Kiev also had its share of groups that explicitly excluded Jews from membership or advocated anti-Jewish policies. anti-Jewish groups such as the Union of Russian People were quite active in Kiev, viewing themselves as defenders of Russianness in a part of the empire "threatened" by the existence of significant minorities such as Jews and Ukrainians, especially with the rise of openly nationalist movements among these groups after 1905.79 As Eugene avrutin notes, the Revolution of 1905 also "popularized racist stereotypes and images as violence and disorganization erupted, as censorship laws and public opinion were liberalized, and as commercial culture proliferated."80 also very influential—in addition to the hoary myth of Jewish exploitation and parasitism—was the growing belief among many non-Jews that Jews represented a serious threat to the very existence of the empire. Indeed, one of the most prominent groupings within the Russian nationalist movement as a whole in the post-1905 empire was the Kiev Club of Russian Nationalists.81 The Kiev Russian assembly (Kievskoe russkoe sobranie; originally a branch of a national movement but later independent) was founded to promote "Orthodoxy and autocracy, the rights of the state, and the distinctive features of the Russian people."82 Non-Christians could not be members. Lectures held in the years leading up to the First World War included a talk on the evils of Ukrainian separatism, but much more energy was devoted to what club members viewed as the Jewish threat to Russia. In the eyes of the organization's leaders, the most important of whom was Father G. la. Prozorov, organized Jewry was planning to destroy the Russian state and enslave the Russian people. The "all-powerful Jewish ka-hal" was also blamed for the Beilis affair, which was an opportunity to do away once and for all with the "indignation that Russian Kievans must suffer who do not submit to Hebrew suggestions and temptations."83 The Kiev Rus-
Sian Sports Society (Kievskoe russkoe sportivnoe obshchestvo) restricted its membership to individuals of Russian descent and Christian faith: even Jews who had converted to Christianity were banned.84
Two of the organizations mentioned above—the Union of Russian People and the Russian Assembly—joined forces with four other nationalist groups or local party branches (the Party of Legal Order, the Russian Monarchist Party, the Union of Russian Workers, and the Russian Brotherhood) after the elections to the First Duma to establish "a powerful rightist coalition" that campaigned in the next election as the United Rightist Parties of Kiev. This coalition, adopting a stridently conservative and at times antisemitic platform, and drawing on support from wide swathes of ethnic Russians from across the socioeconomic spectrum, "gained an absolute majority of the vote, making Kiev the only city in the empire, except for Kishinev, to go rightist in the second elections."85 With 51 percent of the vote against the Kadets' 48 percent in the elections of late 1906, the rightists were empowered to decide who would be chosen as Kiev's representative to the Second Duma.86 In the 1907 elections to the Third Duma, Kiev was the only city of the six in the empire with separate representation to elect a rightist, who was one of two deputies from Kiev (the other was a Kadet).87
As we have seen, the leader of a constituent organization of the rightist coalition, the Kiev Russian Assembly, was a priest. This was hardly a coincidence, since some segments of the Russian Orthodox Church—usually on the lower levels of the ecclesiastical hierarchy—took an active role in promoting Judeophobic sentiment. After the 1905 pogrom, the authorities investigated claims that proclamations calling for the beating of Jews and Poles had been printed at Kiev's Caves Monastery.88 In 1912, the anniversary of the slaying of Andrei Iushchinskii, the boy who had supposedly been the victim of a Jewish ritual murder at the hands of Mendel Beilis, was marked with a commemoration at the Cathedral of St. Sofia.89 And the upper ranks of the clergy of Kiev province were reported to be in attendance at a provincial conference of the Union of Russian People, along with the governor and the regional military commander.90 Notably, however, no Orthodox priests could be found who were willing to testify to the truth of the blood accusation in the Beilis case.91
It is worth noting that even after the 1881 pogrom, which dealt a considerable blow to the Jewish community, the threat of pogrom seems to have played strikingly little role in the lives of Kiev Jewry in the quarter-century that followed (i. e., until 1905). In this period, at least, interethnic violence was seen as a rare phenomenon; Kiev Jews lived in far greater fear of the oblava, the police roundup of Jews living illegally in Kiev, who were subject to arrest and immediate expulsion from the city.92 As we have seen, the opportunities for Jewish-Christian interaction in the civil sphere that existed in some numbers before 1905 shrank considerably after that year and the pogrom it brought for Kiev's Jews. One clear illustration of this trend is the drop in Jewish attendance at the library of the Kiev Literacy Society in the year after the 1905 pogrom: Jews as a proportion of all subscribers fell from 55 to 32 percent.93 This suggests that the outbreak of anti-Jewish violence, while generally outside the norm, made Jews much less likely to mingle with Christians even in public spaces like libraries. Although it is possible that the pogrom was, at least in part, a backlash against increasing Jewish participation in civic life and civil society, it seems more likely that, as Hans Rogger suggests, it was the image of the Jew as revolutionary and seditionist that drove the xenophobic nationalists who whipped up the riotous mob and—when it was not vodka and plunder that was motivating them—the members of the mob themselves.94
Some non-Jewish Kievans made deliberate attempts to show their Jewish fellow subjects that not everyone supported the violence: many donated to the fund established after the pogrom to aid needy victims.95 Moreover, in the wake of the pogrom, workers at some factories held meetings, vowing to expel from their collectives anyone who had participated in the pogrom; some pledged to defend Jews against future attacks.96 And in May 1906, about 150 workers at one of Kiev's shipbuilding yards passed a resolution decrying the possibility of another pogrom, calling for an end to attacks on defenseless citizens, and asking all workers "to defend citizens from attacks on their freedom, life, and property."97
In the years that followed, Kiev's civil society continued to show a certain resistance to anti-Jewish policies and attitudes. At various times after 1905, Kiev merchants petitioned the government to call off planned expulsions of Jews from Kiev, since these would cause economic harm to the city, and even to include Kiev within the Pale of Settlement, presumably to eliminate the burdensome restrictions on Jewish economic activity.98 The administrations of institutions of higher education were apparently also interested in alleviating the onerous conditions under which their students lived: in 1906 the rector of St. Vladimir's University and the director of the Women's Higher Courses requested liberalized residence permits for their students.99 For their part, middle-class Russian and Jewish professionals established a Society for the Promotion of the Dissemination of Accurate Information on Jews and Judaism (Obshchestvo sodeistvuiushchego rasprostraneniiu vernykh svedenii o evreiakh i evreistve) on the model of the first such society in Moscow. The Kiev society took the opportunity to address Jewish stereotypes prevalent in Ukraine with the publication of its first brochure, "Did Jews Lease Christian Churches in Ukraine?"100
Despite these efforts, the trend among Jews after 1905 was to turn inward. Discouraged by growing persecution and political reaction, many sought succor in the Jewish nationalist movement. Those who did not give up hope in a multiethnic and harmonious Russian Empire faced an uphill battle in a society growing more fragmented by the day.
World History
