsyn explains that under Catherine, Jews initially possessed “the rights of Merchant guilds and townsmen,” which awarded them a certain amount of autonomy. Afterwards, they were barred to migrate into cities of the inner-Russian provinces, “and were liable to be moved out of the villages.” But many Jews insisted upon staying in the villages, claiming temporary visitor status. The Russians then changed the law to make shtetls legally equivalent to cities in order to keep Jews apart from the peasants as much as possible. But with so many Jews now in Russian territory, this didn’t solve the problem.

Catherine then offered the Jews tax breaks and other incentives to get them to clear out into the vast, unpopulated area north of the Black Sea known as New Russia. After that didn’t work, the law was changed once again to enable the government to forcibly evict the Jews from the villages. Catherine then decided to issue a special tax upon the Jews, which was twice that paid by Christians. As Solzhenitsyn describes it, “[T]his law proved to be neither effective nor of long duration.”

During the above-mentioned famine, which occurred during the short reign of Catherine’s son Paul, the poet-statesman Gavrila Derzhavin visited the Pale and was horrified by what he saw:

Derzhavin discovered that the Jewish schnapps distillers exploited the alcoholism of the peasants: “After I had discovered that the jews from profit-seeking use the lure of drink to beguile grain from the peasants, convert it into brandy and therewith cause a famine. I commanded that they should close their distilleries in the village Liosno.” “I informed myself from sensible inhabitants” as well as nobles, merchants, and villagers “about the manner of life of the Jews, their occupations, their deceptions and all their pettifogging with which … they provide the poor dumb villages with hunger; and on the other hand, by what means one could protect them from the common pack and how to facilitate for them an honorable and respectable way out … to enable them to become useful citizens.

Afterwards, in the autumn months, Derzhavin described many evil practices of the Polish landlords and Jewish leasers in his “Memorandum on the mitigation of famine in White Russia and on the lifestyles of the jews,” which he also made known to the Czar and the highest officials of state. This Memorandum is a very comprehensive document that evaluates the conditions inherited from the Poles as well as the possibilities for overcoming the poverty of the peasants, describing the peculiarities of the Jewish way of life of that time and includes a proposal for reform in comparison to Prussia and Austria.

After duly ascribing blame to the Polish landlords for their callous greed and to the Russian peasants for their laziness and alcoholism, Derzhavin explains that the sine qua non of this regrettable situation was the Jews:

But the Jews were an irreplaceable, active and very inventive link in the chain of exploitation of these illiterate, emaciated peasants that had no rights of their own. If the White Russian settlement had not been injected with Jewish tavern managers and leasers, then the wide-spread system of exploitation would not have functioned, and removing the Jewish links in the chain would have ended it.

Upon discovering this, Derzhavin recommended distorting the law even further:

After this Derzhavin recommended energetic measures, as for example for the expurgation of these burdens of peasant life. The landlords would need to attend to this problem. Only they alone who are responsible for the peasants should be allowed to distill liquor “under their own… supervision and not from far-removed places,” and to see to it, that “every year a supply of grain for themselves and the peasants” would be on hand, and indeed as much as would be needed for good nutrition. “If the danger arises that this is not done, then the property is to be confiscated for the state coffers.” The schnapps distilling is to begin no sooner than the middle of September and end middle of April, i.e. the whole time of land cultivation is to be free of liquor consumption. In addition, the liquor is not to be sold during worship services or at night. The liquor stores should only be permitted “in the main streets, near the markets, mills and establishments where foreigners gather.”

Solzhenitsyn goes on further, but I think I have enough her to prove my point: racial diversity leads to monstrously complicated laws.

As for Klier, he describes in chapter 6 of Russians, Jews and the Pogroms of 1881-1882 the agonizing twists and turns the Tsarist authorities had to negotiate when hacking the vague and porously worded May Laws into workable legislation. And when faced with a problem as vexing as the Jewish Question, of course they failed. The May Laws were the brainchild of Nikolai Ignatiev, the Tsar’s Minister of Internal Affairs, who wished to accomplish two things: to prevent future pogroms through the threat of harsh punishment for the peasants, and to protect the peasants from Jewish exploitation. The May Laws concentrated on the latter goal, and in their original form, they consisted of six laws which banned Jews 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

As Klier writes, “All restrictive legislation imposed on the Jews in the following decades was bedeviled by the absence of a clear legal definition of a small town.” When attempting to ratify the Laws, Ignatiev met with stiff resistance from the Tsar’s ministers who foresaw the practical implications of such sweeping legislation. The Jews contributed to a non-trivial percentage of Russia’s economy, and to alienate them en masse by relocating them and keeping them from profitable enterprise would harm Russia’s finances to say the least. Expelling so many Jews from “towns and small towns” would also impinge upon the rights of the politically influential landowners. Then, of course, there was the likely possibility of the Jews getting around the Laws regardless of how they were worded. During the deliberations, one minister recalled,

. . . the government’s long experience of imposing restrictions upon the Jews only to have them founder in practice. Virtually the only people who benefited from such experiments were members of the lower administration, who supplemented their income with Jewish bribes.

As with Solzhenitsyn, Klier goes on much further than this, but I think we have enough to buttress the link between racial diversity and complexity of law. Introducing a million or so Jews into the Russian Empire in the late eighteenth century inevitably introduced grotesque complications into Russian jurisprudence, which lasted over a century and culminated in disaster.

For an example of laws as they should be written—that is, clearly and concisely—we can look no further than Ten Commandments. “Thou shalt not steal” says what it means and means what it says. Among a population of people with similar IQs and temperament, a working definition of theft can be agreed upon fairly easily. But when a government must deal with populations of divergent IQs and temperaments, attaining such an agreement becomes maddeningly difficult. While the simpleminded, alcoholic peasants likened theft (more or less) to absconding with a person’s chickens in the dead of night, the nimble-minded, xenophobic Jewish population likened theft (more or less) to acquiring another person’s assets in violation a particular statute as provable through Talmudic casuistry before a rabbi of the kahal. A simple dictum like “Thou shalt not steal” will not suffice to keep the peace under such circumstances. And since words are more easily changed than people, the natural response from the Russian authorities was to expand—and thus, complicate—the law.

Our sense of taste should have rebelled against this. Clearly, laws this ugly, dense, and recondite cannot possibly produce good, lasting results. Some problems are just not worth solving if the solutions themselves produce such legalistic abominations as the May Laws. The Russians would have been well served to slice this Gordian Knot into more manageable pieces in order, if anything, to simplify the law.

Throughout Russians, Jews and the Pogroms of 1881-1882 John Klier discusses how the Russian leadership agonized over the Jewish Question and floated such unwieldy solutions as heaping even more restrictions upon the Jews, dispersing them across the empire, and facilitating their mass out-migration. Never once, however, did anyone suggest simply ceding land in ethnocentric chunks to Russia’s diverse subpopulations, namely, the Jews and the Poles. Yes, this violates the central tenets of empire. Then again, perhaps the very notion of empire—especially over racially diverse populations—is inherently flawed and deserves to be violated? Perhaps Catherine the Great should never have absorbed Poland and its Jews to begin with? Perhaps one of her successors would have been well served to undo this act during the nineteenth century?

Yes, Russia would have suffered with the loss of territory, but considering how a disproportionate number of the Bolsheviks who overthrew Russia in 1917 were either Jews or Poles, splitting apart the western empire would have been, on balance, sage advice indeed.

And given how multiracialism is causing so much chaos today—for example, the anti-white pogroms known as the Summer of Floyd—it may be sage advice for the United States and other countries to break up according to ethnonationalist lines as well, and not follow the former Russian Empire down its path of destruction.