The government in Saint Petersburg—especially after the revolt of the Decabrists in 1825—feared the democratic potential of the populist narodniki, a movement of young radicals who idolized the life of the simple Russian. The incorporation of the word narodnost into a national ideology by Sergey Uvarov eight years after the revolt was a clever attempt by the government to appropriate the new concept of the Slavophiles and change its potentially subversive connotation by making it a pillar of the autocratic, tsarist state. However, the word remained a double-edged sword, because it could refer both to a popular support of the tsar, as well as to a democratic revival. The government, therefore, regarded with mistrust the First Pan Slav Congress, held in Prague in 1848, the year of European revolutions. After the Crimean War, however, things changed. The Pan Slav movement—like its Pan German counterpart—lost its already weak, liberal-democratic credentials and started to accommodate itself with autocratic rule. There were two reasons for this. The first reason was that, unlike in Germany, where the Pan German ideas were supported by a broad middle class, in Russia no such middle class existed. Pan Slav ideals were propagated by a small group of urban intelligentsia who were doubly isolated: they were isolated from the people as well as from the autocratic state bureaucracy. There was simply not enough support in Russian society for liberal-democratic ideas. A second reason for the Pan Slav movement’s embrace of autocratic rule was that the task of unifying all Slavs was considered more important than internal democratic reforms. A strong and autocratic Russia was thought the best guarantee to liberate the oppressed “brother peoples” in Southern Europe from Ottoman rule.
The position of the tsar, however, was not unequivocal. He was, certainly, quite happy to assume the role of “liberator” of the Slav peoples living under Ottoman rule. At the same time he had to be cautious not to offend Austria and Prussia/Germany, which had large Slav minorities. These countries were not enthusiastic about the Russian Pan Slav liberation fervor that could cause upheaval within their borders. And, finally, there were non-Russian Slavs in the Russian empire, such as the Poles, who fought for their own independence. To accept “equal rights for all Slavs,” as was demanded at the Second Pan Slav Congress in Moscow in 1867, was, therefore, out of the question.[36] The nationalism of the tsar was an official “imperial nationalism,” based directly on the existence and the needs of the empire. It had nothing to do with the right of self-determination of the peoples. Because the Russian empire comprised many different peoples with different ethnic backgrounds and different religions, it would not be permissible for the tsar to support an exclusive ethnic Russian or Slav nationalism. However, when the reformist tsar Alexander II was murdered in 1881, his son, Alexander III, under the influence of his reactionary tutor, Konstantin Pobedonostsev, wholeheartedly adopted the ethnic “great Russian” nationalism of the Pan Slavists. The policies of Alexander III were continued after his death in 1894 by his son, Nicholas II. This led to a process of enforced Russification in Poland and the Baltic provinces, where the national languages were suppressed and assimilation was imposed.
FROM PAN SLAVISM TO RACISM: POGROMS AND ANTI-SEMITISM
The new great Russian nationalism very soon developed ugly features. Not only did it lead to a growing repression of non-Russian nationalities, such as the Poles, but also of other minorities of “foreign race” (inorodtsy) that could not be assimilated. In the first place Jews were targeted. The discrimination and scapegoating of Jews became an official state policy. Since 1791, during the reign of Catherine the Great, there had existed already in Russia a policy aimed at restricting the rights of Jews. In that year the Pale of Settlement was introduced. This measure restricted the territory on which the Jews had the right to live. It included the Western border region of the empire (the word “Pale” indicated “border”) and comprised a territory that approximately covered the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. This territory consisted, globally, of Poland, Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine, Bessarabia, and only a small part of Russia proper. Eighty percent of the European part of the Russian empire was “forbidden to Jews” (although there were a few exceptions). Additionally, many towns within the Pale itself were closed to Jews. In 1795, after the third partition of Poland, when Russia annexed Eastern Poland and Poland ceased to exist as an independent state, the Jewish population in the Pale Settlement swelled to approximately five million, creating the greatest concentration of Jews in the world. This concentration within a restricted area made them vulnerable to attacks.
This is what happened after the murder of tsar Alexander II in 1881, when immediately the Jews were accused of the murder. It led to a wave of pogroms in the South of the empire, characterized by looting, rape, and murder. This wave of violence went on for three years. The government not only failed to persecute the offenders, but overtly and secretly supported the movement. The eminence grise of the regime, Pobedonostsev, a known anti-Semite, was quoted as having said that “a third of the Jews will be converted, a third will emigrate, and the rest will die of hunger.” He was the man behind many new repressive measures, such as the May Laws, issued in 1882, banning Jews from rural areas and towns with more than ten thousand inhabitants. Jewish property in rural areas was confiscated and at universities quota were imposed restricting the number of Jewish students. Official, state-sponsored anti-Semitism and popular anti-Semitism, fed by resentment, went hand in hand. According to Leonid Luks, “in this struggle to bind the people to the regime anti-Jewish slogans would play an increasingly important role. There was an ever-increasing tendency amongst the conservatives to associate the sharp social and political conflicts in the country, as well as several foreign policy drawbacks suffered by the tsarist empire (Congress of Berlin, 1878), with the activities of international Jewry.”[37] A leading role in spreading anti-Jewish sentiments was played by the chauvinist and fiercely anti-Semitic Pan Slav movement that quickly grew in strength at the end of the century and reached its apogee after the lost war with Japan and the subsequent revolution in 1905.
One of the most important anti-Semitic organizations was the Soyuz Russkogo Naroda (the Union of the Russian People). Founded in October 1905, it enjoyed a spectacular growth, and soon it had about one thousand local branches. Its virulent anti-Semitism finds its equivalent only in Hitler’s Mein Kampf. One of its theoreticians, V. F. Zalevsky, accused the Jews of parasitism and the secret wish to dominate the world. “The Jews are a damaging tribe,” he wrote, “they don’t like heavy work and try to live from the labors of others, letting others work for them.” He continued: “Even though the Jews… plunder the Russian people, this still seems not to be enough; they want to completely subjugate the Russian people, they want to be their masters.”[38] In the text of a congress resolution of the organization in 1915, prepared by a section with the name “For the struggle against Jewish supremacy,” the word “Jews” was consequently replaced by its pejorative equivalent zhidy (Yids). In the resolution one can read that it should be forbidden for Yids to have Orthodox Russian employees working for them or to participate in joint-stock companies. Russian schools should not accept Jewish children. And for Russians it should be forbidden to visit a Jewish doctor or to eat together with Jews. The only good solution for the “Talmudic zhidovstvo” (Yid people) is “that they be chased from Russia in the name of the imperial laws.”[39]
36
Cf. Frank Golczewski and Gertrud Pickhan,
37
Leonid Luks, “Die politisch-religiöse ‘Sendung’ Russlands,” in
38
V. F. Zalevsky, “Chto takoe Soyuz Russkogo Naroda i dlya chego on nuzhen?” Excerpts published in Golczewski and Pickhan,
39
“Resolution of the ‘Section for the Struggle against Jewish Supremacy’ of the Congress of the Union of the Russian People in Nizhny Novgorod, November 1915,” in Golczewski and Pickhan,