On October 24, 1905, at the end of three days of anti-Jewish violence in Ekaterinoslav, the deputies of the Municipal Duma cowered in their chambers as rocks were thrown at the Duma building. For the next three days, they debated the issues raised by the pogrom and related problems in closed session, revealing the position in recent events of the town’s well-off middle classes, whose interest they represented and from which they stemmed. Their discussions provide an understanding of the situation in the city from a moderate viewpoint, which is normally eclipsed by groups that took a more active and visible role the year’s dramatic events. Although Jews were not well represented in the Duma, their leaders and benefactors looked to it for support, a few of them served in it, and the Duma was not indifferent to the Jewish community. Hence, the deliberations of the deputies about the pogrom and related developments provide insight into the Jewish community, its position in the city, and the dynamics of the pogrom.
The pogrom of Ekaterinoslav in 1905, like that of pogroms elsewhere in the Pale of Settlement, has been written as a story of counter-revolution and victimization. It is seen as the product of the superpatriotic mob and their educated reactionary instigators and as an expression of a virulent anti-Semitism, commonly associated with the last years of the Romanov dynasty.^[1] Without denying the prime force of these factors in explaining the pogroms, it is also true that the pogroms have yet to be integrated into the urban social history of late Imperial Russia, of which they were surely a product. They have as much to do with accepted social structures and ingrained life patterns as with anti-Jewish sentiment or the circumstances of 1905. Moreover, the trauma of the pogroms has perhaps led us to forget or ignore the fact that Jews played a significant and indispensable role in the life of the city, were well aware that pogroms were possible, and took measures to combat them.^[2]
The minutes of Ekaterinoslav’s City Duma for the period immediately before and after the pogrom, provide unusually informative insights into many aspects of the city’s social setting. They make it possible to gauge the reaction of moderate opinion in the city to the pogrom, but also to witness some more permanent aspects of Jewish-Christian relations. The Duma did not play a major role in either promoting or opposing the pogrom, nor were the deputies particularly active in preventing it beforehand or effective at restoring social peace afterwards. But their discussions during the crisis reveal structures and attitudes not normally encountered in the public record and not normally apparent in their mundane proceedings. These revelations cast an unaccustomed light on both the pogrom in Ekaterinoslav and on longer standing inter-ethnic relations in an important frontier area of imperial Russia. However, these revelations can be properly evaluated only with a knowledge of the sequences and particulars of local events, to which we must turn first.

INTRODUCTION

The founding of Ekaterinoslav in 1778 coincides roughly with Russia’s acquisition of a sizeable Jewish population in the partitions of Poland, and Jewish merchants were present in the city from its earliest days. The town had a synagogue by 1800, although the size of the Jewish community remained modest, numbering only 880 in 1825, about 10% of the city’s population of 8,412 in that year. By 1864, there were 5,462 Jews in the city, or about 23% of the population. In the 1897 national census, Jews numbered 39,997, or 35.4% of Ekaterinoslav’s population.^[3] Throughout the 19th Century therefore, the Jewish population of the city increased faster than the Gentile or Christian, with the last third of the Nineteenth Century witnessing the largest increase in absolute numbers. That was due in large part to the expansion of economic opportunities that began about a century after the city’s founding with the opening of the Ekaterininskii Railroad in 1884.
That artery, designed to connect the iron ore of western Ekaterinoslav province with the coal of its eastern districts, intersected the Dnepr River precisely at Ekaterinoslav city. The provincial capital and grain and timber port expanded in the next two decades into an industrial boomtown on the basis of the iron, steel, and metalworking firms that opened in the city and in nearby towns and villages up and down the river and the railroad. As a result, Ekaterinoslav witnessed a tripling of its population and the migration to the city of not only Jews, but of a highly diverse population altogether. The 1897 census showed that Ekaterinoslav’s population of 112,839 contained representatives of every province of European Russia, plus the 10 Caucasus, the 7 Siberian, and the 10 Central Asian ones, and from 26 foreign countries, lived in the city. At the same time, ninety-three percent of the population consisted of just three groups, Russians (42%), Jews (35%), and Ukrainians (16%).^[4] Poles and Germans made up the largest portion of the remaining seven percent. Much of this new population was drawn to the laboring and managerial positions in the dozens of new plants and workshops founded in Ekaterinoslav and nearby communities.
The largest firms were founded by great foreign-owned consortiums or by Russian-foreign joint ventures, such as the Russian Iron Industry Association in Kaidaki (Obshchestvo Russkoi Zheleznoi Promyshlennosti) or the Belgian and Polish owned South Russian Dneprovsk Metallurgical Association in Kamenskoe (Iuzhno-Russkoe Dneprovskoe Metallurgicheskoe Obshchestvo). Lacking the capital for such high-end investment, most Jews owned and invested in small retail or manufacturing enterprises, worked for such businesses, or sold goods in the streets and bazaars. Nevertheless, Jewish merchants came to occupy a very important, if not dominant, position in the city’s economy. In 1903, 84.1% of first guild merchants and 68.8% of second guild merchants were Jews,^[5] which certainly lent the Jewish community a substantial presence in the city.
Most of this activity and most Jewish residences were located in the city proper, though Jews had a smaller but visible presence in the industrial suburbs as well.^[6] Yet the heavy industrial firms that dominated surrounding towns and suburban settlements – such as Nizhnedneprovsk, Amur, Kaidaki, and the Briansk Settlement (Brianskii poselok) – did not hire Jewish workers, and those plants and neighborhoods were consequently dominated by Ukrainian and Russian workers, often newly settled from other provinces.
The rapid growth of this diverse and largely migrant population produced an anomic, disordered, and unsettled existence for the great majority of the city’s population, a condition rife with inter-ethnic tensions and barely restrained aggression. The prime outlet for this tension was the Jews – a condition over-determined by religious, occupational, educational, and economic differences and rivalries endemic to Eastern Europe and the Pale of Settlement long before the town’s population explosion.
The first widely known anti-Jewish violence in Ekaterinoslav, was the July 1883 pogrom, which claimed the lives of one Jew and twenty-eight rioters and caused hundreds of thousands of rubles in damage.^[7] Although smaller anti-Jewish incidents continued to occur in the city during the following years, too little is yet known about this period to gauge their impact upon the local Jews. The nature of the sizeable Jewish community of Ekaterinoslav, like that of most Jewish communities in the southern part of the Pale of Settlement, is largely undocumented and often unwritten.^[8] What is clear is that Gentile hostility notwithstanding, a large, cohesive, prosperous, and well-led Jewish community developed in Ekaterinoslav in the same period.
Though Jews were shut out of the large scale metal industries in the region, they prospered in wholesale and retail trade and commerce as well as in secondary industries such as lumber and brick making.^[9] Very little has been written about Ekaterinoslav’s Jewish merchants, despite their prominence and apparent wealth, attested to by the number and array of Jewish educational and charitable institutions. The Ekaterinoslav Jews had a great number of their own organizations, a veritable parallel civil society. It was created partly to compensate for their relative neglect and discrimination by the Russian authorities, partly due to a standard of care higher than the government’s, especially with respect to relief for the Jewish poor and the education of children, and partly from a need for their own religious schools and organizations. The community maintained a Jewish hospital and cemetery, a series of schools, mutual aid societies, and a number of charities.^[10] Most of them were targeted to the Jewish community itself. M. Iu. Karpas, a Duma deputy and wealthy philanthropist, sponsored a charitable organization bearing his name that supported shelters for women and the aged, a dining hall for the indigent, and a homeless shelter. At the time of the pogrom, he donated 2,000 rubles to a fund to aid the victims.^[11] Other Jewish-sponsored institutions were open to Gentiles as well. One-quarter of the patients treated at the Jewish hospital in 1906, for instance, were Christian.^[12]
Jewish institutions also contributed to the cultural life of Ekaterinoslav. For instance, a Society for Mutual Assistance to Jewish Students and Teachers sponsored a series of inexpensive lectures in 1904 with such titles as “Women and the Family in the Works of L. N. Tolstoy,” “The Development of Individualism in Ibsen’s Women Characters,” and “The History of the Far Eastern Problem.” Plans to continue the series in 1905 with lectures on the Russo-Japanese War and on “the moral problem of our time” were cut short by the school superintendent, but the modernity of the themes and the accessibility of the program to all faiths are clear.^[13]
Moreover, contact between Jewish and Christian elites in Ekaterinoslav could become quite friendly. Shmarya Levin, who served as “Crown Rabbi” (Kazennyi Ravvin) of Ekaterinoslav from 1898 to 1903, attested to Governor D. S. Sviatopolk Mirskii’s warmth at their official meeting, and to Levin’s close relations with liberal Christians in the city. Mirskii apparently cultivated friendly relations with the Jewish community as a matter of policy, as indicated by his attendance at an annual public ceremony of the town’s Talmud-Tora in April 1898. The Governor “noted with satisfaction the excellent condition of this school.” He returned for the same event in 1899 and wrote that he “was convinced that the instruction in the school was superbly organized. I was especially pleasantly struck by the students’ beautiful pronunciation in the declamation of Russian verse.”
Mirskii’s openness to Jews and Levin’s Christian contacts appear to have been exceptions among the Russian upper classes. Levin himself pointed out the contradictory position assimilated Jews faced in his time. “Ekaterinoslav was a city of Jewish apostates, and the majority of them were to be found in the upper classes,” he wrote. (193) Expressing contempt for “these baptized Jews of Ekaterinoslav,” Levin noted that they were forced by their continued rejection by “higher Russian society” to involve themselves with Jews and Jewish affairs. A group of baptized Jewish lawyers, he explained, made a principle of distinguishing between the Jewish religion and the Jewish community.^[14]
Given all the secular assimilationism implied by these observations, it is not surprising that Ekaterinoslav’s Jewish community was also a Zionist stronghold. The strength of the local organization, one of the largest and wealthiest in the movement, was due, by all accounts, to the eminent and influential Menahem Mendel Ussishkin, a Zionist leader of international stature who had settled in the city in 1891. He was mentor to both Levin, whom he persuaded to migrate south from Grodno, and to Ber Borochov, a brilliant young socialist who came to Ekaterinoslav from Poltava to work with Ussishkin in1900 and founded there the Zionist labor group Poale Zion. Jonathan Frankel writes that Borochov “had arrived in Ekaterinoslav as a revolutionary Social Democrat ... and returned to Poltava as a general Zionist.” Be that as it may, Poale Zion became the core organization that, during the 1905 Revolution, produced three variants combining socialism and Zionism, the Zionist Socialist Workers’ Party (S.S.), the Jewish Socialdemocratic Workers’ Party “Poale Zion”, and the Jewish Socialist Workers’ Party (“SERP” or E.S.)^[15]
The strength of the local Zionists apparently rested on the solid and reliable support of the “good Jews” of the city, whose contributions to Zionist projects, while not exorbitant, were steady and reliable, and on Ussishkin’s inspired leadership, along with a handful of Zionist activists.^[16] In 1905, the most visible and active Zionists were the young students and workers of Poale Zion. It is not clear which faction prevailed in Ekaterinoslav, though it is likely that some semblance of the organization had existed in the city since its founding by Borochov and Sh. Dobin in November 1900. At that time it had 100 members, drawn from Jewish workers, clerks, and external students, and by 1905 it had become the single largest party among Ekaterinoslav’s Jewish workers with 2,000 members (by its own count).^[17] To understand the role and significance of Poale Zion, as well as the immediate background of the Duma’s deliberations, we must now turn to the events of 1905 themselves.

THE REVOLUTION AND THE POGROM

For most of Ekaterinoslav, the “events of 1905” took place in the last three months of the year, from the outbreak of widespread strikes in early October till the suppression of a second general strike along the railroad line in late December. Yet events began to unfold long before that, from the mobilization of the town’s small liberal community during the “banquet campaign” in late 1904 to the January strikes of factory workers in unspoken response to the wave of sympathy and outrage following the “Bloody Sunday” shootings in St. Petersburg on January 9. After a relative lull in the spring, another rash of strikes gripped the city in June. In the meantime, the spring had brought hope of actual reforms and deeper changes in the country than those normally contemplated, and wider circles of the city became mobilized, especially the student youth and the educated public. As a result of these events, another category of political activists, referred to in police reports as “Jewish youth,” came to public notice.^[18]
Beginning in June, a higher level of violence was noticeable in the city. Small-scale anti-Jewish attacks took place on June 20 and July 20, the latter date marking the anniversary of the 1883 pogrom. These attacks helped to mobilize the Jewish community, which had already clashed with the police when a demonstration in front of the city’s main synagogue was attempted following a memorial for victims of the Zhitomir pogrom in May. Then a Jewish student was killed on June 20, and his funeral drew 800 persons and became an occasion for political speeches and a dispute between representatives of Poale Zion and the Bund over the politics of resistance.^[19] Spurred by these events and by the workers’ strikes, the political activity of young Jews increased, both as pro-strike agitators and as Self Defense activists. Jewish Self Defense (samooborona) groups had been forming throughout the Pale since the Kishinev pogrom, and by 1905 they had been organized in about a third of the larger Jewish communities.^[20]
In addition, Self Defense was organized among the Russian revolutionaries, who were well represented in Ekaterinoslav and based chiefly in the large metalworking plants like the workshops of the Ekaterininskii Railroad, the Briansk Rail, Iron, and Machine Works, and other nearby iron and steel works. The revolutionaries emphasized the need to arm themselves against pogromists, both to make common cause with the Jewish Self Defense and to organize armed workers for other political purposes. Not only Jewish workers and socialists welcomed the Russian worker allies. At the end of July, a group of Jewish clerks and “bourgeoisie” met and agreed to cooperate with representatives of the Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, and the Bund in purchasing arms and acting jointly to resist the pogromists.^[21]
Inspired again in early October by events in the Russian capitals, where strike activity was reviving and whence the All-Russian Union of Railroad Workers had called for a nationwide rail strike, Ekaterinoslav workers themselves again came out on strike, both in the city and in the factory suburbs. By now, however, they were joined by other parts of the urban population such as whitecollar workers, students, liberal professionals, railroad administration employees, and the ever-present “Jewish youth.” On October 11, three large demonstrations took place in Ekaterinoslav involving most of these groups and anchored by striking metal and railroad workers. They were met by Cossacks and infantry troops, who, partly provoked and partly out of fear, fired on the mostly unarmed demonstrators, killing a total of fifty-one and wounding eighty-one at the three sites.^[22]
The shortterm effect of this paroxysm of violence was to draw the city together. A collective funeral procession on October 13 attracted thousands of participants to an endless march through the city to the Orthodox, then the Jewish cemeteries. The march registered the city’s shock at the deadly results of the government’s determination to contain the burgeoning forces of rebellion, and while it chastened some and angered others, it saddened many. Yet in a spirit of mutual mourning the usual enmities and rivalries were relaxed, as all political parties and all religious denominations walked the last mile together to honor the fallen victims.
News of the October Manifesto, which followed less than a week later, was dampened by the October 11 tragedy, but even so, the political mobilization of so much of the city insured that excitement at the new political era heralded by the climactic announcement of October 17 was felt and celebrated in Ekaterinoslav. The promise of an elected parliament and political freedoms was undoubtedly felt by many to be a guarantee that the violence they had just lived through would not be repeated. Public meetings overflowed available indoor space into the city’s park, and, as in other cities at the time, many new unions and associations were organized in that temporary vacuum of political authority. But other forces in the city had been mobilized by the October 11 shootings and by the October Manifesto.
Before the celebrations had quieted down and the new civic energy had taken concrete form, a new round of violence erupted in the city. Although the Ekaterinoslav pogrom surprised everyone by its suddenness and turbulent destructiveness, violence directed at Jews and others was certainly not new. Since the summer strikes and attacks on Jews, there had been a low-level, but noticeable, current of violence in the city. Jews had already been identified by the police and connected in the newspapers with demonstrations and occasional shootings. The outbreak of pogroms in other towns as early as October 18 plus the likely instigation of monarchist extremists and local police and government officials touched off the violence of the ever-present chern of the city on October 21. The composition of the pogrom crowd has been described as “Ekaterinoslav residents: petty bourgeois, peasants, factory workers, day laborers, off duty soldiers, and school kids,” but not “organized workers” or most railroad workers. The pogromist crowd was estimated at about 1,000 at the beginning, although it diminished as the pogrom ran its course.^[23] The destruction wreaked on October 21-23 claimed sixty-seven Jewish lives and over thirty Russians, while more than 189 were wounded and six-million rubles in property damage was suffered.^[24]
During those three days, both the central and local governments apparently ceased to function. Governor A. B. Neidgart, assumed by the Jewish community to be willing to protect them, confined himself to issuing a warning to the patriotic marchers on the first day. Part of the police force was on strike during the pogrom, and policemen, both in and out of uniform, were observed in the pogrom crowds. Firemen reportedly used their axes to break into Jewish homes. Soldiers refused to halt the pogromists by force, their officers either not authorized to issue such an order or not willing to.^[25]
The Self Defense was active, although its effectiveness in preventing pogrom violence has not been clearly established. V. Dal’man, who helped coordinate Self Defense efforts during the pogrom, claimed that their efforts did prevent greater violence, that they killed a number of pogromists, though he also revealed that Self Defense activists probably fired the first shot that began the pogrom on the night of October 20.^[26] His account of the pogrom makes it sound like a gang war between rival factions. This impression of the events was probably shared by most Ekaterinoslav residents not directly involved in the violence.

THE VIEW FROM TOWN HALL

Whatever happened during the three violent days of Ekaterinoslav’s pogrom, whatever excesses of action or emotion occurred, the full meaning of the events for all parties involved would be apparent only in the period following the pogrom. The violence in the city that had occurred sporadically all year had, since October 11, overwhelmed the peaceful majority of the population, producing a state of chronic fear for the safety of their lives and property. The pogrom of October 21 to 23 seemed to link the city’s riotous and criminal elements with the labor strikes and violence, feeding the anxiety and a gnawing suspicion that the authorities had lost the ability to maintain order. The widespread fear that flowed from October’s violence and the uncertainty as to the reliability of the troops and the police colored and distorted the perception of events for the rest of the year.
In the City Duma meetings on October 24, 25, 26, 30, and November 2, an atmosphere of nervous anxiety prevailed, and the normally sleepy body became energized with previously unheard opinions and disputes. The deputies’ overriding concern was to secure the city against a recurrence of the violence it had witnessed during the preceding two or three weeks. Indeed, the deputies felt the Duma itself to be under siege, especially during the first of these meetings when it was still not clear that the pogrom had ended and, in response to the rocks being thrown at the seat of city government, the deputies retreated to a securer room and closed its meetings to the public. Later that day, they learned that twenty shots had been fired at the Governor as he toured the city. The head of the province’s branch of the State Treasury and a spokesman for Finance Ministry employees appeared before the Duma to call for a “legal organization that would protect the peaceful residents and would stop the violence against the property and life of Jews and bring order.” Lending credence to this alarm for the safety of public monies, a deputy from a district near the Briansk Works reported that the workers were gathering arms and planning to attack the Treasury. The report was neither proven nor disproven, but it gave clear expression to the kinds of fears circulating in these days.^[27]
As the chief forum for the city’s merchant and industrial interests,^[28] the Duma devoted the bulk of its time in these post-pogrom sessions to debating measures to secure the city against further disorders. In the process, the record of their deliberations revealed nuances in the relations of the Jewish community with the deputies – and, by extension, with what might be called the upper middle-class of the city.
At the meeting of the twenty-fourth, for instance, it was reported that several deputies had approached some Jews the previous day to have them ask the Jewish Self Defense to stop shooting. One of the Jews, I. I. Korin, now reported to the Duma that he and several co-religionists had done that and had obtained from the Self Defense activists a promise to cease firing. Korin went on to demand that the deputies do their part to stop the bloodshed by issuing a written notice, by touring the city jointly with Jewish leaders to calm the population, and by calling for the withdrawal of troops from the city “since they not only do not protect the Jews from pogrom and robbery but, on the contrary, promote it.” In the discussion that followed, it appeared that the deputies had assumed that the Self Defense had been the cause of the shooting, a widespread impression in the city, and they had to be told that the cease fire by the Jews would not necessarily halt all further shooting since other parties were still armed and at large. Alarmed at the prospect of continued violence, some deputies not only rejected the proposal to withdraw troops, but called for the establishment of martial law. Others opposed that measure, but as a body the deputies refused to call off the troops, refused to issue a notice, and refused to take a hand in pacifying the populace, which “does not trust [the Duma].”^[29]
The discussions of these days reveal both the Duma’s inexperience in dealing with civil emergencies on this scale and the deputies’ unfamiliarity and discomfort with political decisionmaking. In this instance, they hesitated on October 24 to decide on the need for martial law, deferring the decision to a meeting with the Governor scheduled later that day. After consulting with the deputies, the Governor himself announced that he would keep army troops on duty in the city, ban all political meetings, but not declare martial law unless the Duma requested it, which it did not. He also ordered the Self Defense to stop shooting, lending credence to the belief that it was the only organized group in the city doing the shooting. In fact, as Korin had explained to the Duma, the Self Defense could not account for all the shooting taking place in the city.^[30]
The deputies’ incomplete understanding of the pogrom’s causes and their consequent failure to act decisively against it did not mean that the majority of them shared the viewpoint of the anti-Jewish jingoists. On the contrary, City Manager and Duma President, I. Ia. Ezau, and a number of the deputies held liberal views, and the Duma as a whole attempted to deal with the Jewish community even-handedly. At a Duma session before the pogrom occurred, an Orthodox service was performed in the Duma chambers in memory of the dozens of people killed in the events of October 11. When it had ended, a “Mr. Usynekin” (probably Ussishkin, misspelled) demanded from the audience that a Jewish service for the dead be held in the Duma. Without opposition or debate, this was acceded to and scheduled for the next day.^[31] Later, Ekaterinoslav’s acting Crown Rabbi Burkhshtein addressed the Duma through a spokesman, calling for the withdrawal of troops and threatening (on behalf of the Jewish community, presumably) to withhold tax assessments to support the troops. His spokesman, Kh. I. Rozenberg, incidentally, disagreed with the Rabbi, claiming that the majority of the city’s Jews favored leaving the troops in place.^[32]
In September 1905, four Jewish deputies in the Duma had resigned as a protest against the disenfranchisement of Jews in the elections to the Bulygin Duma, a consultative assembly proposed by the government in February 1905 in response to the January protests. The Union to Achieve Equal Rights for Jews in Russia had asked Jewish city duma deputies not elected by Jews but appointed by the government to resign as part of a public protest of the projected assembly.^[33] Ia. D. Berezovskii, S. A. Kats, M. Iu. Karpas, and S. P. Palei resigned from the Ekaterinoslav Duma in solidarity with the protest. Subsequently, the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD) demanded that the Duma appoint Christian deputies in their place, but Ekaterinoslav’s deputies decided to appeal the order because it overrode the Duma’s own rules for replacing deputies.^[34] Although the deputies were acting in the interest of the Duma’s autonomy from the autocracy, their appeal had the effect of sustaining the Jewish deputies’ protest. And although not stated, the deputies very likely would have wanted to return Jewish deputies to the Duma for the same reason that the government presumably appointed them in the first place, namely, to ease financial and business relations in the city and province by giving at least token representation to and legitimizing the Duma’s decisions in the eyes of an influential economic group.^[35] However, they were not prepared to do so in the open and liberal spirit that prevailed in the fall of 1905. On October 25, the engineer-technician Rodzevich-Belevich, apparently one of those encouraged by the prospect of the new political era announced on October 17, came before the Duma to suggest that the Jewish community could be appeased by holding new elections to the City Duma on the basis of the election law for the new State Duma, which enfranchised propertied Jews. No response from the deputies and no motion or action is reported.^[36]
At the same time, the reputed wealth of the Jewish community could work to its disadvantage. On October 19, the Duma had voted to award 5,000 rubles to the victims of the October 11 shootings, to erect a monument in their honor, and to elect a Duma commission to oversee this work. Yet on October 24, it voted to grant the Jewish community a mere 500 rubles in relief of the pogrom victims. Most likely this was due to an unspoken persuasion that the Jews possessed the resources to care for their own, even though the number of dead and wounded from the pogrom, at least one-third of whom were Russians, outstripped that of October 11, and hundreds of Jewish families were made homeless by the violence. If this discriminated against the Jews in fact, it did not mean that the Duma abjured all responsibility for them, as it later took on the task of alleviating the crowded and unhealthy emergency housing conditions of the Jews made homeless by the pogrom. Later still, the Duma merged its relief efforts with those of the Jewish community, forming a single committee and a single fund for donations.^[37]
A more important reason for the smaller amount of relief voted the pogrom victims was the deputies’ sense, understandable in the wake of the pogrom, that October 11 was only the start of a much longer season of violence and disorder than they had expected before the pogrom and that there was a need to rein in their generosity in order to meet other expenses. The pogrom appeared to be spilling over into generalized lawlessness not confined to Jews. As one deputy put it, “having robbed the Jews, the pogromists are now beginning to rob peaceful residents [sic].”^[38] The revelation that the gromily were an enemy common to the entire city was probably enough to silence any deputy that may have harbored reservations about cooperating with the Jewish community. Whatever differences of opinion may have existed in the Duma and among the propertied citizenry about Jews, the continuation of lawlessness and disorder diminished those differences and emphasized their common interest in restoring order.
Propertied interests, however, did not speak for all of Ekaterinoslav. At the Duma session of October 30, a delegation of forty workers and their political spokesmen from the revolutionary parties, claiming to represent 50,000 workers of the city, appeared to voice their complaints and demands. The Duma record lists their accusations:

1) During the political struggle of the entire revolutionary people defending the barricades against troops that had brought about outrageous carnage, the Duma calmly looked on. 2) When the robbery and murder by the hooligans began, whom the Self Defense could have driven off, the deputies agreed to the Governor’s dispatch of troops and Cossacks, thereby supporting the Governor in his bloody reprisal. 3) That the Duma petitioned for the suppression of meetings and public assemblies. 4) That the Duma demanded the disarming of the Self Defense. 5) That it petitioned for the introduction of martial law in the city.^[39]

The Duma record then moves directly on to the delegates’ demands. But a newspaper report described the workers’ indictment of the Duma in greater and more condemning detail. Their statement went on to interpret the above policies as complicity in a dual plot hatched by the autocracy, which had enticed the liberal opposition with small concessions in order to crush the revolutionary proletariat, on one hand, and, on the other, had drawn on

“the most ignorant forces of society and organized a counter-revolution throughout Russia. It brings together hooligans, puts policemen in civilian clothes, surrounds them with a wild horde of Cossacks, and carries out its bloody attacks on revolutionaries and Jews... By their agreement the Duma deputies have given complete freedom of action to the leader of a gang of robbers and by so doing have covered their hands in the people’s blood.”

The worker delegates even claimed that several Duma deputies “took a most active part in the patriotic demonstrations and that these deputies continue to sit in the Duma.”^[40] The Steering Committee of the delegates then demanded

“the immediate dissolution of [the Duma]. Only a Municipal Duma newly elected on the basis of universal, equal, direct suffrage... can be a genuine spokesman for the interests of all citizens against robbery and murder. The Committee demands from the new Duma the immediate organization of a people’s militia and the removal of the troops and Cossacks from the city. The Committee declares that it will defend all these demands with the organized force of all the workers of the city of Ekaterinoslav.”^[41]

The deputies heard out these charges and demands in silence, but most seem to have agreed with deputy N. M. Lanshin, who accused the delegates of coming to the Duma not with a petition but to make a miting, i.e., to hold a political rally. The worker delegates then left the Duma, and the deputies, in a discussion of the accusations that followed among themselves, after salving their ruffled feelings, apparently put aside any further bitterness and, no longer in the presence of the delegates, responded to the charges in a serious manner. Deputy V. I. Khartsiev reminded his colleagues that the charge that the Duma had petitioned for the establishment of martial law was false, though his failure to deny the other charges implies that he conceded them. Instead, he spoke of the limitations placed on the Duma’s powers by the Municipal Statute (of 1892), which assigned to it only the management of the urban economy. Having excused the Duma in advance, he then granted that it had handled the political situation, so rapidly thrust upon it, clumsily. In conclusion, he urged the deputies to keep in mind those who elected them and to stay at their posts despite insulting accusations.^[42]
The verbal drubbing the deputies received at the hands of the worker delegation seems to have had an actual effect on them. During the remainder of the October 30th session attempts were made to follow through on previous commitments, such as a promise made on October 22 to consult with all the political parties. A resolution was passed to invite delegates from the political parties to meet with the Duma in a special session. The deputies also returned to the question of the reorganizing the police. Although they had vacillated on the question of the effectiveness of the troops in preventing further disorder, the deputies were persuaded that the city police had been and would be ineffective in the future. This was clear from the deputies’ favorable attitude toward Shipov’s proposal of October 24 to form a new force, like a city militia, to protect the citizenry and the treasury.
Now, one week later, that idea had lost favor. Not only had the organization of a militia to replace the police become a demand of the Left, expressed to the Duma by the worker delegates that very day, but a recent conference convened by the president of the Circuit Court to consider measures for calming the population and protecting it against further violence, pronounced itself firmly against a militia. Apparently, “militia” now meant armed civilians patrolling the city streets, and the good citizens doubtless felt that they had had enough of that. By implication, of course, that work was for the time being to be left to the troops. The minutes make a point of mentioning that more than half the conference was made up of local Jews, as if this made its conclusions more compelling.^[43]
The most daring and progressive suggestion of the day was pronounced by the wealthiest and most influential deputy, M. S. Kopylov:^[44] instead of a citizen militia, the local police should be reorganized and brought under the control of the Duma. It is not possible to gauge the deputies’ reaction to this idea, however, because no further discussion is reported in the minutes, and one suspects that this is one place where the recorder of the minutes decided to omit material that might have embarrassed the deputies.^[45] Kopylov is reported to have said only that his proposal was conditioned by budgetary considerations. Instead, an extensive discussion ensued concerning the reorganization of a force of unarmed night watchmen (nochnaia okhrana), hired to guard the bazaars and various other properties. In the course of that discussion, the deputies began to envision the establishment of a city police force by upgrading the night watchmen, supplying them with arms, uniforms, and a pay raise.
The lasting influence of the counter-revolutionary and anti-Jewish violence of October on the population of Ekaterinoslav may therefore be said to have been an intensified concern with public security and the Duma’s rights and authority as opposed to those of the central government. If the intention of the pogromists had been to drive Jews out of Russian society, the Duma record shows that their actions had the effect of solidifying liberal and revolutionary support of Jews and reminding the indifferent of the value of Russia’s Jewish citizens to the entire urban enterprise

CONCLUSION

The Duma deputies seem to have thought and behaved fairly reasonably during the extraordinary events of 1905, even allowing for the concealment of part of their debates and given their institutional weakness and the hidebound political and administrative institutions they worked in. In this respect they differed little from practically the entire educated and “modern”sector of Russian society, which became more reform-minded in 1905 due to the failure of the government at home and abroad. In addition their attitude toward Jews, along with that of large parts of the Christian population after the pogrom, was somewhat chastened. Even the police correctly observed Jewish rights by processing the theft and damage claims and returning the stolen goods of pogrom victims.^[46]
What is implicit but significant in the Duma’s deliberations is the unquestioned, routine, respected position of Jews among the elites of the city. Despite the deputies’ early belief that the Self Defense was a major cause of the violence, they did not identify that violence or the Self Defense with the Jews who came before the Duma or with the Jewish community at large. Just as they distinguished themselves from working class Russians, they apparently distinguished the Jewish elite from “Jewish youth” and from the Self Defense. Although it is probable that there were anti-Semites among the deputies, political hegemony in the Duma was clearly in the hands of moderates, and President Ezau’s unconcealed liberal opinions were not contested or even raised. At their November 2 session, the deputies themselves debated the pros and cons of the October Manifesto and Kadet politics and voted to send representatives to the congress of town and zemstvo delegates called for November 6 in Moscow.^[47]
What is also clear is that the Duma’s decision to support the continued presence of troops in the city also spoke for a large part of the Jewish population, especially after they took a hand in suppressing the pogrom, beginning on October 23. Outrage at the Jews’ victimization by the pogromists has perhaps concealed from historians the divisions within the Jewish community, even in its direst hour. There is evidence, for instance, that a significant number of Jews opposed the Self Defense and accused it of prolonging the pogrom.^[48]
The Duma’s greatest weakness was revealed by the accusations of the worker delegates, those “organized workers” who had opposed the pogrom and defended the Jews and by contrast with whom, the Duma deputies appeared indifferent and ineffective. Moreover, the worker delegates’ condemnation of the Duma and demand for a civil militia in place of the police force was vindicated by the history of the next two months, during which the authorities failed to restore a sense of public security, and fear of renewed violence and the threat of another pogrom continued to haunt the city. This helps to explain the appeal of the workers’ Fighting Strike Committee, formed to lead a second railroad strike that gripped the central part of Ekaterinoslav province for three weeks in December. During the strike it was the only effective and reliable organization keeping order in the city, the only one prepared to oppose renewed pogrom violence with force.^[49] No new pogrom occurred.
If, as on other frontiers, inter-ethnic rivalry and violence in South Russia were features endemic to the region rather than aberrations, the pogroms can be seen as an extreme consequence of the Russian empire’s absorption of Polish and Turkish territories and of their resettlement by populations stemming from ethnically homogeneous villages and shtetl’s, unprepared for and deeply disturbed by the resulting cosmopolitan setting of cities like Kiev, Odessa, and Ekaterinoslav.
The position of Ekaterinoslav’s Jews – given their composition and their relationship with the Russian population implicit in the Duma’s discussions – indicated that it was a frontier area not only for the empire, but for Jews as well. As the bulk of the population was recently settled and more thinly rooted, both the strain of inter-ethnic tension and the unstable freedom of new identities were equally characteristic of the region. New Russia offered not only economic opportunities, but a frontier area’s freedom from the constrictions of settled traditions and communities. Like other frontiers, the Russian South offered not only investments and employment opportunities, it also necessitated and made possible new and modified identities, offering a chance to reinvent oneself. Acculturation and assimilation were apparently more pronounced, if not more acceptable, than in older Russian-Jewish areas to the north. Even Rabbi Shmarya Levin, who sternly disapproved of converted Jews, admitted to a curiosity about Russian culture and enjoyed the company of liberal Christians.
Yet the South was also violently anti-Jewish.^[50] The relative unrootedness of the South may have drawn Ekaterinoslav Jews closer to the frontier separating them from Christian Russia, but the greater anti-Jewish violence of the South also warned them away from that boundary. These contradictory considerations may help to explain the popularity of Zionism and socialism among Ekaterinoslav’s younger Jews, as well as the willingness of some of their parents to support the Self Defense and the anti-pogrom efforts of the Russian revolutionary parties. These choices were both adaptive responses to life in the South and a move away from Jewish tradition. The experience of 1905 offers a microcosmic view of the manner in which the Ekaterinoslav Jews dealt with their conflicted situation: partly by opposing their antagonists in the same political, even violent, terms, partly by allying with political opponents of a government whose local representatives aided and abetted the pogrom, and partly by seeking support among moderates in the Duma and in the same, compromised central government organs, once they drew back from their passive support of the “black hundreds.”

A NOTE ON SOURCES

The outcast and disestablished status of Jews in the eyes of the Russian government may explain why there are practically no systematic records of Jewish social life in the state’s voluminous archives, only sporadic and circumstantial mention. There is in the Russian language a substantial, if uneven and heterogeneous, literature about Ukrainian or South Russian Jews, written by both Jews and non-Jews before 1917, but this is rarely informative about the specific circumstances of separate communities like Ekaterinoslav’s. The Yiddish language literature, which has not been consulted, may help compensate for this inadequacy. In Soviet historiography, Russian-Jewish history is a “blank spot.” For instance, in all the voluminous Soviet publications about the 1905 Revolution, recounting other crimes of the Tsarist regime against its people, the anti-Jewish pogroms, arguably one of the most important developments of the year, remain all but hidden from view. In addition, the great destructiveness of the Soviet period has taken its toll on sources bearing on the entire history of Ekaterinoslav. The chief historical archive of the region (Derzhavnyi Arkhiv Dnipropetrovs’koi Oblasti) lost a major portion of its holdings during the Second World War. Its curators claimed to the author in 2003 that 95% of its records had been destroyed, and it is likely that other areas of Jewish settlement, which coincided with the path of the German invasion, have also suffered heavy losses of historical records. Since 1991 the work of reconstructing Russian-Jewish history has accelerated, especially in Russia and Israel and increasingly in the U.S. Unfortunately, these promising beginnings will be hampered by the lack of systematic records of Russian-Jewish society, though there still remains much of interest and importance to be dug up and analyzed.