Lisa discusses violence against Jews with Max, starting with a reference to the Kishinev pogrom of 1903.
LISA: Lisa, interviewing her grandfather, Max Were you aware at all of the 1903 pogrom? Did it affect you at all?
MAX: Max, interviewed by Lisa or talking with other family members No, it didn't affect me.
LISA: Do you remember hearing about it?
MAX: Yeah, the pogroms... You want me to tell you that now? That's why you came for?
LISA: Yeah, to be with you and to talk to you about it.
MAX: Yeah, yeah, yeah... Because the pogroms usually occurred in the big cities, where the [population] was mostly Jews. The majority of gentiles were organized – they didn't know why they were organized, but everybody understood that they are organizing not for the benefit of the Jews, but for the evils, to make more trouble for the Jews. 'Cause they were in the majority, the Jews were the minority.
And always, when things, they became bad for the population, the population as a result of this, tried to look, whose fault is it? And when they tried to look, it was easy for them to blame the Jews for everything. So when things started to go bad for the general population, they tried to organize pogroms, so that was the era of the pogroms for Jews, and also the era for all the organizations that formed against the Tsar.
NARRATOR: Lisa, backgrounding/commenting. The pogroms were the violent expression of a disintegrating society. They were a last-resort attempt by a desperate government to quell mounting political tensions which would eventually culminate in the Bolshevik revolution of 1917. Undercutting Western influence arrived in the form of the industrial revolution and Marxian theory; internal fuel was added in the forms of famine and the cholera epidemic of the 1890's. The autocratic Tsarist regime was fracturing under these pressures; dissatisfaction among the people was widespread. Terrorism increased substantially, and the government responded with a resurgence of Slavophilism.
This was a specific type of nativism which had been formulated in the 1840's in an attempt to stop the encroachment of Western values, reaching its most extreme expression in the chaotic thirty years before the revolution.
[7]
NARRATOR: After a wave of terrorism in the 1890's, which resulted in the assassination of 3,000 Russian bureaucrats, Tsar Nicholas II stepped up his nationalist propaganda campaign. The Jews were a convenient and useful vehicle for the Tsar, as all Nicholas had to do was continue Alexander III's fourteen-year war against the Jews:
"He and his advisors were determined methodically and systematically to debase the Jew in Russian eyes as the source of Russian poverty and weakness." /12/
It was scapegoating on a large, although subtle scale. Rather than directly murdering the Jews through ritual slaughter, they germinated hatred of the Jews among the gentile population with false accusations, then encouraged the majority to "get revenge," effectively licensing the occurrence of riots, pillage, and murder.
MAX: The Bund was the name of one of the Jewish organizations. There were other organizations that were revolutionary, gentiles, but they had a different name. But the Bund was the name of the Jewish population, working population, that formed at that time... and then came out the socialists, the anarchists, the Bundists... all names of various organizations.
LISA: So you weren't involved with that, because you weren't in the city?
MAX: No, I was too small anyway.
LISA: Yes, I think that was Kishinev?
MAX: Kishinev! Yes, that was the outburst, the result of the various propaganda that went on among the gentiles. So they knew one thing, to get revenge. So the Jews were their first target to get pogromed.
NARRATOR: The Bund was established in 1897 as the first Jewish socialist organization, and was so designed to apply Marxian theory to specific Jewish labor interests. It developed simultaneously with other revolutionary movements against the Tsar, such as the Social Democratic Party.
Kishinev, which was part of the province of Bessarabia, was the first test of the effectiveness of the propaganda campaign against the Jews. In 1903 government officials used the one newspaper of the city to accuse the Jews of a murder they did not commit. Within a few days a community where 50,000 Jews had been living peaceably with 60,000 Christians was torn apart by authorized rioting, looting and murdering. Forty-five were killed, 586 wounded, and 1500 residences were burned or sacked. /13/
/12/ Op cit., p. 247
LISA: On a smaller scale, did you feel that the peasants in your town were against you?
MAX: No. Because in our town... we didn't have no pogroms – pogroms occurred in the bigger cities, where the population was... larger, and both populations; the gentile population was larger, and therefore there are bases for an organized revolution, and organized pogroms! But in the smallest town, it was insignificant. It was a few hundred Jews, a few hundred gentiles, and it didn't amount to anything. In the vicious, or otherwise, you know. In other words, [not] enough to undertake something of a character like that.