Revolutions in Communal Life

The tumultuous period from the Kishinev pogrom in April 1903 through the years of the First Russian Revolution of 1905-1907 witnessed the beginning of the mass politicization and mobilization of Russian Jewish society, as of the entire empire, and the legitimization of the leadership of new political forces in Russian Jewry, the socialists and the nationalists.1 Revolutionary groups—among them the Bund (the General Union of Jewish Workers, the most prominent Jewish socialist party in the Russian Empire)—seized the initiative, especially during the heady days of the industrial strikes leading into the crippling general strike of October and November. The Bund's activities during the months of upheaval, and especially its leadership role in Jewish defense operations, worked to its political advantage, especially among the radical youth. Its self-defense initiatives made it particularly popular among Jews in many cities and towns whose lasting impression of 1905 was not one of liberation but of a series of vicious pogroms initiated by chauvinist groups like the Black Hundreds against Jews as ostensible "revolutionary agitators" and "enemies of the tsar." Russian Zionists, who had previously focused their energies on settlement in Palestine, found themselves without clear direction when revolution came, but managed to win back some political capital in the months immediately following the revolution. Zionism needed to change rapidly in order to maintain its relevance; it was due in large measure to Vladimir Jabotinsky—journalist, brilliant orator, and new leader on the Russian Zionist stage—and his call for Zionist participation in Russian political life that the movement once again regained a central position in the Russian Jewish arena.2 For their part, Jewish liberals weighed their options in the face of a radically new political climate. After October 1905 and the Bund's crisis of confidence leading to its reunification with the Russian Social Democratic Party, other political camps attempted to take advantage of the opportune moment in order to gain momentum. Zionists advocated a Jewish National Assembly to offer leadership for all of Russian Jewry; liberals, along with some Zionists and other parties, created the Union for Equal Rights to lobby for emancipation; and socialist Zionists, who had broken off from the labor Zionist Poalei-Tsion to establish

Independent parties such as the revolutionary territorialist SERP just before the revolution, now tried to push their agendas forward. As Elise Kimerling Wirtschafter writes, "the revolution of 1905-1907 was a time of massive societal organizing and broad-based 'unionization' among economic, educated, and administrative elites, as well as among peasants, artisans, workers, and common laborers."3 Jews were only one of many ethnic groups in the empire for whom the revolution became a vehicle for rising nationalist feelings.4

The impact of the revolution on the Jewish community was far-reaching. Russian Jewish society was transformed by widespread hopes for the democracy that the October Manifesto would bring about, political mobilization on a mass scale, and the legalization of political parties, trade unions, the press, and other institutions. The parties themselves experienced an unprecedented "drive for democratization and openness."5 But as the case of Kiev reveals, Jews reacted differently according to their socioeconomic position and relationship to imperial society. Particularly after the bloody pogrom of October 1905, the masses, for the most part, withdrew into themselves, distrustful of the city that had betrayed them so cruelly and violently and intent on pouring their remaining strength into assisting the victims of the pogrom. The intelligentsia, on the other hand, continued to look hopefully outward for allies during the heady days of campaigns and elections for the new Duma, and saw the salvation of Russia's Jews in political affiliation and participation.6 For them, and for those members of the Jewish proletariat whom they managed to convince, the widespread sense of possibility and excitement lasted through 1906 and into 1907, until the dispersal of the Second Duma in June of that year. Jewish participation in the elections for the State Dumas, and the Jewish National Assembly proposed by the Zionists, made electoral politics and the issue of representation even more central than before.

Thus, the new labor Zionist and territorialist parties founded in the wake of 1905 steadily gained strength, and their energized members were often at the forefront of a new "democratic" movement within the newly politicized local Jewish communities, including Kiev. Even Max Mandel’shtam and his Territorialists, who saw no long-term future for Jews in Russia and poured much of their energy into making mass emigration a real possibility for Russian Jewry, also devoted themselves to the democratization of the institutions of Russian Jewish life.7 By contrast, the Bund went into a steep decline, with the government cracking down on its activities and publications and many party activists and members emigrating to the United States. As

Joshua Zimmerman writes, "One symptom of declining membership and moral was the sharp reduction in funds after 1907. The party lost over two-thirds of its income between 1908 and 1910."8 Nonetheless, many of those Bundists who remained in the Russian Empire continued to play an active role in the liberationist movement, as well as in communal politics. That this decline played out on the local level is evidenced by the intracommunal struggles in Kiev in the immediate post-revolutionary years.

Indeed, it is not hard to see why many Jews wanted change at the local level: how could there be a revolution in national politics without any change in communal governance? Progressive Jews were no longer willing to allow "their" institutions to be led by individuals whom they considered to be governing unjustly and without democratic sanction. With local partisans fighting bitterly for control of institutions and funds and for the claim to the mantle of local leadership, the loci of the struggles in Kiev were the Kiev branch of the Union for the Attainment of Full Equality for the Jewish People in Russia (Soiuz dlia Dostizheniia Polnopraviia Evreiskogo Naroda v Rossii), the Crown rabbinate, the Representation for Jewish Welfare acting as the communal governing board, and the Kiev Branch of the OPE. The new politics forced public figures to demonstrate the legitimacy of their claim to power: the established, plutocratic leadership tried to maintain its authority with claims of experience and influence, while nationalists insisted that only they spoke for the masses. Some scholars have argued that the shift in Russian Jewish political orientation toward self-liberation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century obviated further leadership by the "notables."9 However, events in Kiev suggest that this was not the case, but rather that the wealthy continued to lead the community. Especially in the earliest years of Jewish "self-emancipation," but later on as well, new organizations such as Hovevei Zion did not at first constitute an alternate base of power but rather were supported by both maskilim and notables.

As Jewish liberationist politics matured and spawned movements and ideologies, it often found itself in confrontation with the notables and their vision for Russian Jewry; in this, Kiev was no exception, as we shall see.10 Indeed, those who continued to believe in the liberal vision of emancipation ascribed to a politics of their own.11 In the battle between the two camps, however, neither side could maintain its uncompromising position for long; local circumstances and contingencies called for pragmatism, not stubborn idealism. Rabbi Solomon Lur’e, Crown rabbi of Kiev from 1903 to 1906 and a self-proclaimed representative of the Jewish masses, began to display some of the same despotic tendencies of which he accused the elite; then, after engineering Lur’e's ouster, the notables actually proceeded to appropriate some of his political objectives (or at least his rhetoric). The OPE opposed the Kiev Jewish establishment, but was unable to make headway without the financial support it had lost by doing so, while the plutocrats were compelled to hold elections for the Representation for Jewish Welfare and adopt the populist language of their opponents. While ideological resoluteness might play well in party platforms and the partisan press, activists on the ground were finding that communal politics of necessity required compromises of all.

Amid the sea of words, arguments, opinions, and denunciations that we will wade into, however, we will find precious few emanating from the mouths of the very masses whom the wealthy elite and the educated professional claimed to represent. Other than the glimpses we catch in the words of a few petitions submitted to the authorities, they were silent. So where was this "community," these "masses," whose leadership our protagonists wanted to capture? Undoubtedly, they were hard at work trying to make a living, recovering and recouping their losses after the 1905 pogrom, and perhaps evading the police to avoid expulsion from the city. Some lived just outside the city limits and thus had to spend additional time commuting every morning—many even by ferry, across the Dnepr from the suburb of Slobodka. For these Jews, communal politics, despite its importance in some respects (the funding of Jewish institutions was clearly a significant matter), could not be a full-time pursuit.