Россия и США: познавая друг друга. Сборник памяти академика Александра Александровича Фурсенко / Russia and the United States: perceiving each other. In Memory of the Academician Alexander A. Fursenko - стр. 65

Chapter 10, which describes the history of the Gintsburg Circle’s successes and its struggle with the emigration panic, is entitled “Politics without Prophecy”, a friendly swipe at Jonathan Frankel’s stress on the seminal role of the Jewish intelligentsia in setting the political agenda for Russian Jewry and its vilification of the Gintsburg Circle.[196] Klier’s study supplements the accounts of 1881–2 told by others, including Frankel, by shifting focus from the defiance of Populist and emigrationist Jews to the insider politicking of their elite leaders, embodied by the Gintsburg Circle. Klier provides “inside stories” previously not widely known, revising the usual version of the turn toward reaction in the government’s policy toward Jews. And he has brought the Jews themselves into the story as active participants rather than passive recipients of an unrelenting antisemitism allegedly pervading Alexander III’ regime, by describing and documenting the disagreements in their own ranks as well as the positive reception their leaders received in higher governing circles.

That being the principal contribution of Klier’s study, he has not neglected other dimensions of the Russian upheaval of the early 1880s. The genuinely popular Jewish response to the pogroms is revealed not only in the panicky enthusiasm for emigration, but by the sudden surge in attendance of selihot (repentance prayer) ceremonies responding to the pogroms and held in numerous synagogues. Besides connecting Jewish communities with a familiar tradition, the services also discussed the politics of the pogroms and groups not normally attending synagogue, such as students, swelled attendance at the selihot’s. Parallel to the mixed and complex views he describes between governing circles and Jewish leaders. Klier also reveals the diversity of views within Russian society, surveying merchants, journalists, and radicals, carefully distinguishing differences among socialists, Narodovol’tsy, and Chernoperedel’tsy, while noting that, with few exceptions, the majority of Populists in the early 1880s looked favorably on the pogroms as the harbingers of peasant revolution. Klier’s version of the 1881–2 pogroms, besides being a series of malevolent attacks on Jews, become a vast social and political upheaval, focused on the Jews but also revealing a broad synchronic portrait of Russian government and society moving in response to them.

In keeping with the documentation in his earlier studies[197] of the government’s sincere efforts to assimilate Jews to the state’s own order and needs, Klier distinguishes in the present book between Ignatiev’s hostility and the continuing willingness to accommodate Jewish needs by other top officials, including Alexander III, who deplored the pogroms and met with Jewish representatives to discuss responses to them. Indeed, in this view, Ignatiev stands out as the revisionist and extremist,[198] while the personal antisemitism of many officials is shown to have been tempered by their commitment to maintaining public order and Jewish good will.

Be that as it may, the fact remains that in the end Ignatiev “and his minions” had their way in that the May Laws of 1882 (placing additional restrictions on Jewish mobility)