ABSTRACT
Anti-Jewish sentiment in Russia did not begin in 1905, it was present from the nation’s earliest days in Kiev Rus’. It became a constant and ongoing preoccupation of the Russian state only with the acquisition of a much enlarged Jewish population with the annexation of formerly Polish territories and the formation of the Pale of Settlement from late 18th–early 19th Centuries. The full force of Russia’s 1905 Revolution reached a climax with the October Manifesto and the pogromist backlash that ensued, although disorder and widespread discontent began earlier and continued into 1906 and beyond. Imperial Russia would never return to the stability it knew before 1905, even after that October climax had passed and new actors and elites entered Russia’s political life. Some of that gap remained 12 years later, when Autocracy’s authority, now weaker and much more discredited, again collapsed, giving way this time to far greater social disorder and far more destructive pogroms than were witnessed in 1905.
