JEWS
The Jews constituted a substantial population – accounting for approximately five million in the Russian empire, about four percent of the whole. At first the social and legal structure of the Jewish community was inherited from Poland and only in the 1860s did the Russian state began to mark out a distinctive Jewish policy in keeping with the principles of the reform era.
Russia had no Jews among its population from the end of Kievan times until the First Partition of Poland in 1772. In the eighteenth century some Jewish merchants and artisans settled in the Ukraine and in Riga, but this was technically illegal and the groups were small. When Russia acquired its first substantial Jewish community, the reaction of the Russian government was to preserve the status quo. The kahal organization of the Jewish community remained as it had been in Polish times, with the chief rabbis of each town collecting the taxes for the state and administering justice. Further, the Jews were restricted to the former Polish provinces (the “Pale of Settlement”), so that they could not move into the Russian interior, though the Pale did come to include the Black Sea coast provinces with the new city of Odessa. Nicholas I’s attitude toward the Jews was essentially hostile, but his only measures of consequence were to draft them into the army (at a higher rate than Christians!) and to formally abolish the kahals in 1844. Virtually all Jews remained inside the Pale until the 1850s.
The reforming governments of the 1860s took a different direction, one of selective integration. (Assimilation or “Russification” was not contemplated.) The idea was that the Jews needed to become more useful to the state and to Russian society, and therefore were to be encouraged through education to form elites that could both render that service and provide modern leadership for the Jewish community. To that end the Russian government listened to the petitions of the Jewish commercial and banking elite, and in 1859 permitted individuals of that elite to take up residence outside the Pale. In 1865 similar permission was granted to the wealthiest artisans. The result was the formation of an important Jewish commercial and intellectual elite in St. Petersburg, whose leaders were the Ginzburg banking dynasty. The Ginzburgs’ ties to the government and court ensured them a voice on Jewish affairs until the 1880s.
The other side of the reform policy was the opening of Russian universities to Jews beginning in the 1850s. Crucial to the fate of Jewish students was the November 1861 decree permitting all Jewish university graduates the same rights to private occupations and residence granted to Christians upon completion of the university degree. Though state service, however, remained closed to them, these measures speeded the transformation of Jewish society, especially since they more or less coincided with the first wave of the Haskalah, the Jewish enlightenment that rejected the traditional Jewish religious world for the adoption of European education and norms. By 1886 some fourteen percent of all university students in the empire were Jews, and some ten percent of gymnasium students.
The assassination of Alexander II proved to be a disaster for the Jews of the Russian Empire. In wake of his death a wave of pogroms swept the southwestern provinces (mainly the Ukraine) and continued on and off for two years. The mob blamed the Jews for the tsar’s death, looted their houses, and assaulted and raped thousands of people, though only two died in the violence. Alexander III’s government blamed Jewish exploitation of the peasantry for the riots and began to rescind some of the existing legislation. The most important measure was the introduction in 1887 of quotas in the universities, to be only three percent for Jews in St. Petersburg and Moscow, five to ten percent elsewhere. Outside the two capitals, however, the quotas were not strictly enforced. Petitions for exceptions presented to the Minister of Education and other means led to the actual growth in percentage of Jewish students to twenty-seven percent (Kharkov University) and twenty-four percent (Odessa). Thousands of Jews also went abroad for education, especially to universities in Germany and Austria. There they confronted a paradox. Though legally equal in all respects to native students, Russian Jews confronted a student culture that was, by the end of the century, nationalistic and militantly anti-semitic. In Russian universities, where the students mostly supported the liberal opposition to the state or even the revolutionaries, the student culture was largely favorable to the Jews.
Thus the government had gone back on the spirit of selective integration, but most of the legal structure remained and the modernization of Jewish society continued, if slowly. The lack of more general progress inspired various responses, one being massive emigration to Western Europe and the United States, but this option also was not universally available or desired. Another response was the appearance of a Jewish press that was liberal in its politics and oriented toward the reform of the empire. Baron Ginzburg and the St. Petersburg Jewish elite lobbied unceasingly, but with less and less success after 1881. More radical options, especially among students and young people generally were the various revolutionary movements. Many Jews joined the Russian populists, including the terrorist groups, and later the Marxists who preached international solidarity. Others formed specifically Jewish socialist groups, the Jewish Workers’ League (the Bund), and finally the growing Zionist movement encouraged Jews to opt out entirely and move to Palestine. As the Russian government after the 1880s tried more and more to present itself as “Russian,” anti-Semitism became more or less an official policy. Pogroms like the Kishinev pogrom of 1903, in which nearly fifty Jews died, further poisoned the atmosphere. In response, Russian liberal and radical groups underlined their opposition to legal and social discrimination against the Jews, and Jewish parties grew more radical as well.
In spite of the restrictions, the evolution of Russian society meant that more and more Jews entered the business classes, the professions, the intelligentsia, and more of them found ways, legal or otherwise, to evade their confinement to the Pale. By 1897 six percent of Jews lived officially outside the Pale – many unofficially. Jewish communities emerged in St. Petersburg and Moscow, and even in towns on the Volga far from the legally permitted areas. Jews were entering Russian society, and the emergence of mass politics in 1905 would bring them to center stage in many ways, some of them highly explosive.
UKRAINIANS
Though the largest non-Russian group in the empire, the Ukrainians played little role in imperial affairs until 1905, except as a potential opposition to the Polish national movement and its claims. Their minor role was the result of the ambiguities of Ukrainian national consciousness, only slowly and incompletely changing among some parts of the local intelligentsia from a Russian regional identity into a national Ukrainian one.