Читаем Putin's Wars полностью

The new great Russian nationalism very soon developed ugly features. Not only did it lead to a growing repression of non-Russian nationalities, such as the Poles, but also of other minorities of “foreign race” (inorodtsy) that could not be assimilated. In the first place Jews were targeted. The discrimination and scapegoating of Jews became an official state policy. Since 1791, during the reign of Catherine the Great, there had existed already in Russia a policy aimed at restricting the rights of Jews. In that year the Pale of Settlement was introduced. This measure restricted the territory on which the Jews had the right to live. It included the Western border region of the empire (the word “Pale” indicated “border”) and comprised a territory that approximately covered the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. This territory consisted, globally, of Poland, Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine, Bessarabia, and only a small part of Russia proper. Eighty percent of the European part of the Russian empire was “forbidden to Jews” (although there were a few exceptions). Additionally, many towns within the Pale itself were closed to Jews. In 1795, after the third partition of Poland, when Russia annexed Eastern Poland and Poland ceased to exist as an independent state, the Jewish population in the Pale Settlement swelled to approximately five million, creating the greatest concentration of Jews in the world. This concentration within a restricted area made them vulnerable to attacks.

This is what happened after the murder of tsar Alexander II in 1881, when immediately the Jews were accused of the murder. It led to a wave of pogroms in the South of the empire, characterized by looting, rape, and murder. This wave of violence went on for three years. The government not only failed to persecute the offenders, but overtly and secretly supported the movement. The eminence grise of the regime, Pobedonostsev, a known anti-Semite, was quoted as having said that “a third of the Jews will be converted, a third will emigrate, and the rest will die of hunger.” He was the man behind many new repressive measures, such as the May Laws, issued in 1882, banning Jews from rural areas and towns with more than ten thousand inhabitants. Jewish property in rural areas was confiscated and at universities quota were imposed restricting the number of Jewish students. Official, state-sponsored anti-Semitism and popular anti-Semitism, fed by resentment, went hand in hand. According to Leonid Luks, “in this struggle to bind the people to the regime anti-Jewish slogans would play an increasingly important role. There was an ever-increasing tendency amongst the conservatives to associate the sharp social and political conflicts in the country, as well as several foreign policy drawbacks suffered by the tsarist empire (Congress of Berlin, 1878), with the activities of international Jewry.”^[37] A leading role in spreading anti-Jewish sentiments was played by the chauvinist and fiercely anti-Semitic Pan Slav movement that quickly grew in strength at the end of the century and reached its apogee after the lost war with Japan and the subsequent revolution in 1905.