Hans Rogger, Government, Jews, Peasants, and land in Post-Emancipation Russia. Two specters: Peasant violence and Jewish exploitation

Hans Rogger covers the topic with an unusual thoroughness. What he reports about Jewish economic exploitation may

fall outside the comfort zone of some readers. However the paper underscores the pressure Jews were facing for survival and 

provides a plausible backdrop for the motivation to emigrate, in spite of all its burdens and challenges.

A tribute to the late author is found at this link:

https://muse.jhu.edu/login?auth=0&type=summary&url=/journals/jewish_social_studies/v011/11.1zipperstein.pdf

Download or view the original PDF version of this file

Hans Rogger
Government, Jews, peasants, and land in post-emancipation
Russia
In: Cahiers du monde russe et soviétique. Vol. 17 N°2-3. pp. 171-211.
Citer ce document / Cite this document :
Rogger Hans. Government, Jews, peasants, and land in post-emancipation Russia. In: Cahiers du monde russe et soviétique.
Vol. 17 N°2-3. pp. 171-211.
doi : 10.3406/cmr.1976.1262
http://www.persee.fr/web/revues/home/prescript/article/cmr_0008-0160_1976_num_17_2_1262

Résumé
Hans Rogger, Le Gouvernement, les Juifs, les paysans et la terre dans la Russie d'après
l'émancipation.
Dans le vaste ensemble de la législation qui fixait la manière d'agir de la Russie tsariste envers la
population juive, rien n'était observé avec plus d'opiniâtreté ni de rigueur que les lois, règlements et
ordonnances apportant des restrictions aux droits des Juifs de résider, de posséder ou d'affermer la
terre dans les districts ruraux du pays. Même lorsque les bouleversements de la guerre contraignirent à
abandonner la « zone d'établissement », cause première et symbole du statut inférieur des Juifs, la
campagne resta fermée à ces derniers. Une politique discriminatoire qui était mise au point si nettement
et conservée si longtemps devait être enracinée dans quelque chose de plus que des préjugés
traditionnels, d'autant qu'elle entrait à l'occasion en conflit avec les intérêts fiscaux de l'État et encore
plus souvent avec ceux de la noblesse terrienne. Nos recherches ont abouti à la conclusion que c'est
dans la relation entre les Juifs et les questions agraires, c'est-à-dire dans la façon dont ces questions
étaient perçues (et traitées) par les autorités russes, qu'il faut chercher pourquoi ces dernières
s'obstinaient à refuser d'étendre les droits des Juifs à la campagne. Le parti pris antisémite s'alliait à
une attitude craintive et paternaliste envers la paysannerie pour fixer des limites strictes à
l'émancipation des Juifs et pour justifier le maintien de la discrimination légale.
Abstract
Hans Rogger, Government, Jews, peasants, and land in post-emancipation Russia.
In the vast body of legislation that governed Imperial Russia's treatment of its Jewish population,
nothing was adhered to with more persistence or stringency than the laws, rules and regulations
restricting the rights of Jews to live, as well as to own or lease land, in the rural districts of the country.
Even when the upheaval of war made necessary the abandonment of the Pale of Settlement — that
prime source and symbol of the inferior status of the Jews — the countryside remained closed to them.
A discriminatory policy which was so sharply focused and so long maintained had to be rooted in more
than traditional prejudices, the more so since it conflicted on occasion with the fiscal interests of the
State and more often with those of the landed gentry. Our investigation concludes that it is in the nexus
between the Jewish and the agrarian problems — that is, in the way in which these problems were
perceived (and related) by Russian officials — that the explanation for their tenacious resistance to
expanding Jewish rights in the countryside must be sought. Anti-Jewish bias joined with a paternalistic
and fearful attitude toward the peasantry to place severe limits on Jewish emancipation and to
rationalize the maintenance of legal discrimination.

HANS ROGGER 
GOVERNMENT, JEWS, PEASANTS, AND LAND 
IN POST-EMANCIPATION RUSSIA* 
Two specters: Peasant violence and Jewish exploitation 
III 
If St. Petersburg was at first disposed to see in the excesses of the 
South Russian mobs the sinister hand of revolution, that view soon 
gave way to one that was more familiar and comforting and which 
became more readily acceptable as the conspiracy which had killed 
Alexander II was revealed to be not nearly as far-flung and well-organized 
as had been feared. True, some of the reports coming in from the affected 
localities spoke of the distress and confusion that news of the assassination 
had sowed in the public mind, how that mood had been utilized by 
revolutionary agitators and had contributed to the outbreak and spread 
of pogroms. But their fundamental cause, the government was told 
by its representatives in the provinces, was what would soon be called 
the "abnormal" economic relationships between Jews and the lower 
classes of the Christian population, especially the peasants. As Major- 
General P. I. Kutaisov, special emissary for the investigation of the 
disorders, concluded: not the religious question, not hostility for the 
followers of the law of Moses, but the heavy weight of their pitiless 
economic oppression, felt chiefly by the rural classes, had provoked the 
popular movement against the Jews.1 After a century of complaints 
against the village Jews and a century of efforts to neutralize or remove 
them, such an explanation found a ready hearing, the more so since it 
was echoed by other trusted and highly placed functionaries. 
Prince D. I. Sviatopolk-Mirskii, a hero of the Russo-Turkish War and 
Governor-General of Khar'kov at the time of the pogroms, not only 
ascribed the outburst of mass violence to the feeling of ignorant men 
that they were helpless in the face of Jewish exploitation and that the 
government had abandoned them; he also gave voice to the belief, which 
had been gaining ground among critics of the Great Reforms, that the 
end of serfdom, the removal of the landlords' patriarchal authority and 
protection, had left the peasants all the more vulnerable to Jewish machi- 
* La première partie de cette étude a paru dans les CMRS, XVII (i), 1976, 
PP- 5-25- 
Cahiers du Monde russe et soviétique, XVII (2-3), avr.-sept. igj6,pp. iyi-211.

172	HANS ROGGER 
nations. And when they turned to the courts to extricate themselves 
from the dishonest deals in which the Jews had ensnared them, simple 
folk who had no understanding of legal intricacies and little appreciation 
of the binding force of contracts they considered unfair, were bound 
to be further disappointed, to feel that there was no relying on the law 
or its agents. Nor were the meshchane, living in or near the semi-rural 
townlets, mestechki, better off. They too had suffered since emancipation, 
losing rural customers and employment, hard-pressed at every step by 
Jewish competitors in their role as small producers, traders, or shop
keepers, and in their farming (for most of them a subsidiary or even main 
activity) even worse off than the peasants who were at least assured 
of a plot of land. "In a word, in all spheres of public life, the Jews 
are a sinister force directed against the Russian people and the existing 
order of things, a force against which, in the eyes of the people, neither 
individual citizens nor the state can prevail. This may be the root of 
the conviction which has taken hold in the public mind, that the authorit
ies, unable to deal with them in other ways, have permitted the de
spoiling of the Jews."2 
From Odessa, where he was now civil and military governor, Prince 
Dondukov-Korsakov wrote much the same thing, feeling no doubt 
that his predictions had come true. The exploitation, by Jews who 
had grasped all branches of commerce in town and country, of the local 
people, their inability to use or counter the predatory methods of the 
Jews, explained the constant and extreme antagonism of the rural and 
lower classes. It was this deepseated antipathy, heightened by the 
Jews' latest economic triumphs and intensified by a crisis in business 
and agriculture, that the tragedy of March 1 had caused to explode in a 
burst of violence which, in its later phases, revolutionary agitation had 
helped to spread. A. R. Drenteln, the Governor-General of Kiev, 
dismissed as unfounded the rumor that radical propagandists had had 
a hand in preparing the pogroms or guiding their course. Religious 
enmity might have played a part, but the underlying cause, he agreed 
with his colleagues, was the "deep hatred of the narod, Great Russian 
and even more Little Russian, for the ruthless and deceptive business 
practices of the Jews who victimize a trusting people, seek easy gain, and 
evade their taxes and public duties. . ."3 In Kiev, as in Chernigov and 
Bessarabia, Kutaisov noted, it was particularly the villagers who were 
ill-used by Jewish moneylenders and tavern-keepers, a point also made 
by several zemstvo assemblies.4 His assessment of the disturbances 
diverged from that made by other officials only in one respect; he criticized 
the lack of decisiveness and determination the police and army had 
shown in a number of instances. 
That important fact was largely ignored in the reactions of the highest 
organs of the central administration to the communications they received. 
Secret instructions issued to district police officers to protect simple- 
minded peasants from wily Jews6 indicate that St. Petersburg was. 
losing sight of other factors that had been mentioned as playing at least 
a subsidiary role. When the Minister of Interior, Count N. P. Ignat'ev, 
gave Alexander III his views on the origin of the riots (21 August 1881), 
one issue had come to dominate all others.

JEWS, PEASANTS, AND LAND IN RUSSIA 173 
"Having recognized how harmful to the Christian population 
of the country is the economic activity of the Jews, their tribal 
seclusion and religious fanaticism, the government for the past 
twenty years strove by a whole series of measures to promote 
their assimilation and almost equalized their rights with those 
of the native inhabitants. In the meantime, the anti- Jewish 
movement which began this year in the South [. . .] has proved 
irrefutably that in spite of all the government's efforts, the 
abnormal relations between the Jews and the indigenous inhabi
tants continue as before [. . .] The main reason for behavior 
so uncharacteristic of Russians lies in circumstances of an exclu
sively economic kind. In the last twenty years the Jews, little 
by little, have taken over not only trade and production but 
through rent or purchase significant amounts of landed property. 
Because of their clannishness and solidarity, all but a few of them 
have bent every effort not to increase the productive forces of the 
country but to exploit the native inhabitants, and primarily 
the poorer classes. This provoked the protest of the latter, 
finding such deplorable expression in acts of violence. [. . .] 
Having energetically put down the disorders and stopped the 
people from taking the law into their own hands in order to 
safeguard the Jews from violence, an even-handed government 
must immediately take no less energetic steps to remove the 
abnormal conditions which now exist between Jews and natives 
and protect the latter from that pernicious activity which, 
according to the local authorities, was responsible for the di
sturbances."6 
How that was to be done, Ignat'ev proposed to leave to the commiss
ions composed of representatives of the nobility, peasantry, local 
governments, and Jews which would meet in the 15 provinces of the 
Pale and Khar'kov to discuss the questions put to them by the minister: 
what aspect of the Jewish role in the economy was particularly harmful; 
what practical obstacles were there to the enforcement of the laws on 
leasing and buying land, on lending money and selling spirits; what 
legislative and administrative remedies were required to end Jewish 
evasion of the laws and to neutralize Jewish influence over those branches 
of the economy which the commissions should find to be threatened? 
Ignat'ev's report, proposal, and questions were approved by the 
Emperor in short order (22 August), communicated to the governors 
(whose biases must have been reinforced by the echo they found in the 
capital) and through them to the commissions which they convened and 
chaired. If the purpose of Ignat'ev's enterprise was more than window- 
dressing in order to calm critics at home and abroad by an ostensible 
consultation of informed members of the public — a method he followed 
in other questions — ; if he intended to do more than impress his master 
by a show of action and initiative; if, in short, the commissions were 
truly to assist him by supplying reliable information and wise counsel, 
Ignaťev made this difficult, if not impossible, by the way in which he 
formulated his questions. They turned the commissions' deliberations

174	HANS ROGGER 
to the discovery of the most effective means for curing the Jewish affli
ction without asking how real or how grave it was. 
That Ignaťev was impatient to do something drastic and dramatic 
about the Jewish problem and that he was indifferent to the opinion 
of those who knew it at first hand, became obvious when on 19 October 
he set up another Committee on the Jews, the existing one having been 
allowed to expire. The new body, chaired by his deputy D. V. Gotov- 
tsev7, was presented at its very first meeting with a comprehensive 
scheme for the "discussion of the Jewish question in its totality" 
long 
before it could have received any but the most sketchy materials or 
recommendations from the provincial commissions. The 14 points 
of the Ignaťev-Gotovtsev project aimed at a radical reversal of the policy 
initiated in the previous reign. They would have ended the opportunities 
a few categories of Jews had been given for the improvement of their 
civil and economic status, with the most painful effects for the large 
number whose livelihood was in some way derived from the rural areas 
of the Pale and their inhabitants. There were at the time about 
550,000s Jews in the villages, but the number of those, whether they 
lived in towns or townlets, whose work or business lay wholly or in part 
outside their boundaries was vastly larger. 
The ultimate direction in which Gotovtsev and his chief wished to 
move was indicated by their recommendations to suspend further admis
sions to the interior, "until the definitive solution of the Jewish question," 
to return to the Pale artisans who did not follow their trades, to introduce 
a nwmerus clausus in education as well as in town and county councils 
and assemblies. Most of their points had more immediate goals. They 
called for the removal of Jews from villages at the request of the commune 
(by simple majority in case of moneylenders); forbade Jews to engage 
in the liquor trade in the countryside, while restricting it in the towns, 
and to conduct business on Sundays and Christian holy days. Jews 
would no longer be allowed to sell in villages goods they had not made 
themselves; their buying and selling of foodstuffs was to be closely super
vised; suits brought by Jews against peasants for nonpayment of debt 
could be stopped on a number of grounds if contested by defendants; 
no Jews, with the exception of licensed advocates, were to represent 
anyone but themselves before Justices of the Peace or peasant courts and, 
finally, Jews were no longer to lease or buy land. 
What contemporaries called the "muzhikophilism" of Ignat'ev's 
administration became still more pronounced in the deliberations of 
the Gotovtsev Committee. They produced in February 1882 a set of 
four emergency measures whose immediate adoption was urged in order 
to forestall the renewal of mob violence in the coming Spring. Although 
the excesses of the mob had originated in the towns, the peasants had so 
much become the focus of the Committee's attention that it was felt 
necessary, as one member said, to "give them a visible demonstration 
of the government's concern for their protection from Jewish exploi
tation." Fundamental legislative remedies could be devised at a later 
date; temporary preventive steps for the villages shoud be taken without 
delay. Outside of towns and townlets Jews should be forbidden to live; 
to build, buy, or rent houses; to own, lease, use, or manage land; or to sell

JEWS, PEASANTS, AND LAND IN RUSSIA	175 
liquor. The removal of Jews from their midst, and the right to petition 
for their exclusion from landlords' estates, the Committee proposed to 
entrust to the peasants themselves by simple majority of the village 
meeting, as opposed to the two-thirds vote required normally. 
Ignaťev, not surprisingly, embraced the project which so closely 
reflected his own thinking and inspiration, merely adding two refinements. 
Those Jewish mechanics and artisans who had the right of universal 
residence were to be admitted only to the towns of the interior, and out 
of respect for the religious feelings of Russians, Jews should be enjoined 
from doing business on Sundays and feast days. Anticipating difficulties 
in the Council of State, whose senior members were apt to make haste 
slowly or even to display a measure of independence when they were 
asked to abrogate or circumvent existing laws, Ignaťev presented 
the joint product of his own and the Gotovtsev Committee's labors to 
the Committee of Ministers on 4 March 1882, hoping that it would there 
be promulgated quickly as a ministerial order and then be approved 
by the Emperor.9 
Ignaťev was only partially successful with his colleagues. That he 
did not fail entirely was due almost exclusively to the pro-peasant bias of 
his project and to the insistence of the Jewish Committee that action was 
demanded in the interests not only of the peasants but of the Jews 
themselves whom the government was in no position to defend from 
attack in each of the hundreds of villages in which they lived. It was 
a plea which some of the ministers, in view of its source, met with scepti
cism but none would risk not doing at least something that might conceiv
ably be of use in maintaining law and order. Nor could the ministers 
be at all certain that what they had been told about the pogroms was 
either deliberately or unconsciously distorted or based on inadequate 
and incorrect information supplied by local authorities who wished to 
show that they were blameless or helpless. They had made no inde
pendent inquiries, had no reliable data on the disturbances themselves, 
on the degree of peasant participation or, indeed, on the character or 
consequences of Jewish economic activity in the affected towns and 
villages. It was not in the latter, official and non-official studies sub
sequently pointed out, that the violence had originated, yet neither the 
countryside nor its inhabitants had remained immune. 
Besides, it was impossible to make rigorous administrative or social 
distinctions between town and country. In the larger cities, where urban 
laborers, many of them recent arrivals from Great Russian gubernii, made 
up the rampaging mobs10, one might perhaps dismiss peasant distress 
or anger as a direct cause of pogroms. But even there, and much more 
so in the smaller country towns, many city dwellers retained economic, 
personal, and legal links with the surrounding countryside. This was 
even more true in the townlets, the mestechki, which had in 1875 been 
given self-governing institutions much like those of the towns, but 
which were frequently as small as villages and populated by large numbers 
of peasants. The census of 1897 showed that at that late date fully 
half of the 14,3 million non- Jews living in Russia's cities belonged to the 
peasant estate,11 and a Jewish author writing in 1877, noted that in 
several provinces of the Pale — including Kiev, Volynia, and Podolia — the

I76	HANS ROGGER 
greater part of the Christian townsmen was no different from the country 
people and engaged mainly in agricultural occupations. In Ukrainian 
towns, he added, Jewish keepers of taverns and shops were all involved 
in the grain trade with peasants, although well-to-do peasants were 
the main purchasers.12 If the most sober and reliable student of the 
reign of Alexander III could write as recently as 1964 that the pogroms 
had as their special target the small and middle Jewish rural bourgeoisie,13 
it should cause little surprise that even those of Ignat'ev's colleagues 
who wished to do so were in a poor position to challenge his version of 
events which they wanted at all costs to keep from happening again.14 
Ignaťev, moreover, could cite the findings of the provincial commiss
ions that had become available by the early part of the year in support 
of his program. The record of their discussions and resolutions shows 
that although the minister had tried to predetermine the conclusions, 
which were predominantly hostile to the Jews, they were far from 
endorsing his long-range plans or even giving unqualified or unanimous 
approval to his temporary measures. The commissions did, however, 
address at length the problem-complex Jews-peasants-land and enough 
of them favored the course set in the capital, either in whole or in part, 
to allow Ignaťev to claim that it was demanded or endorsed by public 
opinion. It was in two areas in particular that the commissions echoed 
the initiative of the Ministry of Interior — the sale of liquor to peasants 
(which twelve of their number wished to see stopped and the rest rigor
ously controlled) and land acquisition.15 
As its motive for wanting to restrict the latter, the Gotovtsev 
Committee had given the Jews' distaste for agriculture, the poor showing 
they had made in the colonies, the rights they would acquire as land
owners, and the land hunger of the peasantry. One might question 
Jewish incapacity or dislike for tilling the soil; wonder just what special 
rights their ownership of land would have conferred; and speculate that 
emotion as much as pragmatic reasons, unconscious as much as conscious 
factors, determined the wish to keep Jews off the soil and out of the 
agrarian estate in order to deny them the values and dignity associated 
with owning and working the land. But one could not ignore the growing 
land shortage among the peasantry or the migration of needy villagers 
into the towns of Ukraine, where the influx of Jewish capital had been 
most sudden and the extent of Jewish leaseholding greatest.16 Awareness 
of these facts, along with bureaucratic guidance and anti- Jewish preju
dices, must have influenced the work of the commissions. At least 
thirteen of these — the record is not always clear or complete — declared 
for some sort of inhibition on Jewish land purchases in rural districts, 
most often for the stated purpose of aiding the peasants. 
In degree of severity, the new legislation proposed covered a wide 
range. Four commissions were for an absolute prohibition on Jews 
purchasing real estate in the villages (Kherson, Ekaterinoslav, Volynia, 
Mogilev); three (Vil'no, Khar' kov, Chernigov) were prepared to make 
exceptions for guild merchants who needed land mainly for manufacturing 
enterprises. Vitebsk, Minsk, and Kiev demanded that no peasant land 
pass into Jewish possession, and Taurida wished to control such transfers.

JEWS, PEASANTS, AND LAND IN RUSSIA 177 
Bessarabia wanted to prevent purchase of properties of fewer than 
500 desiatiny (presumably to attract only buyers with enough capital 
for commercial farming and to avoid driving up prices for small parcels 
of land), while Grodno, denying Jews the right to hold mortgages on land 
since they were barred from owning it, also proposed that to reduce their 
numbers in the Pale they be allowed to acquire land for agricultural 
colonies outside its borders. 
On the issue of land leasing the pattern of views expressed was roughly 
similar, with a somewhat greater degree of uncertainty and division due, 
perhaps, to a reluctance to deprive gentry owners of a steady source of 
income. Four commissions favored an end to all Jewish leaseholding 
in the countryside; five wished to see it prohibited for peasant land 
alone; another four advocated certain lesser restrictions and conditions. 
For some commissions the question of Jews renting or owning land in 
the villages was overshadowed by the larger one of their presence there 
which three opposed altogether and eleven wished to see limited or 
subjected to control by the village commune. Ten commissions pro
nounced in favor of a variety of restrictions on Jewish petty traders 
and produce dealers in the villages. 
A sampling of the opinions voiced illustrates the recurrence of familiar 
themes and fears whose strength and persistence it is difficult to explain 
simply as the result of ministerial machinations. Kherson deplored 
both Jewish owning and leasing of land, the latter being thought the 
most harmful. Even ownership, although it amounted to only 6.5% 
of the total area, was considered dangerous since it was by way of becomi
ng dominant, making the Jews a landed as well as a moneyed aristoc
racy. They were already too powerful competitors of the peasants 
for leases of crown land and had therefore to be kept from bidding for it. 
Rental of private lands could, unfortunately, not be stopped without 
hurting its owners more than the Jews.17 Vitebsk, besides limiting 
purchase and rental to a maximum of 50 desiatiny of gentry land — each 
exception to require the permission of the governor — was absolutely 
opposed to the sale of entire estates to Jews and their leasing of peasant 
allotments.18 The Mogilev commission found it unthinkable that Jews 
should be allowed to acquire landed property or even to live outside of 
towns or mestechki. They were an economic and moral threat from 
which the authority of the landlord could no longer shield the peasants, 
and a political one as well, as their conduct had shown during the French 
invasion and the Polish Rebellions of 1831 and 1863. 19 
In Vil'no too it was the decline of the gentry and its desperate need 
for ready money that was said since 1861 to have caused an influx of Jews 
into the countryside as lessees of estates, dealers in lumber and grain, 
brewers, distillers and sellers of spirits. After the relatively well-to-do 
Jews came a flood of others as their stewards, clerks, agents, and domest
ics, all of whom engaged in side occupations at the expense of the 
peasants and settled in their midst. Incomplete figures, the total was 
implied to be much higher, were cited to show that in 1881 alone there 
had been up to 1,700 cases of peasants letting out part of their allotments 
to Jews who were less interested in agriculture than in living among

178	HANS ROGGER 
and off the rural population. There were, moreover, the Jews who 
lived on the lands of the gentry or other classes as leaseholders of inns, 
mills, ferries, and other privileges as well as those who where settled on a 
homestead (usad'ba) in or near the small country-towns. 
Altogether, the number of Jews who lived dispersed among the 
Christian people of the countryside without adopting their character 
or customs exceeded 100,000. Their presence was destroying the peasant 
way of life and causing an increase in crime and vice. Jewish economic 
activity admittedly brought certain benefits. This was particularly 
true of the big firms in the cities which traded in grain, flax, hemp, and 
other crops. But dependence on them, and even less on the many 
poor Jews who followed in their wake, was not a natural condition to 
which for all time the local population need be condemned. It was 
beginning to be aware of the consequences of Jewish domination and 
exploitation and to show signs of that dissatisfaction which had led to 
the outbreaks in the South.20 
The Grodno commission was disturbed alike by Jews leasing from 
nobles and peasants and by their intrusion into the villages not to work 
the land but for "mercantile" goals — to sell vodka, deal in stolen goods, 
lend money, and solicit legal business. The members of the commission 
unanimously declared the leasing of peasant land by Jews to be undesir
able and asked that it be forbidden by law. The gentry could be 
expected to look after its own interests which, it was understood, did not 
include restrictions on the right to free disposition of its property. The 
governor of the province added his recommendation that only craftsmen 
be allowed in the villages, where the overall number of Jews had to be 
quickly reduced while it was still relatively small and before it was 
too late to guard the peasants and avoid disorders.21 
In many commissions the Jews were defended, and vigorously so, 
by men who pointed out that imposing further disabilities would hardly 
end their isolation and fanaticism or put an end to that selfishness and 
sharp dealing to which poverty and discrimination had driven them. 
A minority of the Chernigov commission took this position; it nonetheless 
asked that Jews be removed from taverns and distilleries and denied 
the right to buy land in rural districts.22 Similarly, Count A. K. Sivers, 
Governor of Khar'kov, declared that the only way to avoid Jewish 
violations of the law was the widest possible extension of rights. ■ But 
this was to be done gradually and with great caution, especially where 
it meant close contacts with a rural people that was undeveloped and 
incapable of looking after its own interests. Since an owner always 
took the greatest care of his property, Jews should be allowed to acquire 
land, but leasing, because its purpose was exploitation and quick profit, 
must remain forbidden.23 Even when there was a readiness to abolish 
the Pale of Settlement — and only four commissions recorded on that 
issue endorsed its removal without reservations — it was often motivated 
by the need to thin out the Jewish population and to relieve pressure 
on the land. Five other commissions were willing to see the Pale breach
ed: Grodno for Jewish agricultural colonies anywhere in the Empire; 
Mogilev in places set aside exclusively for Jewish settlements; Podolia 
for migration to Asiatic Russia, "provided there were no political

JEWS, PEASANTS, AND LAND IN RUSSIA 179 
obstacles;" Kherson, Ekaterinoslav, and a minority of Volynia for 
residence in Russia itself, except in villages. 
It is not known whether the Committee of Ministers was at all infl
uenced by the deliberations of the provincial commissions or saw the records 
of their meetings. The ministers, in any case, resisted Ignat'ev's pleas 
for urgency and adoption of his "temporary rules" on formal as well as 
substantive grounds. Measures of such scope as he and Gotovtsev 
requested should not be promulgated outside the normal legislative 
process in the Council of State; they would cause untold suffering not 
only among hundreds of thousands of uprooted Jews but would also 
hurt the many Christians who were linked with them in a web of innu
merable commercial relationships; they would aggravate crowding in 
the cities and heighten the potential for disturbances; in the villages 
too tensions would rise because the authority given to their assemblies 
to expel would lead to bribery and abuses of power.24 
Among Ignat'ev's sharpest critics were M. Kh. Reutern, Chairman 
of the Committee of Ministers and a former Minister of Finance, and the 
incumbent of that office, N. Kh. Bunge. They saw administrative 
arbitrariness and pogroms alike as undermining property rights, the 
nation's credit and good name, its hopes for economic stability and 
growth. The State Comptroller, D. M. Sol'skii, seconded them. "Today 
they are harassing the Jews," he warned. "Tomorrow it will be the turn 
of the so-called kulaks [. . .], then of merchants and landowners. In a 
word, if the authorities stand by passively, we can expect the develop
ment in the near future of the most terrible socialism."25 
The Minister of Interior responded by stressing once again that 
the urban population was very much more capable than the rural folk 
of defending itself from the economic depradations of the Jews, a fact 
which Russian legislation had long recognized, and that an added reason 
for concentrating Jews in a smaller number of towns was the greater 
ease of insuring their safety and public order than if they were scattered 
throughout the countryside. Having weakened the strength of his 
argument by admitting that most of the pogroms had arisen in cities 
and towns, Ignaťev fell back on a second position. If the Jews now 
living in the villages were not to be expelled, others must at the very 
least be kept henceforth from coming into them. On that basis he was 
prepared to drop the request for closing villages outside the Pale to 
Jewish artisans. But he did not retreat from another of his demands: 
that the Jews be forbidden to sell drink in the villages; it was near their 
taverns, he said, that the disorders had begun and might begin again. 
For all their suspicions of what they considered to be his reckless, 
demagogic approach and his lack of sound conservative principles, 
Ignat'ev's colleagues accepted a milder version of his interpretation of 
the events of 1881. The official resume of their debates concluded that 
there was an adequate explanation for the fury with which native Chris
tians had turned upon the Jews: it was extensive indebtedness and 
dependence on them in nearly every sphere of life and labor. That 
situation was caused by the low level of literacy and education in town 
and country, as well as by the special traits of the Jewish race (plemia), 
its aggressiveness and resourcefulness in business. With such a combi-

l80	HANS ROGGER 
nation of factors it was all too easy for elements who were ever present 
and ready, to stir resentment into riot, especially, the ministers pointedly 
remarked, when the authorities failed to display the necessary determi
nation and firmness. Whatever the root causes of violence might have 
been, it was the first duty of government to prevent it and to make entirely 
clear to all that the persons and property of the Jews enjoyed the full 
protection of the laws; neither their violation by mobs nor their slack 
enforcement by officials would be tolerated.26 
Then, after turning down both the original 14 points of the Gotovtsev 
Committee and the scaled-down emergency program presented by Igna- 
t'ev, the ministers voted, "in the interests of the local population," 
to yield to his urging on three points.27 Jews not already living there 
were forbidden to take up residence in the villages (it might help to 
forestall trouble), to acquire rural real estate through lease, purchase 
or any other device, or to conduct business on Christian holy days. The 
prohibition which Ignat'ev and most of the provincial commissions 
wished to see put on the liquor traffic was rejected, either for fiscal or 
humanitarian reasons, although some minor restrictions were authorized. 
Alexander III gave his assent to the "Temporary Rules of 3 
May"i88i," 
the so-called May Laws. This legacy of Ignat'ev's year-long ministry 
survived until 1917, as did its underlying premises. His colleagues 
had not refuted them and they continued to loom large in the bureauc
ratic mind. Twenty-three years later, to the day, the Committee of 
Ministers expressed the opinion that the deplorable outbreaks of 1881 
had demonstrated the abnormal relations between Jews and other 
Russian subjects and that the source of that abnormality was the "econom- 
mic oppression of the rural population by the Jews. This basic thought 
informs the legislation issued in the reign of the Emperor Alexan
der III. . ,"28 
A more important reason for the concessions his colleagues made to 
Ignat'ev than their wish to help prevent a renewal of pogroms was their 
belief that the rules agreed to were a purely partial and temporary 
treatment of a problem requiring careful study and a comprehensive 
solution. Since Gotovtsev's Jewish Committee had failed in that regard, 
they asked the Emperor to appoint a High Commission which would 
not only examine the projects developed by its predecessor but the entire 
body of laws and regulations bearing on the Jews. Its recommendations 
would then be presented to the Council of State for discussion, imperial 
approval, and enactment. Ignat'ev's successor, Dmitrii Tolstoi, made 
this idea his own. Having taken firm steps to prevent a recurrence of 
pogroms, he convinced the Emperor in February 1883 that for their 
lasting prevention the High Commission should immediately begin its 
task, and appointed as its chairman a former Minister of Interior, 
L. S. Makov, who died shortly thereafter and was replaced by Count 
Kh. I. Pahlen, a member of the Council of State and Minister of Justice 
from 1867 to 1878. Usually known by the name of its second chairman, 
the High Commission included representatives of the chief state agencies 
concerned with Jewish matters. In five years of collecting and sifting 
materials and discussing the conclusions to be drawn from them, they 
did not shy away from questioning the presuppositions that had governed

JEWS, PEASANTS, AND LAND IN RUSSIA 181 
past policy and which they knew to be held and respected in high places.29 
It was the majority of the Pahlen Commission30 that laid bare and 
disposed of many of the grounds on which existing laws and disabilities 
were based. In the process it made the most informed, systematic, 
extensive, and dispassionate assessment ever to be made by an official 
body of the part played by the Jews in Russian life. Here at last was 
the thorough-going examination of Ignat'ev's charges which the lack 
of information or time, caution or tactical considerations, had kept the 
Committee of Ministers from making in 1882. Regarding the reports 
of the provincial governors and commissions as tainted or ill-founded, 
and aware of the almost total lack of reliable statistics on nearly every 
aspect of Jewish life, the High Commission itself collected, or caused 
to be compiled by outside experts, the data on which alone informed 
decisions could be based. 
To begin with, the Commission addressed itself in the volume which 
summarized its findings and recommendations to the question of Jewish 
numbers31 which were usually inflated by enemies who saw them multi
plying at a frightening rate and hiding from the tax collector and recruit
ing officer. There were, in 1881, just over four million Jews in the Russian 
Empire, or four percent of its population; their rate of increase was no 
higher and possibly lower than that of other groups. One million lived 
in the Kingdom of Poland where they made up 13 % of the inhabitants; 
2.9 million, or 12,5 % of their total population, lived in the fifteen Russian 
provinces of the Pale of Settlement, with the heaviest concentration 
in the nine former Polish gubernii. Of that number, 1.9 million were 
to be found in the cities; 1.13 million in the townlets; 580,000 in the 
villages. The 164,000 Jews outside the Pale were distributed as follows: 
66,000 in the three Baltic gubernii (3 % of the total, with 13,000 in the 
villages); 54,000 in 32 Great Russian provinces (0,10% of the total, 
with 13,000 in the villages); 29,000 in the Caucasus; 12,000 in Siberia, 
and 3,000 in Central Asia. 
These figures might not quiet irrational terrors of a Jewish flood 
engulfing the geographical heart of Russia and especially its villages, but 
unless they were simply dismissed as false, it would be difficult to repre
sent the threat as both real and imminent. Even in the Pale itself 
there could hardly be talk of a disproportionate number of Jews in the 
villages. In only one of the 151 rural districts studied did the percent
age of Jews go as high as 15.7; in the villages of the remaining districts 
the percentages ranged from five to ten (27 districts) and one to five 
(106 districts). In 17 districts, located for the most part in Poltava, 
Taurida, and Ekaterinoslav, the number of Jews in the villages fell 
below 1 /100 of the inhabitants. In view of the fact that "at the present 
time, over the whole extent of the territory which the law has marked 
out for the permanent residence of the Jews, only the towns and townlets 
are open to their settlement and migration,"82 the picture was not likely 
to change much, if at all. 
Although the absolute number of Jews in the country districts of the 
Pale grew, largely by natural increase, by 22.8 % between 1881 and 1897 
(the year of the first general census), they were a declining proportion of 
the Jewish population, down from 20 to 16 percent. Finally, the figures

l82 	HANS ROGGER 
given for Jewish landowning and leasing — 1.4 and 3.9 percent respectively 
in the 12 gubernii for which there were reliable data — together with the 
listing of legal restrictions on further acquisitions, should have served 
to put the Jewish danger in this area into perspective as well, even if in 
three provinces from 8.4 to 10.6 percent of land was in Jewish hands 
and from 5.3 to 7 percent in five others. Here too the May Laws would 
do their work. By 1900, the area of land owned by Jews had declined 
by almost a half and leased land by 85.1%. Nor did police or court 
records support contentions of significantly higher rates of criminality 
among Jews.33 
The pogroms, the Pahlen Commission concluded, had "without doubt" 
been triggered by Jewish exploitation of the narod; but this was not why 
habitual, minor clashes had turned into major riots. In the North- 
West, for example, where both the soil and the people were poorer and 
Jewish exploitation worse than in the South, all had remained quiet, 
thanks to the precautions taken by Governor-General E. I. Totleben. 
It was the weakness or ineptness of the poUce and military that had in 
the majority of cases made possible the escalation of the disturbances 
in a region where the memory of past popular movements against the 
Jews was still alive and where the people had come to believe that then- 
renewal would be ignored or go unpunished by the authorities. This 
was as true in the countryside as in the towns, although the troubles 
had always spread from the latter to the former. People in the more 
remote villages, however, who dealt neither directly nor constantly with 
Jews in the towns, had largely remained immune to the infection. They 
continued to live in harmony with the few Jews among them, although 
they could have settled accounts with them with impunity. A distinc
tion had, therefore, to be made between immediate and deeper causes 
of pogroms, and since the latter could only be removed over a long period 
of time, it was the government's first task to maintain law and order 
and protect Jews from violence.34 
This was the Commission's answer to those who saw improved economi
c relationships between Jews and narod as the only way of pacifying 
outraged popular feeling. True, such feeling was justified and the 
charges against the Jews were supported by men who had an intimate 
knowledge of provincial life. But in the picture which the Commission 
presented of Jewish economic activity benefits balanced liabilities, and 
more often than not the latter were ascribed to the peculiar conditions 
imposed by law and custom. If the Jews, for example, were over- 
represented in trade, this was so because other spheres were closed to 
them; moreover, they had introduced advanced business methods and 
a more "European" organization which had carried trade in the Pale 
to a much higher stage than its still largely primitive state in the interior. 
In petty retail trade, the commissioners found to their surprise, the Jews 
were not as numerous as was generally believed — in the Pale as a whole 
they accounted for less than half — but the number of Jewish shops in 
towns and townlets was great and growing, with most of them dealing 
in items that were essential for the rural population. In addition, the 
Jews played a large and useful role in local fairs and markets.35 
Whatever the nature of their business, it was characterized by the

JEWS, PEASANTS, AND LAND IN RUSSIA 183 
quick turnover of capital, the wide availability of credit, fierce compet
ition and, as a result, moderate costs and low profits, benefiting consume
rs and sellers. None of these advantages, however, had made Jewish 
businesses, large or small, any more resistant to the prevailing economic 
crisis than their Christian competitors. On the contrary, together with 
the May Laws it had increased business risk and the rivalry among them, 
as well as from Armenians and Greeks in the South, Germans in the 
West, and Old Believers in the interior. In the lumber trade, there 
was growth of competition from Russians, in Ukraine from landlords 
who had begun to market their own grain, and everywhere there were 
more Christian shops. For the Jews, the end result was a falling rate 
of profit and for the already marginal small retailers an existence not 
much above beggary. For those who dealt with the Jews it meant a 
better selection of goods, better prices, and a wider choice of outlets.36 
The Jews were undeniably guilty of many abuses, especially as 
producers and sellers of liquor and lenders of money. The traffic in 
spirits in the Pale was largely in their hands, and almost entirely so in the 
villages and smaller towns. Much of it was illegal, though carried on 
with the help and connivance of peasants and others for whom it was 
a convenience, a necessity, or a source of profit. And far from enjoying 
economic power, many rural Jewish tavern keepers were unable even 
to pay for their licenses out of their earnings and operated without 
them. If so many Jews nonetheless turned to this business, it was 
because each tavern had a bit of garden and land attached to it and on 
a manor the possibility of keeping a cow to help feed their families. When 
the sale of vodka yielded enough to pay for license and rent, the tavern 
keeper might consider himself lucky; otherwise he had to seek side earnings 
as a craftsman, peddler, or, most often, moneylender in which capacity, 
needless to say, he was not always perfectly honest.37 
Yet if Jewish taverns, moneylending, and usury were widespread in 
the Pale, so was the ready availability of credit, and there was no con
clusive evidence to show that either the incidence of drunkenness or 
interest rates were higher than in the rest of the country. Jews did 
evade paying their taxes and license fees, used false weights and meas
ures, and adulterated the products they sold, but they were driven to 
do so in part by extreme poverty. Such abuses were not unique to Jewish 
trade. They would begin to disappear with a general raising of standards 
in Russian commerce; with the education of the Jewish masses and their 
absorption in productive work other than trade; with the gradual removal 
of the exceptional legislation which had made them outcasts and outlaws 
and had helped to perpetuate and strengthen the racial passion for gain 
at the expense of others.38 
The most common accusation against the Jews, that they exploit 
their Christian neighbors, was not without foundation, whatever extenu
ating circumstances might be found in poverty, ignorance, insecurity, and 
oppression. For that reason, the state could not stand by passively 
when peasants were defrauded or borrowed money at ruinous interest. 
But given the need, the free agreement of both sides and observance of 
the law, the state neither could nor should forbid the Jews to traffic in 
liquor, lend money, live in the villages, or take up farming. Repression

184
HANS ROGGER 
and regulation had not worked in the past, would not do so in the future, 
and were bound to be counter-productive. Since the issuance of the 
May Laws, for example, the number of Jews living in the countryside 
had increased and the prohibition on leaseholding had not prevented 
the conclusion of verbal agreements or contracts through Christian 
intermediaries. There was neither point nor humanity, therefore, in 
continuing the system of legal coercion.39 
Instead, the state must do all it can to achieve what should be the two 
broad aims of Jewish policy — to weaken Jewish particularism and exploi
tation by a balanced, 
"organic," and liberal approach. Pursued consis
tently, cautiously, and gradually such a middle course between repression 
and non-intervention would in time unite the Jews with other Russian 
subjects under the rule and shelter of common laws. It would be wrong, 
however, the Commission warned, to hope that gradual emancipation 
would lead eventually to assimilation. It had never yet been achieved 
anywhere and was made impossible by the too sharply pronounced 
characteristics of the Semitic race. Nor was assimilation necessary. 
The interests of the state required no more than that the nationalities 
which formed part of the Empire serve its welfare and greatness with 
sincerity and devotion, without having to abandon either their identity 
or their active membership in the national community.40 
The Commission's advice that the government exercise its tutelary 
and protective role only when there were flagrant transgressions of the 
law derived from the belief that it was both self-defeating and illogical 
for society to enlist the state in its battle against the Jews. Were Russian 
merchants and landlords really incapable of holding their own against 
them; were they really as inexperienced and defenseless as their endless 
appeals and complaints suggested ? What prevented them from shunning 
the Jews if they truly feared them? What kept them from forming 
their own professional or class organizations for mutual aid, credit, and 
trade if it was not the unhealthy habit, acquired over a century, of 
looking to the authorities for help? Self-help, self-reliance, self-defense, 
hard work and sobriety — these were the weapons that would alone para
lyze the economic power of the Jews, and they would not be forged and 
used unless the state withdrew from the contest. This was as true of 
peasants as it was of the upper and middle classes, despite the fact that 
ever since 1861 the former serfs had been treated like wards of the state 
who required special care and protection. In the indictment of the 
Jews it was always the peasants who figured as the hapless victims, 
peasant ignorance and impotence that necessitated and justified anti- 
Jewish measures. But those who clamored for them did more than 
exaggerate the peasants' plight and the Jews' power. They betrayed a 
contempt for the common people of rural Russia and a lack of faith in 
their native endowment.41 
There were not a few well-to-do peasants in the Pale, the Commiss
ioners pointed out, who would not deal with Jews and owed their well- 
being, in part, to that fact. Others, it was true, were often forced to 
turn to the Jews to borrow money, especially after emancipation because 
of new taxes and redemption payments, and for this the Jews were not 
to blame. Nor were they responsible for the peasants' need and passion

JEWS, PEASANTS, AND LAND IN RUSSIA	185 
for vodka and all the evil consequences. If the liquor business was 
exclusively in Jewish hands it was the result of circumstances which 
had prevailed for centuries; and if it went together with moneylending, 
usury, and exploitation, the source was peasant drunkenness. It was 
really too much to expect that the Jews should to their own detriment 
become the people's moral guides and preceptors in sobriety, the more so 
since the advantage was not invariably theirs. Frequently it was 
peasants who swindled Jewish employers or tenants and, in the extreme 
case, settled scores with them in pogroms in villages near cities or townlets. 
Peasants too must at last stand on their own feet and carry on their own 
shoulders the burden of resistance to Jewish exploitation. If they did 
not, even the best of laws would not prevent the ever deeper penetration 
of the countryside by Jewish economic power, by poverty and drunkenn
ess. Old-Believer peasants in the Western provinces had shown that 
sturdy, shrewd, hard-working Russian folk were quite capable of holding 
their own against the Jews. 
"To shift the center of gravity of the struggle against the harmful 
influence of the Jews from the government to society itself, to all 
its strata, does not, however, mean that the government would 
become the silent onlooker of the conflict and adhere to a policy 
of non-intervention. At the same time it cannot yield, at one 
point, to popular dislike of the Jews; insist at another that all 
its subjects be treated alike, and then invoke considerations of 
equal economic opportunity. It must combine all these 
approaches, pursue them simultaneously, yet leave the economic 
struggle to follow its own course without allowing it to go too 
far."42 
For all the contradictions, hesitancies, and cautions of the Commiss
ion's recommendations — it held, for example, that peasant land should 
continue to be denied to Jewish tenants43 — its majority spoke clearly 
in favor of gradual emancipation and against the proposition that peasants 
were in greater need of the sheltering hand of the state than any other 
segment of society. It may well have been the fear of putting that 
proposition to the test that contributed materially to the rejection of its 
work. To a regime convinced of its duty and ability to guide the nation's 
development it was little reassurance to be told that its past instructions 
had failed of their purpose and were constantly evaded. It could be 
and was taken as a call to renew and redouble efforts at control. As the 
government's actions would show, when the tranquility of the countryside 
or the putative welfare of its people was at stake, it refused adamantly 
to dismantle the legal barriers that were to keep Jews separated from 
peasants and the land. 
It was a policy which enjoyed a considerable measure of public 
sympathy,44 not all of it from the right wing of the political spectrum. 
The belief that an inexperienced and simple people should not be left 
to fend for itself in an increasingly competitive market economy was 
not necessarily an unqualified endorsement of government policies or 
held only by anti-Semites.45 Yet even those who regarded the Jews 
as only a symptom rather than the cause of the general phenomenon of

l86	HANS ROGGER 
capitalist exploitation unwittingly strengthened the hand of administrat
ors who sought, by proceeding against the Jews, to diminish the unsettl
ing impact of commercial and industrial change and the dangers it posed 
to social stability and the docility of the masses. 
Their most influencial spokesman was Konstantin Pobedonostsev. 
Director of the Holy Synod (1880-1905), the Tsar's tutor and confidant, 
he had become disillusioned with the reforms of Alexander II. Even 
serf -emancipation, that "great and holy idea," had only given to the 
"dark masses" a freedom which had left them without supervision and 
allowed them to waste their time in drink and sloth, to fall into the hands 
of publicans, usurers, and Jews. His countrymen's infatuation with 
novelty, their loss of respect for authority, the decline of social discipline 
and private virtue had all set in with the reforms and before long the 
general corruption, the destruction of honor and duty came in his mind 
to be linked with the Jews. "They have engrossed everything," he 
wrote to Dostoevsky in 1879, "they have undermined everything, but 
the spirit of the century supports them." And that was as true in 
Russia as it was in Romania and Serbia, a fact which for Pobedonostsev 
emphasized Russia's vulnerability and the need to maintain defenses 
against the Jews. It was their superior talents and industry, their 
intelligence and abstemiousness, qualities which most Russians lacked, 
that obliged the state to come to the aid of the most backward and 
helpless of its people.46 
Deprived of the guardianship of the landlord and without a native 
middle class in town or country, Pobedonostsev said in 1891, the rural 
population could only turn to the state for assistance against Jewish 
exploitation and deceit. The decline of the commune, the spread of 
industry and capitalism made it all the more important that the state 
control and guide the forces undermining the old order. It should 
prevent merchants, Jews, and kulak-usurers from acquiring communal 
lands; it should guarantee the peasants' indivisible and inalienable 
ownership of land and supply them (and small businessmen) with capital 
and credit to restrict the influence of Jewish usurers and forestall the 
emergence of a landless, disgruntled urban proletariat. The commune, 
Pobedonostsev conceded, might be doomed; roads and railways had 
to be built. But the state, "the guardian of the highest interest," had 
to soften the shock of economic and social change.47 The laws of 1886 
and 1893 which tied the peasants more firmly to their village communes, 
and the institution in 1889 of the "land captain," formalizing their 
wardship to the state, made it a certainty that the bonds of the Jews 
would not be loosened when Russians were being restricted to prevent 
their doing or suffering harm.48 
Aside from the May Laws, the most painful of the new disabilities 
which the government of Alexander III imposed on the Jews did not 
come in the area of rural residence and occupation. More ominous for 
their prospects of relief were the restrictions of access to higher and 
secondary education, to the legal and medical professions, the brutal 
expulsions from Moscow and other cities, the total or partial exclusion 
from local government, public service, corporate management, and stock 
exchanges. If Pobedonostsev and others truly dreaded the Jews as

JEWS, PEASANTS, AND LAND IN RUSSIA 187 
the advance guard of the forces of decay and dissolution that were invad
ing Russia together with factories and foreign capital, they made their 
stand and concentrated their effort in the right places. Yet for all the 
evidence that was becoming available that the peasants benefited from 
the proximity of the Jews or that the latter were losing their economic 
power and importance in the villages as the century drew to its close, 
there was no relaxation of vigilance against the small Jewish trader in 
foodstuffs or manufactured goods, the middle-man, and tavern keeper.49 
Official opposition to them was more determined, in fact, than that which 
was being made to the Jewish industrialist or banker, large-scale grain 
merchant, or exporter of lumber. Either the enemy was being attacked 
where he was thought to be weakest and to have the fewest defenders, 
or where the Jews were still believed to be as numerous and dangerous 
— perhaps because of their own poverty and despair — as they had always 
been. 
The impressions of an American traveller50 in the Pale, recorded in 
1892 or 1893, may stand as a summary both of what he heard about the 
Jews locally and of what was echoed by newspapers and officials through
out the country. The Russian peasant, he was told by officers, officials, 
and acquaintances had a traditional hatred of Jews with whom he was 
only too eager to get even as the author of his ills. And very little that 
the government had done in the years after 1863 to settle and strengthen 
Russian peasants in the Western provinces had borne fruit. 
"You begin to inquire, and you find that the Jew not only owns 
the tavern, but trades in all the articles which peasants have 
to buy. You learn also that the Jew is creditor to nearly every 
peasant for miles around, and has a lien upon everything which 
that peasant may grow upon his land. You find that the peasant 
cultivates his land not only for himself, but for the Jew, and 
that all his reward is the privilege of bare existence. There are 
many patriotic and humane Russians who have given it to me as 
their deliberate opinion that the Russian peasant would be better 
off today had he never been emancipated."51 
The condition of the Russian peasant reminded the American of that 
in which the Negro slave had found himself after being freed, and he 
shared the widespread belief that the Jewish question in Russia had not 
become serious until after 1861 when the serf's owner was no longer able 
to shield him from the consequences of his improvidence. With emanci
pation the gulf between peasant and lord had become as wide as that 
separating the Black from his former master; and between these two 
classes there had entered an army of Jews who alone profited from the 
edicts of 1861, victimizing the peasants through their love of drink and 
the landlords through their need of money and ignorance of management. 
"I am informed on good authority that, in spite of laws to the 
contrary, a very large proportion of the land within the Pale is 
practically in Jewish hands, to say nothing of the peasants who 
work upon it. To how great an extent this is the case is as difficult 
to find out as to give the exact number of Jews in Russia, for

I 88	HANS ROGGER 
they have a direct interest in deceiving the government in regard 
to both of these matters, and have, so far, succeeded very well."62 
That view had been held in the bureaucracy for over a century and 
had been changed neither by the findings of the Pahlen Commission nor 
by the May Laws. These were as ineffectively enforced, the Governor- 
General of Vil'no observed in 1884, as if they had been suspended.63 
Late that year, new regulations were issued for nine provinces of the 
Pale nullifying all contracts concluded in contravention of the laws of 
1864 and 1865 and authorizing governors to proceed against Jews and 
Poles who had leased or bought land through such illegal contracts.54 
The May Laws and their increasingly strict interpretation by the Senate 
made purchases of non-urban real estate impossible for all but the very 
few Jews who had the right of universal residence. The prohibition on 
leasing was from the start applied more rigorously by local officials who 
extended it to all forms of real property, including even the rental of 
living quarters in villages. In this instance the Senate held that the law 
had intended to bar Jews only from leasing agricultural land for agri
cultural purposes, but that leasing other real property, whether for 
commercial, industrial, or residential use was permissible without, howe
ver, conferring the right of residence on tenants who had not lived in 
a rural locality before 3 May 1882. 55 
If it was true that the provisions of the May Laws on land purchases 
had at first been laxly enforced, the same could not be said of the article 
which closed the villages to Jewish newcomers. While it was understood 
in some districts to allow Jews who had resided in one village on 3 May 
1882 to move to another one, the Ministry of Interior considered such 
removals as the taking up of a new residence and therefore prohibited. 
The matter reached the Senate and the Council of State where 23 members 
agreed with the Ministry and 24 held that changing domicile from one 
rural district to another was not in violation of the Temporary Rules 
of 1882. The Emperor sided with the minority, tying the right of Jews 
to live in the countryside to the village in which they had made their 
home before 3 May 1882; even temporary departure jeopardized that 
right. The risk of losing it increased considerably when in 1892 the job 
of deciding who was or was not a legal resident was shifted from the courts 
to the police who carried it out with the customary arbitrariness and on 
the basis of records they had themselves compiled. The only recourse 
against their decisions was to the Senate which, pending an appeal, 
might or might not order a stay of execution. In many instances it 
came too late, and expulsions were numerous.56 
In 1891 the American Minister to St. Petersburg recorded signs that 
for some months the May Laws were being more stringently executed.57 
It is impossible to tell whether his comment that they had theretofore 
"been so loosely and lightly observed as to have been practically i
noperative" reflected the true state of affairs or the unhappiness of info
rmants who were congenital pessimists when it came to the adequacy 
and effectiveness of anti- Jewish measures. It is certain that there were 
men in the government who thought that even the strictest enforcement 
of the May Laws would not stop the growth of Jewish numbers and

JEWS, PEASANTS, AND LAND IN RUSSIA	189 
power. Viacheslav Pleve, then Assistant Minister of Interior and head 
of the Conference which had been charged with the work of the Pahlen 
Commission after its dissolution, was one of them. 
He began in 1890 to circulate a program of Jewish legislation in the 
bureaucracy that went in some respects beyond the original Ignat'ev- 
Gotovtsev proposals. The Pleve project, of which no firsthand evidence 
has survived, is thought to have envisioned the setting up of ghettoes 
in a number of large cities, the reduction of Jewish commerce, and the 
return to the Pale of the privileged Jews who had left it. Those whom 
the Rules of 1882 had allowed to remain in the villages were gradually 
to be cleared from them. Young people would have to leave rural local
ities, even their birthplaces, once they came of age; anyone who had 
temporarily absented himself from his village of registry was not to be 
readmitted. Rental agreements concluded in violation of the May Laws 
were to be treated as crimes, and to inhibit contacts between peasants 
and Jews, things would be made still more difficult for Jewish moneyl
enders, tavern keepers, traders, and artisans.58 
Pleve's drastic plan never became law. When the Minister of Finance, 
A. I. Vyshnegradskii, learned of it he intervened with Minister of the 
Interior I. N. Durnovo to delay its submission to the Council of State. 
It never reached that body, possibly because Vyshnegradskii, after the 
Moscow expulsions of 1891 and the protests to which they had given 
rise abroad, warned the Emperor of the still greater damage continued 
persecution of the Jews would do to Russia's credit abroad and her 
economy at home.59 He and his successor Sergei Witte were less successf
ul, however, in pleading the country's economic advantage and financial 
needs against a series of controls and conditions which were placed in the 
years 1892 and 1894 on mining and oil companies with Jewish or foreign 
shareholders or directors.60 
That foreigners as well as Jews were affected by these new laws made 
it more difficult to counter the patriotic argument that Russia's most 
valuable and strategic resources had to be controlled by Russians. The 
same point was made with reference to land. Once it was made more 
difficult or impossible (1887-1892) for foreigners to buy or lease it in 
Poland, nine Western and two Baltic provinces, as well as in Turkestan 
and five other districts of Central Asia (where the prohibition extended 
to all non-native non-Christians), it became improbable that Jews would 
be exempted from laws inspired by nationalism, concern for Russian 
peasants and for the security of the borderlands.61 On the contrary, 
from the mid-eighties the Committee of Ministers allowed the acquisition 
of rural real estate by joint stock companies and partnership only if their 
articles of incorporation or bylaws specified that a majority of officers or 
board members were non- Jews and that company land not be managed, 
held or otherwise put at the disposal of Jewish officers and shareholders.62 
The rationale in this case was conformity with the May Laws, and 
although it was on more than one occasion recognized that these regula
tions hampered business and industry as much as the Jews,63 they were 
only modified after 1906 but never abandoned. The advantages, as 
described officially in 1913, outweighed the drawbacks: "The introduction 
of these conditions minimized the undesirable effects the Jewish element

IÇO	HANS ROGGER 
might have on the inhabitants of rural districts without, at the same 
time, entirely precluding Jewish participation in joint stock enterprises."64 
In other words, Jewish capital was welcome as long as its owners could be 
kept away from places which it had been thought necessary to close to 
them. 
As Minister of Finance from 1892 to 1903 and chief proponent of 
Russia's industrialization with the help of foreign loans and investments, 
Sergei Witte stressed in his recollections how much opposed he had been 
while in office to the whole system of persecution and discrimination as 
irrational and subversive of the goals of economic growth and social 
peace. He had, it is true, deplored the anti- Jewish biases of the Tsars 
and their ministers, called for a relaxation of oppressive laws, for moderate 
extensions of Jewish rights and even, on one occasion, for the gradual 
abolition of their disabilities. 
As the country's first Prime Minister and head of the cabinet under 
the new constitutional arrangements of 1905 Witte revealed himself, 
however, to be a very much more cautious advocate of Jewish rights and 
relief than in his own version of events. There was reason for caution 
in 1905 and 1906 when he was attacked by Right and Left and unsure 
of the backing of an indecisive and suspicious monarch who had no love 
for Jews. But Witte's commitment to Jewish emancipation had always 
been qualified, and his attitude to the Jews, like that of other Ministers 
of Finance, was informed primarily by calculations of utility rather 
than by firm principles. Thus, while he opposed massive expulsions 
from the villages of the Pale which several governors had suggested, 
he nonetheless cited the Jewish presence there to support the introduc
tion of the state liquor monopoly in the Western provinces. 
In the memorandum65 which Alexander III approved on 11 July 1894, 
Witte referred to the reports of the provincial commissions of 1881 to 
show that the liquor traffic had given the Jews a powerful means for the 
exploitation of the local population and that this trade was almost 
always connected with the lending of money, the favorite occupation of 
the Jewish tribe. The Jewish village tavern was everywhere the source 
of peasant ruin and depravity and none of the laws passed or proposed 
were capable of putting an end to this in view of the peasants' 
hankering 
for vodka. The forcible removal of millions of Jews might indeed have 
the desired effect, but Witte dismissed it as impracticable and as a viola
tion of the property rights and economic interests of Jews and non- Jews. 
In an apparent reference to Pleve's project, Witte declared that closing 
the villages to males who had come of age and to women who had married 
outside them could lead, if consistently applied, to the eventual disappear
ance of Jews from the countryside. Yet this was a remedy for the 
distant future. In the meantime, provoked by chronic persecution and 
expulsions, the Jews would grow even more rapacious and become a 
worse affliction for the towns and townlets. 
To solve the Jewish question, Witte wrote in language reminiscent of 
that used by the Pahlen Commission, priority should be given not to 
repressive but to organic measures which would protect the native 
population, raise the moral level of the Jews, and weaken their racial 
exclusiveness and religious separatism. His ideas on that score he

JEWS, PEASANTS, AND LAND IN RUSSIA IQ! 
would communicate in a separate memorandum to the Minister of 
Interior. For the moment he wished only to address the urgent question 
of the Jewish liquor traffic and to submit that the best means of removing 
its baneful consequences and solving the pressing political difficulties 
created by the alien Jewish nationality was to introduce in the Pale 
the state sale of alcoholic beverages without waiting for the results of 
its experimental introduction in Samara, Perm', Ufa, and Orenburg. 
There is no reason to believe that Witte ever submitted a project for 
the solution of the Jewish question. Perhaps the Emperor's assent to 
his immediate request made the matter less urgent, while the accession of 
Nicholas II in October 1894 was bound to cause a temporary cessation of 
governmental initiatives as the new ruler and his father's ministers took 
each others' measure. For the Jews the change of rulers brought no 
change of status or prospects. In the course of 1896-1898 most of the 
privately owned taverns in the Pale were replaced by state liquor stores. 
Some 200,000 Jews were deprived of the scanty livelihood they had 
derived from them and increased by half the number who where described 
in official statistics as being "without definite occupation."66 
IV 
The state liquor monopoly did not end official preoccupation with the 
presence and role of Jews in the countryside and the young monarch 
received much contradictory advice on the subject. Bunge, now Chai
rman of the Committee of Ministers, maintained as he had in 1882 that 
the village Jews, for all their vices, were as yet indispensable to the 
peasants whom they served as sellers of produce and suppliers of tools 
and consumer goods. A way had therefore to be found, short of expuls
ion, to put limits on the Jews' perniciousness without depriving the 
peasant of his services. The problem, as Bunge saw it, was the Jews' 
"privileged position"67 vis-à-vis the villagers. Registered in the urban 
estates, they were subject neither to the authority nor the obligations 
of the peasant estate from which they were barred. The assemblies of 
village and volosť, their elders, officials, and courts could neither tax 
nor discipline them, make them carry their share of labor duties — such 
as road mending — or even hear complaints against them.68 
To this anomalous situation of supposed peasant impotence and 
supposed Jewish impunity, much of official and non-official opinion had 
attributed the pogroms. By the end of his life, Bunge too had come 
close to that view and to the acceptance of Ignat'ev's formula of the 
abnormality of economic relationships between Jews and Russians of 
the lower classes. In order to escape from it he now called for extending 
the jurisdiction of peasant institutions to Jews living in the villages and 
requiring them to assume the same fiscal and labor duties as the peasants. 
Yet they were stul to have no part in peasant government as electors or 
officials and to be barred from buying or leasing land they did not work 
themselves. Jewish landownership was fraught with dangers for agri
culture itself, for industry, and for the state. At best, permanent village

IÇ2	HANS ROGGER 
residents might be allowed to own a house and enough land for a kitchen 
garden.69 
Bunge's belief in the continued utility of Jewish traders and artisans 
to the rural economy, especially in remote areas, was echoed by a number 
of reports and studies.70 Some of these asked for a modification of the 
May Laws to make it possible, for example, for Jewish tailors, black
smiths, and grain brokers to live where they were needed. Several 
governors of the Pale also requested revision or clarification of the 
Regulations of 1882 which were, after all, only temporary and presented 
them with difficult problems of interpretation and application. The 
distinction between urban and rural localities was frequently unclear 
and in the congested towns, unemployment and political unrest were on 
the rise. In December 1895 Nicholas ordered his Minister of Interior 
to determine how the May Laws might be changed or supplemented.71 
I. L. Goremykin moved slowly and cautiously, beginning his task by 
requesting from local officials data and opinions of which there can have 
been no lack in St. Petersburg. It was the absence of reliable and con
crete facts, Goremykin told the Committee of Ministers in February 1897, 
that made it impossible for him as yet to submit specific amendments to 
the Temporary Regulations of 3 May 1882 or to recommend their enact
ment as regular laws;72 more likely it was the difficulty of steering a safe 
course between those who opposed relaxation and those who favored it. 
Where, precisely, the young Emperor stood was still unknown. He had, 
it is true, agreed that the May Laws needed reexamining when the 
Governor of Volynia in his report for 1895 had raised the issue, but had 
disapproved of the governor's suggestion to abolish the Pale.73 He had 
also been disturbed when several governors in the years 1897 to 1900 
told him of extensive Jewish purchases of land and forests in the non- 
Pale provinces of Smolensk, Novgorod, Pskov, and Kursk (where Jewish 
capitalists were building sugar refineries on gentry land) and insistently 
asked that something be done about this "undesirable development."74 
The Commission which was set up in 189975 to deal with the question 
of the May Laws was well aware, therefore, of the limits set to its work 
even if the Tsar, in charging it, had not explicitly ruled out their abro
gation. Composed of representatives of several government departments 
and headed by Assistant Minister of Interior Baron Alexander Uexkull- 
Guldenbandt, the Commission nonetheless thought it advisable to ask 
for a modification of Ignat'ev's Rules by exempting gentry land from 
the prohibition on leasing. While peasant and adjacent land should 
remain inaccessible to Jews because its owners lacked the business acumen 
to deal with them, the government need not worry about the ability 
of noble landowners to look after their own interests. Since existing 
regulations not only deprived them of the right freely to manage their 
estates, reducing their value and leading to all kinds of circumventions 
of the law, it was best to change the law. 
Provision having been made to forestall subletting to peasants, Jews 
should be free to lease gentry land either for their own cultivation or for 
the construction of factories, to operate mills, fisheries, quarries, and 
other gentry properties. Jewish leaseholders would be enabled to make 
an honest living and pomeshchiki to increase the profitability of their

JEWS, PEASANTS, AND LAND IN RUSSIA 	19З 
estates. As if to show that it was not indifferent to the welfare of the 
peasants, the Commission also thought desirable the adoption of Ignat'ev's 
idea that village communes be empowered to expel offending Jews, 
balancing it with a recommendation to open rural districts to those who 
had the right of universal residence. None of these proposals was 
adopted and policy continued to flounder uncertainly between the defense 
and preservation of peasants and land on one hand and the need to 
minimize the economic, legal, and administrative complications created 
by the May Laws on the other. 
On 27 March 1902, for example, Minister of Interior D. S. Sipiagin 
submitted to his colleagues a memorandum suggesting that a number of 
localities in the Pale which were officially designated as rural but had lost 
their rural character because they were situated near railroads or indust
rial establishments be exempted from the effect of the May Laws. Yet 
in May the Senate ruled that Jewish agriculturalists settled on state 
lands did not have the right to acquire additional land from peasants 
and, in December, that Jews in the Pale could not acquire real property 
in those townlets where the organs of local government were of the 
village rather than the municipal type.76 
It was obvious that the Temporary Rules were susceptible of conflict
ing interpretations, in constant need of clarification, and the source of 
many abuses and irregularities. In supporting Sipiagin's initiative, 
the chairman of the State Council's Department of Civil and Religious 
Affairs declared that it was only the first step towards a full review of the 
Temporary Rules which had fettered the Jews without achieving their 
purpose. It was Sipiagin's successor, V. K. Pleve, reputed to have had 
a hand in drafting Ignat'ev's program and himself the author of the more 
rigorous project of 1890, who carried Sipiagin's plan forward and defended 
it in the Committee of Ministers. To those who wanted to reduce the 
number of nominally rural settlements which Pleve proposed to open 
to Jewish residence, he answered that the towns and townlets were overf
ull of Jews, that most were unable to support themselves, and that 
their extreme poverty constituted a threat to public order and security. 
On 10 May and 9 December 1903 the Emperor approved a list of 158 local
ities to which the May Laws no longer applied.77 
Even before the outbreak of the bloody Kishinev pogrom (April 6-8, 
1903) — for which he was held almost universally responsible — supplied 
Pleve with a motive for pacifying outraged opinion at home and abroad, 
this most reactionary and unpopular of Nicholas's ministers had recog
nized the explosive anger of the Jewish masses of the Pale and the need 
to weaken it by minor concessions. Pleve was convinced of the political 
and moral unreliability of the Jews and of the government's right and 
duty to take protective measures against them. Yet he was also a 
pragmatist and believed that some moderation of existing policy was 
required if the alliance which he was sure existed between Jewish finan
ciers abroad and Jewish revolutionaries at home was to be broken and 
Russia's prestige restored. 
To that end Pleve had championed Sipiagin's proposal, restored 
educational quotas (cut a few years earlier) to the level of 1887, and in 
August 1903 let it be known to Jewish contacts that he was disposed

IÇ4
HANS ROGGER 
to let yeung people with a secondary or higher education live outside 
the Pale, to permit the rental of rural land as well as the purchase of 
small plots for Jewish agriculture within it, and possibly to offer other 
concessions. In the same month he informed governors of the Pale 
of his intention to summon yet another Commission for the Revision 
of Jewish Legislation and invited their opinions. The sources disagree 
what the Commission would have advised if its sittings had not been 
terminated about two weeks after they began by the outbreak of the 
Japanese War. Most of its members appear to have favored an easing 
of the May Laws (as did a number of governors) and possibly their 
abolition; a minority definitely did so.78 
The minority included Count К. К. Pahlen, Governor of Vil'no and 
son of the head of the Pahlen Commission. His response to Pleve's 
August circular; a report submitted to the Tsar in late 1903 or early 1904 
by Pahlen's immediate superior, Prince P. D. Sviatopolk-Mirskii, Gover
nor-General of Vil'no, Kovno, and Grodno; and the memoirs of Prince 
S. D. Urusov, Governor of Bessarabia at the time of Kishinev and, like 
Pahlen, a member of the 1904 Commission, may be regarded as represen
tative of liberal bureaucratic opinion on the Jewish question. While 
Pahlen and Sviatopolk-Mirskii may not have been prepared to go as far 
as Urusov's call for the total abandonment of exceptional Jewish laws, 
the three men agreed on the urgent necessity of doing away with the 
May Laws.79 
Their criticisms of these were hardly novel: they had created adminis
trative chaos, encouraged the corruption of local officials, and by closing 
the villages to the Jews had failed either to contribute to their improve
ment or to that of the peasants. The tens of thousands of Jews who 
had on expiration of their leases been forced to leave the countryside 
and their customary work — truck and dairy farms, orchards and mills, 
workshops and taverns — had not only lost their homes and livelihood; 
their leaving had also deprived the rural population of necessary and 
useful services. Nor had the exploitative tendencies of the Jews been 
checked by the May Laws, since those whom they had allowed to remain 
in the villages were now less constrained by competition from outsiders 
and those who entered them illegally were the most ruthless and immoral 
element. 
One form of exploitation, Sviatopolk-Mirskii observed, had however 
been much reduced by the state liquor monopoly, others should be 
combatted by the stricter application of criminal laws and penalties to 
individual lawbreakers, not by preventing Jews in general from living 
and working in rural settlements. This had merely aggravated their 
density, insecurity, and poverty in the towns and made them fertile 
soil for anti-governmental activity. For Pahlen and Sviatopolk-Mirskii 
the growth of Jewish socialism (the Bund) and nationalism (the Zionist 
movement) made a powerful argument for the proposition that since 
repression had failed, it was time for a change of course, for admitting 
that the chief cause of Jewish dissidence was the "abnormal position of the 
Jewish population in general, and of the working class in particular," 
and to end this abnormality by repealing the May Laws. 
It is improbable that Pleve would have embraced these views in

JEWS, PEASANTS, AND LAND IN RUSSIA 
their entirety even if an overwhelming majority of the Commission had 
done so, and certain that the Emperor would have rejected them. Pleve's 
perception of the Jewish problem was narrowly tactical, lacking in broader 
perspectives, and based on the assumption that it could be dealt with 
by palliatives, the opening of safety valves. Meeting with Theodor 
Herzl in August 1903, 80 he told the Zionist leader that the ultimate goal 
for Russia's Jews was assimilation, to be achieved through higher educa
tion and economic betterment. But, he admitted, the process of assim
ilation was painfully slow; nor could it be greatly speeded, for economic 
conditions in the Pale were bad, an expansion of educational opportunities 
would mean displacing Christian graduates, and the whole problem had 
recently been complicated by Jewish adherence to radical parties. He 
would therefore welcome the establishment of a Jewish state to absorb 
several million Jewish emigrants while keeping in Russia the most 
capable and prosperous Jews who could be assimilated. 
What, Herzl asked, could in the meantime be done for the ones who 
remained and to facilitate their pacification? Would the minister 
consider extending the right of residence to Courland and Riga and 
agree to let Jewish farmers buy up to ten desiatiny of land? Pleve 
declared himself not opposed to Jews moving into the Baltic provinces. 
There, facing Germans and Latvians (rather than Russian peasants, 
it was implied), they could not put the population at an economic 
disadvantage. Individual land purchases were another matter. He had, 
he said, launched the idea of authorizing the acquisition of from three to 
five desiatiny, but opposition in the government had been so great that 
he had been forced to withdraw it. What might be feasible and accept
able were Jewish agricultural settlements — des bourgs juifs — in which 
individuals could hold in private possession part of the communal land. 
The question of land was not brought up in the interview which Pleve 
gave in October to the English journalist and "Foreign Secretary of 
Anglo- Jewry" Lucien Wolfe. For the rest, he told him much the same 
as he had told Herzl about the difficulty of assimilating the bulk of poor 
and uncultivated Jews, about the desirability of easing Jewish emigrat
ion, and about the steps he had taken to relieve Jewish misery in the 
Pale by reclassifying a number of villages as townlets. More important, 
and more revealing of his and the government's basic attitudes, was 
the firmly stated commitment to retention of the Pale. "He shares the 
opinion of those," the text of the interview approved by Pleve reads, 
"who find it difficult to grant free access to the Russian interior to the 
Jews, for the Russian peasant, who is himself very poor, would then 
have to share the little that he has with the newcomers who belong, for 
the most part, to the non-productive classes."81 
Pleve's death at the hands of a Social Revolutionary in August 1904 
made impossible the testing of his intentions. Those of his successor, 
the harbinger of the brief liberal "Spring" which was to reconcile state 
and society, were made public when he left Vil'no to assume his new 
post. Sviatopolk-Mirskii told a Jewish delegation that the anomalous 
situation of the Jews would have to undergo a radical change for the 
better; to foreign journalists he stated his intention of reducing disabilities. 
A government declaration of 12 December spoke of greater religious

196 	HANS ROGGER 
toleration and freedom of conscience, of lessening religious and national 
discrimination insofar as this did not run counter to the interests of state 
and people. For all his good intentions the new minister accomplished 
little, and the ground for what he was able to do before he was dismissed 
in January 1905 had been prepared by Pleve.82 Whether it was because 
of the opposition of other ministers or that of the Emperor, because of 
their anti-Semitism, their fears of popular protest or of Jews flooding 
the countryside, a fundamental reform of Jewish policy was as unattain
able for the "liberal" Mirskii as it had been unthinkable for the reaction
ary Pleve. And so it was to remain. Whatever the attitude of the head 
of government or of his colleagues, there would be only minor improve
ments and these could be followed or even accompanied by new restric
tions.83 
On the occasion of the baptism of the heir to the throne, an imperial 
decree of 11 August 1904 widened the residence rights of several cate
gories of Jews: university graduates, first-guild merchants, veterans, 
artisans, dentists, druggists, medical assistants, and midwives. They 
were henceforth allowed to move into the rural districts of the Pale 
and, while living there, to lease real property for residential, industrial, 
or other non-agricultural purposes. It was a gesture which might 
have been significant if it had been followed by others. As it was, it 
affected only a small number of individuals — and with the possible 
exception of masons, carpenters, gardeners, and others for whom the 
new privilege was in any case conditioned on plying their trades — these 
were not much interested in the opening of Pale villages or benefited 
by it.84 
In the midst of the revolutionary storm that engulfed all classes and 
nationalities of the Empire in 1905, the Jews themselves were no longer 
content to ask for relief or likely to be satisfied even if the May Laws 
had been abolished altogether. More insistently than ever before their 
demand was for full and equal rights, and it could no longer be met by 
enlarging the list of villages to which they might move (as was done in 
November 1905) 85 or the categories of those who might move into them. 
There was a profound and almost willful misunderstanding in the 
government of what was needed to placate the Jews whose anger was 
believed to be a chief ingredient of the revolutionary opposition. Even 
ministers who saw that justice as much as politics required that oil be 
poured on troubled waters still thought and talked of granting favors 
or privileges rather than general rights, and incongruously called on the 
Jews for restraint and patience while events were moving at dramatic 
speed. 
In part, this failure to act decisively and generously reflected the 
confusion and conflicts, the inability to gauge correctly the country's 
mood, that afflicted the governmental apparatus and its personnel in 
the face of unprecedented challenges from every quarter. The lack 
of firm leadership and the very magnitude of social and political turbu
lence inspired divided counsel and contradictory action, a mixture of 
repression and liberalization, Durnovo and Witte, punitive detachments 
and the October Manifesto. With respect to the Jews and to the prob
lems and demands they posed, the issue was felt to be even more compli-

JEWS, PEASANTS, AND LAND IN RUSSIA 197 
cated. The men in charge of policy not only wondered whether removing 
Jewish grievances would have the desired effect of checking Jewish 
dissidence or inflaming it. They also worried that yielding to the pleas 
of the Jews might free the government of pressure in one quarter only 
to increase its hazard from other directions. Not all the men who 
opposed Jewish equality did so in genuine dread of mass violence against 
the Jews and the authorities if the latter should opt for emancipation. 
Nonetheless, this was a risk which it was universally felt imprudent to 
ignore. Pogroms — whether spontaneous, inspired, or instigated — were 
widespread before and after the issuance of the October Manifesto and 
they might break out again to make more difficult the work of pacification 
or reform. 
There were, thus, two schools of thought in the government during 
the revolutionary crisis as to what should be done about the Jews: 
one holding that discriminatory laws and practices must be relaxed in 
order to improve Russia's standing and prospects for loans abroad, 
to deprive the government's enemies of an inflammatory issue, and to 
isolate Jewish radicals; the other insisting that liberalization was but 
the first and possibly fateful step in the direction of abandoning all 
safeguards and that it would provoke mass reprisals against both Jews 
and government. Count I. I. Tolstoy,86 who held the Ministry of 
Education in the Witte cabinet, appears to have been the only high- 
ranking official who made a case for unconditional emancipation and did 
so on grounds of humanity and justice as well as practical benefits. All 
other advocates of the expansion of Jewish rights to some degree accepted 
as real the spectre of popular wrath conjured up by its opponents and 
stopped short of fundamental reforms, especially when it came to the 
question of land. Although the revolution had been made and won 
in the towns, peasant riots had helped it to victory, and unless the 
government could restore order in the countryside and win to its side 
at least part of a rural population which was still believed to be possessed 
of conservative instincts, it would be unable to contain the urban 
revolution. 
This was the warning sounded at the Peterhof Conference of July 1905 
by General A. P. Ignat'ev, a member of the State Council and former 
Governor-General of Kiev, whom the Emperor had sent on a tour of 
inspection in Ekaterinoslav and Kherson. He reported that villagers 
in the two provinces had without exception pleaded for the retention 
of autocracy and opposed Jewish equality.87 It may be doubted whether 
the General had made a conscientious or scientific sounding of peasant 
opinion, but there were others to confirm what he had said. In a letter 
of 2 November P. P. Migulin, Professor of Economics at Khar'kov Uni
versity, told Witte that the October Manifesto had been interpreted 
by the peasants as a call to rescue the Tsar from the clutches of "lords," 
Jews, and radical students who were preventing the ruler from giving 
them land.88 
In the same month General N. V. Dubasov made similar observations 
in Chernigov where, he said, anti-Semitism had deep roots among the 
peasants who had received the Manifesto as an imperial license to rob 
and beat Jews and Polish pans. Dubasov himself saw the Manifesto

I98	HANS ROGGER 
as an indirect proclamation of Jewish equality, a warrant for the Jews 
to show their true colors by offending the patriotic and dynastic sent
iments of the Russian majority.89 In view of what the Minister of Interior 
told Witte and the Council of State — that there were no adequate forces 
to cope with widespread disorders in the countryside90 — it would have 
been foolhardy for the embattled head of the cabinet to regard such 
warnings as inspired purely by prejudice or the wish to please the Tsar. 
Having learned on taking office that pogroms were being instigated 
and abetted by certain officials in the police, Witte was strengthened in 
the opinion he had formed at the time of Kishinev that anti- Jewish riots 
were the creation of sinister forces inside and outside the government. 
Yet he could not free himself of the fear that they might also be, or 
become, genuine outbreaks of mass rage. To a Jewish delegation which 
demanded equal rights he said that he believed in emancipation but 
that it had to come slowly and required Jewish abstention from opposi- 
tional politics. To give full citizenship to Jews at once might lead to 
real pogroms in the countryside. His sincerity on that occasion has been 
questioned and his caution attributed to lack of conviction or courage. 
However, when he was speaking for posterity in his memoirs, Witte 
reiterated his belief in the existence and explosive potential of popular 
anti-Semitism. "As long as the Jewish question is not dealt with in a 
correct, dispassionate, humane, and statesman-like fashion, Russia 
will not find peace. But I am very much afraid that full rights, if suddenl
y given to the Jews, may create much new turbulence and will once 
again complicate matters."91 
What the people might want or tolerate, popular will and popular 
sentiment, were invoked also in discussions which A. P. Stolypin, who 
became Premier in July 1906, had with moderate oppositionists during 
the summer and later in the year with his cabinet. Stolypin's wish to 
defuse the Jewish issue before elections to the Second Duma by removing 
the least essential and most offensive kinds of discrimination by decree, 
ran into opposition from constitutionalists as well as reactionaries, with 
both groups insisting that a step so important to the people's conscience 
and rights could only be taken by their elected representatives. Stoly
pin's own commitment to Jewish relief was, at best, tactical; in large 
measure it reflected the urging of his Minister of Finance, V. N. Kokov- 
tsev, who was being told by his contacts in London and Paris that 
concessions to the Jews were a precondition for the placement of a Russian 
loan. In a circular of 24 August Stolypin announced his intention of 
lifting as quickly as possible restrictions that had outlived their usefulness 
and served only as irritants; questions bearing on essential aspects of 
the relations between Jews and Russians would be submitted to the 
Duma.92 
In October the matter came before the Council of Ministers where 
Kokovtsev was the spokesman for a policy to which, according to some 
testimony, Stolypin no longer gave the firm backing which was needed 
if an imperial veto was to be avoided. The limits of Kokovtsev's own 
philo-Semitism were set out in a letter of 28 July 1906 to Edouard Noetzlin 
of the Banque de Paris et des Pays-Bas to whom he confided his doubts 
that making the Jews full-fledged citizens would solve the Jewish question,

JEWS, PEASANTS, AND LAND IN RUSSIA I99 
end Jewish exploitation, or Jewish leadership of the revolutionary move
ment. Nonetheless, he was not in principle opposed to granting legal 
equality and thought it high time to abolish most of the exceptional 
measures against the Jews. 
"But it would hardly be in their interest if this were carried to 
the point of full equality with the indigenous Russian population. 
There is one area — landownership — in which this would do more 
harm than good to the Jews. It must be remembered that there 
are seven million Jews in our population of 140 millions. Giving 
them equal access to the land would arouse the land-hungry 
peasant masses against them; in view of age-old discords and the 
exploitation practiced by the Jews, this would lead to inevitable 
and for the Jewish landowners ruinous clashes with the peasants. "93 
With that exception, Kokovtsev concluded his letter, the fetters hobbling 
Jewish activity should be removed and the May Laws repealed. This 
is what he would urge the Council of Ministers to do immediately, without 
waiting for the Duma. 
He did so when the Council met on 27 October for the first of three 
debates on Jewish legislation.94 To change by administrative fiat the 
principles which had guided Jewish policy for nearly a century and a 
half, Kokovtsev said, was unthinkable and could be done only by the 
legislature, and that applied in particular to the Pale. What the Council 
could and should do was to revoke most of the more recent curbs so that 
the Empire would consist of two distinct areas: one entirely open to 
Jewish residence, the other closed to all but some privileged groups. 
With respect to the land, finer distinctions had to be made. 
Jewish purchase or leasing of peasant allotments, homesteads, or 
lands acquired with the aid of the Peasant Land Bank should uncondit
ionally be forbidden everywhere. Other lands in private ownership 
might, in the Pale alone, be made available for rental or purchase in 
order to relieve Jewish economic distress. Outside of the Pale Kokovtsev 
favored maintaining in full force the restrictions issued on 10 May 1903, 
while allowing those Jews who had the right to live in the interior the 
renting of real estate for residential and other non-agricultural purposes. 
All inhibitions on trade and industry should be ended, including those 
which were designed to keep Jewish shareholders and employees from 
managing or holding land owned by corporate enterprises in rural 
districts.96 
It is revealing that Kokovtsev's colleagues should begin discussion of 
his proposals by turning first to "the most basic question" before them, 
"the rights of Jews to the land;" they doubted that widening these 
would be expedient or timely. They cited what they called incontro
vertible evidence that the Jews had shown neither liking nor aptitude 
for tilling the soil. All the government's efforts and expenditure to 
attract them to agrarian pursuits had been futile and were finally aban
doned because the Jews were leaving the agricultural colonies for the 
cities or letting out their land to be farmed by Christian tenants. There 
was no reason to think that the Jewish character had changed. If in 
past years Jewish capitalists had bought landed property it was exclu-

200	HANS ROGGER 
sivěly for speculative purposes, with the most harmful consequences 
for the condition of the soil and the welfare of peasants. It was these 
considerations that had led to the law of 10 May 1903;96 they still retained 
their validity. 
Indeed, they had become more potent because the question of Jewish 
landownership had now to be seen in the context of the all-important 
problem of agrarian reform. To satisfy peasants who had little or no 
land, state and crown had made generous assignments of land from their 
domains; to admit to the market a new and large contingent of Jewish 
capitalists would be a serious obstacle to the realization of the govern
ment's plans and cause a sharp rise in land prices. Moreover, the transfer 
of gentry properties to Jews could give rise to violent protests on the part 
of peasants who saw the land leaving their reach or who found themselves 
having to buy it at a price which included the Jews' profit in the transact
ion. Finally, the horrendous political implications of Jewish domination 
of the land had to be kept in mind, the intolerable thought that the terri
tory of Russia, a Christian state, should fall into the grasping hands of a 
race which had ever been hostile to Christian states, "Therefore, the 
Council of Ministers declares that the question of allowing Jews to acquire 
ownership of real property outside of urban settlements can only be 
decided in the negative."97 
Unanimity broke down when leasing was discussed, with most minis
ters — the journal does not record their names or number — disposed to 
extend to the Pale the somewhat looser regulations prevailing outside of it. 
They were opposed by Stolypin and State Comptroller P. Kh. Shvanebakh 
on the ground that the principle governing the ownership of land must 
apply to all forms of tenure and use. The circumstances still existed 
which had caused the May Laws to be issued and they imposed on the 
government the duty of guarding peasants from the ruinous exploitation 
of Jewish leaseholders who ravaged the land or sublet it at exorbitant 
rates. Land hunger, the two men told their colleagues, was not confined 
to the interior provinces; it was predictable, therefore, that adoption 
of the proposed measure would dangerously intensify the deep enmity 
for the Jews of a peasantry which saw itself condemned to perpetual 
payment of high rents to Jewish leaseholders. Even if the law was 
frequently evaded and if evasion benefited the gentry, this did not make 
it useless as a deterrent to harmful practices. It would be dangerous 
for the Council to act on so important a question as land without concur
rence of the Duma.98 
The recommendations which the ministers agreed on 1 December 1906 
to submit to the Emperor contained no indication of the divisions which 
had surfaced during sittings. According to one of the participants, 
Stolypin had asked for a unanimous opinion in order to avoid placing 
on the Tsar the onus of affirming (as was customary) either a majority 
on minority view and thereby antagonizing the adherents of the losing 
side. It cannot, in any case, have remained a secret to Nicholas that 
Stolypin and others did not agree with the majority of their colleagues 
or one on more of the proposals which reached him; their reservations 
must have made it easier for him to heed "the inner voice" which com
manded him to veto the Council's proposals. It may be assumed that

JEWS, PEASANTS, AND LAND IN RUSSIA 201 
Nicholas, like the Council minority, was disturbed by what seemed to 
him to be an abandonment of the watch which the country's rulers had 
for so long kept over the land." 
Such a supposition is strengthened by the fact that of the resolution's 
twelve paragraphs only three can be considered as being fundamental 
departures from established policies, and that the very first of these 
would have proclaimed the right of free movement and domicile through
out the entire territory, urban and rural, of the Pale and the Kingdom 
of Poland. Paragraph II merely reaffirmed the statutes allowing certain 
categories of Jews to live outside the Pale (except, according to VI, 
in the districts of the Don, Kuban, and Terek Cossacks), while III 
removed all limitations on the conduct of business and trade by Jews 
where they had the right of residence. IV restated the prohibition on 
concluding contracts for "ownership, possession, or use of real estate 
outside of urban settlements," but gave implicit sanction to such informal 
or short-term arrangements as were possible outside the Pale. V stated 
the applicability of II and III to Poland but specified that earlier restric
tions concerning landed property remained in force as, according to VII, 
did disabilities which applied to all non-Christians. Remaining sections 
abolished financial penalties for the families of men who evaded military 
service; repealed the requirement that passports of converts note their 
former religion; made it easier for families of Jewish convicts to follow 
them to Siberia and allowed corporate firms to petition for the modifica
tion of statutes excluding Jews. Two final paragraphs were of a technical 
nature.100 
There is much that remains unclear about Stolypin's role in this less 
than determined effort to better the Jewish condition. While he wished 
to take the wind out of the sails of the opposition, to placate foreign 
bankers and politicians, he also wanted to cover his right flank in order 
not to antagonize the support he needed for carrying out his agrarian 
reform. Stolypin's reluctance to push through even the least conten
tious of the Council's resolutions by using article 87 is in sharp contrast 
with his willingness to legislate by decree on October 5 and November 9 
to expand peasant rights and to modify radically the laws on communal 
tenure. Indeed, caution in one area may be explained by boldness in 
the other. When the first Congress of Delegates of the United Nobility 
met in November 1906, the very first of its resolutions expressed alarm 
over the rumor that the administration was contemplating the aban
donment of special Jewish legislation just when it had enabled the peas
ants to dispose of their land allotments and freed them from the control 
of the commune. No changes in Jewish law, the Congress demanded, 
should be made on the basis of article 87 and without the Duma101. So 
greatly did conservative proponents of Stolypin's land reform fear that 
peasants who received land in private ownership would sell it to unscru
pulous Jews that many in the extreme Right, and even a few moderate 
Rightists, voted against the reform when it came before the Duma in 
1910 and 1911.102 
Long before then the government had ceased to worry about Jewish 
rights as an issue which a powerful opposition might seize and turn 
against it. With the new electoral law of 3 June 1907 there was a reversal

202	HANS ROGGER 
of roles between the cabinet and a Duma dominated by conservatives, 
with the latter resisting even such minor concessions as the former was 
willing to make and taking the lead to make sure that Jews would not 
share in any new rights granted to Russian citizens. Thus, a bill intr
oduced in the Third Duma to create a volosť zemstvo stipulated that Jews 
were not to participate in its electoral assemblies or to be elected to its 
general meetings. Another bill, on the inviolability of the person, 
specifically excluded Jews from its provisions on freedom of movement 
and choice of domicile. In view of the majority's sentiments, there was 
little ground for hope or fear that the resolution to abolish the Pale 
which was brought in on 31 May 1910 by 166 deputies (136 oppositionists, 
26 Octobrists, and 4 non-party moderates) would win the assent of the 
House or of the Council of State.103 
On the other hand, Stolypin's successor Kokovtsev did not yield to 
pressures for additional safeguards against the Jewish advance or for 
a more stringent enforcement of those already on the books. It was not 
until after his dismissal in January 1914 that the cabinet again took 
notice of complaints by right-wing organizations, anti-Semitic publicists, 
and government officials that Jewish exploitation and possession of lands 
and forests were growing at a frightening rate and that the authorities 
were not doing enough to stop these largely illegal practices.104 Some 
ministers expressed particular concern over the intrusion of large corpo
rate landowners into the villages and the opportunities this created for 
Jewish shareholders or officers to circumvent the law. 
In this instance, however, the Council of Ministers did not wish to 
stop the influx of Jewish or foreign capital to Russian enterprises and 
resisted the far-reaching proposals of the Minister of Agriculture and 
two of his colleagues. Instead, the majority of the ministers and the 
Emperor agreed to limit Jews to a minority of directorial or managing 
positions in companies owning or holding landed property; and in areas 
where they did not have the right to own or lease land to forbid their 
serving on boards of directors or as corporate officers.105 As late as 
February 1916 the Senate reaffirmed existing prohibitions on Jewish 
land tenure in rural districts105 and in April of that year the Council of 
Ministers denied the petition of several branches of the Union of Towns 
and Zemstva that Jewish refugees be admitted to villages to relieve 
crowding in the towns. The Minister of Interior was empowered to 
grant such requests only on an individual and selective basis and only 
for the most compelling of reasons.107 
Whether many, or any, such applications were made and granted 
is not known. It is probable, however, that Krivoshein was right, 
or nearly right (if for the wrong reasons) when he declared during the 
ministerial debates of July and August 1915 that the Jews had no interest 
in settling in the villages. The Provisional Government's removal of 
the legal disabilities imposed on Russia's Jews did not lead to their 
massive migration into the countryside, although it must be remembered 
that the stormy and violent years of revolution and civil war offer no 
reliable test of what might have happened in more normal times.

JEWS, PEASANTS, AND LAND IN RUSSIA	203 
V 
When Krivoshein denied the likelihood of the villages being inundated 
Ъу a Jewish flood, yet insisted that the dikes erected to control it must be 
maintained, was he being as hypocritical as the historians of Russian 
Jewry believed all the representatives of the old regime to be who di
splayed a paternal and protective concern for the welfare of the lower 
classes, and in particular the peasants, at the expense of the Jews? 
Were not their expressions of fear merely a pretext for their deep and 
abiding Jew-hatred, a pretense of weakness and impotence to justify 
the restraints imposed on a supposedly ruthless and powerful adversary 
in the economic and political struggle? 
Jew-hatred there certainly was; conscious or unconscious rationaliza
tions of it there must have been as well. There was also an abiding 
conviction among Russia's rulers that the people whose guardians they 
considered themselves to be had to be sheltered from the worst forms 
of economic insecurity and the state from the social turbulence to which 
it might lead. Clearly, this conviction did not lead to policies that were 
consistently or effectively solicitous of the popular welfare when the 
larger interests of the state were at stake. Russia's tax and tariff 
structure, its agrarian and labor policies were hardly inspired by an 
exclusive or overriding regard for social and economic justice. Indeed, 
the regime's obvious and frequent failure to live up to its paternalistic 
rhetoric and its inability to do so if it wished to achieve industrial and 
military might without profound systemic changes may well help to 
explain the emphasis it placed on controlling the one problem of many 
that seemed susceptible of management without excessive risk — the 
Jewish problem. And this was particularly true where the Jewish 
problem impinged on those of peasants and the land, in view as much of 
their symbolic as practical importance in the Russian scale of values.108 
Even if official Russia did not, in the first instance, worry about the 
peasants as human beings or the carriers of endangered national virtues, 
there was genuine concern for them as potential rioters, tax payers, and 
soldiers or as a counterweight to Polish landlords. To the question, 
cm bono, there is no answer that can be made in simple terms of ruling 
class power or pressure. While it is true that before 1861 concentration 
on the harm caused by the Jews was in part an avoidance of the deeper 
problem of serfdom, and while denying them access to the land and the 
villages after 1861 was connected with the failure to face the larger issues 
of agrarian reform and peasant poverty, it is also true that some of the 
measures proposed and taken after emancipation infringed the rights and 
interests of the landowning nobles and their ability to dispose of or use 
their property as they wished. In that sense the state was above class 
interests; at least its actions cannot be simply regarded as designed to 
benefit its noble supporters. 
This applies also to the bourgeoisie whose wish to displace Jewish 
rivals Plekhanov, Martov, and other Marxists saw behind much govern
mental and public anti-Semitism.109 Envy and competition there were,

204
HANS ROGGER 
but it is to be noted, first, that the supposed spokesmen for business in 
government, the Ministers of Finance, were usually the defenders of the 
economic role of the Jews; and, second, that the initiative for restricting 
that role came usually from government, not from business or industry. 
It was motivated either by the wish to keep such critical resources as 
minerals, oil, or land in Russian hands or had the purpose of denying 
to Jews control or management of rural real estate owned by corporate 
enterprise. Russian capitalists were as much hampered by these restric
tions as were Jewish ones, yet the goal of reducing the undesirable effects 
of the Jews on the rural inhabitants was paramount. 
"The undesirable effects on the rural inhabitants. . ." Preoccupation 
with these was so widespread and persistent in the government that it 
cannot simply be dismissed as deliberate deception or window-dressing. 
It was a form of paternalism that was deeply rooted in the reality of 
rural poverty, ignorance, and proneness to mass violence. Reality, 
needless to say, was magnified and distorted by the search for a scapegoat 
and for explanations of stubborn difficulties, by age-old prejudices, deep- 
seated fears and, possibly, by a still deeper sense of guilt on the part of 
the country's rulers that they had not assured the well-being of the rural 
masses after emancipation. 
Even if the Jews did not really want to live in the villages or buy up 
lands which the peasants were going to receive as part of the Stolypin 
reform, to have made it possible for them to do so would have been 
tantamount to an open surrender of the government's claim that it was 
the champion of the masses and the impartial arbiter of conflicting 
interests. Especially after foreigners were forbidden to acquire land in 
various parts of the country, there was little prospect that Jews — consid
ered an alien element — would be freed from prohibitions that were 
inspired by rising nationalism, concern for the security of the borderlands, 
and by the determination to preserve the symbols and sources of national 
strength and greatness — the land and the people on it. 
Most importantly and most realistically there was the dread of what 
an enraged peasantry might do to private property and public order. 
At different levels of intensity and awareness that dread possessed every 
one of the Tsar's officials. It was there when there had been talk of the 
necessity of aiding starving peasants in White Russia before emancip
ation, and it became still stronger after the pogroms of 1881 and the 
agrarian disturbances of the twentieth century. "A Jewish pogrom, 
said a rightist, anti-Semitic Duma deputy, is the beginning of anarchy 
all around. It is the beginning of the so-called black rebellion."110 
The fear of it was shared by sensible men who were not rabid anti-Semites. 
The explosive ingredients for pogroms and agrarian riots were demon- 
strably present and ready to be set off either by spontaneous combustion 
or the spark of agitation, and with particularly devastating effect where 
local nationalism or separatism complicated the government's job of 
control by adding to, or fusing with, the social problem. A modern 
student of the economic sources of anti-Semitism has compared the 
attitude of Ukrainian or Polish peasants to Jews with that of African 
peasants to the Indian merchant: "a mixture of disdain with admiration 
for the cleverness of the trading race, or resentment at their pretensions.

JEWS, PEASANTS, AND LAND IN RUSSIA	205 
to superiority and their economic exploitation. Sometimes resentment 
turned into burning hatred and led to outbreaks of violence."111 
This, or something like it, is what most Russian bureaucrats believed; 
this is also how they felt. Their conviction of the peasant's weakness and 
inferiority and of his fierce resentment of the Jew was so firm because 
they themselves had these feelings. They saw the Jew as the agent or 
ally of the many forces that threatened them, the peasants, and the 
traditional way of life to which they looked as an anchor of safety and 
stability in a world which was rapidly escaping their grasp. When Rus
sian ministers talked of Jewish financial power as making necessary 
either defensive measures or concessions, when they deplored Russia's 
dependence on the European stock-exchange and money market or felt 
that Russia's poverty made her as vulnerable as Serbia or Romania, 
they thought of themselves as Europe's peasants in face of its powerful 
brokers and bankers. When they proclaimed to foreign journalists or 
diplomats, to Jews and non- Jews, that they were obliged to protect 
their simple and undeveloped people from the superior skills, intellect, 
and subtlety of the Jews, they were also speaking for themselves and their 
undeveloped country and derived a sense of moral certitude from the 
identification. 
To prove that the land-poor masses were the true objects of their 
solicitude, the men who made and defended Russia's Jewish policy could 
also point to the fact that educated and prosperous Jews were free to 
acquire real estate in the cities in which they were allowed to live. Would 
anyone in their position, they asked or implied, behave differently? 
They thought they had no choice and regarded their actions as being 
little different in character or purpose from what other governments 
were doing, not least those that were most vocal in their criticism of 
Russia's treatment of the Jews. Had not the Americans, fearful of 
being swamped by the cheap labor of Oriental immigrants, taken steps 
to exclude them for the sake of native farmers and workmen? Had not 
the English adopted an Aliens Act although protesting Russian perse
cution of the Jews? And how had the English dealt with the "innocent agriculturists" in the Deccan who attacked Hindu moneylenders exactly 
as Russian peasants attacked the Jews, and for the same reason. The 
Indian government did as Ignat'ev had done and sought to remove the 
cause of the disorders by protecting the peasants against the extortionate 
practices of the village usurers.112 
And if there was condemnation from foreign press and politicians of 
how the Russians treated the Jews, there was also approval and under
standing to lend comfort and reassurance that the policies pursued were 
not universally viewed as reprehensible or misguided. What an Englis
hman with long experience of Russia wrote in 1914, had in different ways 
been said by other foreigners, among them a representative of the Ameri
can government,113 a high-ranking Austrian diplomat,114 and a leader- 
writer for The Times of London.115 
"In an advanced state like our own, with education permeating 
every section of the community, public opinion demands that all 
classes, whether Jew or Gentile, must obey the laws that have

20б	HANS ROGGER 
been enacted. [. . .] This, however, does not apply in a commun
ity where millions of the population have but recently emerged 
from a state of subservience and serfdom. Such being the case 
in Russia, where ninety percent of its population can neither read 
nor write, and its peasantry is ever on the verge of destitution, 
it follows that full protection should be given against usury, 
extortion, and evasion of the law on the part of the Jews, and it is 
not for England to dictate when the special protective laws 
should be abrogated and emancipation from them be accorded. 
In my opinion, the time is yet far distant before equal rights 
can with safety be applied."116 
It is doubtful that Tsarist Russia's leaders would ever have thought 
that a time of safety had come. In the meantime, the steps they took to 
protect themselves and the people in their charge from Jewish danger 
only served to breed new difficulties. 
There were, as we have tried to show, objective dimensions to Russia's 
Jewish problem. Besides the anti-Semitism of men, there was what 
Vladimir Jabotinsky, the founder of Zionist Revisionism, called the anti- 
Semitism of things which was born of objective realities. He thought 
that these were inherently and organically hostile to a scattered minority 
whose situation could at most be aggravated or alleviated by the action 
of governments but never normalized.117 
There was, in truth, something abnormal, however it had come about, 
in the situation of the Jewish minority, in its concentration in certain 
classes, regions, and economic activities; and that abnormality was most 
pronounced in a rural and agrarian context. It is even more true, of 
course, that the Russian government's actions nourished and perpetuated 
this abnormality, and that the only hope of ending it in the long run 
would have been to start by lifting all restrictions, abandoning the Pale 
of Settlement, allowing Jews to distribute themselves over the entire 
country, to enter any profession they chose and thus to shed the peculiari
ties and particularism with which they were always taxed. This, 
however, was not an option which Russia's rulers thought was really 
available to them. Unexamined beliefs and traditional biases played 
their part here too. But these were transformed into insurmountable 
blocks by an inability to think about the long run when the country's 
leaders were confronted with the complex Jews-peasants-land. More 
accurately, they did not dare to do so. They shied away from far-sighted 
and far-reaching measures of which the outcome was uncertain and which, 
in the short run, might make matters irreparably worse. Nor were 
they emotionally or intellectually prepared to accept "abnormality" 
and difference as desirable forms of variety which would enrich the nation 
and its people. 
While it would be going too far to say that the perceived need to 
keep Jews away from peasants and the land was the determinant of 
Imperial Russia's Jewish policy, it appears to have been a key element 
in its remarkable persistency. As long, therefore, as the country's 
evolution had not yet reduced the economic vulnerability and the social 
and political significance of the peasantry in the eyes of its governors,

JEWS, PEASANTS, AND LAND IN RUSSIA	20y 
they would resist Jewish emancipation and justify, to themselves and 
others, their prejudices by their interests and those of the people whose 
guardians they felt themselves to be. 
Los Angeles, 1975. 
1.Obshchaia zápiska vysshei komissii dlia peresmoira deistvuiushchikh o evreiakh 
v Imperii zakonov (1883-1888) (no place, no date) : 86-91 ; S. M. Dubnov and 
G. la. Krasnyi-Admoni, eds., Materiály dlia istorii antievreiskikh pogromov v Rossii 
(Petrograd, 1919-1923), II: 184-279; Mina Goldberg, Die Jahre 1881-1882 in der 
Geschichte der russischen Juden (Berlin, 1934). 
2.Obshchaia zápiska. . ., op. cit.: 82-84. 
3.Ibid.: 80-82. 
4.V. Iu. Skalon, Po zemskim voprosam (St. P., 1905), I: 338-352. 
5.M. Goldberg, op. cit.: 45. 
6.The fullest account of Ignat'ey's views and plans on the Jewish question 
is by I. Gessen, "Graf N. P. Ignat'ev i 'Vremennye pravila' o evreiakh 3 maia 1882 
goda, » Pravo, 30 and 31 (1908), cols. 1631-1637 and 1678-1687. The quotation 
is from No. 30, col. 1632. For what follows, also see his Zákon i zhizn '; kak sozi- 
dalis' ogranichitel'nye zákony 0 zhitel'stve eyreev v Rossii (St. P., 191 1): 153-161 and 
his Istoriia evreiskogo národa v Rossii (Leningrad, 1925-1927), II: 215-227; 
P. A. Zaionchkovskii, Krizis samoderzhaviia na rubezhe i8yo-i88o godov (Moscow, 
1964): 413-419; V. M. Khizhniakov, Vospominaniia zemskogo deiatelia (Petrograd, 
1916): 109-114; Julius Eckhardt, Russische Wandlungen (Leipzig, 1882): 389-390; 
Evreiskaia entsiklopediia (hereafter ЕЕ), I: 130; V: 815-822; IX: 690-691; 
E. A. Perets, Dnevnik, 1880-1883 (Moscow-Leningrad, 1927) : 130-133. 
7.The activities and recommendations of the Gotovtsev committee are summar
ized in "Anti-evreiskoe dvizhenie v Rossii v 1881 i 1882 g.," Evreiskaia starina, 
I (1909), part II: 268-273. 
8.Ibid.: 269. 
9.Ibid.: 274. 
10.I. Cherikover, Antisemitizm i pogromy na Ukraine, igij-içi8 gg. (Berlin, 
1923): 19. 
11.S. В. Weinryb, Neueste Wirtschafts geschichte der Juden in Russland und 
Polen (Breslau, 1934): 21, note 5. 
12.I. G. Orshanskii, Evrei v Rossii (St. P., 1872): 24, 28. 
13.P. A. Zaionchkovskii, op. cit.: 379. 
14.It deserves to be mentioned that General E. I. Totleben, whose determined 
action had forestalled pogroms in the North- West, agreed with Ignat'ev — with 
whom he agreed on little else — that Jews should be forbidden to settle in the 
villages. (S. M. Dubnow, History of the Jews in Russia and Poland (Philadelphia, 
1916), II: 276.) ' 15. In summarizing the conclusions of the provincial commissions, I have 
used, besides their Trudy gubernskikh komissii po evreiskomu voprosu, 2 vols 
(St. P., 1884) [subsequent citations, since pagination is not consecutive, will be 
to Trudy, the name of the province, to volume, and page], the Obshchaia zápiska. . ., 
op. cit., of the Pahlen Commission: 97-206; 212-217; 228-239 and "Anti-evreiskoe 
dvizhenie. . .," art. cit., part I: 88-109. (See note 7 above.) 
16.I. Gessen, Istoriia evr. národa. . ., op. cit., II: 219-220. 
17.Trudy, Kherson, II: 1091-1093; 1105; Obshchaia zápiska. . ., op. cit.: 213. 
18.Trudy, Vitebsk, I: 25, 35. 
19.Ibid., Mogilev, I: 9-10, 23, 29; Obshchaia zápiska. . ., op. cit.: 212. 
20.Ibid.: 212, 228-229 and Trudy, Vil'no, I: 60-76. 
21.Ibid., Grodno, I: 4-5, 9-10, 21 and Obshchaia zápiska. . ., op. cit .: 212,229. 
22.M. Khizhniakov, op. cit.: 109-114. 
23.Trudy, Khar'kov, II: 27. Cf. Vil'no, I: 88-113, 119-123, 178 and M. E. Man- 
del'shtam, "Ignaťevskaia komissiia v Kieve, 1881 g.," Perezhitoe, IV (1913): 56.

2O8	HANS ROGGER 
24.I. Gessen, " Graf N. P. Ignaťev. . .," art. cit., 31, cols. 1678-1685. 
25.E. A. Perets, op. cit..: 133. 
26.I. Gessen, " Graf N P. Ignaťev. . .," art. cit., 31, col. 1682; Istoricheskii 
obzor deiateV nosti komiteta ministrov, i88i-i8g4 (St. P., 1902), IV: 183. 
27."Anti-evreiskoe dvizhenie. . .," art. cit., part II: 275. 
28.Zhurnaly komiteta ministrov po ispolneniiu ukaza 12-ogo dekabria IQ04 goda 
(St. P., 1905). For other examples of the acceptance of Ignat'ev's explanation 
of pogroms and of his proposed remedies, see Ministerstvo iustitsii za sto let (St. P., 
1902): 213-214 ; "Reshenie obshchago sobraniia senata, 1888 g., no. 25," Pravo, 
17 (1905), col. 1365; Ministerstvo vnutrennikh del, Správka oh ogranicheniiakh 
v lichnykh i imushchestvennykh pravakh evreev (St. P., 1906): 5. 
29.P. A. Zaionchkovskii, Rossiiskoe samoderzhavie v kontse XIX stoletiia 
(Moscow, 1970): 131-132; ЕЕ, I: 832; V: 862-863; S. M. Dubnow, op. cit., II: 309-312. 
30.The Commission's printed report, the Obshchaia zápiska. . . (op. cit.), 
bears on its final page the names of eight members for the majority view and five 
for the minority. In the copy which I consulted, one of the latter is written in 
by hand. Zaionchkovskii cites archival evidence to the effect that one member 
of the majority adhered, in fact, to the opposition. Cf. S. M. Dubnow, op. cit., 
II: 336-337, 362-369. 
31.Obshchaia zápiska. . ., op. cit.: 2-24. 
32.Ibid.: 5-6. 
33.Ibid.: 58; I. M. Bikerman, Cherta evreiskoi osedlosti (St. P., 191 1): 44-45; 
ЕЕ, III: 86-87; Evreiskoe Kolonizatsionnoe Obshchestvo [ÈKO], Sbornik mate- 
rialov ob ekonomicheskom polozhenii evreev v Rossii (hereafter EKO, Sbornik), 
I, xxvii-xviii: 171, 178-181. According to the 1897 census, 48.84% of all Russia's 
Jews, including those in Russian Poland, lived in towns, 33.05 % in townlets, and 
18.11% in villages. (Encyclopaedia Judaica, XIV: 450.) 
34.Obshchaia zápiska. . ., op. cit.: 93-95. 
35.Ibid.: 1 10-120.	40. Ibid.: 286. 
36.Ibid.: 121-130.	41. Ibid.: 289, 293. 
37.Ibid.: 102-103, 132, 147. 42. Ibid.: 294. 
38.Ibid.: 150-153-	43- ЕЕ, III: 85. 
39.Ibid.: 271-272, 290. 
44.S. Ettinger (Hebrew University, Jerusalem), "The image of the Jews in 
Russian public opinion (until the 1880's)," paper delivered at University of Cali
fornia, Los Angeles, March 1972. 
45.See, for example, "Vospominaniia V. V. Bervi," Golos minuvshago, 5/6 
(1916): 267; Walter G. Moss, "Vladimir Soloviev and the Jews in Russia," Russian 
Review (Apr., 1970): 186; S. Iuzhakov, "Evreiskii vopros v Rossii," Otechestvennye 
zapiski, 5 (1882): 5-6, 9, 13, 25; A. M. Pushchin, Ocherk poslednikh itogov razrabotki 
evreiskago voprosa v Rossii (St. P., 1882): 18-21. 
46.S. M. Dubnow, op. cit., Ill: 10; R. F. Byrnes, Pobedonostsev (Bloomington, 
1968): 205-206. 
47.Ibid.: 301-302; 331. 
48.The law of 1893, besides making more difficult the redemption of land by 
individual peasants without the express consent of the commune, also forbade 
the latter to sell allotment land to non-peasants. 
49.Arcadius Kahan (University of Chicago), "The impact of the industrial
ization process in Tsarist Russia upon the socio-economic conditions of the Jewish population," paper delivered at UCLA, March 1972. 
50.Poultney Bigelow, The borderland of Czar and Kaiser (N.Y., 1894). 
51.Ibid.: 107-108. 
52.Ibid.: 113. Cf. the remarks of N. K. Giers to the American Minister, 
С. Е. Smith, in Foreign relations of the United States, i8go-i8gi (Washington, 
1892): 735. 
53.Jackson Taylor, "D. A. Tolstoy and the Ministry of the Interior, 1882- 
1889," unpubl. doctoral dissertation, New York University (1970): 48; Osoby e 
zhurnaly komiteta ministrov (1907), 157: 11-12. 
54.ЕЕ, VII: 734. 
55.M. I. Mysh, сотр., Rukovodstvo k russkim zakonam o evreiakh, 4th ed. 
(St. P., 1914): 151-152, 154, 327; G. B. Sliozberg, Delà minuvshikh dnei (Paris, 1933), 
II: 4-5.

JEWS, PEASANTS, AND LAND IN RUSSIA 209 
56.Dnevnik gosudartsvennogo sekretaria A. A. Polovtsova (Moscow, 1966), 
И: 59, 473. 
57.Foreign relations of the United States, op. cit.: 741. 
58.P. A. Zaionchkovskii, Rossiiskoe samoderzhavie. . ., op. cit.: 135; G. В. Slioz- 
berg, op. cit., II: 165-168; S. M. Dubnow, "Furor judophobicus v poslednie gody 
tsarstvovaniia Aleksandra III," Evr. starina, 10 (1918): 27-59. 
59.Dnevnik. . . A. A. Polovtsova, op. cit., II: 59, 314; V. N. Lamzdorf, Dnevnik, 
1891-1892 (Moscow-Leningrad, 1934): 52-53, 72. 
60.Handbuch des gesamten russischen Zivilrechts, ed. Klibanski (Berlin, 191 1), 
I: 434; II: 469; M. I. Mysh, op. cit.: 384-385; Lucien Wolf, éd., The legal sufferings 
of the Jews in Russia (London, 1912): 92. 
61.K. Korol'kov, Zhizri i tsarstvovanie Aleksandra III (Kiev, 1901): 176- 
177; V. N. Lamzdorf, op. cit.: 386; G. В. Sliozberg, op. cit., II: 82; Istoricheskii 
obzor deiateV nosti komiteta ministrov, op. cit., IV: 165-182; V: 27-28; Theodor von 
Laue, Sergei Witte and the industrialization of Russia (N. Y., 1963): 185, 189; 
la. I. Gimpel'son, сотр., Zákony o evreiakh (St. P., 1914): 392-395; Správka po 
voprosu o pravovom polozhenii evreev v Rossii: 1 19-120. Compiled by the chancel
lery of the Council of Ministers and bearing the classification Sekretno on its title- 
page, this volume was obviously prepared for use by government agencies and, 
judging by internal evidence, printed in 1914. 
62.Istoricheskii obzor deiatel'nosti komiteta ministrov, op. cit., V: 123-124; 
M. I. Mysh, op. cit.: 397. E. B. Levin, éd., Sborník ogranichitel'nykh zakonov i 
postanovlenii о evreiakh (St. P., 1902), contains a list of companies whose articles 
of incorporation or by-laws included restrictions on Jews. 
63.Th. von Laue, op. cit.: 124. 
64.Správka. . ., op. cit.: 136-161. See above n. 6i. 
65."Evreiskii vopros pri wedenii piteinoi monopolii. Vsepoddanneishii 
doklad S. lu. Vitte," Evr. starina, VIII (1915): 405-410. For a fuller discussion 
of Witte's views see H. Rogger, "Russian ministers and the Jewish question, 1881- 
1917," California Slavic Studies, VIII (1975): 46-52. 
66.S. M. Dubnow, op. cit., Ill: 22-23; EÈ, V: 614 gives the number of those 
displaced from the trade in spirits by the state monopoly as 100,000. There was, 
in addition, a substantial reduction in the number of Jewish distilleries and brewe
ries and, consequently, of the hands employed by them. The Governor-General 
of Khar'kov estimated in 1882 that there were 150,000 Jews in the drink trade. 
67.N. Kh. Bunge, " 1881 - 1884 gg.; zápiska naidennaia v bumagakh 
N. Kh. Bunge, " in Komitét ministrov, Materiály i zapiski razoslannye chlenam 
komiteta ministrov na zasedaniia 15, 22 i 23 marta, 5 i 15 aprelia 1905 g. po dělu o 
poriadke vypolneniia p. 7 Vysochaishago ukaza 12 dek. 1904 g. v otnoshenii 9 zapad- 
nykh gubernii: 137 p. 
68.According to M. I. Mysh, op. cit.: 49, Jews were also removed from the 
jurisdiction of the land captains. 
69.N. Kh. Bunge, art. cit.: 31, 37-39. 
70.В. D. Brutskus, "Ekonomicheskoe polozhenie evreev i voina," Russkaia 
mysl', 4 (1915): 28, 41-42; Dmitrii Drutskoi-Sokol'ninskii, "Antisemitizm na 
západe i v Rossii," Věstník Evropy, 7 (1900): 96-118; S. M. Dubnow, op. cit., III: 
339; S. W. Baron, The Russian Jew under Tsars and Soviets (N. Y., 1964): 64; Leo 
Errera, Die russischen Juden (Leipzig, 1903): 103-104; Harold Frederic, The new 
exodus (N. Y., 1892): 102-103. 
71.Osobye zhurnaly komiteta ministrov (1907), No. 157: 12. 
72.Svod vysochaishikh otmetok po vsepoddanneishim otchetam general- guberna- 
torov, gubernatorov, voennykh gubernatorov i gradonachal'nikov za 1895 g. (St. P., 
1897): 29-31. 
73.Ibid.: 29. 
74.Osobye zhurnaly komiteta ministrov, No. 157: 10; Svod. . . za 1897 g. 
(St. P., 1899): 42 and Svod. . . za 1898 g. (St. P., 1901): 127. 
75.I. Gessen, Zakon. . ., op. cit.: 171; ЕЕ, III: 85-86; V: 821. 
76.M. I. Mysh, op. cit.: 120-123, 346, 354. 
77.I. Gessen, Zakon. . ., op. cit.: 172-173. 
78.On Plevě, H. Rogger, art. cit.: 30, 38-45; Osobye zhurnaly komiteta ministrov, 
No. 157: 14-15. On the Commission, ЕЕ, IX: 692 and S. M. Dubnov, Noveishaia 
istoriia evreiskago národa (Berlin, 1923), III: 380.

210	HANS ROGGER 
79.Tainaia dokladnaia zápiska Vilenskogo gubernatova o polozhenii evreev v 
Rossii (Geneva: Tipografiia Bunda, 1904); Sviatopolk-Mirskiťs report was first 
published, in a French translation, by Pawel Korzec in CMRS, XI, 2 (1970): 
278-291, and in English in Soviet Jewish Affairs, 2 (1972): 87-95, with an introduc
tion by Dr. Korzec which also touches on the Pahlen memorandum. Urusov's 
views may be gleaned from his Zapiski gubernatora (Berlin, 1907), especially 
pp. 202-210. 
80.Theodor Herzls Tagebuecher, 1893-1904 (Berlin, 1923), III: 463-466, 477- 
483- 
81.A. Braudo, "Beseda V. К. Pleve s L. Vol'fom (1903)," Evr. starina, IX 
(1916): 121-125. 
82.V. I. Gurko, Features and figures of the past (Stanford, 1939): 279; S. E. Kryz- 
hanovskii, Vospominaniia (Berlin, n.d.): 17, 21, 26; S. M. Dubnov, Noveishaia 
istoriia . . ., op. cit., III: 383; A. V. Bogdanovich, Tri poslednikh samoderzhtsa 
(Moscow-Leningrad, 1924): 303, 309; Shmarya Levin, The arena (N. Y., 1932): 277. 
83.Thus, the 10 May 1903 reclassification of rural localities was accompanied 
on the same day, by new restrictions on the acquisition of real property outside 
of towns by individuals who had the right of residence in non-Pale provinces. 
(M. I. Mysh, op. cit.: 364.) 
84.Ibid.: 126; I. Gessen, Zakon. . ., op. cit.: 173-175; Osobye zhurnaly komiteta 
ministrov, No. 157: 15. 
85.N. I. Lazarevskii, éd., Zakonodatel'nye akty perekhodnogo vremeni (St. P., 
1909): 190-195, lists the localities opened for Jewish residence on 24 November 1905. 
86.I. I. Tolstoi i Iulii Gessen, Fakty i mysli; evreiskii vopros v Rossii (St. P., 
1907), preface and conclusion. 
87.Peter gofskoe soveshchanie o proekte gosudarstvennoi dumy (Berlin, n.d.): 
34-35- 
88.H. D. Mehlinger and J. M. Thompson, Count Witte and the Tsarist govern
ment in the 1905 Revolution (Bloomington, 1972): 187. 
89."Agrarnoe dvizhenie v 1905 g. po otchetam Dubasova i Panteleeva," 
Krasnyi arkhiv, 11-12 (1925): 183-185. 
90.G. L. Yaney, "Some aspects of the Imperial Russian Government on the 
eve of the First World War," Slavonic and East European Review, 100 (1964): 72. 
91.S. lu. Vitte, Vospominaniia (Moscow, i960), II: 214-440; III: 327-329; 
L. Aizenberg, "Na slovakh i na dele," Evr. letopis', III (1924): 31-34. 
92.D. N. Shipov, Vospominaniia i dumy o perezhitom (Moscow, 1918): 461- 
466; A. F. Koni, Sobranie sochinenii (Moscow, 1966), II: 367; Sidney Harcave, 
"The Jewish question in the first Russian Duma," Jewish Social Studies, 2 (1944): 
162; S. M. Dubnov, Noveishaia istoriia. . ., op. cit., Ill: 405. 
93."Perepiska V. N. Kokovtseva s Eduardom Netslinym," Krasnyi arkhiv, 
4 (1923): 134-135; E. A. Preobrazhenskii, éd., Russkie finansy i evropeiskaia birzha 
v 1904-1906 gg. (Moscow-Leningrad, 1926): 329. 
94.V. I. Gurko, op. cit.: 504-506; V. N. Kokovtsev, Iz moego proshlogo (Paris, 
^ЗЗ)» I; 237"239- The Council's debates are summarized in Osobye zhurnaly 
komiteta ministrov, No. 157: 60 p. 
95.Ibid.: 20-23. 
96.See note 83 above. 
97.Osobye zhurnaly komiteta ministrov, No. 157: 28-32. Even after the Stoly- 
pin reform, peasants were still not entirely free to dispose of their land as they 
wished; it could not be sold to non-peasants who were not native inhabitants 
(rodnye obyvateli) of the Empire. {Ibid., No. 19: 15.) 
98.Ibid., No. 157: 32-37. 
99.The letter of Nicholas and Stolypin's reply are in Krasnyi arkhiv, 5 (1924): 
105-107. 
100.Osobye zhurnaly komiteta ministrov, No. 157: 56-60. 
101.Svod postanovlenii 1-Х s"ezdov upolnomochennykh ob" edinennykh dvorians- 
kikh obshchestv, 1906-1914 (Petrograd, 1915): 38. 
102.R. S. Edelman, "Russian nationalism and class consciousness: the rise 
of the All- Russian National Union, 1907-1912," unpubl. doctoral dissertation, 
Columbia University (1974): 96. 
103.ЕЕ, VII: 369-375. 
104.V. N. Kokovtsev, op. cit., I: 481; M. M. Artsibashev, Griadushchaia gibeV

JEWS, 
PEASANTS, AND LAND IN RUSSIA	211 
Rossii (St. P., 1908); Novyi voskhod, 22 sept. 1911, cols. 22-23; Report of Governor 
A. F. Girs, of Minsk, for the year 1913 to Nicholas II; undated manuscript in 
Russian Archives, Columbia University. 
105.Správka. . ., op. cit.: 141-155. See above n. 61. 
106.Pravo, 7 (1916), cols. 474-475. 
107.Ibid., 17, col. 1042. 
108.Even Witte, the great industrializer, who believed that Russia could 
become powerful only when she ceased to be an exclusively agricultural country, 
would sing the praises of the rural way of life. The Russian people, he wrote in 
1885, were above all agrarian; they loved the land and despised work in the mills. 
Their spiritual essence was intimately tied to the "beautiful, exalted, and ennobling 
work on the soil." (Th. von Laue, op. cit.: 55, 68.) 
109.В. P. Baluev, Politicheskaia reaktsiia 80-kh godov XIX veka i russkaia 
zhurnalistika (Moscow, 1971): 301-302; Iulii Martov, Obshchestvennye i umstvennye 
techeniia v Rossii (Leningrad-Moscow, 1924): 123-124; E. la. Drabkina, Natsional'- 
nyi i koloniál' nyi vopros v tsarskoi Rossii (Moscow, 1930): 37. 
no, V. V. Shul'gin, "The sleeping car," Slavonic and East European Review, 
15 (1927): 475- 
in. S. Andreski, "An economic interpretation of anti-Semitism in Eastern Europe," Jewish Journal of Sociology, 2 (1963): 207. 
112.Olga Novikoff, Russian memories (N. Y., 1916): 113-116, 121. 
113.Report of the Commissioner of Immigration upon the causes which incite 
immigration to the United States (Washington, 1892): 303-305. 
114.Hans Heilbronner, " Count Aehrenthal and Russian Jewry, 1903-1907," 
Journal of Modern History, 4 (1966): 394-406. 
115.Quoted in Darkest Russia, 129, 17 June 1914. 
116.George Hume, Thirty-five years in Russia (London, 1914): 234. 
117.Vladimir Zhabotinskii, Evreiskoe gosudarstvo (Kharbin, 1938): 24-30.