ABSTRACT
On 17 October 1905, a humiliated Tsar Nicholas II issued a manifesto promising to guarantee basic civil liberties and to create a State Duma with an electorate consisting of all classes ‘which at present are altogether deprived of the franchise’. Although the October Manifesto was the crowning achievement of the 1905 Revolution, it failed to appease many opponents of the regime and it triggered nearly 700 pogroms against the Russian Empire’s Jewish communities, mostly in Ukraine. In Kyiv (Kiev), mobs attacked 1,800 homes and businesses and perhaps a hundred Jews were killed. In Odesa (Odessa), an estimated 10,000 families were victimized. As many as 800 died, and up to 2,500 were injured.1 According to historian S. M. Dubnow, ‘in hundreds of cities the carefully concealed army of counterrevolutionaries, evidently obeying a prearranged signal, crawled out from beneath the ground to engage in an orgy of blood’.2 Many contemporaries shared this view; however, no evidence of such a signal being given has been found. Even so, ‘almost without exception’, John Klier has noted, scholars have continued to argue that ‘tsarist authorities actively planned, encouraged or at least welcomed pogroms, in an effort to make the Jews the scapegoats for revolutionary violence, or to channel anti-tsarist protest in a less harmful direction’. These ‘myths’, he believes, have been effectively refuted.3
