World on Fire - Brownstein, Michael [43]
In the late eighteenth century, Russia annexed much of eastern Poland and, along with the territory, acquired large numbers of Jews. Not wanting them to “spread throughout the country,” the tsarist government confined the Jews to certain relatively undeveloped regions, collectively known as the Pale of Settlement. Moscow, St. Petersburg, and, for a while, Kiev and Warsaw, for example, were all “beyond the Pale” and thus off-limits to Jews.
10
The 1800s saw periods of relatively benign neglect toward the Jews, campaigns to assimilate them, and campaigns to annihilate them. The Russian statesman Konstantin Pobedonostsev, adviser to the tsars, supposedly predicted that Russia’s “Jewish problem” would be solved “by having one-third of them killed, one-third of them converted to Christianity, and one-third driven out of the country forever.”
11 Some Jews prospered. Around the thriving port of Odessa—on the Black Sea coast and within the Pale—Jewish bankers, traders, and businessmen were commercially prominent (and frequent targets of anti-Jewish mob violence). Jews also played a central role in Russia’s lucrative vodka industry, operating many of the large commercial distilleries on Great Russian estates as well as smaller-scale enterprises in the Pale. Trade in vodka—one of the largest sources of imperial income—made millionaires out of Jewish financiers, such as the Ginzburg and Poliakov families, both of which played major roles in the building of Russia’s railroads. The Ginzburgs were eventually ennobled. Meanwhile, at the other end of the social spectrum, the Jewish tavern-keeper cut a familiar figure throughout Eastern Europe.
12
Nevertheless, restricted to the Pale, subjected to economic discrimination, and victimized by recurrent anti-Jewish plundering and violence, most Russian Jews at the turn of the twentieth century lived in cruel poverty. (Of course, most other Russians also lived in poverty; the Russian population, was, after all, one of the world’s poorest at the time.) From Warsaw to Lodz in the Polish territories, in Vilna (Vilnius) in the north and Odessa in the south, the Jewish proletariat, along with the Russian, eked out a hungry, miserable existence. At the turn of the century it was not uncommon for Jewish factory employees to work seventeen, even twenty hours a day, usually with only primitive sanitation. In many Jewish communities within the Pale it was typical for up to 40 percent of the population to be unemployed at any given time; begging was commonplace. Around 1900 an estimated 35 percent of Russia’s Jewish population depended on relief provided by Jewish welfare institutions. Between 1881 and 1914 over a million and a half Jews left Russia for the United States.
13
Although Jews were disproportionately represented among the leaders of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, Russia’s deep ambivalence toward Jews persisted throughout the Communist era. Jews paid an especially terrible price during Stalin’s purges; virtually all the cultural leaders of Soviet Jewry were executed, and many Jewish academics and students were purged from institutions of higher learning. On the other hand, Jews tended to be overrepresented among the bureaucratic elite (although never at the top level), among doctors and lawyers, and in the Soviet Academy of Sciences.
14 In addition, along with other “outsider” ethnic groups such as Chechens and Azerbaijanis, Jews played a disproportionate role in the Soviet Union’s black market system—a vast array of underground enterprises which, in the dysfunctional, shortage-stricken Communist economy, were a crucial source of necessities and consumer goods. Nevertheless, no one (outside the Politburo) got billionaire-rich in the former Soviet Union, and Jews were no exception.
Not so in the post-Soviet era. During the 1990s, seven cutthroat entrepreneurs, six of them Jewish, came to control