SUMMARY:

“Moshko the Imperial” is a chapter from the book Lenin’s Jews (forthcoming from Yale University Press). The book discusses urban culture in the towns where Moshko Blank lived in the first half of the nineteenth century (ch. 1, “From Nowhere to Zhitomir”); contextualizes Lenin’s attitude to Jews in his milieu and his conceptualization of Jews in general and in the Russian Empire in particular (ch. 3, “Lenin, Power, and Jews”); reconstructs consistent attempts of the Bolsheviks to suppress any mention of Lenin’s Jewish roots in the Soviet historical discourse (ch. 4, “Glue for the Vertebrae”); and sheds light on the questions of the Judaization of Lenin and the Bolsheviks in the writings of the Russian far right (ch. 5, “How Lenin Became Blank”). The second chapter of the book, “Moshko the Imperial,” offered to the readers of Ab Imperio in the authorized translation, utilizes the existing narratives about Lenin’s maternal grandfather from Starokonstantinov and introduces a number of recently uncovered primary documents. It seeks to contextualize Moshko Blank against the broad backdrop of contemporary political, cultural, and ideological trends among East European Jews. Moshko is portrayed as an ingratiating individual who hated his brethren and a Jew in himself and who achieved notoriety among Russian administration as the author of claims, appeals, protests, and denunciations. A master of denunciations, Moshko bowed down before imperial power: the Russian imperial authorities, the Russian Orthodox Church, and Russian state symbols were his utmost values. As a close analysis of his letters to Tsar Nicholas I has proved, Moshko was neither a harbinger of Jewish religious reform nor a champion of the Haskalah. He planned to uproot Judaism, not to modify it. Ultimately, he should be placed among other Jewish informers of his time – individuals who sought to solve their personal financial or social problems, to be remunerated by the administration, or to achieve upward mobility by denouncing the Jews to the Russian authorities. “Moshko the Imperial” tells the story of the romance of Moshko Blank with the Russian imperial “vertical of power,” a romance that had both a happy and unsettling end.