A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891-1924

Perhaps above all the reforms were fated by their sheer ambition. It turned out to be much harder to impose foreign capitalist ways on the backward Russian countryside than the senior bureaucrats, sitting in their offices in St Petersburg, had been prepared to acknowledge. The village commune was an old institution, in many ways quite defunct, but in others still responsive to the basic needs of the peasants, living as they did on the margins of poverty, afraid of taking risks, suspicious of change and hostile to outsiders. Stolypin assumed that the peasants were poor because they had the commune: by getting them to break from it he could improve their lives. But the reverse was closer to the truth: the commune existed because the peasants were poor, it served to distribute the burden of their poverty, and as long as they were poor there would be little incentive for them to leave it. For better or worse, the commune's egalitarian customs had come to embody the peasantry's basic notions of social justice and, as the events of 1917 would prove, these were ideals for which they would fight long and hard.

iv For God, Tsar and Fatherland

In the hills overlooking the western districts of Kiev there are some caves where before the revolution children used to play and, on fine Sundays in the summer, families would come with picnics. One day in the spring of 1911 some children found the corpse of a schoolboy in one of the caves. There were forty-seven stab wounds in the head, the neck and the torso, and the boy's clothing was caked dry with blood. Nearby were his school cap and some notebooks, identifying the victim as Andrei Yustshinsky, a thirteen-year-old pupil at the Sofia Ecclesiastical College.

Kiev was outraged by the murder. It filled the city's papers. Because of the large number of wounds on the victim's body some Black Hundred groups

said that it had to be a ritual murder by the Jews. At the funeral they distributed leaflets to the mourners in which it was claimed that 'every year before their Passover the Jews torture to death several dozen Christian children in order to get their blood to mix with their matzos'. They called upon the 'Christians to kill all the Jews until not a single Yid is left in Russia'.³⁶

The ritual murder theory received spurious backing from the so-called Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a forgery by the tsarist police which had first been published in St Petersburg in 1902, and which long before its enormous success in Hitler's Europe provided a popular basis in Russia for the myth that the Jews formed a worldwide conspiracy to deprave and subjugate the Christian nations. But it was only after 1917, when many Russians blamed the calamities of the war and the revolution on the Jews, that the Protocols were widely read. A copy was found among the last effects of Nicholas II after his murder in July 1918. But they were published in several editions between 1905 and Andrei's murder, and so the charge of the Black Hundred groups that he had been killed for Jewish ritual ends would have sounded familiar and thus perhaps half convincing to many tens of thousands of citizens. There was, moreover, in these years a large 'scientific' literature on Jewish ritual murders, vampirism and white slavery, which gave the charges of the Black Hundred groups a certain cachet. In short, as Witte put it, anti-Semitism was 'considered fashionable' among the elite.³⁷

During the weeks after Andrei's funeral rumours spread through Kiev of an organized ritual murder campaign by the Jewish population of the city. The Rightist press repeated the charge and used it to argue against the granting of civil and religious rights to the Jews. 'The Jewish people', it was claimed by Russian Banner (Russkoe znamia), had been transformed by their religion into a 'criminal species of murderers, ritual torturers, and consumers of Christian blood'. Thirty-seven right-wing Duma deputies, including eleven Orthodox priests, signed a petition demanding that the government bring to justice the 'criminal sect of Jews'. The Ministers of Justice (I. G. Shcheglovitov) and the Interior (N. A. Maklakov) were both convinced of the ritual murder theory, as were most of the government and the court, and it was with the personal blessing of the Tsar himself that they now went in search of a Jewish suspect.³⁸