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Abstract
This article gauges Jewish public opinion in 1917 by analysing voting statistics for a range of elections, most important among them the elections to the All‐Russian Constituent Assembly. The results of Jewish voting in 1917 suggest that in this revolutionary year the Jewish population in the territories of the former Russian Empire, when viewed as a whole, can be cast as neither thoroughly Zionist nor socialist. Even the horrors of the First World War – including widespread anti‐Jewish violence, accusations of espionage, and mass deportation – failed to radicalise the Jewish population dramatically. Continuing a trend originating with the First Duma elections in 1906, Jews voted in significant numbers for independent Jewish coalitions emphasising communal and religious autonomy for Russian Jewry within a generally liberal framework, and elected representatives who were prominent members of Jewish society. The war did, however, catalyse the Jewish shift out of the Russian liberal fold. Although the Russian Zionists ran independently from the Kadets beginning with the elections to the Second Duma in 1907, now a number of prominent non‐nationalist Jews also left the Kadet party and were elected to represent Jewish national coalitions. Finally, this article explains how the correlation between nationality, class and party politics in much of the region of Jewish residence likely bolstered the appeal of Jewish parties and diminished that of their competitors.
Notes
1. See Radkey, Russia Goes to the Polls.
2. See Sviatitskii, “Itogi vyborov vo Vserossiiskoe Uchreditel'noe Sobranie, Predislovie,” 115–19. Lenin used Sviatitskii's article as the basis for his own study.
3. On the origins of the idea of an All‐Russian Constituent Assembly, see Protasov, Vserossiiskoe uchreditel'noe sobranie, 11–32.
4. Protasov, “The All‐Russian Constituent Assembly and the Democratic Alternative,” 248.
5. See Radkey, The Sickle under the Hammer, 280.
6. A number of factors prevent a complete picture of the results, both logistical and political. Disruptions in the telegraph system created communication problems between central electoral commissions and the local district commissions. Furthermore, the new Bolshevik regime made no effort to cooperate with these commissions whose members had been appointed by the Provisional Government. At the height of the campaign, the Council of People's Commissars even liquidated the All‐Russian Electoral Commission, destroying not just the electoral machinery, but much of the historical record along with it. Because of Bolshevik suppression of the press, records do not necessarily even exist for results which at the time must have been known locally. Protasov, “The All‐Russian Constituent Assembly and the Democratic Alternative,” 257; Radkey, Russia Goes to the Polls, 5.
7. As observed by Radkey, Russia Goes to the Polls, 3–4; “It is true that it was held during one of the great crises of Russian history, and hence reflected a mood less stable than that which would have prevailed in normal times; yet merely to record the will of a great people at a crucial stage of its development is to preserve something of enduring value, quite apart from the disclosure of certain tendencies in the vast Eurasian Empire which are in no sense transitory but are of permanent significance.”
8. On the All‐Russian Jewish Congress, see Altshuler, “Ha‐Nisayon le‐argen kinus kelal‐Yehudi be‐Rusyah ahar ha‐Mahpekha,” 75–89; Gitelman, Jewish Nationality and Soviet Politics, 77–81; Rabinovitch, “Alternative to Zion,” 254–66.
9. Gitelman, Jewish Nationality and Soviet Politics, 79. State Archives of the Russian Federation, Moscow (GARF), fond 9528, devoted to the All‐Russian Jewish Congress, lacks the rather important component of complete election results but does include some interesting, if random, materials relating to the campaign.
10. As Mikhail Beizer points out, the All‐Russian Jewish Congress was Evkom's first target in its attack on autonomist Jewish communal institutions, Beizer, Evrei Leningrada, 60. To underscore their intentions regarding any possible non‐socialist Jewish congress, in April 1918 the Bolsheviks arrested its primary organiser, Meir Kreinin on charges of “aiding the bourgeoisie in its struggle against the Soviets,” Jewish Chronicle, April 12, 1918, 8. The Bolsheviks took similar measures against the Electoral Committee of the All‐Russian Constituent Assembly.
11. Elections to local Jewish communal governments throughout Russia in 1917 and Jewish elections in Ukraine in 1918 seem to suggest a similar trend, albeit less decisively. See Gitelman, Jewish Nationality and Soviet Politics, 78–9. In December 1917 the Jewish parties in Ukraine made plans for a Provisional Jewish National Assembly (known as the Forparlament, or Pre‐parliament) and elections were held during the Pavlo Skoropads'kyi regime (the so‐called Hetmanate government). The Pre‐Parliament was to be comprised of representatives from each of the Jewish parties and representatives elected by about 200 kehillot. Among the kehillot that managed to conduct and ratify elections in the fall of 1918, approximately 40% of votes went to Zionists: Abramson, A Prayer for the Government, 74, 93–9.
12. Altshuler, “Ha‐Nisayon le‐argen kinus kelal‐Yehudi be‐Rusyah ahar ha‐Mahpekha,” 85, calculates that in Moscow less than 13% of eligible voters took part, and in Petrograd and Odessa approximately a third participated in each. Altshuler's calculations of voter participation are somewhat lower than what appeared in the Jewish press because his approximations of Jewish population are higher. For example, Evreiskaia nedelia, 18 January 1918, nos 1–2, 20 reported that 44% of eligible voters took part in Odessa. Approximately 270,000 Jews voted in the elections for the Ukrainian Jewish Pre‐Parliament, but it is similarly difficult to assess proportional voter turnout; Abramson, A Prayer for the Government, 95.
13. Poltava's large population of Jewish refugees, displaced from other areas of the Pale during the war, may partially account for its political diversity.
14. By far the most complete tabulation of results is produced in Spirin, Rossiia 1917 god, 273–328. Other sources which include statistics and analysis of election results include Radkey, Russia Goes to the Polls; Spirin, Krushenie pomeshchich'ikh i burzhuaznykh partii v Rossii; Sviatitskii, “Itogi vyborov vo Vserossiiskoe Uchreditel'noe Sobranie,” 104–19. Many of the later studies build on the original computations of Sviatitskii, who was an SR deputy. Spirin uses local newspapers as well as archival holdings in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus to supplement Sviatitskii's calculations, whereas Radkey primarily uses local newspapers only.
15. It is impossible to know the number of eligible Jewish voters living in Russian territory in November–December 1917, but the population was considerably diminished by the loss of Poland and the Baltic region, which were at the time controlled by Germany. Using a median from the 1897 and 1926 censuses, Altshuler approximates that in 1918, 400,000 Jews lived in Belorussia, constituting 10% of the population, and one and a half million Jews lived in Ukraine, constituting 7% of the population, Altshuler, “The Attitude of the Communist Party of Russia to Jewish National Survival,” 75. The Jewish Statistical Society approximated that 3,387,000 Jews lived in European Russia in 1917 (a figure that is almost certainly too high), Ettinger, “The Jews in Russia at the Outbreak of the Revolution,” 15.
16. Mendelsohn, The Jews of East Central Europe between the World Wars, 51.
17. Ibid.
18. In his influential work Zvi Gitelman calls the impact of the Balfour declaration “tremendous,” and states that “The revolution had aroused these [Jewish] parties to an unprecedented flurry of activity, but it was the brief letter sent by Foreign Secretary Arthur James Balfour to Lord Rothschild on November 2, 1917, stating that ‘His Majesty's government views with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people,’ which affected their fortunes most profoundly,” see Gitelman, Jewish Nationality and Soviet Politics, 75. See also the Jewish Chronicle and Zionist Review. The Jewish Chronicle, 1 February 1918, 8, stated of the Petrograd communal elections, “The great Zionist success was undoubtedly a result of the effect which the British Declaration regarding Palestine has made on the public.”
19. “Vegen ‘natsionalen blok’ tsu der grindungs‐farzamlung,” Dos yidishe folksblat, 3 October 1917, no. 1, 12.
20. Russian documentation, beginning with that of Sviatitskii, referred to these coalitions as Jewish nationalist parties, and the vote for non‐socialist Jewish parties generally as “nationalist.” I refer to these coalitions as Jewish “national” coalitions and parties, both because their composition was not entirely nationalist, and national is the term that they consistently incorporated into their names.
21. A list of the names of every representative elected to the Constituent Assembly plus their party and district is included in Pokrovskii and Iakovlev, 1917 g. v dokumentakh i materialakh, 116–38.
22. Levin, “Russian Jewry and the Duma Elections,” 240, 250, 247; according to Levin, the huge number of non‐partisan electors demonstrates the extent to which, despite politicisation, “the majority of the Jewish population continued to consider Jewry a unified entity and adhered to the traditional and deeply‐rooted idea of the solidarity of Jews in the face of Gentiles.”
23. Levin, “Jewish Politics at the Crossroads,” 144.
24. Again the elections to the Polish Sejm in 1919 seem generally to support this pattern. Because the Folskpartey and non‐Zionist Orthodox League ran separately in the elections to the Polish Sejm, and the national coalition was more clearly Zionist (though it was for Jewish national autonomy in Poland and included some prominent independents), it is also possible to somewhat better gauge Zionist support. While the Temporary Jewish National Council won a plurality of the votes for Jewish parties, it did not win a majority. The Folkspartey won approximately a third the number votes as the National Council and a plurality of votes in Warsaw. The Orthodox League won just over half the number of votes as the National Council. Furthermore, Zionist support was much stronger in the previously Austrian western Galicia than the previously Russian Polish provinces. See Mendelsohn, Zionism in Poland, 107–8.
25. It must be noted that from the Second Duma onward, few options existed for elected Jewish members other than joining the Kadet faction.
26. Due to Vinaver's personal advocacy with the Kadet parliamentary leadership, a statement proposing Jewish emancipation was read into the official record in 1909. The Kadets with the support of some other representatives also introduced a bill in 1910 calling for the abolition of the Pale of Settlement. The 165 members who tabled the bill did so in order to make a public statement of liberal support for the Jews, as they knew the legislation would not pass. See Orbach, “The Jewish People's Group and Jewish Politics,” 8. Despite the limited franchise, there were two Jewish deputies in the Third Duma, Naftali Fridman and Lazar Nisselovich (1856–1914). For a first‐hand account of their efforts, see Nisselowitsch, Die Judenfrage in Russland, especially 41–5.
27. See Politicheskie partii Rossii, 73. The Bloc was made up of six Duma caucuses. The Kadets, Progressists and Left Octobrists were on most issues considered the Bloc's “liberal” wing, while the Centrists, Zemstvo Octobrists, and Progressive Nationalists constituted the Bloc's conservatives. For a description of the caucuses which composed the Progressive Bloc, see Hamm, “Liberal Politics in Wartime Russia,” 453–68. On the Kadet and Octobrist policies in general on the eve of the war, see Haimson, “The Problem of Political and Social Stability in Urban Russia on the Eve of War and Revolution Revisited,” 860–3. On the Progressive Bloc, see 866–73. As Haimson observes, the Progressive Bloc was reluctant during the war to oppose the Tsar in a meaningful way for fear of impeding the war effort.
28. See “Progressivnyi blok i evreiskii vopros,” Evreiskaia nedelia, no. 15 (30 August 1915): 1–3. Considerable dissatisfaction with the Kadets' participation in the Progressive Bloc also came generally from party members who believed that the Kadets were sacrificing their liberal principles and agenda and were becoming indistinguishable from Octobrists: Stockdale, Paul Miliukov and the Quest for a Liberal Russia, 229. See also Pearson, “Miliukov and the Sixth Kadet Congress,” 210–29.
29. Resolution of the Central Committee of the Constitutional‐Democratic Party, from the conference of 6–8 (19–21) June 1915. See Rapport sur la Question Juive, 54–7; and “Iz ‘chernoi knigi’ rossiiskogo evreistva. Materialy dlia istorii voiny 1914–1915 g,” Evreiskaia starina 10 (1918), 225–7.
30. This affair is described in detail in Hamm, “Liberalism and the Jewish Question: The Progressive Bloc,” 163–72. The circulars affair, the actions of the Jewish Duma members and the Kadet party were covered in‐depth during the winter and spring of 1916 in Evreiskaia zhizn' and Evreiskaia nedelia. See also L.M. Bramson, “Primenenie na praktike Shcherbatovskogo tsirkuliara o rashirenii ‘cherty’,” Novyi put', no. 1 (21 January 1916): 4–9.
31. Central State Historical Archives of St Petersburg (TsGIA SPb) fond 2049, opis 1, delo 192.
32. Hamm, “Liberalism and the Jewish Question,” 165.
33. At their Conference in Kharkov in November 1919 the Kadets openly blamed widespread anti‐Jewish violence on Jewish support for the Bolsheviks; see Rosenberg, Liberals in the Russian Revolution, 426. See also Budnitskii, Rossiiskie evrei mezhdu krasnymi i belymi, 344–67.
34. Protasov, “The All‐Russian Constituent Assembly and the Democratic Alternative,” 259–61. As Dando, “A Map of the Election to the Russian Constituent Assembly of 1917,” 316, suggests, the Kadets may have fared poorly in terms of popular support, but the fact that their two million votes were heavily concentrated in the urban areas of western Russia, the very same areas of the strongest Bolshevik support, contributed to their under‐representation in the apportionment of seats in the Constituent Assembly.
35. Levin, “Russian Jewry and the Duma Elections,” 237.
36. See Harcave, “Jewish Political Parties and Groups and the Russian State Dumas from 1905–1907,” 101–2.
37. The one partial exception was Petrograd, where Jewish nationalists chose to support the Kadet Party instead of run against it.
38. See Levin, “Russian Jewry and the Duma Elections,” 246. The Zionists were also hurt by the break‐up of the Union for Full Rights and performed dismally in the Second Duma elections, their first attempt at independent politics in Russia; see Levin, “Jewish Politics at the Crossroads,” 129–46.
39. The complete electoral rules were published by the Provisional Government's Constituent Assembly Commission as “Polozhenie o vyborakh v Uchreditel'noe Sobranie. S Nakaza, raspisaniia chisla chlenov Uchreditel'nogo Sobraniia i postanovlenii Vremennogo Pravitel'stva,” (Petrograd, 1917).
40. Some Jewish socialists indeed voted for the Mensheviks, SRs and Bolsheviks instead of the Jewish socialist parties, but it would be extremely unlikely that Jewish socialists voted for the Kadets.
41. “Gorodskie vybory v Minske,” Evreiskaia nedelia, no. 34 (27 August 1917): 21.
42. Mendelsohn, “The Russian Jewish Labor Movement and Others,” 88. Mendelsohn calls this area the “North‐West,” and includes also Vilna, Bialystok Grodno and Kovno. This was one of the least industrialised areas of European Russia and the majority of Jewish workers were employed in small shop‐like factories, although some were also employed in larger factories, such as those making matches and cigarettes (90). See also Mendelsohn, Class Struggle in the Pale, x–xi, 16, 64. The voting statistics for Minsk may reflect the impact of the emigration movement, as the vast majority of those Jews who left Russia around the turn of the century were the very same artisan workers who had planted the seeds of the Russian Jewish labour movement.
43. Haimson, “The Problem of Social Identities in Early Twentieth Century Russia,” 9.
44. Gatrell, A Whole Empire Walking, 17–23, 145–50.
45. Ibid., 146.
46. Ibid., 141–70, passim.
47. Zipperstein, “The Politics of Relief,” 25. See also Beizer, Evrei Leningrada, 236–44; Pevzner, “Jewish Committee for the Relief of War Victims,” 114–42; and Tumanova, “Evreiskie obshchestvennye organizatsii v gody pervoi mirovoi voiny,” 124–41.
48. For the resolutions and platform of the Ukrainian Socialist Revolutionary Party in 1917, see Programmnye dokumenty natsional'nykh politicheskikh partii i organizatsii Rossii, 138–48.
49. Baron, Russian Jew under Tsar and Soviets, 87; Rosenberg, Liberals in the Russian Revolution, 30–1. As Snyder, The Reconstruction of Nations, 134, observes; “The Achilles heel of peasant nations, and the weak point of ethnic politics, is the city.”
50. Rosenberg, “The Russian Municipal Duma Elections of 1917,” 142–3.
51. See Guthier, “The Popular Basis of Ukrainian Nationalism in 1917,” 32.
52. Suny, “Nationalism and Class in the Russian Revolution,” 229.
53. Ibid.
54. Peled, Class and Ethnicity in the Pale, 28, suggests that in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Jews and Russians in the cities and towns of the Pale of Settlement were heading down very different paths of economic development. In essence, Russian workers were employed in large, technologically advanced, and strategically important factories (and mines), whereas Jews were almost entirely employed by other Jews in small un‐mechanised workshops (for considerably lower wages). Peled connects the development of Jewish nationalism in late imperial Russia to discontent with the declining economic situation of Jewish workers, fostering class and national consciousness that became one and the same (and as such, Peled's argument is essentially the same that Guthier makes about the Ukrainian peasantry and national sentiment).
55. Voters could choose between a strongly Ukrainian autonomist joint list of Ukrainian and Russian SR candidates and a second list of Ukrainian SRs (UPSR) and the All‐Ukrainian Peasants' Union (Selians'ka Spilka). Approximately 80% of votes were cast for one of these two lists, and of those votes, almost 80% were cast for the more nationalist‐oriented Ukrainian Peasants' Union. See Spirin, Rossiia 1917 god, 302. The results in Poltava Province are also perhaps the most complete and official record in the elections. As Radkey, Russia Goes to the Polls, 31–2, states, “a rare exception to the rule.”
56. The voting breakdown for the city itself did not survive, but we know that 28,154 votes were cast in the city, and in all probability, a significant percentage of the Jewish votes (as well as Kadet votes) in the province as a whole were cast in the city. See Spirin, Rossiia 1917 god, 302.
57. Levin, “Russian Jewry and the Duma Elections,” 250.
58. Revutsky, Wrenching Times in Ukraine, 10.
59. Voting in Ukraine took place in the period between the Third Universal declaring a Ukrainian National Republic in Federation with Russia and the invasion of Ukraine by the Red Army, followed by the declaration of Ukrainian independence in the Fourth Universal of January 1918.
60. Abramson, A Prayer for the Government, 34–9.
61. The nearly 1000 member Central Rada created a smaller legislative council known as the Mala (Little) Rada, which in turn created a General Secretariat as its executive cabinet. Jewish socialists were allocated 4% of the seats in the Central Rada and all Jewish parties combined were allocated a full quarter of the seats in the Mala Rada. The Second Universal, issued 16 July, recognised an agreement made between the General Secretariat and the Provisional Government in Petrograd that the organisational framework of an autonomous Ukraine would be established with consultation and agreement by non‐Ukrainian minorities. See Liber, “Ukrainian Nationalism and the 1918 Law on National‐Personal Autonomy,” 26–7. See also Magocsi, A History of Ukraine, 471–7; and Subtelny, Ukraine, 345–53.
62. Guthier, “The Popular Basis of Ukrainian Nationalism in 1917,” 38.
63. Includes only the votes from districts where the Bund ran independently from the Menshevik Party: Ekaterinoslav, Kiev and Kamenets‐Podolskii.
64. Ran only in Poltava (12,100 votes) and Kamenets‐Podolskii (322 votes).
65. Names differed slightly depending on region. Jewish National Electoral Committee: Kishinev, Vitebsk, Zhitomir, Ekaterinoslav, Minsk, Gomel, Kamenets‐Podolskii, Poltava. Jewish National Committee: Chernigov. Jewish National Bloc: Kiev and Kharkov. Jewish Bloc: Odessa and Nikolaev. Jewish Nationalists: Simferopol and Sevastopol. Sviatitskii states that Jewish nationalists won a total 550,075 votes and won a total of six seats in the gubernias of Kiev, Kherson, Mogilev and Minsk; however, in his partial breakdown of seats elected by gubernia he only accounts for five of these seats. Because of the incompleteness of results Spirin does not provide a breakdown of total votes and seats by party, but adding the totals he provides yields a result of 498,913 votes and the election of Jewish nationalist deputies in Kiev, Minsk, Gomel and Odessa. We know thanks to Pokrovskii and Iakovlev, however, that exactly five deputies from these coalitions were confirmed elected, from the cities of Minsk, Kiev, Kherson (Odessa) and two from Mogilev. Sviatitskii's sixth “Jewish nationalist” elected may refer to a Jewish representative of another party such as Ansky or David L'vovich, or may otherwise be an error.
66. Includes only the votes from districts where the folkists ran independently from national coalitions: Vitebsk, Zhitomir (includes votes from the city only, not the total for the district) and the Gomel “Idishe Folkspartey and Non‐Party Democratic Committee.”
67. One individual who ran in Zhitomir, garnering 1943 votes in the town and 13 votes in the garrison. Total votes for the district of Zhitomir are unknown.
68. Also known as Fareynikte, or S.S. and E.S. Includes 14,115 votes for Jewish Socialists in Kiev and 917 votes for SERP, which ran independently in Kharkov. Excludes votes in Petrograd, where the party ran on a joint list with the Ukrainian Social Democratic Workers' Party and the Ukrainian SR Party.
69. Includes only votes from the districts where the Zionists ran independently from national coalitions: Tiflis, Baku (city only), Batum (city and garrison) and the garrison at Kamenets‐Podolskii. In Tiflis, Baku and Batum the Zionists were the only Jewish party.
70. Cities were selected based on availability of data. It is impossible to know the exact Jewish population by city in absolute numbers or as a percentage of the total in 1917. In the 20 years after the complete census of 1897 Jewish population figures were affected by emigration from the Russian Empire (at least one and a quarter million people), immigration to larger cities by Jews in smaller towns, dislocation due to war, and of course birthrate. In 1923, the Soviet Union conducted an urban census applying primarily to cities and industrial settlements (under more stable conditions than the first Soviet census of 1920, but 1923 was not a complete census like that of 1926). Schwartz, “A History of Russian and Soviet Censuses,” 53. Between 1917 and 1923, the Jewish population of many towns appears relatively steady, although the approximate number of Jews as a percentage of the population in many cases decreased. Thus, to arrive at the approximate Jewish populations as percentages of the total, I used a median figure between the 1897 and 1923 censuses. These medians are based on Jewish population in the city and surrounding area that tends to be somewhat higher than for the city alone. Population figures must be considered very rough approximations. For a discussion of the demographics of Jewish urbanisation and the redistribution of the Jewish population in the late imperial and Soviet periods, see Lewis et al., Nationality and Population Change in Russia and the USSR, 173–7 and 238–47.
71. 1897 figure.
72. 1897 figure. The electoral results suggest the proportion of Jews grew by 1917.
73. Estimating the Jewish population of Kiev in 1917 is even more difficult than for other cities because of the distortion caused by the lifting of residential restrictions in 1917. The Jewish population was approximately 12% in 1897 and grew in proportion to the city population but experienced a massive upsurge following the revolution (the Jewish population of Kiev grew from approximately 50,792 to 111,040 between 1910 and 1920; see Evreiskoe naselenie SSSR, 15). The proportion of Jews in Kiev and its surrounding regions grew to 30.3% by 1923.
74. Kishinev voted in the All‐Russian Constituent Assembly elections but in 1918 was incorporated into Romania. Thus, only the population figures for 1897 are available.
75. The fact that the combined percentage of votes for Jewish parties in Mogilev exceeds the Jewish population in the city reflects non‐Jews who voted for the Bund–Menshevik list.
76. 1897 figure.