Chapter 17. Emigration between the two World Wars

As a result of the October coup and the subsequent Civil War, hundreds of thousands Russian citizens emigrated abroad, some retreating in battles, others simply fleeing. Among those emigrants were the entire surviving combat personnel of the White Army, and many Cossacks. They were joined by the old nobility, who were so strikingly passive during the fateful revolutionary years, although their wealth was precisely in land or estates. Many former landowners, who failed to take their valuables with them, upon arrival to Europe had to become taxi drivers or waiters. There were merchants, industrialists, financiers, quite a few of whom had money safely deposited abroad, and ordinary citizens too, of whom not all were well-educated, but who could not bear to stay under Bolshevism.

Many emigrants were Russian Jews. “Of more than 2 million emigrants from the Soviet republics in 1918-1922 more than 200,000 were Jews. Most of them crossed the Polish and Romanian borders, and later emigrated to the USA, Canada, and the countries of South America and Western Europe. Many repatriated to Palestine.”[1] The newly formed independent Poland played an important role. It had a large Jewish population of its own before the revolution, and now a part of those who left Poland during the war were returning there too. “Poles estimate that after the Bolshevik revolution” 200-300 thousand Jews “arrived in Poland from Russia.”[2] (This figure could be explained not only by increased emigration, but also by the re-arrangement of the Russian-Polish border). However “the majority of the Jews who left Russia in the first years after the revolution settled in Western Europe. For example, around 100,000 Russian Jews had gathered in Germany by the end of World War I.”[3]

“While Paris was, from the beginning, the political centre and unofficial capital of Russia-in-Exile., The second, so to say cultural capital of Russian emigration in Europe from the end of 1920 until the beginning of 1924, was Berlin (there was also an intense cultural life in the 1920s in the Russian quarters of Prague, which became … Russia-in-Exile’s main university city).”[4] It was “easier to settle” in Berlin because of inflation. “On the streets of Berlin” you could see “former major industrialists and merchants, bankers and manufacturers,”[5] and many émigrés had capital there. Compared to other emigrants from Russia, Jewish emigrants had fewer problems with integration into the Diaspora life, and felt more confident there. Jewish emigrants were more active than Russians and generally avoided humiliating jobs. Mihkail Levitov, the commander of the Kornilov Regiment who had experienced all sorts of unskilled labour after emigration, told me: “Who paid us decently in Paris? Jews. Russian multi-millionaires treated their own miserably.”

Both in Berlin and in Paris “the Jewish intelligentsia was prominent – lawyers, book publishers, social and political activists, scholars, writers and journalists”[6]; many of them were deeply assimilated, while Russian emigrants “from the capitals [Moscow and St. Petersburg]” mostly had liberal opinions which facilitated mutual amity between the two groups (unlike the feeling between Jews and the Russian monarchist emigrants). The influence of Russian Jews in the entire cultural atmosphere of Russia-in-Exile between the two world wars was more than palpable. (Here it is proper to mention a very interesting series of collections, Jews in the Culture of Russia-in-Exile, published in Israel in 1990s and still continuing.[7]) Some Jewish families with a comfortable income opened Russian artistic salons, clearly demonstrating Jewish attachment to and immersion in Russian culture. There was a famously generous house of the Tsetlins in Paris. Many others, I. V. Gessen’s (in Berlin), I. I. Fondaminsky-Bunakov (tireless in his “endless, selfless cares for Russian culture abroad”[8]), Sofia Pregel, Sonya Delone, Alexander and Salomeia Galpern, were constantly engaged in the burdensome business of providing assistance for impoverished writers and artists. They helped many, and not just the famous, such as Bunin, Remizov, Balmont, Teffi, but also unknown young poets and painters. (However, this help did not extend to “White” and monarchist emigrants, with whom there was mutual antagonism). Overall, among all the emigrants, Russian Jews proved themselves the most active in all forms of cultural and social enterprise. This was so striking that it was reflected in Mihail Osorgin’s article, Russian Loneliness, printed in the Russian Zionist magazine Rassvet [Dawn], re-established abroad by V. Jabotinsky.

Osorgin wrote: “In Russia, there was not this ‘Russian loneliness’ neither in the social nor the revolutionary movement (I mean the depths and not just the surface); the most prominent figures who gave specific flavour to the whole movement … were Slavic Russians.” But after emigration “where there is a refined spirituality, where there is deep interest in thought and art, where the calibre of man is higher, there a Russian feels national loneliness; on the other hand, where there are more of his kin, he feels cultural solitude. I call this tragedy the Russian loneliness. I am not at all an anti-Semite, but I am primarily a Russian Slav… My people, Russians, are much closer to me in spirit, in language and speech, in their specific national strengths and weaknesses. For me, it is precious to have them as my fellow thinkers and peers, or perhaps it is just more comfortable and pleasant. Although I can respect the Jew, the Tatar, the Pole in the multi-ethnic and not at all “Russian” Russia, and recognise each as possessing the same right to Russia, our collective mother, as I have; yet I myself belong to the Russian group, to that spiritually influential group which has shaped the Russian culture.” But now “Russians abroad have faded and given up and surrendered the positions of power to another tribe’s energy. Jews adapt easier – and good for them! I am not envious, I am happy for them. I am equally willing to step aside and grant them the honour of leadership in various social movements and enterprises abroad…. But there is one area where this ‘Jewish empowerment’ strikes me at the heart – charity. I do not know who has more money and diamonds, rich Jews or rich Russians. But I know for certain that all large charitable organizations in Paris and Berlin can help poor Russian emigrants only because they collect the money needed from generous Jewry. My experience of organizing soireés, concerts, meetings with authors has proven that appealing to rich Russians is a pointless and humiliating waste of time…. Just to soften the tone of such an ‘anti-Semitic’ article, I will add that, in my opinion, the nationally-sensitive Jew can often mistake national sensitivity of a Slav for a spectre of anti-Semitism.”[9]

Osorgin’s article was accompanied by the editorial (most likely written by the editor-in-chief Jabotinsky based on the ideas expressed and with a similar style) to the effect that M.A. Osorgin “has no reason to fear that the reader of Rassvet would find anti-Semitic tendencies [in his article]. There was once a generation that shuddered at the word ‘Jew’ on the lips of a non-Jew. One of the foreign leaders of that generation said: ‘The best favour the major press can give us is to not mention us.’ He was listened to, and for a long time in progressive circles in Russia and Europe the word ‘Jew’ was regarded as an unprintable obscenity. Thank God, that time is over.” We can assure Osorgin “of our understanding and sympathy…. However, we disagree with him on one point. He gives too much importance to the role of Jews in charity among refugees. First, this prominent role is natural. Unlike Russians, we were learning the art of living in Diaspora for a long time…. But there is a deeper explanation…. We have received much that is precious from the Russian culture; we will use it even in our future independent national art…. We, Russian Jews, are in debt to Russian culture; we have not come close to repaying that debt. Those of us that do what they can to help it survive during these hard times are doing what is right and, we hope, will continue doing so.”[10]

However let us return to the years immediately after the revolution. “Political passions were still running high among Russian emigrants, and there was a desire to comprehend what had happened in Russia. Newspapers, magazines, book publishers sprung up.”[11] Some rich men, usually Jews, financed this new liberal and more left-of-center Russian emigrant press. There were many Jews among journalists, newspaper and magazine editors, book publishers. A detailed record of their contribution can be found in The Book of Russian Jewry (now also in Jews in the Culture of Russia-in-Exile).

Of significant historical value among these are the twenty two volumes of I. V. Gessen’s Archive of the Russian Revolution. Gessen himself, along with A. I. Kaminkov and V. D. Nabokov (and G. A. Landau after the latter’s death), published a prominent Berlin newspaper Rul [Steering Wheel], “a kind of emigrant version of Rech [Speech],” but unlike Milyukov’s brainchild, Josef Gessen’s position was consistently patriotic. Rul often published articles by G. A. Landau and I. O. Levin, whom I have amply cited, and also articles by the famous literary critic U. I. Aikhenvald. The political spectrum of Berlin papers ranged from Rul on the right to the socialists on the left. A. F. Kerensky published Dni [Days], which provided a platform for such personalities as A. M. Kulisher-Yunius (author “of a number of sociological works” and a Zionist from Jabotinsky’s circle), S. M. Soloveichik, the famous former Socialist Revolutionary O. C. Minor (he also wrote for the Prague Volya Rossii [Russia’s Will]), and the former secretary of the Constituent Assembly M. V. Vishnyak. In 1921 U. O. Martov and R. A. Abramovich founded the Socialist Gerald in Berlin (it later moved to Paris and then New York). F. I. Dan, D. U. Dalin, P. A. Garvi, and G. Y. Aranson worked on it among others.

V. E. Jabotinsky, whose arrival in Berlin (after three years in Jerusalem) coincided with the first wave of emigration, re-established Rassvet, first in Berlin and then in Paris, and also published his own novels. In addition “many Russian Jewish journalists lived in Berlin in 1920-1923, working in the local and international emigrant press.” There we could find I. M. Trotsky from the defunct Russkoe Slovo [Russian Word], N. M. Volkovyssky, P. I. Zvezdich (who died at the hands of Nazis during the World War II), the Menshevik S. O. Portugeis from the St. Petersburg Den [Day] (he wrote under the pseudonym S. Ivanovich), the playwriter Osip Dymov-Perelman, and the novelist V. Y. Iretsky.[12]

Berlin also became the capital of Russian book publishing: “In 1922 all these Russian publishers released more Russian books and publications than there were German books published in the whole of Germany. Most of these publishers and booksellers were Jewish.”[13] Most notable were the publishing houses of I. P. Ladyzhnikov, owned since the war by B. N. Rubinstein (classical, modern and popular scientific literature), of Z. I. Grzhebin (which had links to the Soviets, and so sold some of his works in the USSR), the publishing house, Word, established as early as 1919 and run by I. V. Gessen and A. I. Kaminka (collections of Russian classics, emigrant writers and philosophers, valuable historical and biographical works), and the artistically superb issues of Zhar-Ptitsa run by A. E. Kogan. Also there was Edges of A. Tsatskis, Petropolis of Y. N. Blokh, Obelisk of A. S. Kagan, Helicon of A.G. Vishnyak, and Scythians of I. Shteinberg. S. Dubnov’s World History of the Jewish People was also published in Berlin in ten German volumes, and during the 1930s in Russian in Riga.

Riga and other cities in the once again independent Baltic countries (with their substantial Jewish populations) became major destinations of Jewish emigration. Moreover, “the only common language that Latvians, Estonians and Lithuanians shared was Russian,” and so the Riga newspaper Segodnya [Today] (publishers Ya. I. Brams and B. Yu. Polyak) became “highly influential.” “A large number of Russian-Jewish journalists” worked there: the editor M. I. Ganfman, and after his death M. S. Milrud; Segodnya Vecherom [Today Evening] was edited by B. I. Khariton (the latter two were arrested by the NKVD in 1940 and died in Soviet camps). V. Ziv, an economist, and M. K. Aizenshtadt (under the pen names of first Zheleznov, then Argus) wrote for the newspaper. Gershon Svet wrote from Berlin. Andrei Sedykh (Y. M. Tsvibak) was its Paris correspondent, Volkovyssky reported from Berlin, and L. M. Nemanov from Geneva.[14]

From the late 1920s, Berlin started to lose its position as the centre of emigrant culture because of the economic instability and the rise of Nazism. Rul had to close in 1931. Emigrants had dispersed with the “main wave going to France,” especially to Paris which was already a major centre of emigration.

In Paris the main emigrant newspaper was Poslednie Novosti [Breaking News], founded “ at the beginning of 1920 by the St. Petersburg barrister M. L. Goldstein. It was financed by M. S. Zalshupin,” and in a year the newspaper was bought by “P. N. Milyukov…. While it was in a precarious position, the paper was significantly financially supported by M. M. Vinaver.” “Milyukov’s right hand” was A. A. Polyakov. Editorials and political articles were written by Kulisher-Yunius (who was arrested in 1942 in France and died in a concentration camp). The international news section was run by M. Yu. Berkhin-Benedictov, an acquaintance of Jabotinsky. The staff included the acerbic publicist S. L. Polyakov-Litovtsev (who had only learnt “to speak and write Russian at fifteen”), B. S. Mirkin-Getsevich (who wrote as Boris Mirsky), the noted Kadet [Constitutional Democrat] publicist Pyotr Ryss and others. Poslednie Novosti published the satirical articles of I. V. Dioneo-Shklovsky and the popular science of Yu. Delevsky (Ya. L. Yudelevsky). The best humorists were V. Azov (V. A. Ashkenazi), Sasha Cherny (A. M. Gliksberg), the “king of humour” Don-Aminado (Shpolyansky). Poslednie Novosti had the widest circulation of all emigrant newspapers.[15] Shulgin called it “the citadel of political Jewishness and philo-Semitic Russians.”[16] Sedykh regarded this opinion as an “obvious exaggeration.” The political tension around the paper also stemmed from the fact that immediately after the Civil War it was dedicated to “disclosure” and sometimes outright condemnation of the Volunteer Army. Sedykh noted that in Paris “there was not only a political divide, but also a national one”; “Milyukov’s editorial team included many Russian-Jewish journalists,” while “Jewish names virtually never appeared on the pages of the right-wing Vozrozhdenie [Rebirth] (with the exception of I. M. Bikerman).[17] (Vozrozhdenie was founded later than the other papers and ceased operation in 1927, when its benefactor Gukasov fired the main editor P. B. Struve.)

The leading literary-political magazine Sovremennye Zapiski [Contemporary Notes], published in Paris from 1920 to 1940, was established and run by Socialist Revolutionaries, N. D. Avksentiev, I. I. Fondaminsky-Bunakov, V. V. Rudnev, M. V. Vishnyak and A. I. Gukovsky. Sedykh noted that “out of [its] five editors … three were Jews. In 70 volumes of the Sovremennye Zapiski we see fiction, articles on various topics and the memoirs of a large number of Jewish authors.” Illyustrirovannaya Rossia [Illustrated Russia] was published by the St. Petersburg journalist M. P. Mironov, and later by B. A. Gordon (earlier the owner of Priazovsky Krai).[18] Its weekly supplement “gave the readers 52 pieces of classic or contemporary emigrant literature each year.” (The literary emigrant world also included many prominent Russian Jews, such as Mark Aldanov, Semyon Yushkevich, the already mentioned Jabotinsky and Yuly Aikhenvald, M. O. Tsetlin (Amari). However, the topic of Russian emigrant literature cannot be examined in any detail here due to its immenseness.)

Here I would like to address the life of Ilya Fondaminsky (born in 1880). Himself from a prosperous merchant family and married in his youth to the granddaughter of the millionaire tea trader V. Y. Vysotsky, he nonetheless joined the Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs) and “sacrificed a large part of his wealth and his wife’s inheritance to the revolution”[19] by buying weaponry. He worked towards the outbreak of the All-Russian political strike in 1905 and during the uprising he served in the headquarters of the SRs. He emigrated from Russia to Paris in 1906, where he became close to D. Merezhkovsky and Z. Gippius and developed an interest in Christianity. He returned to St. Petersburg in April 1917. In the summer of 1917 he was the commissar of the Black Sea Fleet, and later a delegate in the Constituent Assembly, fleeing after it was disbanded. From 1919 he lived in Paris, France, during the period under discussion. He devoted much time and effort to Sovremennye Zapiski, including publication of a series of articles titled The Ways of Russia. He played an active role in emigrant cultural life and provided all possible support to Russian writers and poets. For a while he even managed to maintain a Russian theatre in Paris. “His passion, many-sidedness, energy and selflessness … were without parallel among emigrants.”[20] He estranged himself from the SRs and joined Christian Democrats. Along with the like-minded G. P. Fedotov and F. A. Stepun he began to publish the Christian Democratic Novy Grad [New City]. “He grew ever closer to Orthodoxy during these years.”[21] “In June 1940 he fled Paris from the advancing German forces,” but came back and was arrested in July1941and sent to Compiegne camp near Paris; “by some accounts, he converted to Christianity there. In 1942 he was deported to Auschwitz and killed.”[22]

Between 1920 and 1924, the most important forum for purely Jewish issues was the Paris weekly, Jewish Tribune, published in both French and Russian with the prominent participation of M. M. Vinaver and S. B. Pozner. It published articles by many of the aforementioned journalists from other newspapers.

Novoe Russkoe Slovo [New Russian Word] was founded in 1910 in the United States and added its voice from across the ocean. Its publisher from 1920 was V. I. Shimkin and the main editor (from 1922) was M. E. Veinbaum. Veinbaum remembered: “The newspaper was often criticised, and not without reason. But gradually it earned the reader’s confidence.”[23](Its masthead now proudly boasts: “the oldest Russian newspaper in the world”; it is even two years older than Pravda. All the others have died out at various times, for various reasons.)

Right-wing or nationalist Russian newspapers appeared in Sofia, Prague, and even Suvorin’s Novoe Vremya [New Times] continued in Belgrade as Vechernee Vremya [Evening Times], but they all either collapsed or withered away without leaving a lasting contribution. (The publisher of Rus in Sofia was killed.) The Paris Vozrozhdenie of Yu. Semenov “did not shirk from anti-Semitic outbursts”[24] (but not under Struve’s short reign).

***

Those who left soon after the Bolshevik victory could not even imagine the scale of inferno that broke out in Russia. It was impossible to believe in rumours. Testimonies from the White camp were mostly ignored. This changed when several Russian democratic journalists (the Constitutional Democrat (Kadet) A. V. Tyrkova-Williams, the socialist E. D. Kuskova (exiled from the USSR in 1922), and the escaped SR S. S. Maslov began to inform the stunned emigrant public about rapid growth of grass-root anti-Semitism in Soviet Russia: “Judeophobia is one of the most acrid features of modern Russia. Perhaps even the most acrid. Judeophobia is everywhere: North, South, East, and West. It is shared regardless of intellect, party membership, tribe, age…. Even some Jews share it.”[25]

These claims were at first met with suspicion by Jews who had emigrated earlier – what’s the reason for this anti-Semitism? The Jewish Tribune initially rejected these claims: “generally, Russian Jewry suffered from Bolshevism perhaps more than any other ethnic group in Russia”; as to the “familiar identification of Jews and commissars” – we all know that it is the work of the [anti-Semitic] “Black Hundreds.” The old view, that anti-Semitism resides not in the people but in Tsarism, began to transform into another, that the Russian people are themselves its carriers. Therefore, Bolsheviks should be credited for the suppression of popular “Black Hundred” attitudes in Russia. (Others began to excuse even their capitulation at Brest [at which Russia ceded large amounts of territory to the Kaiser’s German military]. The Jewish Tribune in 1924 dusted off even such argument: “the Russian revolution of 1917, when it reached Brest-Litovsk, prevented the much greater and more fateful betrayal planned by Tsarist Russia.”[26])

Yet the information was gradually confirmed; moreover, anti-Jewish sentiments spread over a large segment of Russian emigration. The Union for Russian Salvation (dedicated to crown prince Nikolai Nikolaevich) produced leaflets for distribution in the USSR in a manner like this: “To the Red Army. The Jews have ruled Great Russia for seven years….” “To Russian workers. You were assured that you would be the masters of the country; that it will be the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat.’ Where is it then? Who is in power in all the cities of the republic?” Of course, these leaflets did not reach the USSR, but they scared and offended Jewish emigrants.

S. Litovtsev wrote: “In the beginning of 1920s, anti-Semitism among emigrants became almost an illness, a sort of delirium tremens.”[27] But it was a broader attitude as many in Europe during the first years after the Bolshevik victory rejected and damned the Jews, so that “the identification of Bolshevism with Judaism became a widespread part of European thought. It is ridiculous to assert that it is only anti-Semites preach this social-political heresy.”[28] But could it be that the conclusions of Dr. Pasmanik were somehow premature? Yet this is what he wrote in 1922: “In the whole civilised world, among all nations and social classes and political parties, it is the established opinion now that Jews played the crucial role in the appearance and in all the manifestations of Bolshevism. Personal experience tells that this is the opinion not only of downright anti-Semites, but also … that representatives of the democratic public … reference these claims, i.e., to the role of Jews not only in Russian Bolshevism, but also in Hungary, Germany and everywhere else it has appeared. At the same time, the downright anti-Semites care little for truth. For them all Bolsheviks are Jews, and all Jews are Bolsheviks.”[29]

Bikerman wrote a year later: “Waves of Judeophobia now roll over nations and peoples, with no end in sight”; “not just in Bavaria or Hungary … not only in the nations formed from the ruins of the once great Russia … but also in countries separated from Russia by continents and oceans and untouched by the turmoil…. Japanese academics came to Germany to get acquainted with anti-Semitic literature: there is interest in us even on distant islands where almost no Jews live…. It is precisely Judeophobia – the fear of the Jew-destroyer. Russia’s miserable fate serves as the material evidence to frighten and enrage.”[30]

In the collective declaration To the Jews of the World! the authors warn: “Never have so many clouds gathered above the Jewish people.”[31]

Should we conclude that these authors exaggerated, that they were too sensitive? That they imagined a non-existent threat? Yet doesn’t the abovementioned warning about “anti-Semitic literature in Germany” sound very scary – in retrospect, from our historical perspective?

“The opinion that Jews created Bolshevism” was already so widespread in Europe (this was the “average opinion of French and English philistines,” Pasmanik notes) that it was supported even by Plekhanov’s son-in-law, George Bato, who claims in his book[32] that Jews are inherently revolutionaries: “as Judaism preaches an ideal of social justice on earth … it has to support revolution.” Pasmanik cites Bato: “Over the centuries … Jews have always been against the established order…. This does not mean that Jews carried out all revolutions, or that they were always the sole or even main instigators; they help the revolutions and participate in them”; “One can responsibly claim, as many Russian patriots, often from very progressive circles, do, that Russia now agonizes under the power of Jewish dictatorship and Jewish terror”; “Impartial analysis of the worldwide situation shows the rebirth of anti-Semitism, not so much against Jews as individuals, as against the manifestations of the Jewish spirit.”[33] The Englishman Hilaire Belloc[34] similarly wrote about “the Jewish character of Bolshevik revolution,” or simply: “the Jewish revolution in Russia.” Pasmanik adds that “anyone who has lived in England recently knows that Belloc’s opinion is not marginal.” The books of both authors (Bato and Belloc) “are enormously popular with the public”; “journalists all over the world argue that all the destructive ideas of the past hundred years are spread by Jews, through precisely Judaism.”[35]

“We must defend ourselves,” Pasmanik writes, “because we cannot deny obvious facts…. We cannot just declare that the Jewish people are not to blame for the acts of this or that individual Jew…. Our goal … is not only an argument with anti-Semites, but also a struggle with Bolshevism … not only to parry blows, but to inflict them on those proclaiming the Kingdom of Ham…. To fight against Ham is the duty of Japheth and Shem, and of Helenes, and Hebrews.” Where should we look for the real roots of Bolshevism? “Bolshevism is primarily an anti-cultural force … it is both a Russian and a global problem, and not the machination of the notorious ‘Elders of Zion.’”[36]

The Jews acutely realized the need to “defend themselves” in part because the post-war Europe and America were flooded with Protocols of the Elders of Zion, suddenly and virtually instantly. These were five editions in England in 1920, several editions in both Germany and France; half a million copies in America were printed by Henry Ford. “The unheard-of success of the Protocols, which were translated into several languages, showed how much the Bolshevik revolution was believed to be Jewish.[37]” English researcher Norman Cohn wrote: “in the years immediately after the World War I, when the Protocols entered mainstream and thundered across the world, many otherwise entirely sensible people took them completely seriously.”[38] The London Times and Morning Post of that time vouched for their authenticity, although by August 1921 the Times published a series of articles from its Istanbul correspondent, Philipp Greaves, who sensationally demonstrated the extensive borrowing of the text in the Protocols from Maurice Jolie’s anti-Napoleon III pamphlets (The Dialogue in Hell between Machiavelli and Montesquieu, 1864). At that time the French police managed to confiscate every single copy of the infamous pamphlet.

The Protocols came to the West from a Russia overtaken by the Civil War.

A journalistic fraud produced in the early 20^th century (in 1900 or 1901), the Protocols were first published in 1903 in St. Petersburg. The mastermind behind them is thought to be P. I. Rachkovsky, the 1884-1902 head of the Foreign Intelligence unit of the Police Department; their production is attributed to Matvei Golovinsky, a secret agent from 1892 and son of V. A. Golovinsky, who was a member of Petrashevsky Circle. [The latter was a Russian literary discussion group of progressive-minded commoner-intellectuals in St. Petersburg organized by Mikhail Petrashevsky, a follower of the French utopian socialist Charles Fourier. Among the members were writers, teachers, students, minor government officials, army officers. While differing in political views, most of them were opponents of the Tsarist autocracy and the Russian serfdom. Among those connected to the circle were writers Dostoyevsky]. (Still, new theories about the origin of the Protocols appear all the time). Although the Protocols were published and re-published in 1905, 1906, 1911, they had little success in pre-revolutionary Russia: “they did not find broad support in Russian society…. The Court did not give support to distribution either.”[39] After many failed attempts, the Protocols were finally presented to Nicholas II in 1906 and he was very impressed. His notes on the margins of the book included: “What a foresight!’, ‘What precise execution!’, “It is definitely them who orchestrated the [revolutionary] events of 1905!’, ‘There can be no doubt about their authenticity.’ But when the right-wing activists suggested using the Protocols for the defence of the monarchy, Prime Minister P. A. Stolypin ordered a secret investigation into their origins. It showed they were a definite fabrication. The monarch was shocked by Stolypin’s report, but wrote firmly: “remove the Protocols from circulation. You cannot defend a noble cause with dirty means.”[40] And since then “Russia’s rulers’ dismissal of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion came into force: no reference to the ‘Protocols’ was allowed … even during the Beilis Trial.”[41]

However “1918 changed everything for the Protocols.[42]” After the Bolsheviks seized power, after the murder of the royal family and the beginning of the Civil War, the popularity of the Protocols surged. They were printed and re-printed by the OsvAg [White Army counter-intelligence agency in the South of Russia] in Novocherkassk, Kharkov, Rostov-on-Don, Omsk, Khabarovsk, Vladivostok, and were widely circulated among both the Volunteer Army and the population (and later Russian emigrants, especially in Sofia and Belgrade).

“After the Bolshevik victory the selling of Protocols was banned in Russia” and become a criminal offence, but “in Europe the Protocols brought in by the White emigration played an ominous role in the development of right-wing ideology, especially National Socialism in Germany.”[43]

Exposure of the Protocols as forgery, and general denial of identity between Bolsheviks and Jews constituted a major share of liberal emigrant journalism of the 1920s and 1930s. We see several prominent Russians there: Milyukov, Rodichev, Burtsev and Kartashev.

A.V. Kartashev, historian of religion, Orthodox theologian and at the same time, a public figure, wrote about the unacceptability of anti-Semitism for a Christian in the pre-revolutionary collection Shchit [Shield],[44] which I have often cited. In 1922, in emigration, he wrote the foreword to Yu. Delevsky’s book on the Protocols.[45] In 1937 Burtsev too asked him to write a foreword for his book. Kartashev wrote in it: “A man with common sense, good will and a little scientific discipline cannot even discuss the authenticity of this police and journalistic forgery, though certainly a talented forgery, able to infect the ignorant…. It’s unfair to continue supporting this obvious deceit after it has been so unambiguously exposed. Yet it is equally unfair to do the opposite, to exploit the easy victory over the Protocols authenticity to dismiss legitimate concerns…. A half-truth is a lie. The whole truth is that the Jewish question is posed before the world as one of the tragic questions of history. And it cannot be resolved either by savage pogroms, or by libel and lies, but only by honest and open efforts of all mankind. Pogroms and slander make a sensible and honest raising of the question more difficult, degrading it to outright stupidity and absurdity. They confuse the Jews themselves, who constantly emphasize their ‘oppressed innocence’ and expect from everybody else nothing but sympathy and some sort of obligatory Judeophilia.” Kartashev certainly regarded debunking of this “sensational apocrypha” as a “moral duty,” but also thought that “in washing out the dust of Protocols from the eyes of the ignorant, it is unacceptable to impair their vision anew by pretending that this obliterates the Jewish question itself.”[46]

Indeed, the “Jewish question” cannot be removed by either books or articles. Consider the new reality faced in the 1920s by Jews in the Baltic countries and Poland. In Baltics, although “Jews managed to maintain for a while their influential position in trade and industry”[47] they felt social pressure. “A good half of Russian Jewry lived in the newly independent states…. New states trumpet their nationalism all the louder the less secure they feel.”[48] There “Jews feel themselves besieged by a hostile, energetic and restless popular environment. One day, it is demanded that there be no more Jews percentage-wise in the institutions of higher learning than in the army … the next, the air of everyday life becomes so tense and stressful that Jews can no longer breathe…. In the self-determined nations, the war against Jews is waged by the society itself: by students, military, political parties, and ordinary people.” I. Bikerman concluded that “in leading the charge for self-determination, Jews were preparing the ground for their own oppression by virtue of higher dependence on the alien society.”[49] “The situation of Jews in Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania is literally tragic. Yesterday’s oppressed are today’s oppressors, what is more – extremely uncouth oppressors, entirely unashamed of their lack of culture.”[50]

So it transpired “that the breakup of Russia also meant the breakup of Russian Jewry” as the history paradoxically showed that the Jews were better off in the united Russian Empire despite all the oppression. So now in these splintered border countries “Jews became the faithful guardians of the Russian language, Russian culture, impatiently waiting for the restoration of the great Russia. Schools that still teach in Russian became filled with Jewish children,” to the exclusion of learning the languages of the newly-formed states. “In these tiny countries, the Russian Jew, accustomed to life in the open swathes of a great empire, feels uncomfortable, squeezed and diminished in his social status, despite all the civil rights and autonomy…. Indeed our people’s fate is bound up with the fate of the great Russia.”[51]

Still, the position of Jewry in the circles of international post-war politics was strong, especially in Paris, and in particular regarding Zionism. “In July 1922 the League of Nations recognised the World Zionist Organization as the ‘Jewish Agency,’” which first and foremost represented the interests of Zionists, and secondly of non-Zionists, and also provided support to the European Jews.[52]

Bikerman accused the Zionists of seeing a “fragmented Russia … as an ideal. This is why the organization of Russian Zionists calls itself not Russian, but Russo-Ukrainian. This is why the Zionists and related Jewish groups so assiduously fraternized with the Ukrainian separatists.”[53]

***

After the Civil War, Soviet Russia sank into a heavy silence. From this point and for decades to follow, all independent voices were squashed and only the official line could be heard. And the less was heard from Russia, the louder was the voice of emigration. All of them, from anarchists to monarchists, looked back in pain and argued intensely: who and to what extent was to blame for what had happened?

Discussion developed within emigrant Jewry as well.

In 1923 Bikerman noted: “Jews answer everything with a familiar gesture and familiar words: we know, we’re to blame; whenever something goes wrong, you’ll look for a Jew and find one. Ninety percents of what is written in the contemporary Jewish press about Jews in Russia is just a paraphrase of this stereotype. And because it’s impossible that we’re always to blame for everything, Jews take from this the flattering and at first glance quite convenient conclusion that we’re always and everywhere in the right.”[54]

However, consider: “Before the revolution, the Jewish society passionately argued that a revolution would save the Jews, and we still ardently adhere to this position.” When the Jewish organizations gather resources in the West to aid their co-ethnics, suffering in the USSR, they “denounce, belittle, and slander everything about pre-revolutionary Russia, including the most positive and constructive things; See, “the Bolshevik Russia has now become the Promised Land,” egalitarian and socialist. Many Jews who emigrated from Russia settled in the United States, and “pro-Bolshevik attitudes spread quickly among them.”[55] The general Jewish mood was that Bolshevism was better than restoration of monarchy. It was widely believed “that the fall of Bolshevism in Russia would inevitably engender a new wave of bloody Jewish pogroms and mass extermination…. And it is on this basis that Bolshevism is preferred as the lesser evil.”[56]

Then, as if to confirm that Bolsheviks are changing for the better, that they can learn, the NEP came! They’ve loosened their suffocating grip on the economy, and that made them all the more acceptable. “First NEP, then some concessions – hopefully, it’ll all work out for us.”[57]

We cannot call the entire Jewish emigration pro-Bolshevik. Yet they did not see the Bolshevik state as their main enemy, and many still sympathized with it.

Yet a noteworthy incident, mockingly described in Izvestiya, happened to Goryansky, a Jewish emigrant writer.[58] In 1928, the already famous Babel (and already well-known for his links to the Cheka) was “temporarily residing” in Paris to muster creative inspiration. While in the Cafe Rotonda he noticed his “old acquaintance,” probably from Odessa, who magnanimously offered his hand to him: “Greetings, Goryansky.” But Goryansky stood up and contemptuously turned away from the offered hand.

Rise of Hitlerism in Germany naturally and for a long time reinforced the preference for Bolshevism in the social mind of the European Jewry.

The First International Jewish Congress took place in Vienna in August 1936. M. Vishnyak disapprovingly suggested that the collective attitude toward the Bolshevik regime was perfectly exemplified by the opinion of N. Goldman: if all sorts of freedom-loving governments and organizations “flatter and even fawn before the Bolsheviks … why shouldn’t supporters of Jewish ethnic and cultural independence follow the same path? … Only Moscow’s open support for anti-Jewish violence in Palestine slightly cooled the Congress leaders’ disposition toward the Soviet state. Even then … they only protested the banning of Hebrew … and the banning of emigration from the USSR to Palestine, and, finally, they objected to the continuing suffering of Zionists in political prisons and concentration camps. Here N. Goldman found both the necessary words and inspiration.”[59] In 1939 on the eve of the World War II, S. Ivanovich noted: “It cannot be denied that among emigrant Russian Jews” the mood was to “rely on the perseverance of the Soviet dictatorship” if only to prevent pogroms.[60]

What of Jewish Bolsheviks? I. Bikerman: “Prowess doesn’t taint – that is our attitude to Bolsheviks who were raised among us and to their satanic evil. Or the modern version: Jews have the right to have their own Bolsheviks”; “I have heard this declaration a thousand times”; at a meeting of Jewish emigrants in Berlin “one after the other, a respected Kadet, a Democrat, a Zionist ascended the podium” and each “proclaimed this right of Jews to have their own Bolsheviks … their right to monstrosity.”[61]

“Here are the consequences of these words: Jewish opinion across the world turned away from Russia and accepted the Bolsheviks”; “when a famous, old, and well respected Jewish public figure – a white crow – suggested to a high Jewish dignitary in one of the European capitals organizing a protest against the executions of Orthodox priests in Russia [i.e. in the USSR], the latter, after reflecting on the idea, said that it would mean struggling against Bolshevism, which he considers an impossible thing to do because the collapse of Bolshevik regime would lead to anti-Jewish pogroms.”[62]

But if they can live with Bolsheviks, what do they think of the White movement? When Josef Bikerman spoke in Berlin in November 1922 at the fifth anniversary of the founding of the White Army, Jewish society in general was offended and took this as a slight against them.

Meanwhile, Dr. D. S. Pasmanik (who fought on the German front until February 1917, then in the White Army until May 1919, when he left Russia) had already finished and in 1923 published in Paris his book Russian Revolution and Jewry: Bolshevism and Judaism (I cited it here), where he passionately argued against the commonplace explanation that Bolshevism originated from the Jewish religion. “The identification of Judaism with Bolshevism is a grave global danger.” In 1923, together with I. M. Bikerman, G. A. Landau, I. O. Levin, D. O. Linsky (also an ex-member of the White Army) and V. C. Mandel, Pasmanik founded the National Union of Russian Jews Abroad. This group published an appeal To the Jews of the World! in the same year, and soon after published a collection Russia and the Jews in Berlin.

Here is how they describe the task they undertook and their feelings. Pasmanik said: “The unspeakable pain of the Jew and the unending sorrow of the Russian citizen” motivated this work. “Because of the dark events of the recent years, it was difficult to find a balanced point of view on both Russian and Jewish questions. We … attempted to merge the interests of the renewed Russia and of the afflicted Russian Jewry.”[63] Linsky: “Unfathomed sorrow” dwells in the souls of those who “realize their Jewishness while similarly identifying as Russians.” It is much easier when “one of the two streams of your national consciousness dries up, leaving you only a Jew or only a Russian, thus simplifying your position toward Russia’s tragic experience….The villainous years of the revolution killed … the shoots of hope” for rapprochement between Jews and Russians that had appeared just before the war; now “we witness active … Russo-Jewish divergence.”[64] Levin: “It is our duty to honestly and objectively examine the causes of and the extent of Jewish involvement in the revolution. This … might have certain effect on future relations between Russians and Jews.”[65] The co-authors of the collection rightly warned Russians not to mix up the meaning of the February Revolution and Jewish involvement in it. Bikerman if anything minimised this involvement (the power balance between the Executive Committee of the Soviet of Soldiers’ and Workers’ Deputies and the Provisional Government was for the most part unclear to contemporaries). However he thought that after the October Bolshevik coup “the Jewish right to have their Bolsheviks implies a duty to have also their right-wingers and extreme right-wingers, the polar opposites of the Bolsheviks.”[66] Pasmanik: “In all its varieties and forms, Bolshevik communism … is an evil and true foe of Jewry, as it is first of all the enemy of personal identity in general and of cultural identity in particular.”[67] “Bound by a plethora of intimate connections to our motherland, to its political system, economy and culture, we cannot flourish while the country disintegrates around us.”[68]

Obviously, these authors were fully aware of the significance of the Russian catastrophe. In describing those years, I heavily relied on the work of these people with the hope that their bitter, but not at all “self-hating,” reflections can finally be understood and comprehended in their entirety.

Their 1923 Proclamation stated: “The National Union of Russian Jews Abroad firmly believes that the Bolsheviks epitomize the greatest evil for the Jews as well as for all other peoples of Russia…. It is time for the Jew to stop tremble at the thought of going against the revolution…. Rather, the Jew should fear going against his motherland [Russia] and his people [Jewish].”[69]

However, the authors of Russia and the Jews saw the Jewish national consciousness of the early 1920s as something very different from what they’ve thought it should have been. “Almost all circles and classes of Russian society are now engaged in grievous self-reflections, trying to comprehend what has happened….Whether these self-accusations and admissions of guilt are fair or not, they at least reveal the work of thought, conscience, and aching hearts…. But it would be no exaggeration to claim that such spiritual work is the least noticeable among the Jewish intelligentsia, which is no doubt a symptom of certain morbidity…. For an outsider it appears that a typical Jewish intellectual has no concerns.”[70] For this intellectual “everyone else is to blame – the government, the generals, the peasants, etc. He has nothing to do with all this…. In no way did he forge his own destiny and the destinies of those around him; he is just a passersby, hit on the head by a falling brick”; “so they were complicit in destroying [the world around them], but after it was finished they became unaware of their role in it.”[71]

Jewish Bolsheviks was a particular pain for the authors. “A sin that carries the seed of its own nemesis, … what greater affliction is there for a people than to see its sons debauched?”[72] “It is not just that the Russian upheaval needed people of a certain sort for its perpetuation, or that the Jewish society provided this sort of people; what is most important is that they were not rebuffed, did not meet enough opposition from within their own society.”[73] “It is our duty to shoulder the struggle specifically against the Jewish Bolsheviks, against all kinds of YevSeks [the ‘Jewish Section,’ the name given to officials appointed by the Soviets to deal with Jewish affairs], and against Jewish commissars in general.”[74]

It should be noted that these authors were not alone in arguing that Russian (and now emigrant) Jews should fight against the Bolsheviks. From the pages of the Jewish Tribune: “If Bolshevism was swept from power in Russia by a wave of popular wrath, Jewry might be held, in the eyes of the masses, responsible for prolonging Bolshevism’s lifespan…. Only active participation in the struggle to liquidate Bolshevism can secure Jews a safe position in the common cause of saving Russia.”[75]

Bikerman warned: if we support the Bolsheviks “on the principle that your own shirt is closer to the body” then “we should not forget that we thus allow the Russian to take care of his own shirt that is closer to his body; that it justifies the call, ‘Slaughter Yids, Save Russia.’”[76]

What of the Jewish attitudes toward the White Army? “This unworthy attitude that Jews have towards people who have taken upon their shoulders the endlessly difficult task of fighting for Russia, for the millions of the sheepish and weak-willed, points out to the complete moral disintegration, to a sort of perversion of mind….” While “all of us, Jews and non-Jews alike, placed ourselves obediently under the communist yoke and our backs under the whip, there were some Russians, courageous and proud, who overcame all obstacles, gathered from what remained of the breached and ripped apart fronts [of World War I], consolidated and raised the banner of resistance…. Just that they were willing to fight under these circumstances alone immortalizes them for the history. And these people became an object for abuse” on the side of so many Jews, “libeled by every loquacious tongue”; so “instead of appreciation the tragedy, we see epidemic mindlessness, endless laxity of speech, and triumphant superficiality.” And yet “the Russia for which the Whites fought is not alien to us; it is ‘our shirt’ too.”[77] “Jewry should have fought for the White cause as for the cause of Jewish salvation, for … only in the restoration and swift rescue of Russian statehood can Jews find salvation from that death that has never been as close as in these days.”[78]

(Death was indeed approaching, although from another direction).

Who would deny these conclusions today, after decades of Soviet regime? But at that time, only few authors, Jewish or Russian, could see so far ahead. The Jewish emigrant community as a whole rejected these thoughts. And thus they had failed the test of history. It might be objected that it did not cause Jewry a noticeable, significant harm, and certainly it was not the Holocaust brought by Hitlerism. Yes, it did not bring commeasurable physical harm, but, historically, its spiritual harm was noticeable; take, for instance, the success of Bolshevism in the expulsion of the Jewish religion from the country where it had once deeply spread its sacred roots. And there was more – the Jews, by “betting on Bolshevism” influenced the overall course of events in Europe.

The authors of the Russia and the Jews appealed in vain: “In the many centuries of Jewish dispersion … there has not been a political catastrophe as deeply threatening to our national existence as the breaking of the Russian Power, for never have the vital forces of the Jewish people been as united as in the bygone, living Russia. Even the breakup of the Caliphate can scarcely compare with the current disaster.”[79] “For the united Russian Jewry the breakup of Russia into separate sovereign states is a national calamity.”[80] “If there is no place for the Jews in the great spaces of the Russian land, in the boundlessness of the Russian soul, then there is no space [for Jews] anywhere in the world…. Woe to us, if we do not wise up.”[81]

Of course, by the very end of the 20^th century we can easily reject these grim prophecies, if only as a matter of fact – just as enough space has been found on earth for formerly Russian Jews, so a Jewish state has been founded and secured itself, while Russia still lies in ruin, so powerless and humiliated. The warnings of the authors on how Russia should be treated already appear a great exaggeration, a failed prophecy. And now we can reflect on these words only in regard of the spiritual chord that so unexpectedly bound the two our peoples together in History.

“If Russia is not our motherland, then we are foreigners and have no right to interfere in her national life.”[82] “Russia will survive; her renaissance must become our national concern, the concern of the entire … Russian Jewry.”[83] And in conclusion: “The fate of Russian Jewry is inextricably linked to the fate of Russia; we must save Russia, if we want to save Jewry …. The Jews must fight the molesters of the great country shoulder to shoulder with all other anti-Bolshevik forces; a consolidated struggle against the common enemy will heal the rifts and substantially reduce the current dramatic and ubiquitous growth of anti-Semitism; only by saving Russia, can we prevent a Jewish catastrophe.”[84]

Catastrophe! – this was said ten years before Hitler’s ascension to power, eighteen years before his stunning sweep across the USSR and before the start of his program of Jewish extermination. Would it have been possible for Hitler to preach hatred of “Jews and communists” in Germany so easily and successfully, to claim Jews and communists are the same, if the Jews were among the most prominent and persistent opponents of the Soviet regime? The spiritual search of the authors of Russia and the Jews led them to prophetically sense the shadow of the impending Jewish Catastrophe, though erring in its geographical origin and failing to predict other fateful developments. Yet their dreadful warning remained unheard.

I am not aware of anything else close to Russia and the Jews in the history of Russian-Jewish relations. It shook the Jewish emigration. Imagine how hurtful it was to hear such things coming from Jewish lips, from within Jewry itself.

On the part of Russians, we must learn a lesson from this story as well. We should take Russia and the Jews as an example of how to love our own people and at the same time be able to speak about our mistakes, and to do so mercilessly if necessary. And in doing that, we should never alienate or separate ourselves from our people. The surest path to social truth is for each to admit their own mistakes, from each, from every side.

Having devoted much time and thought to these authors (and having dragged the reader along with me), I would like here to leave a brief record of their lives.

Josef Menassievich Bikerman (1867-1942) came from a poor petty bourgeois family. He attended a cheder, then a yeshiva, provided for himself from the age of fifteen; educated himself under difficult circumstances. In 1903 he graduated from the historical-philological faculty of the Imperial Novorossiya University (after a two-year-exclusion gap for participation in student unrest). He opposed Zionism as, in his opinion, an illusory and reactionary idea. He called on Jews to unite, without relinquishing their spiritual identity, with progressive forces in Russia to fight for the good of the common motherland. His first article was a large tract on Zionism published in the Russkoe Bogatstvo [Russian Treasure] (1902, issue 7), which was noticed and debated even abroad. In 1905 he was deeply involved into the Liberation movement. He worked in several periodicals: Syn Otechestva [Son of the Fatherland], Russkoe Bogatstvo, Nash Den [Our day], Bodroe Slovo [Buoyant Word]. As an emigrant he was printed in the Paris Vozrozhdenie, when it was run by P. B. Struve.

Daniil Samoilovich Pasmanik (1869-1930) was a son of Melamed (a teacher in a cheder). In 1923 he graduated from the medical faculty of Zurich University and then practiced medicine in Bulgaria for seven years. In 1899-1905 he was the freelance lecturer in the medical faculty at Geneva University. He joined Zionist movement in 1900 and became one of its leading theorists and publicists. He returned to Russia in 1905 and passed the medical license exam. He participated in the struggle for civil rights for Jews; he opposed the Bund and worked on the program for Poale-Zion; in 1906-1917 he was a member of the Central Committee of the Russian Zionist organization. He was a member of editorial boards of Evreiskaya Zhizn [Jewish Life], and then of Rassvet. He wrote many articles for Evreisky Mir [Jewish World] and the Jewish Encyclopaedia. He published his medical works in specialized journals in German and French. Pasmanik was in Vienna when the WWI broke out in 1914, from where he with great difficulty managed to return to Russia; he joined the army and served in field hospitals until February 1917. He joined the Kadets after the February Revolution; he supported General Kornilov and the White movement; in 1918-1919 he was involved in the White government of the Crimea, was elected chairman of the Union of the Jewish Communities of the Crimea. In 1919 he emigrated from Russia to France. In 1920-1922 in Paris he together with V. L. Burtsev edited the White émigré newspaper Obshchee Delo [The Common Cause]. Overall, he authored hundreds of articles and tens of books; the most notable of them include Wandering Israel: The Psychology of Jewry in Dispersion (1910), Fates of the Jewish People: The Problems of Jewish Society (1917), The Russian Revolution and Jewry: Bolshevism and Judaism (1923) The Revolutionary Years in Crimea (1926), What Is Judaism? (French edition, 1930).

Isaak Osipovich Levin (1876-1944) was a historian and publicist. Before the revolution, he worked as a foreign affairs commentator for Russkie Vedomosti [Russian Journal] and for the P. B. Struve’s magazine, Russkaya Mysl [Russian Thought]. He emigrated first to Berlin. He was a member of the Russian Institute of Science, worked in the Rul, Russkie Zapiski and in the historical-literary almanac Na Chuzhoi Storone [In the Foreign Land]; he regularly gave presentations (in particular on the topic of the rise of German anti-Semitism). He moved to Paris in 1931 or 1932. He was widowed and lived in poverty. Among his works are Emigration during the French Revolution and a book in French about Mongolia. During the German occupation he registered according to his “racial origins” as was required by authorities; he was arrested in the early 1943, for a short time was held in a concentration camp near Paris, then deported; he died in a Nazi concentration camp in 1944.

Grigory (Gavriel) Adolfovich Landau (1877-1941) was son of the well-known publicist and publisher A. E. Landau. He graduated from the law faculty of the St. Petersburg University in 1902. He wrote for periodicals from 1903 (the newspapers Voskhod [Sunrise], Nash Den, Evreiskoe Obozrenie [Jewish Observer], the magazines Bodroe Slovo, Evreisky Mir, Vestnik Evropy [European Herald], Sovremennik, Severnye Zapiski [Northern Notes], the yearly almanac Logos). He was one of the founders of the Jewish Democratic Group in 1904 and the Union for Equal Rights for Jews in Russia in 1905. He was an outstanding Kadet, member of the Central Committee of the Kadet Party. In August 1917 he participated in the Government Conference in Moscow; from December 1917 he was a member of the Executive Committee of the Jewish Community of Petrograd. He emigrated to Germany in 1919; from 1922 to 1931he was I. V. Gessen’s deputy at Rul. Apart from Rul, he also wrote for the magazine, Russkaya Mysl, the weekly, Russia and the Slavs, the collection Chisla [Dates], etc. He often lectured at émigré evenings (in 1927 in the talk titled The Eurasian Delusion he criticised “eurasianism” as the movement contrary to the values of Russian history and leading to ideological Bolshevism). From Nazi Germany he fled for Latvia, where he worked for the Riga newspaper Segodnya [Today]. He was arrested by the NKVD in June 1941 and died in the Usollag camp (near Solikamsk) in November.[85] Among his works the most influential were Clownish Culture (in Nash Den, 1908), the article Twilight of Europe (Severnye Zapiski, 1914, issue 12), which antedated “much of what would later bestow worldwide fame on Oswald Spengler”[86] (and later a book with the same title (Berlin, 1923)), Polish-Jewish Relations (1915), On Overcoming Evil (in the collection book The Works of Russian Scholars Abroad, Berlin, 1923), The Byzantine and the Hebrew (Russkaya Mysl, 1923, issues 1 and 2), Theses Against Dostoevsky (Chisla, volume 6, Paris, 1932), Epigraphs (Berlin, 1927). Much of what he wrote was dismissed by contemporaries. He was too conservative in spirit to be accepted by progressive public. He was a sagacious thinker.

Shulgin’s book was regarded as anti-Semitic, and the proposed “interexchange of views” never took place. Anyway, the impending Catastrophe, coming from Germany, soon took the issue of any debate off the table.

A Union of Russian-Jewish Intelligentsia was created in Paris as if in the attempt to preserve a link between the two cultures. Yet it soon transpired that “life in exile had created a chasm between fathers and sons, and the latter no longer understand what a “Russian-Jewish intelligentsia” is.[112] So the fathers sadly acknowledged that “the Russian Jews, who used to lead global Jewry in spiritual art and in the nation building, now virtually quit the stage.”[113] Before the war, the Union had managed to publish only the first issue of collection Jewish world. During the war, those who could, fled across the ocean and untiringly created the Union of Russian Jews in New York City, and published the second issue of the Jewish World. In the 1960s, they published the Book of Russian Jewry in two volumes, about pre- and post-revolutionary Jewish life in Russia. The bygone life in the bygone Russia still attracted their minds.

In this work I cite all these books with gratitude and respect.