The Anabaptist Jacques
Crusader
Re: The old days - Aboard the Apollo - 1973
The reviews of Taj’s posts are in from other historians:
“He’s the Cyrus the Great of historians”---Herodotus
“Pericles’ got nuthin’ on him”—Thucycidies
“Accurate, but too nice”—Nicolo Machiavelli
“This should mark the decline of his opponents”—Edward Gibbon
“He’s the ‘Honest Abe’ of history”—Carl Sandburg
"He’s telling it like it was”—Plutarch
“Oy Vey!”—Flavius Josephus
“What an education!”—Henry Adams
“He’s firing the guns of March”--Barbara Tuchmann
“Never in the history of history have so many read so much from so few”—Winston Churchill.
“And I thought I wrote a lot”—Will Durant
What you wrote about Russia and the Jews in this post and earlier posts extracted from your book conflicts with the historical record.
There were hundreds of pogroms and thousands of Jews were killed.
While the pogroms were never initiated by the government, tactical assistance was given.
The last two Tsars were vocally anti-Semitic.
Nicholas II had expelled many Jews from Russia and had called the pogroms acts of patriotism.
By the end of the 19th century there were over 1,400 statues, regulations and rules restricting Jews. They were Russia's version of the untouchables.
The Jews were the only ethnic group forbidden to own land or to enter the civil service, or to serve as officers in the army.
There were strict quotas on how many Jews could attend high schools and even fewer in universities.
Apart from a few exceptions, they were only permitted to live in fifteen provinces in western Ukraine, Poland. Bessarabia, and a few in Lithuania and these were known as "The Pale of Settlements."
Saying that this is the only place in Russia where the pogroms took place is misleading because this is the only place where Jewish communities were allowed to exist.
This is why just stating incidental facts is a poor and misleading way to write about history because it excludes the context.
And some of the places were not towns. Kishinev, which was the provincial capital (in what is now called Moldova) had a population of 120,000 in 1903.
Odessa in the Crimea was much larger. Both these cities had deadly pogroms.
Contrary to what you said, Jews did join the army although they were not allowed to become officers.
To get an idea of the character and depths of anti-Semitism you should read about the Beiliss Affair (1911-1913).
And last but not least, the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” was a forgery by the tsarist police and first published in 1902.
A copy was found among the last effects of Nicholas II after his murder in July 1918.
The Emancipation of the serfs was not the enlighten act as you seem to imply.
The landed gentry were greatly in debt by 1860 with mortgages to private banks.
The freeing of the serfs was a way for them to get out debt.
Under the terms of the Emancipation the serfs were forced to pay for the land through a mortgage arrangement with the state.
The landed gentry received cash payment for their land from the government and the newly freed peasants were stuck with a mortgage owed to the state.
Some properties were sold to the peasants as high as seven times the actual value.
The Emancipation salvaged the private banks and the upper classes in Russia by soaking the peasants, just as the financial bailout in America had.
Even though the peasants were emancipated in 1861 the landed gentry retained all the dominant rights over them, including public floggings of minor misdemeanors, and peasants could be arrested for failing to remove their hat and bow before a member of the landed gentry.
These rules stayed in effect until the 1905 revolution.
The peasant writer Sergei Semenov describes how his fellow peasants saw it as "a return to the days of serfdom, when the master squire had lorded over the village."
Between 1890 and 1905, local noblewomen were even arrest for teaching peasant children how to read and write.
The industrial growth of Russia is true, but this does not give the total picture.
The conditions in 1892, more than 20 years after the serfs were freed were horrid.
Semenov wrote:
“With every day the need and misery of the peasants grew. The scenes of starvation were deeply distressing, and it was all the more disturbing to see that amidst all this suffering and death there were sprawling huge estates, beautiful well-furnished manors, and that the grand old life of the squires, with its jolly hunts and balls, its banquets and its concerts, carried on as usual”
As far as the "Manifesto on the Improvement of State Order" of 1905, this was published to quell the rioting during the 1905 Russian Revolution.
A duma was created but it had no force of law and the Tsar held veto power.
After a few sessions the Tsar appointed the members himself and eventually he disbanded the Duma altogether.
The schools you speak of were mostly created and operated by the Zemstvo Union, not the Tsar.
But still there were improvements in some areas.
Between 1860 and 1914 the number of university students in Russia grew from 5,000 to 69,000 (45 percent of them women).
And what you wrote about the banking is too laughable to even bothering to discuss.
Here are my sources:
"A People's Tragedy" by Orlando Feges. 1997
“Zemstvo Organizations and Their Role Within the Adminstrative Structure” by K. E. MacKenzie in T. Emmons and W Vucinich “The Zemstvo.”
“Europe Transformed 1878-1918” by Norman Stone. 1983
“To, chego bol’she ne bidet.” By A. V. Tyrkova-Williams (roughly—“that which will never be again.”)
“The Systemization of the Russian Government” by G. Yaney 1973
“The Land Captains: A Note on Their Social Composition, 1889-1913.” By D. J. Macey 1989.
“Twenty-five years in the Village” By S. T. Semenov. 1915
“Memoirs of a Russian Governor.” By S. D. Urussov. 1908
“Urban Growth and Anti-Semitism in Russian Moldavia’ by E. H. Judge in L. H. Judge and J. Y. Simms’ “Modernization and Revolution: Dilemmas of Progress in Late Imperial Russia.” 1992
“God’s Playground: A History of Poland.” Norman Davies. 1981
“Jewish Policies and Right-Wing Politics in Imperial Russia” by H. Rogger. 1986 Also by Rogger: “Russian Ministers and the Jewish Questions, 1881-1917” 1975 and “Russia in the Age of Modernization and Revolution, 1881-1917.”
“Troubled Waters: The Origins of the 1881 Anti-Jewish Pogroms in Russia.” By I. M. Aronson 1990.
“Pogroms: Anti-Jewish Violence in Modern Russian History” by J. Klier and D. Lambrozza 1992
“The diaries of Theodor Herzel”
The “Pervaia vseobshchaia perripis” (First Total Census)
“Students, Professors and the State in Tsarist Russia” by S. Kassow 1969.
“Letters of Leo Tolstoy to his wife, 1862-1910” by Leo Tolstoy.
You may want to stay away from Wikipedia when it comes to history. It is very distorted and incomplete.
Again, just giving facts omits context and thereby alters the reality.
The Anabaptist Jacques
Nope, you're dodging the facts again. Socialist views have nothing to do with it.
Nicholas II re-enforced the autocratic rule.
Why did the riots break-out in 1905?
Because he ordered the massacre of demonstrators on Bloody Sunday.
The Manifesto was signed as a way of stopping the Revolution of 1905.
The revolution was not a few riots as you said I implied. It is called the Rusian Revolution because there was a revolution, not just a few riots.
Nicholas II stubbornly refused to give in.
Finally, the military and the nobility rested all their hopes on Count Witte.
On 9 October 1915 Witte was given an audience with Nicholas. He told Nicholas that they were on the verge of a cataclysmic revolution which would “sweep away a thousand years of history.”
He told the Tsar he had one of two choices: either to appoint a military dictator or introduce major reforms.
Witte outlined the reforms in a Manifesto which he brought with him.
It granted civil liberties, a constitutional order, cabinet government, and a legislative Duma elected on a democratic franchise.
Most of the Tsar’s military advisors agreed with Witte, telling the Tsar that the loyalty of the armed services was in doubt and if they were used to put the Revolution there might fall apart all together (which is what happened in 1917)
Tepov, the Governor of St. Petersburg who had the most influence at the court, also agreed with Witte.
Despite all this Nicholas refused and asked his uncle, Grand Duke Nikolai, to assume the role of dictator.
But The Grand duke took out a revolver and threatened to shoot himself then and there if the Tsar refused to sign Witte’s Manifesto.
On 19 October the Tsar wrote to his mother “My dear Mama, you can’t imagine ehat I went through before that moment. …From all over Russia they cried for it, they begged for it, and around me many—very many—held the same view…. There was no other way out than to cross oneself and give what everyone was asking for.”
“The image of Nicholas as an ‘enlightened Tsar’ who ‘introduced democracy to Russia’ could not be further from the truth, although it is one that apologist for the tsarist regime as well as peddlers of nostalgia in post-Soviet Russia would have us accept.” (Feges 191)
To counter the reforms, two government officials, A. I. Dubrovin and V. M. Purishkevich formed the Union of the Russian People.
Acting on the Tsar’s instructions the Ministry of the Interior financed its newspaper and secretly channeled arms to it.
The Union formed a paramilitary group called the Black Hundreds.
The target of their worst violence was the Jews.
In just the first two weeks there were 690 documented pogroms—with over 3,000 reported murders—during the two weeks that followed the October Manifesto.
The worst pogrom took place in Odessa where 800 Jews were murdered, 5,000 wounded and more than 100,000 made homeless.
On October 27, 1905, Tsar Nicholas II wrote to his mother about the pogroms saying that that the people are angry once more “…because nine-tenths of the trouble-makers are Jews, the people’s whole anger turned against them.”
Why don’t you just admit you don’t know what you are talking about?
Your tactic of trying to discredit any historical record that proves you mistaken as socialist and liberal propaganda quite frankly makes you sound like a modern right-wing version of Trotsky.
I did not attempt to discredit you by charging you with political bias. I didn’t do that, I relied on historical evidence.
There is an old maxim in law, “If the facts are on your side, pound the facts; if the law is on your side, pound the law. But if neither the facts or the law is on your side, pound the table.”
You’re just pounding the table.
My sources for this are:
“Letters of Tsar Nicholas and the Empress Marie”
“Memoirs of Count Witte”
“The Crisis of Russian Autocracy: Nicholas II and the 1905 Revolution.” By A. Verner 1990
“A People’s Tragedy” by Orlando Feges. 1997
The Anabaptist Jacques
The reviews of Taj’s posts are in from other historians:
“He’s the Cyrus the Great of historians”---Herodotus
“Pericles’ got nuthin’ on him”—Thucycidies
“Accurate, but too nice”—Nicolo Machiavelli
“This should mark the decline of his opponents”—Edward Gibbon
“He’s the ‘Honest Abe’ of history”—Carl Sandburg
"He’s telling it like it was”—Plutarch
“Oy Vey!”—Flavius Josephus
“What an education!”—Henry Adams
“He’s firing the guns of March”--Barbara Tuchmann
“Never in the history of history have so many read so much from so few”—Winston Churchill.
“And I thought I wrote a lot”—Will Durant
