The Russian Zion Alternative

Abstract

Few events in the life of Russian Jewry had as devastating affect as the notorious 1881 pogroms. More than one hundred and fifty communities were besieged after the assassination of Alexander II, engineered, according o Czarist officials, by Hesia Helfman. The reign of Alexander III was marked by overtly anti-Semitic acts, carried out principally under the aegis of Pobyedonostzev, who saw the solution to the Jewish problem in expelling one third of Russia’s Jews, converting another third and exerminating the last third. A former professor of constitutional law and from 1880 procurator of the Holy Synod, Pobyedonostzef considered democracy a leprous disease and parliamentarianism “the great lie of our time”. His tripartite plan for ridding Russia of its Jews had immediate results. “Thousands of Jews who had lived twenty or thirty years in Moscow were suddenly expelled. They were forced to sell their property overnight”.¹ As for the pogroms themselves, Michael Davitt (the Irish nationalist who had gone to Russia to investigate) described the butchery in graphic tones. “Modern readers, versed in the details of concentration camps … are frequently left unmoved by contemporary accounts of pogroms in Kishinev or Homel, Zhitomir, Odessa, and Kiev … In the quieter days of 1890 or 1900 the sudden slaughter of forty of fifty innocent men, women and children, innocent except for their being Jewish, was so traumatic a shock that everywhere in Eastern Europe Jews began to change their outlook on life”.²

As a group the Jews are an embodiment of the true pacifist belief in the needlessness of force and of the ability of mankind to get along without it. They are a sort of living prophecy of another world to come, one not requiring armies, navies, police and the other paraphernalia of a State. William Zukerman