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Early morning, October 25, 1917. Workers are taking up strategic points on the windswept streets of Petrograd. In the Winter Palace, head of the Provisional Government Alexander Kerensky anxiously awaits his getaway car. Outside, Red Guards have taken control of the central telephone station. The Bolshevik seizure of power is immanent. There are no lights or phones in the palace. From his window, Kerensky can see the Palace Bridge: it is occupied by Bolshevik sailors. Finally, an American embassy car is secured, and Kerensky begins his escape from Red Petrograd. As the vehicle turns a corner, Kerensky notices some graffiti, freshly painted on the palace walls: “Down with the Yid Kerensky, long live comrade Trotsky!” The slogan retains its absurdity a century on: Kerensky, of course, was not Jewish, whereas Trotsky was. What the slogan does point to, however, is the messy and contradictory role that antisemitism played within the revolutionary process. In much of the existing literature on the Russian Revolution, antisemitism is understood as a form of “counterrevolution,” as the preserve of the anti-Bolshevik right. There is, of course, much truth to this claim: the tsarist regime was defined by its antisemitism, and in the devastating wave of anti-Jewish violence that followed the October Revolution in the civil war years (1918–1921), the bulk of the atrocities were carried out by the White Army and other forces opposed to the nascent Soviet government. Yet this is not the full story. Antisemitism traversed the political divide in revolutionary Russia, finding traction across all social groups and political loyalties. Within Marxism, racism and political radicalism are often framed in contestation; in 1917, however, antisemitism and class resentment could be overlapping, as well as competing worldviews.

February: A Revolution in Jewish Life The February Revolution transformed Jewish life. Just days after the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II, all legal restrictions on Jews were lifted. More than 140 statutes, totaling some thousand pages, were removed overnight. To mark this historic moment of abolition, a special meeting was convened by the Petrograd Soviet. It was the eve of Passover, March 24, 1917. The Jewish delegate who addressed the meeting immediately made the connection: the February Revolution, he said, was comparable with the liberation of Jews from slavery in Egypt. Formal emancipation, however, was not accompanied by the disappearance of anti-Jewish violence. Antisemitism had deep roots in Russia, and its persistence in 1917 was closely connected to the ebb and flow of revolution. Over the course of 1917, at least 235 attacks on Jews were carried out. Though totaling a mere 4.5 percent of the population, Jews were victims of around a third of all acts of physical violence against national minorities that year. From the moment of the February Revolution, rumors of impending anti-Jewish pogroms circled on the streets of Russian cities, so much so, that when the Petrograd and Moscow soviets assembled for their first meetings, the question of antisemitism was high on the agenda. Actual outbreaks of violence were rare in those early weeks. By June, however, the Jewish press began to report that “crowds of workers” were gathering on street corners to welcome pogromist speeches that declared the Petrograd Soviet to be in the hands of “the Jews.” Bolshevik leaders sometimes came face-to-face with such antisemitism. When walking the streets in early July, Vladimir Bonch-Bruevich — Lenin’s future secretary — encountered a crowd openly calling for anti-Jewish pogroms. Head bowed, he hurried on. More and more reports came in of similar gatherings. At times, class resentment and antisemitic representations of Jewishness overlapped: later in July, speakers at a street-corner rally in Petrograd called on the crowd to “smash the Jews and the bourgeoisie!” Whereas, in the immediate context after the February Revolution, such speeches had failed to have any real traction, they now were drawing large audiences. It was in this context that the First All-Russian Congress of Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies gathered in Petrograd.

The Question of Antisemitism This First Congress of Soviets was a historic gathering. More than a thousand delegates from all socialist parties attended, representing hundreds of local soviets and some twenty million Russian citizens. On June 22, as reports flooded in of yet more antisemitic incidents, the Congress produced the Russian socialist movement’s most authoritative statement yet on the question of antisemitism. Drafted by the Bolshevik Evgenii Preobrazhenskii, the resolution was titled “On the Struggle against Antisemitism.” When Preobrazhenskii finished reading it aloud, a Jewish delegate rose to his feet to give it his wholehearted approval, before adding that while it would not bring back Jews murdered in the 1905 pogroms, the resolution would help heal some of the wounds that continued to cause so much pain in the Jewish community. It was passed unanimously by the Congress. The resolution essentially restated the long-held social-democratic view that antisemitism was tantamount to counterrevolution. It contained, however an important admission: the “great danger,” read Preobrazhenskii, was “the tendency for antisemitism to disguise itself under radical slogans.” This convergence of revolutionary politics and antisemitism, the resolution continued, represented “an enormous threat to the Jewish people and the whole revolutionary movement, since it threatens to drown the liberation of the people in the blood of our brothers, and cover in disgrace the entire revolutionary movement.” This admission that antisemitism and radical politics could overlap broke new territory for the Russian socialist movement, which until then had tended to frame antisemitism as the preserve of the far right. As the revolutionary process deepened in mid-late 1917, the presence of antisemitism within sections of the working class and revolutionary movement became an increasing problem that required a socialist answer.

The Soviets’ Response By late summer, soviets had initiated a broad and wide-ranging campaign against antisemitism. The Moscow soviet, for example, organized lectures and meetings in factories on antisemitism throughout August and September. In the former Pale of Settlement, local soviets were instrumental in preventing the outbreak of pogroms. In Chernigov (Ukraine) in mid-August, Black Hundred accusations that Jews were stocking up bread led to a series of violent anti-Jewish disturbances. Crucially, it took a delegation from the Kiev soviet to organize a group of local troops to put down the unrest. The Provisional Government attempted to initiate its own response to antisemitism. In mid-September, the government passed a resolution promising to take “the most drastic measures against all pogromists.” A similar statement released two weeks later ordered government ministers to use “all powers at their disposal” to put down pogroms. However, with the transfer of power to the soviets already underway, the Provisional Government’s authority was in a process of disintegration. An editorial in the pro-government newspaper Russkie Vedomosti on October 1 captured the situation well: “the wave of pogroms grows and expands . . . mountains of telegrams arrive daily . . . [yet] the Provisional Government is snowed under . . . the local administration is powerless to do anything . . . the means of coercion are completely exhausted.” Not so with the soviets. As the political crisis deepened and the process of Bolshevization continued apace, scores of provincial soviets established their own campaigns against antisemitism. In Vitebsk, a city 350 miles west of Moscow, the local soviet formed a military unit in early October to protect the city from pogromists. The following week, the Orel Soviet passed a resolution to take up arms against all forms of antisemitic violence. In the Russian Far East, a meeting of the All-Siberian Soviet issued a resolution against antisemitism, declaring that the local revolutionary army would take “all measures necessary” to prevent any pogroms. This revealed how deeply ingrained the fight against antisemitism was within sections of the organized socialist movement: even in the Far East, where there were comparatively few Jews and even fewer pogroms, local soviets identified with the Jews on the Western Front suffering at the hands of antisemites. Without doubt, the soviets had become, by mid-1917, the main political opposition to antisemitism in Russia. An editorial in the newspaper Evreiskaia Nedelia (the Jewish Week) captured this well: “It must be said, and we must give them their dues, the soviets have carried out an energetic struggle against [pogroms]. In many places, it has only been thanks to their strength that peace has been restored.” It is worth noting, however, that these campaigns against antisemitsm were aimed at workers in factories and sometimes activists within the broad socialist movement. In other words, antisemitism was identified as a problem within the social base of the radical left, and even sections of the revolutionary movement itself. What this revealed, of course, is that antisemitism did not simply emanate from “above,” from the former tsarist establishment; it had an organic base within sections of the working class, and it had to be confronted as such.