In the reign of the last emperor Nicholas II, anti-Semitism reached hitherto unprecedented heights in Russia. Bloody pogroms, a judicial Beilis process in practice weighing against the entire Jewish nation, the multitude of laws, instructions, and secret rules limiting the rights of the Jewish population, the sharp anti-Semitic rhetoric on the pages of the press and in the Duma, the appearance of militant political parties specialising in anti-Semitism – these became characteristic of Russian imperial politics in the declining years of the autocracy.
There have been numerous attempts from various perspectives, ranging from economic-based interpretations to Freudian analyses, to understand and explain the phenomenon of anti-Semitism whose stubborn and continuous manifestations occurred in different countries throughout much of human history. These studies certainly concluded that perfect and complete understanding of Jew-hatred is impossible. In the case of late Imperial Russia where Rightist programmes and actions were full of controversies and their anti-Semitism was particularly controversial, divided and confused it is entirely true. Yet there is obvious evidence that anti-Semitism intensifies in times of various sorts of crises and in periods of rapid Jewish economic and political rise.^[1] In Russia, the aggravation of social tensions due to the revolution of 1905 and the sudden liberalisation of the regime seen by the extreme Right as a Jewish victory and set the stage for the rise of political anti-Semitism.
Undoubtedly one factor intensifying the Jewish question and providing perceived support to anti-Semitic arguments was the extremely sharp growth of revolutionary radicalism in Jewish youth, who created their own Jewish revolutionary unions and swelled the ranks of all-Russian revolutionary parties at the beginning of the twentieth century. In 1905 the proportion of Jews to non-Jews among those arrested for political crimes was nine times greater than the proportion of Jews in the imperial population. The Bund in this period was three times larger in number than the all-Russian Social Democratic Party^[2] which initially itself was largely a product of Jewish revolutionary activity. Yet as the prominent historians of the Russian revolution noted, many revolutionaries were Jews but relatively few Jews were revolutionaries.^[3]
When about 80 per cent of European Jews found themselves in the Russian Empire following the partitions of Poland, one could certainly foresee the future troubles. Perhaps the most xenophobic state in Europe had to incorporate the most separatist, ethnocentric and Orthodox part of the Jewry. There was little hope that Jews would somehow “organically merge” with the native population. In order to protect “the ignorant and simple-minded peasantry” from the exploitation of more advanced and literate Jewish elements (who often dominated local trade and commerce) and limit Jewish influence, the state introduced a special legislature. With time being, the number of anti-Jewish laws, instructions, and decrees reached approximately 1400 (!) in late Imperial Russia.^[4] Many Jews naturally responded with growing hostility to the Russian authorities. Life for a Jew could become much easier if he would abandon the Judaic faith and adopt Christianity. Yet Russian Jews stubbornly preserved their identity. In the period of 1880-1905, only around 500 to 1000 Jews were baptised – out of more than five million Jews living in the empire.^[5] “Bloodless holocaust” – a rather unfortunate term used by some contemporary Jewish authors to describe the process of abandoning of their traditional identity by the millions of modern Jews – was not really a possibility in tsarist Russia.
Dislike towards the self-isolated group of well-to-do newcomers that emphatically rejected Christianity was commonplace. Many Russian writers, including Fyodor Dostoevsky (who was shocked at Jewish “squeamishness and aversion towards the Russian”^[6]) largely represented the sentiments of educated society when they expressed their Judeophobia. The peasantry responded to the murder of the tsar-liberator Alexander II with spontaneous horrible anti-Jewish pogroms.^[7] When the October Manifesto of 1905 introduced public politics with legal political parties looking for social support, attacks on Jews by newly emerging party activists became an irresistible political temptation.
The crisis of stable autocratic power untied the hands of anti-Semites. So long as the notorious “bureaucratic regime” held the people in the grip of its police, the “excitation of one part of the population against another” (in bureaucratic language) was not allowed because the state maintained social order. When the regime weakened, anti-Semitism came to the surface along with liberalisation and revolution. The voice of anti-Semites, heard previously only in taverns and kitchens, now resounded in the Duma and on the pages of newspapers.
Those who set the tone were the right-wing (pravye) parties and groups that officially emerged in the autumn of 1905.^[8] Their positive programme, beyond slogans of loyalty to the vacillating autocracy, remained vague. Yet they could always identify a concrete enemy: the Jew. Correspondingly, their extreme wing, Black Hundredists rather pathetically called themselves “true Russians” which became almost a synonymous to “anti-Semites”. Why the Jews were identified as the enemies of the Russians and how Rightists identified the Jew; why anti-Semitism became such an important issue for the Right and what were the variants of anti-Semitism within their ranks; the consequences of their anti-Semitic claims and activities - these will be the focus of this article.
In the activities of the Right, anti-Semitism occupied a leading place. In programmes of right-wing parties and resolutions of right-wing congresses, on the pages of right-wing newspapers and in Duma addresses, the Jewish question invariably appeared as the centre of attention. This was a recurrent perennial theme for Black Hundreds and they employed it even in seemingly quite inappropriate circumstances. “The Yids have completely enslaved us” – such was the theme of one of the founders of the Union of Russian People (SRN) P. F. Bulatsel’s lecture at a monarchist congress called to observe the three-hundredth anniversary of the Romanov dynasty (!).^[9] Supporters of the autocracy of Nicholas II spent the majority of their energy on the struggle with what they saw as the “Jewish influence.” For the Black Hundreds the “Jewish problem” was most important – the solution to this problem contained the key to solutions for all other issues. The battle with Jews, so they thought, centred on the very question of saving the autocratic order.
In the vague Black Hundredist doctrine, autocracy and nationalism became clearly inseparable. All “true Russians” were by nature fully loyal to the autocrat. Correspondingly, those who did not feel a complete devotion to the autocratic order had lost Russian character and come under foreign (Jewish) influence.
The Russian national ideal particularly propagated by the extreme Rightists laid in the past, in the times of pre-Petrine Rus’ when Jews had no influence. In “reinventing tradition” the SRN viewed the post-Petrine epoch critically claiming that at that time the Russian autocracy “already was not Orthodox-Russian”.^[10] A long time ago in the imagined past Rus', according to the Black Hundred interpretation, had known better times. The leader of the Moscow Rightists V. A. Gringmut saw the tragedy of Russian history in the fact that Kiev, the mother of Russian cities, being the cradle of Orthodoxy and autocracy, transferred this idea to Moscow, which guarded it in purity. But then the “half-German Petersburg” “turned it into bureaucracy and resold it to the Jews.”^[11] “We must have two forces: the Tsar and the People, united together in Christ,” summed up the radicals at the Kiev congress.^[12] The unattainable ideal of the Orthodox peasant kingdom had no place for Jews.
In 1905, socially widespread anti-Semitism embedded in parties and politics was both a product of modernisation and a protest against it. In Russia there were a large number of people (not only in socialist circles) dissatisfied with capitalism, liberalism, as well as with materialism, secularisation, and other such components of modernisation. Jews, it appeared, gained more than other groups from the development of modern society. The importance of money grew, while that of noble social background declined; industry and capital, where Jews played an important role, were overcoming the traditional agrarian lifestyle considered the essence of “Russianess”. For anti-Semites the “Jew” became a symbol of modernisation; capitalism, constitution, secularisation, and the rest of the oncoming modern world that was crowding patriarchal Rus’ out of contemporary life. As K. P. Pobedonostsev remarked, the “spirit of the century” stood with the Jews.^[13]
The similarities between the situation in Russia and that in Europe where anti-modernism occupied an important position in anti-Semitic arguments are obvious. When Jews in times of emancipation began to penetrate into various kinds of business, they were labeled by German and Austrian anti-Semites from the 1870s onwards as carriers of “depraved” values of materialism and capitalism and the embodiment of those forces challenging the traditional order.^[14]
For Russian nationalism the “Jew” was a symbol and embodiment of “anti-Russian” – the internal enemy, foreign rich newcomer, and ominous living contradiction to all positive qualities characterising the Russian individual.
First, according to widespread belief, Jews were tainted with the terrible sin of the killing of Christ and the rejection of Christianity and Christian values. This was seen as the basis for perceived Jewish hostility to Russian Orthodoxy and the moral basis of Russian life. Modern Judaism was subjected to sharp accusations of the Right. The Black Hundreds propagated the view that Jews, “followers of the sects of the Pharisees and Sadducees,” created the “humanity-hating” religion of the Talmud.^[15] Moscow Nationalists wrote in their programme: “The essence of Jews is the immorality of the basic principles of their contemporary faith and moral teaching. It is in particular their antidemocratic and purely national religion. People in the highest meaning of the word can only be Jews; all others are ‘goys,’ in relation to whom all means and methods are permissible.”^[16]
The “Jew” also stood in opposition to the “Russian” because of his economic activities. Jews, in contrast to Russian peasants who worked so hard on the land, did not produce bread but took up trade and financial operations; this gave anti-Semites grounds to claim that Jews obtained their supposed enormous economic might through exploitation of Russians and other peoples.^[17] As the extreme Right concluded, Jews “were trying to bring to full economic slavery” a Russian people “weakened by revolution.”^[18] Nationalists too, echoing the Black Hundreds, stated that Jews “could never create wealth at any time in their history. Their influence on the wealth of the nation is always destructive.”^[19]
If “real Russians” were devoted to their country, then Jews, according to anti-Semitic logic, were hostile to Russia and created a fifth column within the country.^[20] Equality for Jews, in the view of the Right, would untie the hands of treacherous forces and would allow them to “enslave” the Russian population. Revolution, constitutional reforms – all that had subverted autocratic authority – was seen as a result of Jewish work.
Such was the general thrust of the logic of anti-Semitism – although the word “logic” is not entirely applicable to the varied palette of feelings, from hostility and suspicion to open hatred expressed on the pages of right-wing publications.^[21]
In the last decades of the Romanov dynasty the understanding of Jewish identity shifted. Since in official understanding “Orthodox” and “Russian” were synonymous, a Jew could avoid legal restrictions through conversion to Russian Orthodoxy. However, in the period under scrutiny, restrictions were applied to Jews as a nationality rather than as a religious group. Consequently anti-Semitism transferred as well from religious anti-Judaism to the modern, secular variant. This shift was reflected both in state legislation as well as in nationalist ideologies. The law on elections to the Fourth State Duma, for example, specifically noted that Jews converted to Orthodoxy had to vote along with other Jews in a separate Jewish curia.^[22] After 1893, Jews were forbidden to change their names to Christian ones even after baptism.^[23]
This same tendency came to dominate emerging right-wing parties. Whilst still using arguments based on religious antagonism, almost all on the Right took positions on racial anti-Semitism. Only very few - mostly from the circles of traditional Slavophiles, similarly to German intellectual Judeophobes such as Heinrich von Treitschke or Adolf Stoecker who earlier welcomed Jewish converts to Christianity^[24] believed that by the adopting Orthodoxy a Jew would “organically merge” with the Russian nation. For example, D. A. Khomiakov, the son of the famous Slavophile and member of the SRL (Soiuz Russkikh Liudei), defended the traditional point of view, suggesting that baptised Jews should have the same rights as Russians. However, he remained in a small minority in his party, and the SRL in a its resolution highlighted that “Jews by their lineage cannot have electoral rights.”^[25] The Union of the Russian People (SRN) specifically and repeatedly stipulated the necessity of toughening measures against Jews regardless of their religion; a SRN representative found it appropriate to proudly announce at an audience with Nicholas II that Jews, “even if they have adopted the Orthodox faith,” would absolutely not be accepted into the SRN,^[26] even though one can imagine only with enormous difficulty that many Jews would want to join the SRN at any rate. Rightists’ Duma leader and the founder of the Union of the Archangel Michael (SMA)^[27] V. M. Purishkevich publicly announced in the Duma that he preferred unbaptised Jews to those baptised in the Russian Orthodox faith.^[28] The Main Council of the SMA appealed to the authorities with the idea to place special stamps in Jews’ passports “to identify immediately that the bearer is a Jew,” regardless of the passport holder’s actual religious practice.^[29] More telling of the Rightists’ position were not so much individual opinions or resolutions of a given group but how right-wing congresses emphatically adopted not religious but pagan non-Christian racist views. A 1907 congress of the United Russian People in Moscow demanded that “Jews, even if baptised, should be forbidden to enter military service, civil service in the state, and in general service in all government institutions.”^[30] This was surpassed by a congress of the Right in the previous year in Kiev, which showed in its project on Duma elections how far anti-Semitic paranoia could go: “Jews, even if they have converted from the Judaic faith to something different, either Christian or Mohammedan or pagan, can participate in elections only in previously set Jewish curia. The same rule must be applied to individuals originated in mixed marriages of Jews with Christians or with people of other faiths up to the third generation inclusive, and also in regards to individuals married to Jews (even if not partaking in the Jewish faith).”^[31] Symbolically, the first consciously chosen victim of Black Hundred terror was an Orthodox Christian of Jewish nationality M. Ia. Gertsenshtein, a member of the Kadet Central Committee. In the rhetoric of the moderate Right, racist rather than religious categories often prevailed as well. A mouthpiece of the VNS demonstrated that its position against Jewish equality was based not on religious considerations but on the fact that “Semitic Jews represent an entirely different ethnic type, with a special ethical order, from that of Aryan Europeans,” and that “this difference causes Jews’ predation and hard-heartedness.”^[32] In a commentary, prominent monarchist thinker L. A. Tikhomirov wrote, “unfortunately, we have many more anti-Semites than Orthodox Christians.”^[33]
Anti-Semitism was a general characteristic trait throughout the Right; there were no significant exceptions to this rule within their ranks. Strong differences existed between the Nationalists and the Black Hundreds on many questions – for example, views on the October Manifesto. But against the Jews the Right stood as a generally united front. In the nineteenth century Russian conservatism was not necessarily anti-Semitic (e. g., as in the case of the leading conservative writer M. N. Katkov). However, after 1905 it became increasingly difficult to find an example of this sort. Katkov’s admirer and follower, V. A. Gringmut, under the influence of his anti-Semitic circle together with the Russian Monarchist Party that he headed, adopted an anti-Semitic platform in 1905 and supported the nomination of A. S. Shmakov to the proposed Bulygin Duma; Shmakov was an anti-Semitic maniac who saw in everything around him signs of a Jewish-Masonic conspiracy and who decorated the walls of his office with drawings of all kinds of Jewish noses.^[34]
As a rule, the “level” of anti-Semitism was closely correlated with the level of right-wing radicalism of the given activist or group. Extreme Black Hundredists, in accordance with radical anti-Semitism, included all Jews without exception in the enemy’s camp. More moderate pravye allowed the possibility for reconciliation with the non-revolutionary part of the Jewish people. The Saratov “moderate monarchists” split off from the local SRN cell, having admitted that “Jews, like all other peoples, are not some kind of homogenous mass or a special breed of people. Among them are rich and poor, good and evil, the same as are among Russians.”^[35] In Kishinev the more moderate “Bessarabian Party of the Centre” distanced themselves from local SRN founder P. A. Krushevan, well-known for his agitation of pogroms. The point in the moderate Rightist programme in the Third Duma on rescinding “pointless constraints” on Jews was not echoed in the VNS programme; this is because of the weakening influence in the VNS of left-wing Nationalists (V. A. Bobrinskii and P. N. Krupenskii), and the strengthening of the more right-wing group headed by P. N. Balashev.^[36] Since 1908, Purishkevich, who was moving from the extremists towards the moderates, became a family friend of one of Stolypin’s closest associates Jewish professor I. Ya Gurliand whom extremist A.I. Dubrovin’s Russkoe Znamia invariably called “suddenly raised quick little Jew”.^[37] Later in the war years, Purishkevich even critisised Dubrovin’s party for its attacks against Jews, stating that anti-Semitic calls “should not be tolerated” when Jews were coming forward to defend the motherland – although his own Union of the Archangel Michael continued to assault Jews.^[38] In November 1915, the Nizhny Novgorod congress, where the most extremist elements lead by Dubrovin predominated, adopted perhaps the most outrageous resolutions in Black Hundred history, demanding on the basis of the theory of a massive Jewish world-wide plot against Russia the creation under the aegis of right-wing or-ganizations of “squads of ardent advocates for the protection of the motherland from the actions of the secret Jewish state system inside her and for the control of the assimilation of Jews with Russians using conversion of Jews to Christianity.”^[39] On the contrary, the Judeophobia of the prominent Nationalist V. V. Shul’gin, who was evolving from the extreme Right to the Progressive Bloc in the end, was, even in the evaluation of Soviet historian D. Zaslavskii, “not without a shade of benevolence.”^[40]
The nationalism of Shul’gin who represented the firm Stolypinites and the nationalism of Dubrovin, that of the extreme Black Hundredists, regardless of their many similarities, were in the end of different nature. Tentatively one could label them as “European” and “isolationist” types. The first strove to unite Russian society and state on a national basis, was based on rationalism and had European cultural foundation. The second found support in the lower uneducated strata of society; was constructed, as Witte noted, completely “not on reason but on passions”; strove to return Russia to the pre-Petrine epoch; was extremely xenophobic; and expressed the Russian peasantry’s age-old hatred towards the educated classes.
Correspondingly, Shul’gin’s and Dubrovin’s anti-Semitisms were rather different too. The first who finally agreed that Jewish equality was unavoidable could not only see Jews as future Russian citizens but even find them to some extend useful and necessary. The second could not find a room for Jews in his ideal Russia at all.
For the extreme Rightists, anti-Semitism became the stable sign of self-identity on the basis of which they defined who was “us.” Accordingly, all political opponents were characterized through this prism, that “all of them are not Russian national (parties), and the interests of Jews are more dear to them than the interests of the Russian population.”^[41] Characteristically, the Moscow congress of the Right in 1906 accepted a pre-election agreement with members of the Union of 17 October as possible “only under the condition that these individuals announce that they are open opponents of equality for Jews.”^[42] Parties “allowing Jews into their numbers are not considered friendly,” emphasised the Rightists’ elitist club Russkoe Sobranie.^[43] The monarchism of the Octobrists and other moderates became less important in the eyes of the extreme Right because of centrists’ insufficiently harsh stances on the Jewish question.
At the same time Judeophobia was rather wide-spread among the Russian politicians, even beyond the Right. Moderate liberals declared that all Russian citizens regardless of nationality or faith were equal; pravye insisted that equality for Jews was absolutely impossible. So according to programmes, there was a gap between Octobrists and pravye. In practice, however, the matter was not so clear. Octobrist leaders, as more enlightened individuals, looked upon Jews without Black Hundredist fanaticism but still with some suspicion. In a conversation with Nicholas II in the summer of 1906, A. I. Guchkov (at that point in the monarch’s favour) defined his position precisely: “Personally I do not particularly like Jews and I think that it would be much better here without them.”^[44] At a session of the central committee of the Union of 17th October held in memory of the recently murdered P. A. Stolypin, speaker N. P. Shubinskoi considered it necessary to highlight that the Prime Minister was struck down by the hand of an “inorodets (non-Russian) - traitor”.^[45] Anti-Semitism was especially strong in the Octobrist organizations in western gubernii, in the Pale of Settlement. Guchkov received a report from fellow party colleague A. M. Nemirovskii that “in the province there are even committees of hooligans who take up hounding Jews, thus surpassing the unions of ‘true Russians’.”^[46] Regardless of their bold party programme announcements during the 1905 revolution, in practice the Octobrists approached the Jewish question with great caution. The second congress of the Union of 17th October in 1907 decreed that “an immediate and absolute solution to the problem is impossible.” Accordingly, Guchkov proposed to decide the Jewish question “step by step,” only slowly and gradually abolishing legal restrictions – that is, in the same way as the Nationalist Shul’gin proposed. In the Third Duma the Octobrists together with the extreme Right often supported restrictive measures.^[47]
The Kadets upheld Jewish equality more consistently, becoming in this way a favourite target for the Right that saw here proof of liberals’ loyalty to Jewish capital. Moreover, pravye and Octobrists united as a broad front in the Third Duma on the Jewish question; because of this, the Kadets, fearing accusations of philo-Semitism”,^[48] admitted in a party conference in October 1908 that raising the Jewish question “required extreme caution and the display of our programme [e.g. equality for Jews] would be extremely risky.” This indecisiveness was accentuated by vacillations on the party’s right flank. As V. A. Maklakov admitted to his friends, “I am a good Kadet. I accept the entire programme with the exception of the confiscation of land, the right of general franchise, and equality for Jews.”^[49]
Anti-Semitism could also be found unexpectedly in groups further to the Left of Russian politics. “The father of Russian Marxism,” G. V. Plekhanov – married to a Jewish wife, surrounded his entire life by many Jewish friends from the social-democrats – wrote to Lenin during the polemic with the Jewish Bund that Russians should not be under the thumb of that horrible race, which shocked even the young future Bolshevik leader who was prepared to undertake the most insolent political maneuvers.^[50]
Thus, Judeophobia was not an attribute of the Right alone, although anti-Semitism took up a very special place in their ideology. It contained, unlike Judeophobia of those to the Left, a strong element of irrational fantasy. The Jewish question was not just a component of the national question; it was the cornerstone of their worldview. The Black Hundreds saw themselves at war “with a world evil,” a war that could know no compromise. To Dubrovin this picture of the world appeared as a fight of those like-minded to him, the allies of autocracy, against the “Jew-president,” the “black raven of the Russian land,” supported by the bought-out traitors to Russia hatching plans of destruction of the last bastion of the true faith.^[51] Dubrovin’s comrade in the Union of the Russian People, E. V. Butmi, using the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion,”^[52] exposed the supposedly insidious plans of Jews, this focus of world evil, for world conquest; only the Russian tsar and his loyal servants from the SRN stood between them and their goal.^[53] Such revelations made a strong impression on a particular sort of audience. One listener to Shmakov’s report on the Jewish conspiracy made at a congress of extreme pravye remarked with shock: “Our enemy has the intention to enslave fully our mother, Rus’. This plan is immediately striking in its audacity; it appears improbable, impossible. But in order to dispense with all doubt, the speaker used a series of historical references, read to the Assembly many excerpts from Jewish books and laws which to this day they follow unfailingly.”^[54] Nationalists tried not to fall behind the Black Hundreds. One of the leading Nationalist columnist A. I. Savenko claimed that Jews were aiming for “sovereignty over everybody,” including a “decisive enslavement of Russia and the foundation on her territory of a Jewish Palestine.”^[55]
The picture of the surrounding world for avid anti-Semites looked gloomy, at times rather apocalyptic. Behind the dissolution of the traditional social order and the crisis of autocracy they saw hidden and powerful Jewish influences. Panic was unfeigned: “The Jewish question embraced all our institutions, including the church…Jews had snuck into the army, into the general staff, and their influence is enormous. Jews had seized the quartermaster corps, the means of communication (that concerning deliveries and contracts), Jews had taken over financial institutions, schools of higher education, and so on and so on.”^[56] “The Russian court sometimes is found under Jewish influence…”^[57] Even the “allegedly Russian” government was defending not Russians but Jews,^[58] whilst the police “were not executors of a loyal oath but traitors to the motherland in the hands of the Yids.”^[59] In this way, it appeared that Jews had practically subordinated the entire country to their influence.
The last true hope of the “truly Russian” parties was only the tsarist throne. “Only the Autocratic authority of the Russian Tsars saved and can save the Russian people from enslavement by Jews,” announced N. E. Markov, the leader of the “Renovated” SRN which had thrown Dubrovin’s group from the party.^[60] “The Autocratic Tsar is the true and powerful defender of the Russian State and the Russian people from everything hostile. He never will allow Jews or non-Russian to harm his native people.” This approached the main point of Black Hundred propaganda.^[61] Autocracy and anti-Semitism turned out to be very closely connected in the propaganda and rhetoric of the extreme Right. Without autocracy, their native and natural authority, the simple Russian people would end up under the yoke of Jewish enslavement.
A fear that Jews exploit liberalisation to dominate those around them was indeed a typical theme for European, particularly German anti-Semitism. Wilhelm Marr, one of the “founders” of modern anti-Semitism claimed that Jews began to dominate over Germans using too liberal German environment.^[62]
Everywhere anti-Semites, despite of their often loud agitation, offered very little in a sense of practical solutions. In Russia the Right enjoyed a sympathy of the almost unlimited ruler, the Sovereign himself. Nicholas II had a benevolent character, but his worldview was well suited for acceptance of anti-Semitism. His rejection of modernisation, his mysticism, his confusion about the real world, his application of moral values to his allies and enemies (e.g. when the first belonged to “the good” and the latter to “the nasty”), his nationalism (e.g. when allies to autocracy were defined as “true Russians”) – all these traits led Nicholas II to the conclusion that opponents to his unlimited power were mostly “Yids”, as the tsar almost invariably and despicably called his Jewish subjects. It cannot be said that the emperor intentionally fomented anti-Semitism as a deliberate policy to direct popular discontent against a chosen scapegoats. If there were “insincere anti-Semites” as perhaps the Vienna mayor Karl Lueger who cynically used anti-Semitic rhetoric to attract certain audiences, then the sincere anti-Semitism of Nicholas II was, on the contrary, an expression of his uncomplicated nature.
The tsar simply had no idea of what to do with his Jewish subjects. Nicholas II stubbornly refused to make concessions to “indecent people” weaving secret plots. Jewish liberation, he believed, would also threaten social upheavals from the side of the illiterate anti-Semitic masses.^[63] However, ridding the country of Jews was impossible. Having armed himself with a combination of mystical theories and political calculations, Nicholas II blocked even cautious attempts to solve the Jewish question and induced the government to largely ignore its existence.
The tsar’s right-wing supporters came out with anti-Semitic chorus which demonstrated the broad range of their entrenched prejudices but could not formulate any practical solutions.
In principle there were two routes to solving the Jewish question, as Witte expressed in a conversation with Alexander III: either “to drown all the Jews in the Black Sea” or “gradually to wipe out the existing special laws created for Jews” and to bring them into Russian citizenry.^[64]
To their credit, the Russian authorities never considered the first variant, which reflected Stalin’s aphorism “if there is a person, there is a problem, if there is no person, there is no problem” and which the Nazis tried so pedantically to prove. Even the overwhelming majority of Black Hundreds publicly rejected open violence against Jews.
Yet in public opinion the infamous anti-Jewish pogroms and Right-wing parties, with their militant anti-Semitism, became closely linked, Right-wing groups themselves usually disavowed any involvement with pogroms, at least in public statements. They had one indisputable alibi: during the pogrom outbreak in the end of October–beginning of November 1905 the Union of the Russian People, like the vast majority of other right-wing organizations, simply did not yet exist.
However, future activists for pravye parties not only existed at this time; they acted according to their convictions. Kostroma merchant K. Rusin and Kerch tobacco entrepreneur V. Mesaksudi were found by a court to be the direct organizers of pogroms in their respective cities. Once freed, they became chairmen of local cells of the SRN.^[65]
As extreme Rightists had been united into parties, their role in the pogroms in 1906 and 1907 became more distinct. Don Rawson concluded that the Jewish pogrom in Elisavetgrad in February 1907 was consciously planned out by the local SRN cell in response to the murder of a head of a local Black-Hundred military unit. Similarly, a major Jewish pogrom in Gomel in January 1906 was a revenge of a local right-wing organization on “Jews” to whom Black Hundreds attached collective guilt for the murder of a policeman.^[66]
Undoubtedly, many pogroms arose spontaneously as a part or continuation of revolutionary disorder, without any organization by the Right. In Warsaw in January 1905 many stores were wrecked during revolutionary demonstrations. (On January 16, 1905, more than thirty were badly damaged.^[67]) On October 19, 1905, in the village of Prostyn’ in the Siedlce guberniia, a group celebrating the proclamation of the October Manifesto became very drunk by evening and with cries of “Hurray! Long live freedom!” attacked Jewish homes.^[68]
The rhetoric of the emerged right-wing movements and the militant anti-Semitism of their propaganda undoubtedly helped increase the danger of violence. However, involvement in mass murders, theft, and violence against innocent victims looked so repulsive that leaders of right-wing unions tried to distance themselves from the pogroms in appropriate occasions. Undoubtedly some of this was because of suggestions from the authorities, including the tsar himself, about the prohibition of the incitement of mass violence. Dubrovin could make the following statement: “The pogroms are repugnant to us already because of their senselessness, not to speak of their wild, aimless ruthlessness and rowdiness of base passions. Pogromists themselves (Russians or Christians in general) have to pay for the pogroms, and also the pitiful, badly dressed, hungry poor part of the Jews. The rich and all-mighty Jewry, almost without exclusion, remains unharmed. The Union of the Russian People has made and will make all possible efforts in order not to allow pogroms.”^[69] In the mouth of a person heading a militant anti-Semitic organization and producing a newspaper which regularly used anti-Semitic rhetoric of the most provocative type, such an announcement did not seem very convincing.
However, among the Right there were principled opponents to pogroms, often found among Slavophile intellectuals of the older type, on the sidelines or only marginally involved in party movements, and among moderates on the Right. The first saw in pogroms a terrible discrediting of the monarchical idea, an outrageous challenge to cherished Orthodox principles, and unacceptable weakness of the authorities. One such critic of pogroms from this perspective was Tikhomirov’s friend General A. A. Kireev.^[70]
One example of the position of moderates came from V. V. Shul’gin, who called the pogroms a “dark uprising” and “the beginning of all sorts of anarchy in general.”^[71] His newspaper Kievlianin argued that the struggle with Jews via violent methods “was directly harmful for Christians themselves.”^[72] The VNS, a narrow gentry party, did not have “muzhik democratism of the Black Hundreds” (to use Lenin’s term), and VNS members were sickened by any indulgence in popular disorder. Pogromists, being a natural part of the Union of the Russian People, were an alien social element for the VNS. Disturbances of lower classes were dangerous for Nationalists themselves. Pogroms, beginning with Jews, could easily spread into violence against the rich and turn into robbery of gentry estates.^[73] Even in their anti-Semitic writings the Nationalists underscored that relations with Jews had to be built “on the basis of strict legality, without arbitrariness [proizvol] and with an aversion ever more so of crowd violence.”^[74]
For the most part radical Russian anti-Semites preferred to free Russia from Jews through emigration. In its programme the SRN proclaimed “that [the SRN] would strive with all its might so that its representatives in the State Duma would first of all put forward the question of creating a Jewish state and about how to help Jewish eviction to that state regardless of what material sacrifices this would require of the Russian people.”^[75] The means by which the Black Hundreds intended to attain such a radical result and what “material sacrifices” would require from them remained unclear as usual.
A deep inferiority complex stood behind the demands for restrictive measures on Jews. On the Right there was an imagined scenario of free competition, where the “cunning and treacherous” inorodets would always turn out to be stronger than the Russian without the interference of the tsarist government in any sphere of activity (especially economic and academic). Russian nationalism in its Black Hundred rendition did not come across in an attractive way. Shul’gin pointed out that anti-Jewish restrictions “in essence insulting for us and humiliating”.^[76]
Regarding the sphere of education, the Right could only voice complaints about Jewish domination in schools, but not any consistent programme to deal with it. Congresses of the Black Hundreds displayed the most unexpected and contradictory opinions. At the Third Kiev Congress of the Right, a chorus of voices demanding the removal of Jews from Russian schools was suddenly interrupted by the St. Petersburg Rightist, University lecturer B. V. Nikol’skii, who announced that he “could not admit that Jews should be forbidden to study.”^[77] This humane move led to a spirited discussion. The following congress in 1907, regardless of the widespread anti-Semitic calls that Russians and Jews should not be near each other, unexpectedly proposed a project for a strange kind of Russification of Jewish education. Jews would be invited to establish “their own schools exclusively for Jews at their own expense, but with strict government supervision and with instruction in all subjects, besides the Jewish religion, by Russian teachers and in the Russian language.”^[78] This resolution, however, led to no real results.
Concerning the problem of the Pale of Settlement pravye could find no practical ways of how to combat the “tolerance and corruption of the administration” thanks to which Jews were still leaving the Pale. In this respect the Union of the Russian People persistently suspected that the government was under Jewish influence.^[79]
The campaign against Jewish “economic might” again yielded nothing practical. Rightists constantly demanded that the government place Jewish entrepreneurs in an unendurable situation: “to forbid Jews to operate banks, bank and loan offices, to take part in state enterprises, to obtain and rent land even indirectly, to restrict the right to trade and take up industry,”^[80] and in general to forbid Jews to undertake economic activities outside the Pale. The SRN also suggested measures such as “broad confiscation” of property from Jews who were “proven to be in revolutionary movement.”^[81] When the tsarist government did not heed the call to begin a wide-scale economic war against the most commercially active segment of society, which had already been restrained by numerous limitations, the Black Hundreds decided they themselves would act.
As the immediate revolutionary momentum subsided, Black Hundred orators increasingly voiced the new view that it was necessary “to beat the Jew not with a stick but with the ruble” (ne dub’em, a rublem).^[82] The Volynskii divisions of the SRN opened “Russian stores” in the villages, proposing that Russian peasants use only their services. In Kiev, the Popular Russian Consumer Society was founded “to unite Russians on an economic basis,” and opened its own commercial stores.^[83] Calls were widely made to Russians to boycott Jews and to make their purchases only at Russian stores and to only use the services of Russian artisans.^[84] Here, however, a major dilemma appeared before the customers: nationalist feeling versus practical financial considerations. SRN stores existed in different cities and, likely, had different degrees of success; but at the very heart of the initiative, the Volynskaia guberniia, the police reported that “the peasants did not heed this advice [of the local SRN on the boycott of Jews], clearly for economic reasons.”^[85]
Right-wing anti-Semitic entreaties over a twelve-year period remained for the most part basic attempts to reiterate a negative stereotype, with few practical suggestions for the tsar’s government. The Right found no real solution to the Jewish question that so tortured them. In the SRN “they scream at yids” but “cannot find a way out,” admitted the chairman of one local Black Hundred cell.^[86]
Only on the other extreme flank of the Right, Shul’gin, after all his anti-Semitic rantings and ravings, in the years of the war came to the conclusion that, as he wrote, since it was “impossible to have eight million enemies within Russia,” it was necessary “gradually and slowly to extract the thorns” of anti-Jewish legislation.^[87] There was no other way out.
The Right hoped that their anti-Semitic rhetoric would find a positive response. At the start of the century anti-Semitic views, of different degrees and variants depending on culture and level of education, were shared by a significant proportion of the population in the Russian empire. The question of how wide-spread this anti-Semitism was remains debatable. This subject was a matter of political discussions at the beginning of the century but naturally broad, scientifically accurate surveys of public opinion in a huge, diverse, and semi-illiterate country were not being carried out at that time. However, recently O. G. Bukhovets presented some interesting data. Having analysed all petitions and resolutions from 1905 to 1907 of peasants in Belorussia (where Jews made up the highest percentage of the population), Bukhovets discovered that the Jewish theme was present in only around 14 percent of documents, and in only 41 percent of these did peasants view inorodets negatively.^[88] However, other contemporary studies claim that anti-Semitism in Russia was sufficiently widespread.^[89] The peasant milieu was easily susceptible to manipulation; a single speech by an SRN activist or a Socialist-Revolutionary could be enough to radically change the opinion of the peasant obshchina. The Left and radical liberals denied widespread anti-Semitism, considering it a falsehood of reactionaries and especially of the government, which, they believed, deliberately kindled ethnic discord. Regardless, Judeophobia received a strong impulse in 1905 and was popular in particular among the multiethnic population in the Western and South-Western regions of the Empire.^[90]
In right-wing propaganda the theme of anti-Semitism sounded non-stop. “The main reason of the unhappiness of the Motherland is the incredible propagation of Jews in the country,” went the diagnosis according to Kievan Rightists’ youth newspaper Dvuglavyi orel.^[91] With the help of this ingenuous admission one could explain just about anything. The high prices of goods during the World War was explained by the economic dominance of Jews who were “not putting goods out onto the market.”^[92] It would seem that Russian peasants’ grievances about their landlords were difficult to link to Jewish conspiracies; however, Purishkevich, standing guard for gentry lands, explained the revolutionaries’ agrarian demands as really serving the interests of Jews, who wanted gentry lands.^[93] Accordingly, Krupenskii claimed that the most important issue was the Jewish problem, and put the agrarian question in second place.^[94]
Naturally, with such a worldview, the right-wing parties had the largest support in those regions where anti-Semitism was the strongest—amongst the non-Jewish population in the Pale of Settlement, where Jews were concentrated and often dominated trade and commerce. In this region, according to S. A. Stepanov, more than a half, 57.6 percent of all members of extreme right-wing parties were consolidated.^[95]
To suggest that the most convinced monarchists had gathered specifically in the Pale is absurd. Inevitably there were doubts about how monarchist the radical right-wing parties really were, since it seemed that anti-Semitism, especially in the provincial groups, was the predominant ideology even in preference to monarchist convictions. In the opinion of the Elisavetgrad Vice-Governor, members of the local SRN had united not because of their loyalty to the tsar, but “almost exclusively [because of] hatred to Jews.”^[96]
In a society subject to unseen forces at work in the process of modernisation, when the past anchors of support were coming loose and value systems were in flux, anti-Semitism allowed all those nostalgic about the past - reactionaries, conservatives, and right-wing populists – to come up with a simple, visible enemy to blame for disorientation and discontent. This technique was used continuously by different groups and people either sincerely and naively or ill-intentionally. “Jews are our primary enemies,” reasoned the Kursk Popular Party for Order before the elections.^[97] Political conflict was crudely moved into the nationalities sphere, where the national character of the Rightists’ opponent was defined without any doubts: “The Kadet party is purely Jewish. It exists exclusively from Jewish minds and Jewish money,” Savenko criticised his political rivals.^[98]
The Black Hundreds came rather close to fascism, identifying nationality with particular political views. They alone were the only “true Russians”; thus their political opponents, whether individuals, groups, or institutions which Black Hundredists disliked, were “Jews” or at best “Jew-like”. “One can have a name von Anrep while being Russian, one can be called Miliukov but he is Jewish,” said Purishkevich. Since as Black Hundredist B. Nazarevskii wrote, affiliation with the intelligentsia “washed away” one’s Russianness, the intelligentsia in Black Hundred discourse was invariably identified as Jewish.^[99] At the Fifth Congress of monarchists, a representative of the Russian Assembly, V. I. Venozhinskii, came down hard on Russian writers A. I. Kuprin and L. Andreev as “decadent Jewish scribblers” who wrote “Jewish literature in broken Russian.”^[100] A bureaucrat usually could not be considered as a true Russian person, and despite the fact that they were very few ethnic Jews among bureaucrats this entire social stratum came under suspicion as Jewish too. Duma deputies, when they failed to please the Black Hundreds, were stigmatized in the same way. “One should not expect anything from these Jewish mongrels,” wrote the leader of the Astrakhan’ extreme Rightists N. N. Tikhanovich-Savitskii on the activities of deputies to the Third State Duma^[101] – although of the hundreds of deputies in the conservative Third Duma only several members were true ethnic Jews. The reactionaries’ absurd anti-Semitism, arising as part of the principle of “with us or against us” (nash-ne nash) repelled people from monarchism, recording among the ranks of “foreign” enemies of the Russian throne the most developed, capable, educated part of Russian society, not only liberals and revolutionaries but even moderates. For example, the Rightist professor from Dubrovin’s group A. I. Sobolevskii explained the political evolution of Shul’gin with his “dependence on Jews.”^[102]
Even within right-wing parties one was not automatically insured against accusations of being Jewish; even here one heard claims about Jewish influence. “I know that Jews found a comfortable place in certain right-wing newspapers,” I. I. Dudnichenko, extremist of Dubrovin’s type, recalled with horror.^[103] In an argument Purishkevich himself was accused by Dubrovin of being a “person of inorodets ancestry.”
The most radical elements of the Rightists always suspected that the government was under the Jewish influence. The Russian monarchists naturally could not be as anti-governmental as many European anti-Semites were.^[104] Yet the very appearance of the Black Hundred movement largely signified a protest against the politics of first prime-minister Witte who was immediately dubbed a Jewish agent. “Now the honest Russian people who love Russia actively appealing to the sovereign to quickly drive away from the presidential position the main enemy of the Russian people and the main Jewish aid and his Jewish wife”, spoke the Black Hundredist proclamation.^[105] Even the outstanding nationalist P. A. Stolypin, a hope and pride of the VNS, was called “non-Russian” by Russkoe Znamia.^[106] It went still further. As no other ruler, the Tsar Sovereign himself could fulfill the desires of the extreme Rightists. In those Black Hundred strata that were susceptible to various conspiracy theo-ries, a corresponding set of explanations for current events was born. According to the report of right-winger father Vostokov, Feofan, Archbishop of Poltava, interpreted the reasons for the crisis the following way: “After His Coronation in 1896 the Sovereign and Consort paid a coronation visit to the French President in Paris. And here, the devil’s cunning representatives of the Jew-Masons, direct enemies of Christianity and es-pecially of Holy Orthodox Rus’, created it in the grounds of the Elysee; they seduced the Tsar into joining a Masonic lodge…Great Russia is slipping down into the abyss of satanism…”^[107]
The Black Hundred utopian ideal, myth of pre-Petrine Rus', like any utopia, came into tense conflict with the reality of the world. This conflict had an inevitable and constant character. It was impossible to see the victory of popular autocracy in the limitation of tsarist power, or a barely “supreme” position of Russian nationality, or in the crisis of the Orthodox Church. The extreme right-wing parties themselves played only a subsidiary marginal role and suffered one split after the other. Black Hundreds could neither explain these crisises nor offer the practical solutions. Behind all ills anti-Semites saw the hand of the Jews who now marked the universal world-wide enemy.
Anti-Semitism could rally and attract people to the party by speculating on a coming threat from the visible enemy. However, such unification via artificially aroused hatred could not be firm. The Beilis affair which split the Nationalist party proved this once again. In 1911 Black Hundreds made an attempt to revive the centuries-old accusation that Jews ritually used Christian blood – which should have, by their accounts, called forth an explosion of mass anti-Semitism since it could prove that Jews were dangerous not only to the economic, moral, and political life of society but also to the very lives of citizens allegedly threatened by a terrible death at the hands of Jews.^[108] A Kievan Jew, Mendel Beilis, became a victim of this accusation; he was accused of murdering a Christian boy in the course of a Jewish blood ritual.^[109]
This affair was initiated by Kiev Black Hundreds and found enthusiastic support from right-wing leaders in the capitals. G. G. Zamyslovskii, the Rightist Duma speaker, and Shmakov became the leading figures supporting the accusations. The Union of the Archangel Michael and the Union of the Russian People organized a campaign supporting the accusations.^[110] Interestingly, the SMA, which sincerely feared Jewish treachery, decided not to mail cards printed by them with the image of the murdered boy Andrei Iushchinskii, as they thought the cards would be bought up and destroyed by Jews.^[111] The modest figure of Mendel Beilis interested the accusers least of all; attention was directed against the treachery of Jews as a nation. In the end, despite the Rightists’ efforts, a jury found Beilis innocent, although it concluded that the ritual murder did take place.^[112]
During the process the Nationalists suffered a scandalous split. The VNS, the Kiev Club of Nationalists, and party member professor of psychiatry I. A. Sikorskii, who took an active part in the process, supported the accusation. Unexpectedly, Shul’gin rebelled. While he admitted that he had no sympathy for Jews, the editor of Kievlianin (the mouthpiece of the moderate Right) announced that his newspaper would uphold the principle of legality in relation to all citizens, even Jews. The Beilis affair, in Shul’gin’s opinion (which proved to be entirely correct), was a falsification that would hurt the prestige of the Russian throne. To combine the principles of legality and anti-Semitism turned out to be difficult.
The Kievan Nationalists regarded such behavior as a stab in the back. Outraged by their criticism, Shul’gin left the Kiev Club of Nationalists and took part in the judicial process on Beilis’ side. For “slandering the officials” the issue of Kievlianin with the scandalous article was confiscated, and Shul’gin was placed under three-month arrest but was pardoned by the tsar.^[113] The tsar’s reaction to the outcome of the affair showed that, in contrast to extreme right-wing leaders, anti-Semitic hatred did not blind Nicholas II. The tsar said, upon hearing the court’s decision, that ritual murder had definitely taken place, but he was happy that the innocent Beilis had been found not guilty.^[114]
Immediately after the Beilis process, Black Hundreds made two more attempts to organise similar affairs dealing with supposed ritual murders. Both ended embarrassingly. In Kiev the murderer of one Russian child was found, but he turned out not to be a Jew. In the Smolensk guberniia Dubrovin, the editor of Russkoe Znamia N. I. Eremchenko, and local activists of the Dubrovin SRN tried to bring a Jewish women to court for an allegedly ritual murder. The plaintiffs were found guilty of slandering an innocent person and sentenced to six months in jail.^[115]
Surprisingly, toward the end of their history pravye nearly made a contribution to that against which they struggled constantly – the extension of rights to the Jewish population. During the war anti-Semitism looked especially unattractive: Jews fought alongside other nationalities in the Russian army, and the nation in this ultimate trial needed to rally together instead of tear itself apart. But instead, right-wing parties continued their anti-Semitic rhetoric, accusing Jews of espionage and treason.^[116] Perhaps the most provocative resolutions in the history of Russian anti-Semitism, which demanded the violent assimilation of Jews, were adopted in the congress of the extreme Right in Nizhnii Novgorod in November 1915.^[117] Some members of the Right, like Purishkevich, however, oscillated. On the Left wing of the movement Progressive Nationalists, reluctantly accepting the demand of Jewish equality, entered into the opposition’s Progressive Bloc. The remaining supporters of autocracy, with their anti-Semitic principles, looked unimpressive. Meanwhile the crisis grew and the government needed support.
In order to improve the image of supporters of the regime, the idea arose to make a right-wing party free of anti-Semitism. In June 1915, in Moscow, the Fatherland Patriotic Union, headed by V. G. Orlov, was created. The founder, up till then in the Union of the Archangel Michael, announced that he “remained the same right-winger and patriot” that he had been, that his organization stood for unlimited autocracy and that his party’s charter in no way differed from other right-wing organisations – except that in his Union’s programme there was “no challenge to inorodtsy, persecution of them is not allowed, since facing the contemporary demands of our motherland, it would be against the needs of the state and unjust to act against those nationalities who fight for honour, glory, might, and greatness of Russia.”^[118] The Union stood for Jewish equality and accepted Jews into its ranks. Orlov was well-connected with the Police and stood out even amongst other Rightists for his dubious financial operations. He was not however known as an independent generator of ideas. Thus far there is little doubt that the Fatherland Patriotic Union was created by the Director of the Police Department S. P. Beletskii, who at that time was concerned with strengthening right-wing organisations. The Union received subsidies and began to recruit allies giving patriotic lectures in the provinces.^[119]
For the Black Hundreds this was a deadly blow. The Council of monarchist congresses, which Dubrovin and Markov entered, announced that they did not recognise the Fatherland Patriotic Union as a right-wing monarchist organisation, insofar as “acceptance of Jewish equality fully contradicts the fundamental political beliefs of right-wing monarchists.”^[120] This was in fact an admission of the key significance of anti-Semitism for extreme monarchists.
Immediately a scandal typical of the Black Hundred style erupted. The Dubrovin side accused Orlov of treachery for opening his organization to “turncoats and traitors – Jews.”^[121] Orlov, until this time Chairman of the Moscow Bureau of the Union of the Archangel Michael, was excluded from the SMA. Then his opponents exposed that for 300 Roubles he had sold the title of honorary member of the Moscow Bureau of the SMA to one V. A. Bernov, who to the horror of monarchists turned out to be a baptised Jew.^[122] Such accusations still failed to strongly embarrass Orlov, and he soon enticed and brought into his new party former members of the Moscow Union of the Archangel Michael. In a fit of fury Purishkevich closed down the Moscow branch of his organization.^[123] After this the discussion got personal.
Regardless of the isolation, Orlov did not give up and attracted to his side the left-leaning Kolokol of V. M. Skvortsov and at the end of 1916 announced that his organisation had 82 cells. Prime-minister B. V. Shtiurmer was elected as honorary member of the Union.^[124]
In 1916 Orlov became closely acquainted with the new head of the government A. D. Protopopov, who used the Fatherland Patriotic Union to influence the royal couple in the way he needed. Concerned with his total break with the Duma, Protopopov decided to take a step to the Left and come forward with an initiative to expand rights for Jews – as Beletskii said, presuming “by this route to restore the subverted trust” of liberal society to his figure.^[125] Protopopov understood that it would be very difficult to convince Nicholas II to carry out such reform. He also feared right-wing outrage. At that point the Minister of Internal Affairs decided to employ “the voice of the simple patriotic people” which the tsar trusted more than anything else. Protopopov secretly gave Orlov materials for drafting a petition to the tsar from the Fatherland Patriotic Union on granting freedoms to Jews. A letter was delivered from Orlov to the Sovereign, but the origins of the document did not remain a secret from the extreme Right. Markov and Zamyslovskii raised a scandal against Protopopov; the minister tried to assure them that the initiative came from Orlov, and that he had nothing to do with it.^[126] The development of this intrigue was cut short by the February Revolution.
If moderate nationalism was called upon to unite the government and the people, then anti-Semitism in its extreme forms played the opposite role instead. Fanning xenophobia, the extreme Right could label whomever they wanted as “not ours”. The accusations against the intelligentsia and often the bureaucracy of being pro-Jewish pretty much repulsed the educated strata of Russian society from Russian nationalism. On the contrary, anti-Semites’ preposterous fantasies attracted the imaginations only of those less educated. The Black Hundreds themselves complained about the absence of intelligent individuals in their ranks.
In a sense, anti-Semitism clearly expressed the crisis permeating the empire of Nicholas II. The growth of their anti-Semitism was an attempt by right-wing parties to find another basis for popularity and to overcome the crisis of the autocratic ideology. Yet the ideology of Right-wing extremism, especially its anti-Semitism, offered little real hope for reconciling state and society and could offer no real solutions to the growing social tensions and fissures. The preposterous anti-Semitic fantasies served only as a substitution for real political answers to the pressing issues of the day - and in fact, only added to the crisis. As a main rallying point for supporters of autocracy, anti-Semitism in the Black Hundred form discredited, perhaps more than anything else, both extreme right-wing parties and the very regime they were trying to defend so awkwardly.
The extreme Right made anti-Semitism the centrepiece of their propaganda to the people, which highlighted the lack of any positive ideas in their parties. In comparison with liberals, who attracted sympathy through their ideals of emancipation and freedom, or the revolutionaries, who promised both freedom and the property of others, the extreme Right could not offer a picture of an alluring future. Russian conservatism, looking gloomily at the oncoming world, had little to offer the Rightists populists. With such a tsar as Nicholas II, the question arose as to whether the monarchy had a future at all. For the Right the myth of a tsardom free from Jews and their vicious influence became the answer.
The pathos of the movement was in the fight “against” the stranger, personified in the figure of the Jew. Catastrophically, these supporters of the tsar had very few positive ideas and arguments to offer Russians. It seemed that monarchists under Nicholas II could not obtain popular support without anti-Semitism. Anti-Semitism thus became linked to monarchism, and occasionally superseded it in importance in the ideological framework of right-wing parties. Anti-Semitism became a “socialism of fools” arrayed against real socialism and liberalism in the battle of political beliefs.