The classic explanation of these pogroms was that either the tsarist regime, or forces close to and supportive of the regime, encouraged these pogroms as a way of directing popular discontent away from the government and onto a visible minority group. While still widely held today, this explanation has been convincingly challenged in recent years by historians who have pointed out the complex and varied reactions the regime had to pogroms, the lack of archival evidence for such a conspiracy, the regime’s deep fear of any sort of popular violence, and a general belief that the Russian government was incapable of organizing such widespread and, in the case of October 1905, simultaneous disturbances. However, if the old conspiracy theory is breaking down, no consensus explanation has emerged to replace it. The last great wave of pogroms, in 1919-1921, was the bloodiest and the most atypical, occurring after the fall of the imperial regime and during conditions of bitter strife in which violence of every kind was unrestrained. Concentrated in Ukraine, all parties to the conflict carried out pogroms at one point or another, but the most organized and bloodiest were perpetrated by the White Volunteer Army. Condoned by officers and carried out by Cossacks, with some looting by peasants, these pogroms may account for 150,000 deaths. See also: CIVIL WAR OF 1917-1922; JEWS; NATIONALITIES POLICIES, TSARIST; OCTOBER MANIFESTO; PALE OF SETTLEMENT
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Aron, I. Michael. (1990). Troubled Waters: The Origins of the 1881 Anti-Jewish Pogroms in Russia. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press. Judge, Edward H. (1992). Easter in Kishinev: Anatomy of a Pogrom. New York: New York University Press. Klier, John D. (1993). “Unravelling of the Conspiracy Theory: A New Look at the Pogroms.” East European Jewish Affairs 23:79-89. Klier, John D., and Lambroza, Shlomo, eds. (1992). Pogroms: Anti-Jewish Violence in Modern Russian History. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
(1868-1932), leading Soviet historian of the 1920s and early 1930s, chief administrator of the social sciences, and a principal enforcer of Marxist orthodoxy.
Mikhail Pokrovsky served as Vice-Commissar of Education; Chairman of the Presidium of the Communist Academy and Chairman of its Society of Marxist Historians; Full Member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences (briefly before his death); and was also a member of the Presidium of the Central Control Commission and held numerous other positions.
Pokrovsky studied history at the Imperial Moscow University under the supervision of Vasily Klyuchevsky and Pavel Vinogradov. In 1905 he embraced Marxism as a creed and methodology. As a result of revolutionary activities, he spent the years from 1907 to 1917 in exile, mostly in France. There he produced his most important scholarly works, notably his five-volume History of Russia since Ancient Times. In it he stated his major thesis: Russian history manifested the same pattern of development as did other European societies in that capitalism was a natural outcome of class conflict and not a foreign implant. Russian autocracy, a mere variant of European absolutism, was created by and served the interests of merchant capitalism. The latter was an ill-defined category that Pokrovsky
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borrowed from Karl Marx. This thesis placed Pokrovsky at odds with most other Russian historians, who asserted that Russian autocracy, unlike European absolutism, had the power to fashion social relationships; it was, in a certain sense, “supra-class.” Most of Pokrovsky’s numerous subsequent writings reiterated this thesis and attacked the non-Marxist historians who did not share it.
Pokrovsky returned to Russia in August 1917 and held prominent positions in the Moscow Soviet. After the Bolsheviks took power he largely confined his activities to the pedagogical, scholarly and propaganda institutions of the Soviet government and the Communist Party. He was the party-designated leader of what was called the historical front, an array of institutions designed to establish the hegemony of Marxist doctrine and to circumscribe and finally eliminate all non-Marxist doctrines and convert or silence their adherents.
Pokrovsky elaborated a theory of cultural revolution that justified the provisional pluralism implied by the policies mentioned above: the building of communism with the hands of non-communists, at least in the short term. The policy and his theory began to flounder during the late 1920s. His concept of merchant capitalism and his leadership of the historical front came under attack from a faction of rival historians. Hastening to get in step with Josef Stalin, Pokrovsky aggressively attacked non-Marxist scholars as class enemies, but his theory of merchant capitalism clashed with Stalin’s theory of socialism in one country. In 1931 Stalin upheld the authority of Pokrovsky. His “school” (i.e., associates and former students) dominated the scholarly and propaganda apparatus until 1936. In that year Stalin signaled a vituperative campaign against the ideas of Pokrovsky: he was branded as anti-Marxist and petty bourgeois, largely because his works were devoid of nationalist sentiment. Pokrovsky had helped to devise the repressive instruments that were used against him posthumously. Almost his entire school was physically annihilated. Because Pokrovsky was an anti-Stalin symbol, he received a partial rehabilitation in the years of Nikita Khrushchev’s predominance. During the early twenty-first century his name has almost entirely lost its symbolic weight. See also: MARXISM; STALIN, JOSEF VISSARIONOVICH
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Barber, John. (1981). Soviet Historians in Crisis, 1928-1932. London: Macmillan Press in association with the Centre for Russian and East European Studies, University of Birmingham. Enteen, George M. (1978). The Soviet Scholar-Bureaucrat: M.N. Pokrovsky and the Society of Marxist Historians. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Pokrovsky, M. N. (1966). History of Russia from the Earliest Times to the Rise of Commercial Capitalism, tr. J. D. Clarkson and M. R. M. Griffiths. 2nd ed. Bloom-ington, IN: University Prints and Reprints. Pokrovsky, M. N. (1993). Brief History of Russia, tr. D. S. Mirsky. 2 vols. London: Martin Lawrence Limited.
Relations between Poles and Russians have never been easy. Despite their close linguistic and ethnic ties, differences rather than similarities characterize the relationship between them. In religious denomination, political tradition, worldview, even the alphabets in which they write their related languages, Poles and Russians are clearly distinct. Russia took its form of Christianity during the late ninth century from Byzantium while Poland was christened by emissaries from the pope almost a century later. Russia came to be the very essence of autocratic rule under Ivan IV and the Romanovs, while Poland developed in an opposite direction, toward a highly decentralized polity linked with Lithuania and dominated by the nobility. Throughout history, Poland has tended to see itself as the easternmost outpost of Western values and traditions: unlike Russia, Poland participated in the Renaissance and Reformation. Defining themselves as Europeans, Poles have often depicted their Eastern neighbors as barbarians and schismatics. Russians returned the favor, describing Poles as flighty, hysterical, and treacherous.
MUSCOVY AND POLAND-LITHUANIA
The first significant clashes between the Polish state and Muscovy occurred after the Union of Lublin (1569). During the 1550s and 1560s Muscovy had pursued an aggressive westward policy, seizing some Lithuanian lands. When Muscovite political authority dissolved into anarchy during the Time of Troubles during the early seventeenth century, Poland was ready to fish in troubled Russian waters. Polish nobles and Jesuits supported the first
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“False Dmitry,” who claimed to be Ivan IV’s son and triumphantly entered Moscow in 1605. In great part because of the large Polish retinue and openly Catholic sympathies of “Dmitry,” he was soon deposed and murdered. But Polish interference in confused Muscovite politics continued. Most spectacularly, King Sigismund III of Poland succeeded in having his son Wladyslaw proclaimed tsar in 1610. The Polish presence in Moscow was not to last; by 1613 the Poles had been slaughtered or forced to flee, and Mikhail Romanov was elected tsar.
As Russia recovered and expanded under the Romanovs, Poland grew weaker. Poland’s highly decentralized government and elected king meant that the central government could not impose its will on the provinces.
