The Russian Revolution: Online Resource

Nationality Groups in Russia around 1900

by Daniel Field, Professor of History, Emeritus, Syracuse University

In all, there were about 170 nationality groups in Russia at the time of the census of 1897. More different languages were spoken in the Caucasus, the mountain range to the northeast of the Black Sea, than in all Europe outside Russia. Ethnic Russians, or "Great Russians," made up slightly less than half the population of 125 million. Together with 28 million Ukrainians and Belorussians, however, East Slavs represented a clear majority.

Ukrainians and Belorussians came of similar ethnic stock as the Russians and most were of the same religion. The three languages are closely related. Indeed, the Imperial government regarded Ukrainian and Belorussian as dialects of Russian and did not recognize their speakers as a distinct nationality—except by prohibiting most kinds of publication in these languages. (A learned linguist has observed that a language is a dialect with an army and a navy.) Because so much was shared, it was fairly easy for Ukrainians and Belorussians to assimilate with Great Russians, and national consciousness—as opposed to regional loyalty—was limited to a few intellectuals until the early twentieth century, when it developed rapidly in Ukraine.

Poles, who were West Slavs, were another matter. They numbered seven million. They were quite distinct from East Slavs in language and in religion, being Roman Catholic. Furthermore, they had a tradition of conflict with Russians and memories of national independence, Russia having acquired her Polish lands only in the latter eighteenth century. These lands were more highly developed economically than most of the rest of the Empire. In 1831 and again in 1863, Poland had risen in rebellion against Russian rule. Some Poles held that, for economic and military reasons, Poland could not survive as a separate state, but in general, Polish national consciousness was highly developed, and a crisis of Russo-Polish relations seemed an inevitable byproduct of any other crisis in the Empire.

There were in the empire almost two million German speakers, not counting persons (like Witte or the philologist Dahl) who were Russian by culture and sentiment but bore German names. Germans were concentrated in so-called colonies" in the South and along the Volga, where they had been enticed in the eighteenth century, and in the Baltic Provinces. German aristocrats from the Baltic held a disproportionate share of elite positions in the bureaucracy, especially at the tsar's court, and also in science. As nineteenth-century fiction attests, Russians regarded Germans as the embodiment of the bourgeois virtues and the bourgeois vices. Despite their close relationship to the throne, in the latter nineteenth century Germans were subjected to russifying pressures in the Baltic region that had been their preserve.

The indigenous population of the Baltic Provinces, numbering four million, had been under the sway of a German elite for centuries. (A similar situation prevailed in the Grand Duchy of Finland, which had an administration separate from the rest of the Empire; here the elite was Swedish.) The Latvians, Lithuanians and Estonians responded to this double subjugation with furious cultural and educational activity, producing, among other things, the highest literacy rates in the empire; they also responded in the revolutions of 1905 and 1917 by surpassing other areas in revolutionary turmoil. The intensifying nationalist fervor of the Baltic and Finnic peoples was gratified by the establishment of four independent states after World War I; of these, Finland retained its independence after World War II, while the rest regained their independence only with the collapse of the USSR.

In Transcaucasia lived 2.5 million Georgians and Armenians. Both peoples had ancient cultural traditions and highly distinctive (nonslavic) languages; both had embraced Christianity centuries before the East Slavs. While nationalism was on the upswing among the Armenians early in the twentieth century, both peoples were remarkable for a combination of adaptability to Russian ways coupled with social and cultural cohesion. These qualities, together with energy and enterprise, enabled them to play a role in the cultural and political life of the Soviet Union disproportionate to their numbers. Even more than Americans, Russians tend to accept as one of themselves anyone who speaks and behaves as they do; Georgians have been able to win this acceptance without sacrifice of their language or culture. Stalin, the hero of Soviet patriots and Russian chauvinists, spoke Russian with a marked Georgian accent. Transcaucasia held the potential, which would be realized in the coming revolutions and Civil War and again in the past few years, for many-sided conflicts: between Armenians and Georgians, between either or both and the Russians, between all of these and the foreigners who owned most of the mineral and industrial wealth of the region, and between any or all of these and the third major nationality of Transcaucasia, the Azerbaijanis.

The Azerbaijanis were among the 12 million Turkic people of the empire. In European Russia, apart from Azerbaijan, lived the Crimean Tatars and the Volga Tatars; they were descended from the inhabitants of khanates conquered by the Russians in the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. In the latter nineteenth century, Russia expanded into Central Asia, which was inhabited by Kazakhs, Bashkirs, Turkomens, Uzbeks, Kalmuks and Kirghiz. (Like the United States, Russia has expanded overland, which accounts for our moral superiority to the "imperialist" powers like England and France, which seized territories overseas.) The range of lifestyles among the Turkic peoples was wide. The Volga Tatars had coexisted peacefully for centuries with their Slavic neighbors and were, like them, settled agriculturalists. Most of the Turkic peoples of Central Asia were pastoral nomads who underwent, like American Indians, a long and losing struggle against the ploughman and the officials and military forces that worked in his behalf. The protectorates of Khiva and Bukhara were under the rule of native despots and were scarcely touched by European institutions or ways. All of these groups spoke a Turkic language (except the Kirghiz) and all of them were Muslims. Some Turkic intellectuals were drawn to secularism, nationalism or both, but for most, national consciousness began and ended with Islam, and the mullah (priest) was the bearer of culture and of law.

There remain the inorodtsy, or "peoples of other stock." These were peoples kept, in American terms, "on reservations," deliberately isolated from the temptations and pressures of the metropolitan community. Most of these groups were denizens of the far North or of Eastern Siberia, small in numbers and economically and culturally primitive. Yakuts, Samoeds, Aleuts and Eskimos were classified as inorodtsy. So were the Empire's Jews, who were confined (except for a favored few) within the Pale of Settlement in the western provinces.

Jews and Antisemitism

The experience of the five million Jews living in the Russian Empire around 1900 presents special problems to the historical understanding. It is difficult not to view that experience through the prism of the holocaust—the killing of the six million Jews by the Nazis. And it is easy to imagine the East European Jews of the nineteenth century as very like their descendants among us, and hence to imagine them as so many men and women like Dr. Salk and Aunt Bertha, shaking the bars that confined them. This retrospective projection is fallacious and serves to minimize the achievements and the problems of Jews over the past century. It is more useful to imagine the Pale (cherta osedlosti, the zone of western Russia, including Poland and parts of Ukraine, to which most Jews were confined by law) as an extremely underdeveloped nation. Like, say, the Afghans, the Jews of the Pale were very poor and operated on a low level of technology, apart from a few industrial oases. Like them, they lived in and were imbued by a highly traditional culture, in which priests and priestly values completely dominated social and cultural life. But, unlike Afghans, Jews were a minority group, the targets of prejudice and sometimes persecution.

Antisemitism is not in the nature of things; like other phenomena of social history, it requires explanation. The antisemitism of Christians in the Russian Empire had several sources. In the early centuries of the Christian era, Jewish and Christian zealots competed vigorously, and on more or less equal terms, for souls in the Near East. Patristic texts generated by this long-past struggle found their way into the traditional literature of the Orthodox Church and were familiar to the faithful, even the unsophisticated. From these texts a Russian acquired a disposition against the Jewish name, such as we might have against "Philistines" or "Vandals": we have never met any and are not quite sure what they are, but we know they're the wrong sort. Most ethnic Russians passed all their lives without ever meeting a Jew, but they were, by a fortuity of church history and tradition, prepared to dislike Jews. More important were the hostility and suspicion which peasants (and not just in Russia) have for outsiders; their arrival in the village almost always means something bad for peasants. Jews, alien to Christianity and to agriculture as well as to the village, were the quintessential outsiders. A major rationale of confining Jews within the Pale was the government's supposition that it could not protect them from peasant violence.

Government policy, however, was not made by peasants. The antisemitism of the elite, in Russia as in the United States, was in some measure artificial or "learned." It developed, in part, as a corollary of the nationalist and reactionary doctrines that prevailed in the reigns of Alexander III and Nicholas II and, in part, it was picked up by ethnic Russian officials from colleagues who came from areas with a considerable Jewish population and a tradition of antisemitism. This kind of antisemitism underlay, for example, the limitations on Jewish entry into Russian universities. Yet this kind of antisemitism, even in conjunction with the other strands, would not develop into the murderous antisemitism that fueled the holocaust. That kind of antisemitism derives from the ideology and social structure common to much of Eastern Europe from the Black Sea to the Baltic.

In the idealized representations of ideology, rural Eastern Europe was a harmonious world of sturdy, deferential peasants and chivalrous, benevolent squires. Money had no place in this ideal, but it had a considerable function in real life. Because of circumstances deriving from their arrival in this area and because they were barred by law from many occupations, Jews were largely involved in such trades as peddling, horsedealing, money-lending, tavern-keeping, and tailoring. The Jew personified the money relationships to which squires and peasants would like to close their eyes, and almost every money transaction was, for the peasant, a misfortune. Consider a peasant whose horse had died. He must buy a new one from a Jew. This leaves him short of money and obliged to borrow from a Jew to pay the rent for which the squire's steward, another Jew, is dunning him. Ridden by debt and despair, he goes to a tavern to drown his sorrows, and it is a Jew who pushes the glass across the counter. The Jews in this sad saga would be as poor as their peasant neighbors; more important, in most instances they were intermediaries or even agents for the Christian squire, to whom much of the money collected accrued. But as the exploiter nearest to hand, alien in language and religion, the Jew was the easiest target for frustrated peasants. Squires and government officials, like some Soviet officials in recent times, did not mind diverting to the Jews the antagonisms that might have been directed against themselves, the social system, and the regime.

In the twenty-five years following 1881, the problem of popular antisemitism was brought vividly to the forefront by a series of pogroms, or mob attacks on Jewish houses and property. In many cases, low-level police officials incited the pogroms. The government in St. Petersburg could not encourage any violation of public order, but it would rather see mobs vent their fury on Jews than on manorhouses or police stations. The government's ambivalence was epitomize in a remark the tsar wrote on a police report: "I am glad in my heart when they beat the Jews, but it cannot be permitted."

The pogroms, coupled with antisemitic legislation, put a choice before every Jew. One can distinguish five kinds of response. One was to continue to live the traditional life of the shtetl, or Jewish village. This was a tight community, isolated (except economically) from the surrounding world; every aspect of daily life was governed by religious and customary sanctions. The sabbath was the central event of family and community life, setting the rhythm of working, eating and bathing. Learning and piety were prized above all other qualities; women bore toil and privation so that their menfolk could spend as much time as possible in the study house, and the most desirable match was not the rich man's son but the brightest boy in the yeshiva. A shtetl was a mixture of sacerdocracy and mandiranate—that is a community ruled by priests and priestly canons and dominated by men vested with traditional learning. In memoirs, the shtetl is often portrayed in the glow of sabbath candles as a domain of warmth and joy, but living in that kind of community would make most of us extremely restless.

For some Jews, by the middle of the nineteenth century, traditional Jewish life was unbearably squalid and confining. Inspired by the example of German Jews, the followers of Haskallah reached out for secular enlightenment. With the kind of desperation that now is common in the third world, they hoped, through social and economic development, to overcome the poverty and the weakness that were the lot of the Jews. They did not renounce their Jewishness or their faith; unlike their German prototypes, few of them converted to Christianity. They wanted to keep the Commandments and the Law, but shake off traditional practices that impeded modernization. Some historians hold that these customs and superstitions were inseparable from truly Jewish life and that the ideas of the Haskallah were insidiously destructive. Yet no nation has been able to turn deliberately away from the power and light that modernization seems to offer those who reach for them.

Another response, increasingly popular after 1881, was Jewish nationalism. Nationalism must be distinguished from the complacent maintenance of tradition; it amounts to the intellectual rediscovery of nationhood. Many nationalists were the children of assimilated Jews who had, as adults, to learn Yiddish. Nationalistic doctrine is much the same everywhere, particularly among oppressed peoples. Like the Irish, say, nationalists took this stance: our oppressors are powerful and domineering, we are poor, but we have a great tradition and a great future; most important, we have Soul, while they are superficial and materialistic.

Unlike the Irish, however, Jews did not have a compact national territory. Zionism, the return to the Jewish homeland, was one resolution of this problem. While the founders of Zionism came from central Europe, many of its early leaders were born in the Russian Empire, and many of the early social policies of Israel can be traced to Russian populism. But there were also Jewish nationalists who wanted to take their stand in Eastern Europe, where most Jews lived.

Yet another response to plight of Jewry was radicalism. Jewish radicals hoped to overcome poverty and backwardness by organizing the Jewish poor against their oppressors, both Jewish and Christian. The most important Jewish socialist organization, the Bund, combined the secular cosmopolitanism of the Haskallah with some elements of nationalism. For example, the Bund was proudly Yiddish, regarding Hebrew as the language of superstition and sacerdocracy. Another variant on radicalism was anarchism—in essence, a program of violence meant not only to smite the oppressor but also rouse the masses out of passivity.

Finally, a Jew might respond by repudiating the Jewish community. One means was emigration, usually to America. Most emigrants wanted simply to recreate the Jewish communities they know in more favorable material and political circumstances. But things worked out rather differently, as visitors to Great Neck can attest. Another means was conversion. Because the antisemitism of the Empire was not racial (like that of the Nazis), a baptized Jew was eligible for every kind of preferment; Alexander III's Director of the Council of State, was, like the great Yiddish writer, named Peretts—but he, of course, was a convert. Few Jews embraced Christianity, however. (Parenthetically, this avenue was closed off during the Soviet period due to a paradoxical by-product of the separation of Church and state. A Soviet citizen who was wholly Russian in language and culture but descended from Jews was officially classified as Jewish by nationality and subject to discrimination on that account.) Finally, there was the possibility of what might be called "secular conversion"—an ostentatious renunciation of the ways and the faith of the Jews without accepting Christianity. Trotskii provides a prominent example; in the midst of an attack on the Bund, he was asked whether he was Jewish or Russian. He replied, "Neither, I am a Social Democrat."

The same five kinds of response were open to other minority nationalities that did not face the special difficulties that afflicted Jews. Among Muslims, for example, Jaddadism was the counterpart of Haskallah and Panturkism the counterpart of Zionism. Indeed, since modernization presents similar challenges to all nations, the same kinds of choice lay before Russians. Russian peasants who continued to follow the faith and folkways of village tradition were, like the complacent denizens of the shtetl, trying to respond by not responding. The so-called "westerners" of the 1830s and 1840s, such as Herzen and Belinskii, represented the Russian counterpart to Haskallah; they had many followers down through 1900. The westerners' antagonists, the slavophiles, were the first sophisticated ideologues of Russian nationalism, the equivalent, in some respects, of Zionists. The Russian populists and Socialist Revolutionaries presented, as did the Bund, an amalgam of radicalism, cosmopolitanism and devotion to the interest of the common people. Finally, Russian Social Democrats, or Marxists, at least in their first generation, renounced all that was distinctly Russian, not to embrace another faith but in the name of transnational, secular goals.

NOTE: These resources are designed to accompany The Russian Revolution published by the Choices Program.