The Jews and the Russian Revolution (1917–37)

intermezzo The Jews and the Russian Revolution (1917–37) The fall of tsarism in March 1917 was greeted by Russian Jews as an event that marked the end of their suffering and the beginning of a new era of liberation. One of the first measures adopted by the provisional government was the sup- pression of the anti-Semitic legislation in force under the old regime: a total of 650 laws limiting the civic rights of the Jewish population, as Trotsky noted in his Historyof theRussianRevolution.1The Jews remained somewhat mistrustful, however, toward the October Revolution, because it was centred in Petrograd, far from the Pale of Settlement, and was the product of a ‘historical bloc’ – the industrial proletariat and the Russian peasants – to whom they were largely alien. The Soviet decree that distributed the land to the peasants was of no interest for the Jews, urbanised and traditionally not involved in agricultural activities. Moreover, the Soviets of Petrograd and Moscow barely had a real existence for the Jewish workers and artisans of Vilnius and Bialystok. This was the Jewish paradox at the core of the Russian Revolution. On the one hand, the Jews appeared as the true architects of the Revolution and were denounced by the newspapers all over the world as conspirers who had overthrown theTsarist regime: in April 1917, almost half of the members of the Petrograd Soviet bur- eau were Jews; on 23 October, five out of the twelve members of the Bolshevik Central Committee that decided to take power were Jews.2 For years, an inter- national anti-Semitic campaign presented the Russian Revolution as a Jewish ‘plot’.On the other hand, the Pale of Settlement remained at the margins of this revolutionary wave. In June 1918, Zionists won the elections in the Jewish community councils (kehillot), followed by the Bund, the principal force on the left, whose eighth national conference (December 1917) had condemned the October Revolution. Arbeiter Shtime, the Bund’s weekly, denounced Lenin’s ‘coup’ as nothing but ‘insanity’.3 The Bolsheviks had ignored the ‘Jewish street’ and now their policies faced widespread scepticism among the Russian Jews, not to speak of the open 1 See Trotsky 2008, p. 643. 2 Slezkine 2004, p. 175. Before the Revolution of 1917, the Jews represented between one-third and one-fourth of the Central Committee of both the Menshevik and the Bolshevik parties. See Budnitskii 2012, p. 55. 3 Budnitskii 2012, p. 65. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004384767_008 128 intermezzo opposition expressed by most Jewish political parties.4 In 1918, the People’s Commissariat of Nationalities – led by Stalin – established a Jewish section. Its leader was Simon Dimanshtein, an old Bolshevik who spoke Yiddish – he had received the title of rabbi before becoming an atheist Marxist – but had never participated in Jewish political life. To make up for such serious limits, he asked for the collaboration of Samuel Agurskj, a Socialist Jew just returned from the United States. The first Communist party magazine in Yiddish, the weekly Wahreit (Truth), appeared in March 1918, six months after the revolution, and rapidly became a daily, changing its title to Der Emess (Truth, a Yiddish term of Hebrew rather than German origin). The publication of a Yiddish newspaper raised numerous difficulties – because of the lack of Yiddish journalists – and most articles were translated from Russian.5 In October 1918, Dimanshtein cre- ated the Evsektsiia, the Jewish section of the Communist party, in order to win over the ‘Jewish street’ to the proletarian dictatorship. Rapidly, the Evsektsiia took charge of the Soviet government’s policy on the Jewish affairs. During the civil war, between 1918 and 1921, the Russian Jews gradually shif- ted from an attitude of mistrust, indeed hostility, to substantial support for the Soviet regime. The most important source of this change was the anti- Semitism of the counter-revolution. A wave of extremely violent pogroms swept throughout Ukraine, which in 1917 had been an experimental ground for Jewish cultural national autonomy. Initially, most Jewish parties supported the government of Petliura (where the ‘territorialist’ Socialist Zilberfarb took the ministry of Jewish affairs) but they progressively joined the Soviet regime during the following years.6 Anti-Semitism always had been a pillar of the ideo- logy and culture of the Russian army and quickly became – in an even more radicalised form – the banner of the Whites. The armies of Kolchak, Denikin and Wrangel made very extensive use of anti-Semitism as a weapon in their struggle against the Soviet regime. Ukraine was the scene of 2,000 pogroms, affecting around a million Jews and leaving between 75,000 and 150,000 victims.7 According to several scholars, the pogroms of 1918–20 were qualitatively different from the previous waves of tsarist anti-Semitism of the 1880s and 1905–6: not only was the number of their victims incomparably higher, but also their propaganda turned into an open appeal to massacre. They took the form 4 Sloves 1982, p. 24. In 1917, the Bund had more than ten times the number of the Jews within the Bolshevik party; see Budnitskii 2012, p. 80. 5 See Weinstock 1986, vol. 3, p. 32. 6 See Sloves 1982, p. 37. 7 See Gitelman 1972, pp. 160–3..

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