The 1881 pogrom dealt a heavy blow to Kiev's Jews, especially in the years immediately following the "disorders": according to one source, the Jewish population had dropped to 11,000 by 1885 (the official count had been 14,000 in 1874 and was certainly higher just prior to the pogrom).1 If true, this would have meant that Jews now formed only 7 percent of Kiev's populace, the lowest level for decades.2 However, another, more reliable source gives a figure of 18,000 Jews in 1887, so the decrease in population—if there was one at all—was probably slight and fleeting (as is the case throughout
The entire period under study in this book, the population statistics available to us are, at best, educated guesses).3 The city's Jewish population soon returned to its upward trajectory, and Jewish visibility—despite the pleas of the "nobles"—did not diminish but, if anything, only increased, especially in the realm of philanthropy (Jewish philanthropy will be discussed in greater detail in chapter 6). Nor did the pogrom seem to have a decisive impact on Jewish-Christian interaction in the ensuing years; as chapter 5 will show, in the everyday life of Kiev's workplaces, social clubs, and voluntary organizations, a mixture of segregation and integration between Christians and Jews meant that toleration and even camaraderie was practiced in some circles, while interethnic tension and hostility remained a fact of life. Government policies mandating or encouraging segregation, which multiplied in the 1880s and 1890s, bolstered the latter trend. On the other hand, the Kiev Literacy Society counted both Christians and Jews among its board members and operated programs open to individuals of both religions, in addition to courses geared specifically to the needs of Jewish students.4 The percentage of Jews in some public school districts was as high as 29 percent, but universities and gymnasia imposed quotas on Jewish students, while some private schools barred them altogether.5 What all this meant for the security of Kiev's Jews is difficult to determine. Residential patterns are similarly ambiguous in meaning for the historian: does the fact that there was a decrease in Jewish residential concentration in a few neighborhoods mean that Jews felt more comfortable living among Christians, or did they fear that the continued existence of Jewish "ghettos" could serve as provocation for animosity and even violence?
One piece of evidence that seems to demonstrate that interethnic tensions were—at least to some extent—always brewing beneath the surface is a report from Kiev in 1884 to a St. Petersburg newspaper, recounting the tale of a dispute between two market-women, one Jewish, the other Russian Orthodox, at the Zhitnyi bazar, which escalated to a brawl that threatened to explode into a full-scale pogrom. According to the report, the Jewish trader's husband, "a hefty Jew," gave his wife's antagonist a whack, whereupon a crowd of artisans and laborers moved in to defend the Russian woman and began to rain blows upon the Jewish man, who managed to escape from their grasp. Part of the throng scattered the Jewish woman's dried fish all over the market, while others went after the woman's husband, crying "Beat the Jews!" A passing trader managed to calm the crowd, averting large-scale violence.6 Was this a common occurrence? It is difficult to say: on the one hand, opportunities for tensions to erupt were myriad; on the other, the fact that this fracas was worthy of being printed in one of the capital's newspapers suggests that incidents of this kind were rather more rare. The incident may well have started as a simple dispute, without religious or ethnic differences playing a role, and then turned into a brouhaha when someone with an axe to grind began to yell that this was an opportunity to beat the Jews. The many details, sometimes rather peculiar, included in the report seem to vouch for its authenticity, though certain aspects—"the Jew started it by provoking a Christian"; "the mob shouts, 'Beat the Jews!'"—are reminiscent of common tropes from pogrom (or near-pogrom) narratives. (The 1883 pogrom in Ekaterinoslav was touched off by "the cries of a peasant woman at the market" after her unruly son was cuffed by a Jewish salesman.)7 Perhaps the figure of "the passing trader" is somehow representative of the pacifying effect of the small but growing sphere of civil society in urban Russia; individuals who had meaningful interactions (i. e., outside the realm of commerce) with members of other religious or ethnic groups were less likely to engage in violence against others from the same group. There is no doubt, however, that some Kievans were resentful of the so-called Jewish "takeover" of their city, which was apparently worthy of a long article in one of the capital's newspapers; in 1885, Sankt-Peterburgskie vedemosti found that Kiev was "although not yet a zhid city, will undoubtedly be that [soon]."8 The author deplored the recent "flood" of Jews into Kiev and insinuated that local officials had lost control over who was permitted to settle in the city legally.
There is no doubt that many of Kiev's Jews experienced insecurity on a daily basis, but not because of the threat of physical violence per se. Rather, they lived in "constant anxiety and fear" of the round-up (oblava), a phenomenon unique to Kiev and its labyrinth of legislation on Jewish settlement in the city. In a pattern that became increasingly frequent over the last two decades of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, Kiev police would raid Jewish homes in the middle of the night to uncover individuals or families staying in the city without the requisite permission; they were then detained, fined, and expelled (sometimes in chains along with common criminals).9 One local observer described it this way:
The ones who suffer are mostly the migrants who have come from small towns for meager earnings, but the local Jews with rights also suffer. Someone's servant is expelled, another one's clerk from the store, and sometimes, even an old mother who has come from the Pale to visit her son. In addition to ongoing surveillance, there are also frequent general "cleansings" in the form of nighttime visits to Jewish homes during which those without rights are taken away from their beds. And the ghetto has become so used to this that all the persecutions are considered to be the necessary conditions for existence here.10
Almost without exception, every description of Jewish life in Kiev from the 1880s on includes a reference to the oblavy, the disgraceful treatment of the arrestees, and the bribes required to remain in the city.11 Sholem aleichem's works contain several fictionalized descriptions of raids that are apparently based, at least in part, on his own experiences, as told in his memoir:
But [the threat of police raids and expulsion] didn't prevent anyone from going to Kiev. The Russian proverb says, "If you're afraid of the wolf, don't set foot in the forest." But despite everyone's fears of the midnight inspections, they traveled to Kiev anyway. The innkeeper saw to it that the inspections proceeded smoothly and that, God forbid, no unkosher merchandise [i. e., illegal Jews] was discovered. How? Simple. The innkeeper greased those palms that had to be greased. He got advance word of a raid and knew what to do. The forbidden goods were hidden, one in an attic, another in a cellar, someone else in a clothes closet, a fourth in a chest and a fifth in a place where no one ever dreamed that a human being could be hidden. Best of all, when they crawled back into God's world from their hiding places, everyone laughed at the whole thing, like children at hide-and-seek. If worse came to worse, they consoled themselves with a sigh: "So what! We've lived through worse times and bigger Hamans!"12
Despite the light tone of the memoirist's tale, oblavy were not usually laughing matters. In one of his fictional works, Sholem Aleichem has his protagonist Menachem-Mendl recall "that terrible time. . . when I trembled like a thief, lay freezing in misery in an attic all night or curled up like a dog in a cellar."13 In periods of stricter oversight, raids were carried out not only at night but in the daylight hours: Jews might be stopped to have their papers inspected while waiting to board the tram, or even in synagogue during services, which created a climate of "constant anxiety and fear."14 Over the course of three nights in May 1895, for example, a total of 78 Jews were arrested in the Jewish neighborhoods of the city, and all were slated for depor-tation.15 Both advocates and opponents of the tactic of expulsion acknowledged that many of the deportees soon returned to Kiev, so plentiful were the economic opportunities there. However, in some cases entire groups, such as porters and cabmen, were expelled en masse, usually because the authorities decided that the particular occupation in which these men made their living would no longer be classified among those giving Jews residence rights in the city; this happened in 1881, 1886, and again in 1891 (Simon Dubnow cites a figure of 2,000 expelled Jewish families in 1886, a huge number).16 Jewish artisans who did not meet the exact criteria required for a residence permit were summarily expelled. another, more mundane but no less menacing, danger was economic downturn leading to a dearth in employment opportunities. In the early 1890s, it seems to have been a combination of these two factors that led to the departure of high numbers of Jews from Kiev.17
Specific examples from the archives allow us to understand how the lives of Jewish artisans could be embittered by the regulations on expulsion. In 1892, Simkha Osadchii's deaf-mute son received an expulsion order after he reached his eighteenth birthday. The local authorities ruled that the son, once of the age of majority and despite his disability, could no longer remain with his father in Kiev, but Osadchii appealed the ruling all the way to the Senate in St. Petersburg, which overturned the order in 1894 and allowed the two to stay together in Kiev.18 A more mundane case—but one that nonetheless generated sheaves of memoranda and petitions, as did many of these cases (that folder alone contains sixty-six folio pages)—was that of one artisan Efshtein, who was given an expulsion order in 1894 for living in Kiev without a residence permit, and then appealed to be accepted back into the Kiev Artisan Board (remeslennaia uprava) in order to avoid the expulsion.19 The archives stacks are full of such cases, each one of which cost the government untold resources in time and money. The cost to the artisans cannot be measured by the historian. Nor was it only artisans who lived under the threat of expulsion: when the owner of a cast-iron works died in 1911, his sons were charged by a factory supervisor of trading in fabric without the necessary permit. Because Jews trading illegally outside the Pale could have their wares confiscated, the authorities ruled that the factory could be impounded. Thus, according to a correspondent for the Warsaw daily Unzer leben, a family that had lived in Kiev for several decades was expelled from the city and, most likely, ruined economically.20
While the situation of Kiev's Jews was in some ways unique, the insecurities that they faced—particularly the threats of expulsion and economic failure—were not very different from those faced by Russian Jewry as a whole. The May Laws of 1882 included a clause forbidding "new settlement" by Jews in a rural area or village; the clause was often interpreted broadly and used to expel families from areas they had inhabited for generations, forcing them into the ever more crowded towns and cities of the Pale (here we must also note the brutal expulsion in 1891 of thousands of Jews from Moscow).21 And, of course, millions of the empire's Jews, hemmed in by residential, occupational, and educational restrictions, lived in poverty, many seemingly surviving on the very air. These, indeed, were the chief threats to Russian Jewry and the primary incentive for emigration. Whether it is wise to refer to government restrictions as a "legislative pogrom," a "cold pogrom," or a "silent pogrom" is open to debate, but perhaps these terms obscure unnecessarily the very important distinction between physical violence and administrative measures, however cruel.22 More significantly, they elide the largely socioeconomic factors that contributed to the 1881-82 pogroms (which were not organized by the government) and the political and ideational characteristics of the official restrictions that followed.
That the real threat to Kiev's Jews lay not in the mob but in the authorities seemed to be bolstered by a suggestion made by right-wing city councilor F. N. lasnogurskii in 1902, that the city petition the government for permission to expel all of its Jews. The mayor moved that as the proposal did not fall under the purview of the municipal administration, that it not even be accepted for consideration. While this was clearly not an idea that most people considered desirable or even realistic, the fact that such a suggestion could be made in the city council at all must have been unsettling, to say the least.23
World History
