Russians, Jews, and the Pogroms of 1881–1882

Anti-Jewish pogroms rocked the Russian Empire in 1881–2, plunging both the Jewish community and the imperial authorities into crisis. Focusing on a wide range of responses to the pogroms, this book offers the most comprehensive, balanced, and complex study of the crisis to date. It presents a nuanced account of the diversity of Jewish political reactions and introduces a wealth of new sources covering Russian and other non-Jewish reactions to these events. Seeking to answer the question of what caused the pogroms’ outbreak and spread, the book provides a fuller picture of how officials at every level responded to the national emergency and irrevocably lays to rest the myth that the authorities instigated or tolerated the pogroms. This is essential reading not only for Russian and Jewish historians but also for those interested in the study of ethnic violence more generally.

John Doyle Klier (1944–2007) was the Sidney and Elizabeth Corob Professor of Modern Jewish History in the Hebrew and Jewish Studies Department at University College London. His earlier books, Russia Gathers Her Jews (1985) and Imperial Russia’s Jewish Question (Cambridge, 1995), are standard works in modern Russian-Jewish history, along with Pogroms: Anti-Jewish Violence in Modern Russian History (coeditor, Cambridge, 1992).

John Doyle Klier

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© John Klier 2011

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First published 2011

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ISBN 978-0-521-89548-4 Hardback

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Contents

Editors’ preface

John Doyle Klier died on 23 September 2007. At the age of only sixty-two, he was at the height of his powers as a scholar. This book was the last major project that John completed. Our task has been far from onerous. At the time of his death, John had completed the manuscript for this book and responded to the readers’ reports. We undertook the revisions he proposed, especially those regarding the reorganization of the material. While the first part sets the stage, the second focuses predominantly on non-Jewish and the third predominantly on Jewish responses to the pogroms. The manuscript has obviously been copy-edited, but we have barely changed the actual text. We are grateful to the colleagues who helped us with queries that arose along the way.

The selection of the illustrations has ultimately been ours. In some cases it was quite clear from the manuscript which illustrations John had in mind; in others we have chosen from John’s files the images that seemed most suitable. Presumably he would have wanted to comment on the nature and provenance of these illustrations, something we are in no position to do in his place.¹

Clearly, John did not have the chance to step back and take one last careful look at the revised version as it now stands. He would doubtless have wanted to make further changes at this stage to round off the book in its final form.

As an appendix to this book, the reader will find a chronological list of anti-Jewish violence and related developments in Imperial Russia in the years 1881–2 that John was able to document on the basis of his archival research. By no means all of the cited material has been used for this book. Based on John’s notebooks we have been able to link each entry in the list directly to an archival reference, which makes this a valuable resource for further research in the field of Russian Jewish history. The map on pp. xxii–xxiv records all those sites of anti-Jewish violence mentioned in this list for the period between 15 April and 10 May 1881 whose location could be clearly identified. We are grateful to Cath D’Alton (UCL) for the realization of Map 2 and thank Tim Aspden who produced Map 1 on p. xxi for John’s previous book, Imperial Russia’s Jewish Question, 1855–1881 (Cambridge, 1996). Finally our thanks go to all the colleagues at Cambridge University Press who have helped bring this project to fruition.

John wanted to dedicate this book to “three scholars who have done much to direct and inspire me as a scholar of Russia and Russian Jewish history,” Ralph T. Fisher, Hans Rogger, and Jonathan Frankel. Under the circumstances it would have seemed strange to simply dedicate the book to these three colleagues in the usual way, and we have instead decided to use this opportunity to do so on John’s behalf.

From 1960 to 1987, Ralph T. Fisher was the director of the Russian and East European Center at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where John took his doctorate in 1975. John felt deeply indebted to Fisher for accepting him on the program and for nurturing his achievements. Fisher’s personal generosity of spirit and energy made the center a home and a springboard for John and many other graduates of the program.

John regarded Hans Rogger as an inspirational pioneer in Russian Jewish history. He frequently acknowledged the role that Rogger had played in inspiring scholarly debate beyond the conspiracy theory approach to Russian Jewish history in general and the pogroms in particular. John concluded his obituary for Rogger on a personal note, explaining that,

To embark upon research on the history of Russian Jewry in the 1970s, as I did, meant, inevitably, becoming a “revisionist”. . . Any young scholar, therefore, was “working without a net,” making hypotheses that seemed to go against a century-old scholarly consensus. The appearance of Rogger’s articles and his demand for a re-examination of assumptions and beliefs were of enormous psychological encouragement and support.²

For scholars of Jewish history in Eastern Europe, the academic year 2007–8 was unusually bleak: having begun with John’s death it ended with the death of Jonathan Frankel on 7 May 2008. Their longstanding professional relationship was characterized by warm collegiality, mutual appreciation, and friendship. John greatly admired and respected Frankel’s work and, in response to the readers’ reports for this book, John wrote that he considered “Frankel’s to be the definitive description of the rise of the so-called New Jewish Politics.”

Lars Fischer

François Guesnet

Helen Klier

¹ Cf. John D. Klier, “Iskusstvo i pogromy. Khudozhestvennoe otobrazhenie antievreiskogo nasiliia v imperskoi Rossii (1871–1903 gody),” in O. V. Budnitskii, et al., eds., Russko-evreiskaia kultura (Moscow, 2006), 437–52.

² John D. Klier, “Hans Rogger, 1923–2002,” East European Jewish Affairs, 32, 1 (2002), 152.

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