Revolution of the Jewish street: Smolensk, 1917.

For Jews in small Russian cities like Smolensk, the Romanov monarchy's collapse opened unprecedented opportunities for social and political organization.(1) Yet we know virtually nothing about Jewish local politics during 1917.(2) Serious historical work on Russian Jews in 1917 has concentrated almost exclusively on high politics, and studies of particular Russian Jewish communities treat 1917 as a golden but fleeting moment of Jewish freedom in a manner that places it beyond analysis. Decades of Soviet rule obscured the Jewish past in cities - like Smolensk - that lay outside the infamous Pale of Settlement established under Catherine II in 1791.(3) Not until 1994 did local historians make their first references to Smolensk's modern Jewish community.(4) The following analysis of revolution on Smolensk's Jewish street (a Yiddish term referring to Jews' social world), is a contribution to building a critical historiography of Russian-Jewish politics outside the Pale.

During March-July 1917 networks of Jewish socialists in Smolensk mobilized to seize political opportunities offered by the February Revolution. In framing discrete political positions in competition with other Jewish parties and organizations, leaders of the Jewish socialist parties articulated a politics of class, based upon a highly politicized ascription of class identities. This built upon a master frame of class struggle and an established repertoire of developed ideological positions.(5) But it also responded to cues from Jewish workers, artisans, and clerks, whose workplace mobilization constituted the vital core of the labor movement in Smolensk during these months. Therefore class struggle and class identity resonated more strongly with a majority of Smolensk's Jews than did the model of Jewish cultural identity offered by non-socialist Jewish organizations. In July, moderate socialists - including members of Jewish socialist parties - consolidated their control over local state institutions. Later in the summer, however, labor conflicts and declining living conditions drove a wedge between workers and socialist leaders. Jewish workers continued pushing employers for concessions on wages and work-place control with little success, while the leaders of Jewish socialist parties urged them to moderate their demands. In a process that paralleled the development of labor politics in Russia's largest cities, Smolensk's Jewish socialist leaders found themselves marginalized by their own rhetoric of class struggle.(6) In fall 1917, many Jewish workers drifted away from the moderate socialists towards non-socialist Zionist organizations, which had developed their own organizational base and developed distinct political positions grounded by Jewish cultural identity. By contrast, the Jewish socialist parties now reflexively responded to events outside their control. In the face of the most traumatic of these events - the Bolshevik seizure of power - Smolensk's Jews fell back upon a pre-revolutionary repertoire of accommodation to hostile authorities.

Smolensk's Jews Before 1914

As Smolensk's Jewish population grew in the three decades before World War One, divisions within the Jewish community mirrored the city's basic social cleavages.(7) Social divisions underlay one of the central themes of Jewish politics - class struggle: even before the formation of socialist party organizations in the city, Jewish artisans and clerks saw themselves as workers in conflict with the Jewish bourgeoisie.(8) Tsarist legal inequities provided a second, and interlocking theme: to most Jews, obtaining civil rights required either a revolution, the establishment of an independent Jewish homeland, or both. From 1900, Jewish workers and socialist activists began forming underground networks of study groups and party cells. In 1905 these networks facilitated rapid and sustained collective action, as Jewish socialists seized upon political opportunities created by the crisis of the autocracy. In 1906, the regime recovered and smashed local unions and party organizations. But even during the repressive period from 1907 through the war, loose networks of activists remained.

Smolensk's Jewish community took shape only after the Great Reforms of the 1860s. From the fifteenth through the mid-nineteenth century, the city had only a tiny cohort of Jewish merchants.(9) Smolensk lay outside the Pale of Settlement, to which Tsarist legislation had restricted Jews. But after 1860, hundreds of artisans took advantage of legal opportunities to escape overcrowding in the Pale and move to Smolensk.(10) In 1880 Smolenskii vestnik complained that Jewish artisans lent money, kept taverns, and fenced stolen goods.(11) Thirteen years and 2,000 immigrants later, the same newspaper blamed filth in Iamskaia Sloboda (the Carters' Suburb) on Jews.(12) Such complaints reflected anxiety over the Jewish community's rapid growth: by 1914, Jews accounted for nearly 10 percent of Smolensk's 70,711 residents.(13) The complaints also indicated that Jews shared characteristics with the general population.

Early twentieth-century Smolensk was a small overcrowded administrative center, with an economy based upon trade and artisanal manufacturing, and a highly stratified population.(14) Over 1,000 Jewish artisans and their families lived and worked in the city's poorest, dirtiest districts (Iamskaia and Petro-Pavlovskaia north of the Dnepr River, and Rachevskaia and Svirskaia to the south). Dozens actually were petty merchants who owned groceries and pharmacies and who dominated the needle trades.(15) Hundreds of Jews worked as clerks in shops and (less often) government institutions; the best-paid clerks rented fiats in Soldatskaia Sloboda near Blon'e, the city's central district. Jewish doctors, dentists, and attorneys - often the children of local merchants - lived nearer the "elite" streets of Blon'e. At the pinnacle of Jewish society was a small circle of families that dominated the local lumbermilling, leathermaking, and brewing industries, and loomed large in the flax and grain trade.(16) Twelve Smolensk Jews - more than in any city outside the Pale - had become First Guild Merchants. They sponsored the city's Jewish public institutions - two Mitnagdic (non-Hasidic Orthodox) synagogues, a Jewish School, a Jewish Library, a Talmud-Torah Society (to provide Jewish education for poor children), and a Society to Aid Poor Jews.(17) But unlike "Russian" propertied elites, Jewish merchants had no legal access to political power.

Jews shared a tenuous legal and social position, which conditioned their political education. Russian Jews carried the burden of legal inequities, from seclusion in the Pale to quotas governing education, that heightened their vulnerability to collective violence. In September 1903, rumors of a pogrom raced through Smolensk, driving home the fragility of Jewish life; rumors became terror during a very real pogrom on 26 October 1904.(18) Legal inequality thus animated Jewish politics in Smolensk, and combined explosively with intra-Jewish class conflicts.(19) Jewish socialists made equal rights a central element in labor agitation among Jewish artisans, who in 1901 and 1902 mounted small strikes for higher wages, shorter hours, and better working conditions, and who joined Social Democratic study groups in large numbers.(20) From 1902, members of the Jewish Bund worked within Smolensk's Russian Social Democratic organization to rally artisans against capitalist exploitation and for rule of law and equal rights.(21) From 1903, the Jewish Socialist Workers Party (SERP) worked similarly within the Party of Socialist Revolutionaries (PSR).(22) Braving constant police harassment and frequent mass arrests, a small network of activists distributed underground literature, held illegal rallies, and planned strikes.

Pogrom agitators often accused Jews of fomenting revolutionary agitation.(23) In fact, local Jews were at the center of revolutionary events in 1905. Smolensk's Jewish socialist activists and radical artisans mobilized rapidly in the days following the "Bloody Sunday" massacre in St. Petersburg. On 19 January an anti-government protest at the Society to Aid Poor Jews' tailor shop triggered a cascade of political demonstrations. Jewish artisans also pressed employers for higher wages and better working conditions. Strikes in the needle trades began a cycle of labor protest that spread to factories, typographies, and even government offices. At the height of revolutionary upheaval in October, Jewish artisans and students battled police in Smolensk's streets, while Jewish trade unionists led a crescendo of strikes and demonstrations. Jewish artisans were at the center of the city's radical politics as well, and helped to form Smolensk's Soviet in November.(24)

In 1905 differences among Smolensk's Jewish socialists spawned separate organizations of each major Jewish revolutionary party. The largest local faction belonged to the Bund, which stressed the importance of Jewish cultural autonomy, but rejected Zionism and argued that the emancipation of Jewish workers would come only as the product of the general struggle for socialism. Smolensk also had a sizable organization of the Marxist-Zionist party Poalei-Zion, which held that Jews could only find freedom in Palestine, but that Jewish workers must struggle for socialism and civil rights in the Diaspora as well as in Palestine. SERP also formed a large faction in Smolensk. SERP's socialism had more in common with that of the populist PSR than it did with the Marxists. It also rejected both Palestinian and "territorialist" Zionism in favor of a non-territorial federalist conception of Jewish national autonomy.(25)

Revolutionary mobilization in 1905 broadened and strengthened socialist cohorts. These networks survived even after the Tsarist state regained its bearings and crushed the revolution. Police smashed the union movement and decimated the revolutionary parties in Smolensk in December 1905 and January 1906. But Jewish socialists - like other local activists - turned to legal work in the insurance and cooperative movements and public organizations, which facilitated cooperation among themselves and contact between activists and laborers.(26) Work in organizations like the Society for the Spread of Enlightenment Among Jews (ORPME) also "activated" liberals.(27) Organized party activity of all sorts, however, had ceased.

Organized anti-Jewish activity, in contrast, accelerated. In 1906, Smolensk police chief M. M. Gromyko helped organize a chapter of the monarchist Union of the Russian People.(28) Soon afterwards, police began threatening Jews with expulsion from the city.(29) Local "Union" activities peaked in October 1913, when its leaders tried to foment a pogrom by accusing a Jewish woman (M. L. Pinkus) of slaying a Russian child in a Jewish ritual. The district court found Pinkus innocent, and sentenced her accusers to four months in prison. As Pinkus - outraged by the light sentence - prepared her case for the Moscow Appeals Court, Russia entered the First World War.(30)

The Great War and Smolensk's Jews

War brought Russia's Jews greater hardship.(31) The regime, army, and populace all suspected Jews as German collaborators. The state banned written use of Yiddish and Hebrew, and the military brutally expelled Jews from front regions.(32) But in doing so, they created an opening for Jewish public involvement. Jewish liberals pressured the Fourth State Duma's Progressive Bloc to discuss lifting restrictions on Jews.(33) And as neither state nor Russian public organizations could handle the flood of Jewish deportees and refugees to the interior, the regime permitted Jewish organizations to carry the burden of relief.(34) The Jewish Committee to Aid War Victims (EKOPO) and other agencies formed by Petrograd and Moscow shtadlanim (Jewish notables with access to the corridors of power) immediately became contested ground, as professionals and socialist activists staked claims to guide public work.(35) This expansion of Jewish public space was echoed in the provinces. Concurrently, state repression, war-time shortages and working conditions, and the plight of war refugees made socialist discourse on legal inequality and class conflict resonate all the more strongly among Jewish artisanal workers and clerks.

In early 1915 N. V. Shvarts and other wealthy Smolensk Jews organized a Society for the Aid of Jewish War Victims (EVOPO), a refugee labor bureau (associated with the ORT - The Society of Artisan and Agricultural Labor), and a chapter of The Society for the Protection of Jewish Health (OZE).(36) That summer, as the refugee problem escalated, socialist activists seized upon this opening and began pushing their way into the administration of the new agencies.

In summer 1916 Smolensk faced a deluge of deportees and refugees that aggravated relations between the Jewish community and state authorities, and in the process heightened Jews' sense of legal inequality. In June, 1,500 Jewish refugees passed through the city; in July, 6,500; in August, 8,600.(37) Government officials offered little assistance.(38) Authorities posted signs at railroad stations telling refugees "there are absolutely no free apartments or rooms in Smolensk!"(39) Smolensk's governor banned Jewish resettlement and refused companies permission to transfer Jewish employees to the city.(40) The military overruled him, and by late 1916 nearly 1,000 Jewish refugees - most of them children - had resettled in the city.(41) These "alien" Jews (most were Hasidic) lived in squalid temporary quarters and needed food, clothes, and work.(42) Their presence raised tensions: police heightened surveillance, publicly accused Jews of speculation and worse, and even arrested a local merchant for Zionist activity.(43) EVOPO accused police of fomenting a pogrom.(44)

At the same time, Jewish artisans and clerks - like all workers and employees in the city - faced worsening shortages of food, escalating inflation, and deteriorating wages and working conditions.(45) Jewish socialist activists stressed the hardships borne by Jewish laborers in their challenge to elite and liberal dominance over public relief efforts. In a frontal assault on the right-liberalism of Jewish elites, SERP activist and local newspaper editor Solomon Gurevich called for democratization of Jewish public organizations in September 1916. Gurevich lambasted liberal proposals to provide individual refugees with loans from private banks. Such schemes, he charged, gave public authority to private capitalists and helped only those "capable of independent action." Jewish cooperatives should provide for collective aid.(46) In January 1917, Gurevich attacked local Jewish elites in the pages of Evreiskaia nedelia, Russia's largest Jewish liberal newspaper. He charged that Jewish workers had demonstrated self-control in the face of wracking inflation, while the "big Jewish bourgeoisie" selfishly decreased its charitable contributions. Moreover, elites ignored the "moral necessity" of democratizing Jewish public organizations. The public must "free itself from the monopoly of the owners with their 'haughty positions'" and face down "petty," "opportunistic," and "rightist" plans to turn Jewish agencies into "private charities."(47) He later charged that "big money" used financial clout to "terrorize" EVOPO.(48) Warned by EVOPO officials against fomenting class divisions, Gurevich called on "democratic elements" to overcome EVOPO's "bourgeois cliques."(49)

A broadening public sphere and a fragile veneer of public unity characterized Smolensk's urban society in January 1917. Conflict like that in EVOPO took shape in other public organizations. Indeed, Gurevich's criticisms of Jewish elites corresponded to thinly veiled attacks on the Tsarist regime in his newspaper, Smolenskii vestnik.(50) When the regime collapsed, Jews became caught in a city-wide tide of revolutionary solidarity. But the tide receded quickly, leaving divisions within the community in an even starker light.

Smolensk's Jews and the February Revolution

In the wake of the February 1917 revolution, Russia's Provisional Government abolished the special legal disabilities under which Jews had suffered, abolished the Pale of Settlement, and recognized Jews' equal rights as Russian citizens. In Smolensk, as elsewhere, networks of Jewish activists quickly seized the opportunity to mobilize. Mobilization highlighted ambiguities within and tensions among various forms of Jewish public identity. Jews who identified uneasily with Russian citizenship could now publicly proclaim their identification with Zionism without fear of retribution. And with the problem of legal equality settled, trade-union and socialist activists focused entirely on the theme of class struggle. In doing so, they demonstrated the fragility of revolutionary unity.

Encouraged by State Duma debates, on 21 February 1917 Smolensk's Commission on City Affairs discussed granting Jews voting rights. The liberal Commission members fell into two camps: those who believed it "stupid" and "uncivilized" to deny Jews full citizenship; and those who feared that Jews would take over local government. The debate died quietly.(51) But only days later, the Romanov dynasty crumbled and Jewish emancipation became a reality. On 21 March the Provisional Government issued detailed legislation protecting Jews' full and equal rights as citizens.(52) And in the revolution's first, hectic weeks, Smolensk's Jews rushed to organize both as citizens and as Jews.

Jewish citizen-activists moved quickly to participate in state, public, and political institutions.(53) Newspaper editor Solomon Gurevich, clerk S. P. Shur, and attorney A. K. Bliumberg all represented public organizations on the new Provisional City Executive Committee (PEC). The PEC appointed Shur and merchant I. A. Pasynkov to the city's reorganized Provisions Committee. Shur and Gurevich (as PEC members, not as Jews) served on the Commissar's Council.(54) Jews forged general (as opposed to Jewish) public organizations, such as the Society of Unity of Family and School. They led trade and trade-union organizations, including the Society of Lumber Producers, and unions of pharmacists and needle-shop workers. Shur and other Jewish trade unionists sat in the Soviet of Workers' Deputies. Leivik Hodis was one of several Jews in the Soldiers' Soviet. Jewish men and women belonged to reconstituted Russian political parties: Gurevich, Bliumberg, and other SERP activists to the PSR; Shur, Rakhil Rozenberg, and other Bundists to Smolensk's "united" SD organization, and Dr. S. I. Rozenfel'd and other Jewish liberals to the Party of People's Freedom (Kadets).(55) Jewish artisanal workers, clerks, professionals, and merchants also all contributed heavily to the Fund for the Aid of Former Political Prisoners, a charity symbolizing participation in the citizens' sphere.

But Russian citizenship did not obscure Jewish difference. City and military authorities moved to accommodate the community's special needs. The Minsk Military District Staff, for instance, lifted the ban on written communications in Yiddish and Hebrew and let Jewish soldiers eat at special Passover cafeterias.(56) The PEC condemned pogroms and declared "that violence against any citizen will not be tolerated, be he Christian, Jew, Tatar, or other."(57) But anti-Jewish suspicions proved resilient, and ongoing food shortages made provision of Jews with kosher meat and Passover flour a politically touchy issue.(58) Moreover, proclamations and demonstrations of citizenship revealed the ambivalence of Jews' self-identities as citizens. On 9 March, for instance, Rabbi Fridman of the city's main synagogue called on Jews to recognize "our duty to the native people, our motherland, and the new government."(59) Jews were citizens, yet still considered themselves outsiders.(60)

Jews also mobilized as Jews. EVOPO, the first Jewish organization to meet under the new conditions, elected a new leadership council on 4 March. This election began the democratization of Jewish organizations, which frequently led to socialist majorities.(61) Socialists and merchant elites set aside differences in the interest of relief work. And the new political context permitted new forms of work for instance, on 18 and 19 March EVOPO hosted the city's first Yiddish play, a production of "Der Ieshive-Borkher" ("The Yeshiva Student," also known as "The Jewish Hamlet").(62) At the same time, the revolutionary context encouraged Jews to organize along class and ideological lines.

Merchants organized along particularistic lines first. In early March they formed a "Society of Jewish Public Figures," in an effort to sustain elite dominance over public charity.(63) By mid-March, artisans, clerks, and students were forming their own class- and religious-based organizations. The first to institutionalize was the Jewish Workers' Club, formed by SERP activists at a meeting on 15 March at the Jewish Library.(64) Turnout on 15 March was low, but within a week the club had enrolled 150 members. As of 1 April its membership of 260 extended well beyond the circle of SERP activists to include artisans, workers, and employees.(65) Zionist organizations emerged concurrently with the Workers Club. Jewish students met on 18 March to discuss cultural issues. A core of khedar and yeshiva students then formed a Zionist circle, which met weekly at the Jewish Library. Students also arranged an all-city Zionist meeting on 19 March. The meeting disintegrated into an argument between religious Zionists and members of the reborn Poalei-Zion party. Non-socialists then formed a City Zionist Organization, which worked in tandem with the students to organize public lectures.(66) Poalei-Zion denounced the City Zionist Organization as "bourgeois," and held its own weekly meetings at the Jewish Library. The revived Socialist-Zionist Party (SS) also rejected the "bourgeois" City Zionist Organization, and began holding its own meetings (also at the Jewish Library).(67)

Smolensk's Bund and SERP began mobilizing their supporters in late March. Oddly (since a SERP party activist, Gurevich, ran the city newspaper), SERP's first meetings had no press coverage. A Bundist initiative group met on 28 March at the Jewish Library and resolved to support the new government. It added, however, that the soviets must establish kontrol' (supervision) over the state to guarantee workers' rights.(68) A well-attended Bund meeting two days later voted that Bundists could work on cultural issues with the "Jewish bourgeois parties," but that political cooperation was unthinkable.(69)

The Bund's effort to frame its position through strident class rhetoric appealed directly to Jewish artisans. On 12 April the "Jewish" union Needle Shop - which united the self-declared "proletarian" tailors, seamstresses, and other artisans - demanded that (Jewish) garment workshop and haberdashery owners raise wages. With Smolenskii vestnik's help, it publicly exposed inhumane conditions in workshops.(70) Owners of several expensive stores in Blon'e agreed to union demands, but sweatshop owners refused. The "workers" involved were artisans, the "capitalists" petty merchants. But unionists described themselves as proletarians battling bourgeois exploitation. Nature conspired to intensify social hostilities when ice and rain forced the Dnepr over its banks on 6 April. "Bourgeois" streets near Blon'e stood untouched as water inundated Iamskaia, Rachevskaia and Svirskaia. The flood hit poor Jewish streets hardest, and left dozens of families homeless.(71) The glow of legal equality had faded.

The Politics of Class Identity

At its 12 April meeting, the Bund asked Jewish workers to ignore Smolensk's "Days of Freedom" festival. Instead, they should organize a May Day parade (on 18 April OS), with red flags and banners extolling "class and political demands and their solidarity with the workers of the world."(72) Bundist Leivik Hodis introduced this resolution in the Smolensk Soviet, which agreed and planned a massive celebration, including representatives of all the Jewish socialist parties and a Bund Choir.(73) The Bund framed its politics almost exclusively in terms of class struggle, and by doing so pointed the way for all of the city's socialist parties. Jewish socialists appealed directly to working-class identities. An alternative model of identity existed, in the form of Jewish cultural identity and particularly identification with the general principles of Zionism, which cut across class lines. But at this stage in the revolution class identification proved far more attractive to Jewish artisans and clerks, whose fight for higher wages and control over the workplace set the pace of Smolensk's labor movement. Their support helped socialists wrest control over city government.

Once the February Revolution had made open political party competition possible, Smolensk's Jewish socialist parties faced the problem of competing for the loyalty of only 3,000 artisanal workers and employees. In mid-April, party leaders discussed solving this problem by forming a common organization. Bundists quickly withdrew, but the other parties formed a single contingent in the 18 April May Day parade. On 6 May, Poalei-Zion also abandoned inter-party talks. Smolensk's SS and SERP factions finally formed a United Jewish Socialist Workers' Party (the OESRP, or Farainigte) on 26 May, days after the Socialist Zionists' agreement to set aside their "territorialist" program had facilitated unification at the national level.(74)

The continued existence of several parties appealing to the same population required that activists frame their positions in a manner that dramatized party differences. Similarities among party platforms made this difficult - all Jewish parties, for instance, had evolved approximately the same position on cultural autonomy since the 1905 revolution. And so the SS and Poalei-Zion differentiated themselves by emphasizing their Zionism. On 10 May, for instance, SS hecklers at a Bund-sponsored lecture attacked the Bund's anti-Zionism.(75) And Poalei-Zion attracted Zionist supporters with lectures and courses on Palestine. The cause of Zionism had broad appeal in Smolensk: a Zionist Tarbut (Culture) society and a He-Haver Zionist organization formed by students at A. Liboshitskii's school had begun hosting weekly lectures, and I. M. Izraelitan and other merchants promoted the City Zionist Organization with great success among artisans in the Zemstvo Union's leather-making workshop.(76) Poalei-Zionists therefore emphasized not only their Zionism, but also the theme of class struggle in clarifying their differences with non-socialist Zionists. They accomplished this by ascribing "bourgeois" and "petty bourgeois" class characteristics and identities to their non-socialist opponents, a tactic in keeping with an established rhetorical repertoire of the Russian left. On 20 May, for instance, Poalei-Zionists disrupted a public lecture by denouncing the views of speaker Kh. D. Ryvkin (a non-socialist Zionist) as "bourgeois."(77)

Jewish socialists also had to compete with popular Rabbi A. Iu. Fridman, who in June organized a chapter of the religious Orthodox anti-Zionist party Agudas-Israel (Unity of Israel), and proselytized extensively among artisans and shopkeepers at the Tradesman's (Riabatskaia St.) Prayerhouse.(78) Again, socialists countered these efforts by describing Agudas-Israel as a "bourgeois" organization, thereby tainting its supporters with a non-working-class identity.

Liberals also competed for community support, but framed their position through appeals to supra-party, supra-class national unity. On 11 May, liberals organized a meeting of The Jewish Public Assembly, an "inter-party [mezhdupartiinyi] or supra-party [vnepartiinyi]" club "to unite all strata of the Jewish population around the ideals of nationalism and cultural enlightenment."(79) When E. S. Lur'e - who stood between the liberals and the Zionist socialists - requested he floor to discuss the club charter, the majority shouted him down and stripped guests of the right to speak. Lur'e then wrote a scathing letter to Smolenskii vestnik that described the club as a closed gathering of propertied elites.(80)

Lur'e's evocation of class identities hit the liberals' major weakness. Not only was their nationalism too assimilationist to encourage Zionist loyalties, but they denied class divisions at a time when a whirlwind of labor strife surrounded Smolensk's Jews. On 16 April the predominantly Jewish Society of Pharmacy Employees had demanded that their mostly Jewish employers raise pay, limit night work, and recognize workers' control over employment decisions. Owners announced that they would agreed to all but one demand: "We consider [workers' control] violence against our personal rights." A desperate PEC effort to avert the strike before the May Day parade failed. The union shut down the city's pharmacies on 17 April. On 19 April the Smolensk Soviet endorsed the strike, but urged that the union moderate its demands. Union leaders did so on 24 April, and agreed to return to work if employers recognized union (rather than shop committee) authority over hiring. The strike ended, but tensions remained.(81)

The pharmacy strike triggered another cascade of labor conflict, accentuating class tensions. On 19 April, Needle Shop announced a boycott against haberdasheries that had not raised wages, and it demanded city-wide implementation of a 15 April Soviet resolution on the eight-hour working day. Cooks and waiters, cigarette makers, shoe makers, carpenters, postal-telegraph employees, zemstvo employees, and government employees - all of whom declared themselves workers followed by unionizing and demanding an eight-hour day. On 28 April the Jewish-led Union of Commercial Employees announced that clerks would work only eight-hour days. The Needle Shop union then organized more boycotts against shops and workshops (particularly "Jewish" garment workshops) that had not recognized union demands.

Deteriorating urban conditions further reinforced class tensions. By late June the City Provisions Committee had begun rationing nearly all basic foodstuffs, and each week new charges were leveled against merchants for hoarding and speculation.(82) In late May, elite-sponsored charities added to tensions by deciding to charge poor Jews for meals.(83) In June City Sanitation Inspector M. A. Abegauz warned that conditions in workers' neighborhoods - and particularly along predominantly Jewish streets - had reached a critical point. While sewers and a fresh water supply protected Blon'e and the "elite" city districts, the workers' districts were drowning in filth.(84) (In fact, monthly reports on the outbreak of infectious disease by city district show a clear pattern of deteriorating health in the workers' districts.) Abegauz blamed workers' hardships on elites who still dominated city government.

The rhetoric of class hostility also marked efforts to reorganize the Jewish obshchina (the kahal, or communal organization). On 15 May a Bund meeting called for democratization of the obshchina, which was still a "bourgeois" institution dominated by rabbis and merchants.(85) On 21 May, the SS and SERP invited Jewish parties and organizations to discuss obshchina reform. Twenty-two delegates from seventeen organizations attended. Furious argument erupted when a Bundist delegate defined the obshchina as a cultural but not religious institution. Several socialists then demanded exclusion from the obshchina of the elite Choral Synagogue, since it was "the private property of its 120 members."(86) In the days that followed, the socialists, synagogues, and The Jewish Public Assembly all discussed obshchina reform. But the issue fell to the wayside as city duma elections approached.

The political power of the class discourse became manifest in campaign for elections to the Smolensk city duma. Smolensk's duma campaign began on 19 May, when the city administration published electoral guidelines.(87) The next evening the Bund proposed an all-socialist electoral bloc. Smolensk's Socialist Bloc, formed in early June, united the Jewish parties with the Mensheviks, SRs, and Peoples' Socialists. Its detailed electoral program promised to improve working and living conditions for the city's proletariat, extend city services to workers' neighborhoods, tax luxury goods, and establish municipal control over certain industries.(88) The bloc's platform put class at the center of a campaign that demonstrated the complexity of local Jewish politics.

In early June a Non-Party Jewish Initiative Group, which included a few socialists, began meeting at the Jewish Public Assembly to discuss the duma elections. The group agreed to promote individual Jewish candidates from the established parties and to sponsor non-party meetings to publicize the campaign.(89) On 20 June the Non-Party Jewish Electoral Committee invited the community to a mass meeting at the Ampir theater. Gurevich's editorial in that morning's Smolenskii vestnik warned that voter absenteeism might lead to a "bourgeois" victory, and endorsed the non-party Jewish electoral meeting as a means of stimulating voter interest.

But the meeting did not go as Gurevich hoped. Heated arguments broke out when socialists insisted that parties must pick their own candidates and warned that Gentiles would perceive any "Jewish list" as "narrow nationalistic chauvinism." Liberals countered that Jewish candidates must protect the national rights of all Jews, and proposed a "non-party electoral slate" that represented the entire community. Zionists and members of Agudas Israel both agreed that Jewish duma members had to fight for matters of "the national soul," such as supply of kosher meat. If the socialist parties did not commit to these issues, then "the Jewish masses, for whom these issues are extraordinarily important and sacred . . . should choose their own representatives." Most of Gurevich's colleagues from OESRP, the Bund, and Poalei-Zion then left in protest.(90)

Shaken by events, Gurevich told Smolenskii vestnik readers on 22 June that the socialists' refusal to participate in non-party meetings risked driving voters to the Kadets, who always attended non-party meetings. To win votes, socialists must reach out to workers and demonstrate a plan to struggle for their interests. Gurevich warned his comrades,

You can not just sit back and rely on the great social-historical idea of class struggle and class consciousness. . . . If workers are politically disorganized, then what becomes of class consciousness and class solidarity? Democracy and socialism go hand in hand, or else you end up with anarcho-bolshevism.(91)

On 25 June, Bundist Iakob Popil'skii answered Gurevich's criticisms. Popil'skii called socialist participation in non-party meetings pointless and Jewish absenteeism a non-issue. Jews were keenly interested in elections because of the nationality question. Moreover, he questioned Gurevich's assumption that joining forces with conservatives and liberals could reduce voter absenteeism in the workers' districts. He pointed out that the socialists had deliberately quit the meeting to shatter "the illusion of all-Jewish unity."(92)

In fact, the 20 June non-party meeting galvanized the Jewish socialist parties, which mobilized all of their members and began reaching out more aggressively to artisans and employees. On 22 June, S. S. Landau promised a large crowd that the Socialist Bloc would defend their interests as workers and as Jews.(93) Socialists repeated this theme daily at union meetings, the Ampir theater, the Society of Peoples' Universities, and other working-class public spaces. By 23 July - the day of the duma elections - the Jewish socialist parties had taken their case for the Socialist Bloc to the workers.

As socialists stepped up their campaign, the Non-Party Jewish Electoral Committee began looking more like a "bourgeois" party. The committee's 29 June meeting elected a eight-man leadership that included merchants N. V. Shvarts and A. I. Gil'man. Gil'man explained that the committee might endorse the Socialist Bloc or the Kadets, or it might run its own candidates instead.(94) The committee then formed an electoral slate made up entirely of large property owners.(95) This created a rupture. OESRP renegades A. Bliumberg and M. P. Izabolinskii and several Zionists quit the committee, charging that it had violated democratic procedures.(96) The committee proved politically aggressive even as it hemorrhaged. It held ward-level electoral meetings across the city on 6-9 July. But Gurevich now denounced non-party groups as "the mobilized forces of the Jewish propertied class" and decried "all-Jewish unity" as a front for "Jewish representatives of Capital who defend their own class and group interests."(97)

The Socialist Bloc - and with it the Jewish socialist parties - scored a stunning victory in the 23 July duma elections, taking 20,880 of 28,851 votes. The NonParty Jewish candidates won only 550 votes.(98) Returns by district suggest that the Jewish population voted overwhelmingly for the Socialist Bloc. Class politics had triumphed in Smolensk's Jewish community.

Politicized Culture

Duma elections demonstrated that appeals framed by class struggle and working-class identity had more resonance among Smolensk's Jews in July 1917 than did identification with "bourgeois" forms of Zionism or religious Orthodoxy. But Jewish socialist activists had a clear understanding of the deep importance of specifically cultural identities, and they treated the cultural field as a battleground of the political struggle.

Jewish public activity represented a dizzying mobilization of Jewish cultural identity. Men and women from every corner of the community participated in some form of explicitly Jewish activity (exclusive of religious observances).(99) I have identified, for instance, over 500 different people who either spoke at or were significant members of Jewish organizations in 1917 - in other words, about one out of every fourteen Jews in Smolensk was a visible member of an organization. Hundreds more took part but left no records. And thousands engaged in cultural activities that were implicitly political. The revolution set loose the force of popular interest in Jewish history, languages, and arts. Each week, advertisements appeared in Smolenskii vestnik for Petrograd and Moscow Jewish newspapers, Jewish music lessons, and Jewish night-school courses. The Miniatur Theater began hosting regular Jewish musical evenings, and Yiddish and Hebrew language events became regular occurrences.

Jewish language lectures always carried strong political overtones and soon became a field of political competition. Smolensk's non-socialist Zionist organizations championed Hebrew. He-Haver exploited the symbolic force of Hebrew, as it demonstrated in an elaborate celebration of the anniversary of Theodore Hetzl's death on 27 June. Student activists draped the Ampir Theater with "Jewish national banners," a portrait of Herzl, and red placards inscribed in Russian and Hebrew: Russian placards read "Long Live Free Russia!" and "Long Live the Free People of Russia"; the Hebrew, more pointedly, read "What Was Sown With Tears Will Be Reaped With Happiness."(100) Socialists, who considered Yiddish the national language, offered weekly Yiddish lectures and courses. These often turned into open confrontations between supporters of Hebrew and champions of Yiddish, as when Zionists disrupted a large OESRP-sponsored lecture on Yiddish on 1 July. Language, like sanitation and wages, fell within the sphere of politics.

Theater played a major role in the cultural contest between socialists and non-socialist Zionists. On 12 April the Jewish Troupe of Vaisman and Failia arrived at the Miniatur Theater in the Lopatin city gardens for a four-day engagement. Its production of "A Mensch Zol Men Zain" ("A Man Must Live") starring R. A. Medvedev and Rosy Brin opened on 17 April. An audience hungry for Yiddish packed the theater, and on 18 April Vaisman and Failia added an operetta to their schedule. On 20 April the troupe performed Iakov Gorden's "Mirel Efros." On 21 April they staged "Dos Gassen Meidel" ("A Daughter of the Street"), which the troupe described as "a story of Jews deprived of their rights." The response was so great that Vaisman and Failia held "Dos Gassen Meidel" over for two additional days, then spent the rest of the summer in Smolensk.(101) Yiddish theater became working-class space. Artisans crowded to the theater (Rosy Brin became their favorite). Needle Shop and the Smolensk Soviet used Vaisman and Failia's troupe for fund-raising events. Yiddish theater's success built upon and reinforced the politics of class and demonstrated the intertwining of class identity with forms of Jewish cultural identity.

Jewish Moderate Socialism in Political Eclipse

From March through July 1917, collective action on Smolensk's Jewish street had anticipated and helped shape city politics. Jewish socialists - like other moderate socialist leaders - had taken advantage of existing political opportunities and had created new opportunities by fighting to democratize public and state institutions - in other words, to bring them under socialist control. But democratization of state institutions threw the moderate socialist parties into a paradox. Socialists made use of the politics of class struggle in rising to power, so that their authority rested on appeals to working-class identity and interests. But to administer power, they had to temper those interests.(102) The moderate socialists' position seemed to contradict the class rhetoric on which they had built their base of support. From late July, non-Jewish workers in Smolensk who were faced with declining real wages and worsening working and living conditions increasingly rejected the socialists' conciliationism in favor of the more strident Left SR and Bolshevik positions on class conflict. In this regard the course of labor politics in Smolensk paralleled that in Russia's largest cities, where popular support for the Mensheviks and the SRs plummeted. While the moderate socialists' failure as a whole is outside the scope of this essay, Jewish politics in August-December 1917 must be considered in the context of this dialectic. Jewish workers in Smolensk, however, like Jews in other provincial cities showed little interest in Bolshevism; as social polarization intensified and Jewish moderate socialist and union leaders lost legitimacy in the eyes of Jewish workers, non-socialist Zionists seized the opportunity to take advantage of the socialists' dilemma.

In Spring and early Summer, Jewish unions had been the vanguard of Smolensk's labor movement. But from late July conflicts starting outside the Jewish community spread towards its heart, while Jewish union power dissipated. On 25 July, Bolshevik-led metalworkers voted for a 50 percent wage increase. Metalworkers (none were Jews) presented owners with demands on 4 August. Management refused to negotiate, and the union began planning a city-wide strike. On 3 August, woodworkers (again, non-Jews) demanded a 50 percent wage increase from the predominantly Jewish Society of Lumbermill Owners. Workers appeared at the home of lumbermill-owner Litvin on 6 August demanding a raise. Litvin's refusal triggered a three-day strike. On 12 August the anarchist-led Leatherworkers' Union (which did include some Jewish workers) broke off negotiations with the city's leather plants. Workers appeared at Jewish plant-owner A. L. Neiman's home on 16 August demanding raises. Neiman refused. His workers struck. Failed negotiations also led to strikes at the Iakov Pevzner and Friedson plants. Friedson agreed to a union-offered compromise on 24 August, Neiman held out until 26 August, and Pevzner came to terms on 6 September. On 16 August, in the midst of the August cycle of conflict, Needle Shop - the best organized Jewish union in Smolensk - began a week-long strike against workshops that had not raised wages. The strike failed dismally. The place of Jewish organizations in the dynamic of labor unrest had shifted. Again in September and October, another strike cycle began in non-Jewish unions, which often targeted Jewish business owners, while Jewish unions swept into the strike movement suffered defeat after defeat. On 7 September, 248 metalworkers struck against the Vil'ia plant. The strike spread to the Gergard and Reshitnikov factories and to several lumbermills. The cycle of conflict hit organized Jewish labor on 23 September, when pharmacy workers began a three-week strike. It failed.

At the moment when class conflict seemed inevitable to Jewish workers, their moderate socialist leaders stepped out of alignment with the frame of class struggle. In keeping with the positions taken by the national leadership of the Bund and the other major Jewish parties, Smolensk's Jewish socialists urged workers to seek compromises with their employers, and championed the ideal of a "class conscious, politically educated proletariat." The Bundist S. P. Shur and other Jewish Soviet and duma leaders warned workers that they must consider the "all-state significance" of their actions, moderate their demands, and negotiate with management. But such reason and consciousness had little appeal to workers who considered their employers intractable, who saw their world through the frame of class struggle, and for whom moderation no longer seemed logical. The ground was sliding out from under the moderate socialists. On 23 September the Soviet's plenum elected a new Executive Committee. Of the Jews, only soldiers' deputy Leivik Hodis remained.(103)

Worse still, the moderate socialists could no longer guarantee Jews' safety from traditional threats. To the socialists' horror, a mob of railroad workers and soldiers in the provincial town of Roslavl' looted and burned Jewish-owned stores on 2 October. Screaming "Slaughter the Yids!," the crowd murdered two Jews and severely wounded another twelve. The leaders of the Roslavl' Soviet, who had tried to halt the violence, barely escaped with their lives.(104) To the moderate socialists, the revolution seemed to be spinning towards anarchy.

While events spun out of the socialists' control, non-socialist Zionists - who had steadily built up their organizations - seized the opportunity to turn the community's attention back towards obshchina reform. At a 17 August public meeting to renew reform efforts, Zionist Levi Dobkin proposed setting up an obshchina Reorganization Commission. OESRP members asked that the commission reserve positions for political party representatives. Non-socialist Zionists charged that the socialists had no right to preferential treatment, since parties counted for only four of seventeen Jewish public organizations. Socialists countered that only their presence could guarantee democratic elections. The meeting compromised: the parties would receive six places on the commission, as would the social organizations. On 23 August delegates from several public organizations elected Zionist leaders to the commission. But Jewish socialist parties took little interest in obshchina reform. They played no active role in the commission's 4 and 8 October meetings, and did little to formulate the obshchina electoral guidelines on 24 October.(105) Socialist leaders no longer set the agenda for Jewish politics. Instead, they reacted to events unfolding around them. And then the entire political context changed.

Smolensk Jews Under Soviet Rule

Bolshevik rule radically constrained Jewish collective action. Lenin's seizure of power sparked a tragi-comic contest between the Smolensk Soviet Military Revolutionary Committee and the duma's Committee to Save the Revolution on 30-31 October. After a series of indecisive skirmishes, the two sides formed a joint Committee of Public Safety, and the Menshevik-SR duma bloc and the Soviet's "soft" Bolshevik-Left SR faction shared power throughout November. But in December, hard-line Bolsheviks began cracking down on the opposition. And in late February 1918 the Minsk Bolsheviks - who had retreated to Smolensk ahead of the German advance - liquidated local duma and zemstvo institutions and purged the soviet leadership of its soft elements. Smolensk's Jewish moderate socialists rejected Lenin's government as criminal anarchy, and waited for the Constituent Assembly to restore order. Jewish artisans and clerks demonstrated no attraction to Bolshevism, but local elections for the Constituent Assembly and the Jewish obshchina proved the extent of the moderate socialists' isolation. By December Bolshevik rule had become dangerous. And by early spring 1918, Smolensk's Jews turned from identification with the working class toward an identification with Zionism and dreams of emigration.

Despite Jewish socialist leaders' great hopes for the November 1917 Constituent Assembly elections, the campaign generated far less energy among Jews than had duma elections. The largest Jewish parties did not run their own slates of candidates, and the Russian party organizations shied away from picking local Jews as candidates. The City Committee of Zionist Organizations (following the Moscow Regional Zionist Committee), threw its support behind the Peoples' Socialists; no local Jews appeared on that party list. The Menshevik list included a national-level Bund leader (A. I. Vainshtein), but only one local Bundist, S. P. Shur (who was listed as a Menshevik but not as a Bundist, although he belonged to both parties). And Solomon Gurevich was the only Jew picked for the Smolensk PSR slate. That the PSR at least recognized the need to appeal directly to Jewish voters is clear from the following advertisement, printed in Smolenskii vestnik on 11 and 12 November:

Citizen Jews! Don't forget the Law of 21 March giving you full and equal rights when you are menaced by danger. The Constituent Assembly must uphold your full and equal rights. Therefore, all Jews aged 20 or older are obliged to go to their polling places on 12 November and choose their candidates. Citizen Jews! Vote for the list of the Party of Socialist Revolutionaries - List NO. 3! The PSR will demand that the Constituent Assembly urgently affirm the act of 21 March. The PSR list includes Solomon Grigor'evich Gurevich, the chosen candidate of the Jewish party OESRP. Jews! Protect your class interests! Remember the act of 21 March! Vote for List No. 3!

The PSR appealed to Jews as citizens sharing a distinct set of class interests, but not as workers or even as toilers. The Bolsheviks had appropriated the discourse of class struggle so thoroughly that local PSR leaders could only explain the current political struggle to Jews through reference to the pre-March frame of citizenship and equal rights.

Constituent Assembly election results demonstrated the extent of the moderate socialist parties' decline in Smolensk. Bolsheviks won the most votes (11,339): they took three of four workers' districts and swept the garrison. The Kadets polled second, with 8,097 votes. The PSR and Mensheviks came in a distant third and fourth, with only 6,643 votes city-wide. The Menshevik/Bund list won in District 8, which had a sizable Jewish population. But even there, the SD-PSR "Bloc" took fewer votes than the Kadets and Bolsheviks combined. It seems unlikely, then, that many of Smolensk's 4,650 registered Jewish voters cast ballots for the SRs and Mensheviks. Some probably defected to the Kadets and a few might have supported the Bolsheviks, although the Bolshevik record on Jewish national autonomy severely limited their Jewish vote. Jews who could support neither the Bolsheviks nor the Kadets yet had rejected the moderate socialist parties abstained from voting, and turnout was low in districts with large Jewish populations.

The obshchina election campaign proved an even starker demonstration of the Jewish moderate socialists' collapse.(106) The candidate slates reveal that non-socialist groups had built up their mobilizing structures substantially since the duma elections. In addition to the OESRP, Bund, Poalei-Zion, and Agudas (Agudas-Israel) lists, there were slates from six non-party organizations: the Nizhne-Riabatskaia Street Mitnagidic Synagogue; the Kadetskaia Street Mitnagidic Synagogue; The Revzin Prayerhouse (established by refugees); the "Agudas Israel" Hasidic Synagogue (also established by refugees); The City Committee of Zionist Organizations; and a Non-Party Democratic Electoral Group. Jewish socialist activists headed their party lists, which included several union leaders. The non-party group included the community's best-known liberal professionals. The religious lists revealed social gradations among Jewish property owners. The wealthiest merchants - Shvarts and Levitin, ran on the Agudas party list; middling merchants, like Pasynkov, ran on the Nizhne-Riabatskaia synagogue slate, etc. By far the largest list belonged to the non-socialist Zionists, who brought together petty merchants and tradesmen.(107)

Each party held lectures and meetings on the obshchina elections on an almost daily basis.(108) Agudas went to lengths to explain that it - not the Hasidic Agudas Israel list - represented the Agudas Israel Party. The Hasidic Jews were "a list of individuals who are not responsible to any party and do not have any sort of program."(109) The Non-Party Democratic Group kept to liberal rhetoric and wooed voters with the slogan "Real Work for the Needs of the Jewish Population." The socialist parties laid out fine points of their long-term positions on the nationality question and Jewish cultural autonomy. They also made use of the familiar frame of class struggle. The OESRP stressed the years of public work each of its candidates had devoted to the cause of Jewish workers.(110) The Bund vigorously ascribed characteristics of a Bundist voter in leaflets addressed "to jewish WORKERS, SOLDIERS, and all jewish DEMOCRATS." But since the Bolshevik seizure of power the dominant frame of Jewish politics in Smolensk moved steadily away from class struggle towards a renewed rhetoric of citizenship.

On the morning of the elections, S. G. Gurevich urged his Jewish readers not to ask "why should we vote now for the obshchina and the obshchina council, when all around us madness and danger rules, when a thickening dark cloud is gathering above us, and a great black abyss opens before us?" The 21 March law had given Jews, who before the revolution were poorer and more disorganized than any other people in Russia, full equal rights and authority as citizens. Now, in this time of anarchy, they must form an authoritative Jewish institution for the defense of the Jewish people's rights. "And that institution must be the obshchina, with the obshchina council at its center, elected by all Jewish residents of Smolensk." Gurevich concluded that the obshchina represented the revolution, and warned "If the revolution dies, the Law of 21 March dies."(111)

Gurevich's warnings fell on many deaf ears: only 50 percent of registered voters went to the polls (2,228 of 4,650).(112) The socialist parties combined took only 14 out of 36 places. The non-socialist Zionists won 12 places. The majority of remaining delegates aligned themselves with the non-socialist Zionists. The moderate socialists no longer commanded the full support of their traditional base of artisans and clerks, many of whom either abstained or defected to the non-socialist Zionists. Like the Constituent Assembly elections, this can be explained in part by workers' disaffection with the moderate socialists' temporizing over labor conflicts. But it also represented a loss of hope in the revolution and the disintegration of the class struggle frame: Jews, united by their vulnerability, might live in freedom in Zion, but not Russia.

The causal relationship is unclear, but fear of anti-Jewish violence in Smolensk increased almost immediately after Lenin's government took power. In the first days of November the city began receiving rumors of pogroms at regional trading posts and railroad junctions.(113) Robbery of Jewish shops became more frequent, and on 15 November peasants murdered Jewish lumbermill owner Kh. A. Efros on his estate in nearby Dorogobuzhskii county.(114) By the end of November, pogroms had become a constant topic of Jewish public discussion.(115) On 2 December the city commandant canceled performances by the Jewish Dramatic Circle and closed down their venue, the Mozaika theater. The next day, Red Guards harassed Jewish socialists at a meeting to protest the Bolsheviks' violent treatment of Constituent Assembly delegates gathered in Petrograd. The Bund, Mensheviks, and SRs then staged meetings to support the Constituent Assembly and condemn the Bolsheviks. On 6 December one of these meetings erupted into violence. Supporters of the Bund, the Mensheviks, and the PSR gathered at the Kino Palas Theater that evening to draft a joint resolution on the Constituent Assembly. A soldier burst into the theater, announced that the building was surrounded and ordered the crowd to disperse. When the meeting continued, more soldiers entered the building, cut off the lights, and began shoving people into the street. Soldiers outside ran protestors - including several elderly women - through a gauntlet of spitting, kicking, and rifle-butt blows, while they screamed "Burzhui!" and "Yids!" at those they beat.(116) Again on the morning of 10 December, soldiers broke into a socialist meeting at the Evropeiskaia Hotel and roughed up several party leaders, whom they cursed as "Yids."(117)

Faced with escalating violence, many Jews retreated from the public sphere to the insularity of their own community. For instance, the world outside the Jewish community appears only once in a 5,000 word transcript of the new obshchina's first meeting, held on the night of 10 December: when I. L. Gil'man reported on the Balfour Declaration, Hodis (Bund), Abegauz (Bund) and Ronin (Poalei-Zion) launched into criticisms of "bourgeois" Zionists grovelling at the feet of "British imperialists."(118)

The Bund and the OESRP told Jews to keep faith in Russia's future and in the Constituent Assembly, continued their protests against Bolshevik rule, and struggled to rebuild support among workers.(119) But they faced escalating repression. On 23 December, Bolshevik authorities (overwhelmed by a wave of strikes in government institutions), arrested Bund leader S. P. Shur for slandering the new regime.(120) Jews now became targets of Bolshevik class politics. Red Guards searched and looted the homes of Jewish merchants, whom they frequently threatened at gunpoint. Soviet officials practiced extortion against Jewish merchants, threatening Shvarts and others with violence if they refused to give "contributions."(121) On 27 December, armed men claiming to represent the soviet and demanding money broke up a Jewish meeting and beat several bystanders.(122) The more the moderate socialists struggled to rally opposition to the new regime, the greater the violence against local Jews. Between December 1917 and February 1918, the cold of winter and desperate shortages of food paled in comparison to the looming threat of a full-scale pogrom.

After the Soviet government disbanded the Constituent Assembly in January 1918, and after the Minsk Bolsheviks shattered the last vestiges of the democratic revolution in Smolensk in February, local Jews resigned themselves to accommodating to the new regime. The Jewish obshchina went through contortions to obtain approval for even its most basic charitable activities and struggled to recover assets and properties expropriated by Soviet authorities.(123) Jewish socialists in the obshchina tried to organize community self defense. On 16 April, Hodis in the obshchina's name requested that Soviet authorities provide weapons for Jewish Self-Defense and Anti-Pogrom Units. He warned that the city was in a "pogrom mood . . . under the influence of Black Hundreds who call for Jewish blood and threaten Jewish neighborhoods." Soviet officials shuffled Hodis' supplication from office to office, claiming (typically) that no single commissariat had authority to approve the request. On 4 May, Hodis chaired a well-attended meeting of Jewish soldiers and veterans, which formed a non-party Smolensk Union of Jewish Soldiers. The designation "non-party" was essential to prevent instant Soviet persecution. Moreover, the union explicitly promised the new regime that it would not take part in any armed political demonstrations. Its primary function was "defense of the life, honor, and dignity of the Jewish population." The local Soviet banned the Union. Then, on 14 May, a pogrom erupted in the market near Iamskaia. Looters destroyed several Jewish shops and workshops and beat dozens of petty traders. Rumors now spread through the city that Jews had conspired to burn local churches (including Smolensk's great cathedral), and that Red Army soldiers planned to slaughter all local Jews. Still, local officials refused to grant the obshchina's request. Instead, they arrested former city mayor B. P. Rachinskii on 17 May and charged him with fomenting the pogrom. Jewish leaders protested, and Gurevich went to local Cheka headquarters with merchant M. I. Pevzner to plea on Rachinskii's behalf. Soviet authorities released Rachinskii, but never agreed to arm the Jewish self-defense units.(124)

The February Revolution opened the gate for Jewish collective action. Jewish socialists rushed through that gate and transformed Jewish public life. Under democratic conditions, Jewish socialist parties framed collective action with appeals to class struggle and working-class identities. As in ordinary situations of contentious political competition, Jewish socialists ascribed to their opponents characteristics - in this case, class characteristics - different from those they ascribed to their own potential supporters. The revolutionary context, however, made politics in 1917 extraordinary, partly because it imparted a sense of excitement and boundless possibilities, but also because the strain of the war, the presence of hungry refugees, soaring inflation, food shortages, and the fragility of the state all intensified the political process.

Jewish socialists used the possibilities and problems created by the revolution to elaborate a politics of class struggle. In doing so, they built on the class identification of artisans and clerks, which reflected workers' very real frustration with the daily conditions of work and life and with their employers' intransigence. In the course of party competition, the socialists further politicized class identities. Poalei Zion considered a tailor who supported their party and attended the Nizhnii-Riabatskaia Street synagogue a worker, but treated the non-socialist Zionist leatherworker praying beside him as a petty-bourgeois. G. A. Gurevich the carpenter could publicly identify himself as a worker, but so could S. G. Gurevich, the newspaper editor and OESRP activist. The politics of class and of appeals to working-class identities carried the socialists into power in Smolensk.

But the social dynamics that made class discourse so salient did not disappear once moderate socialists assumed authority. The war dragged on, food shortages worsened, inflation ate up workers' wages and (together with their confidence that Capital would crumble) fueled more labor unrest. Democratization meant that moderate socialists now had to balance working-class interests with those of the state. On Smolensk's Jewish street, moderate socialist leaders preached patience to artisans and clerks who daily saw their own lives grow more difficult. The moderate socialists had opened up a field of discourse and expounded a program that raised expectations. They then could neither meet those expectations nor circumscribe the logic of their own rhetoric. As local society polarized, so did politics. The process marginalized the moderate Jewish socialist parties and, in the absence of any real support among Jews for Bolshevism, worked to the advantage of the non-socialist Zionists. Jewish moderate socialists then ceased creating political opportunities and began reacting to circumstances beyond their control.

Bolshevik rule proved the greatest of those circumstances. The Bolsheviks seized opportunities created by the revolutionary dynamic of social polarization to eclipse the moderate socialists. Soviet power in Smolensk weakened restraints against anti-Jewish violence. Indeed, rank and file Bolsheviks manipulated the popular image of Jew as exploiter and class enemy to unleash terror in the community. A very different revolution was underway.

Department of History Bloomsburg, PA 17815

ENDNOTES

Research for this essay was made possible by support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, The Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies, and Bloomsburg University. Thanks to Dina Abramowicz at YIVO and S. L. Solodovnikova of the Smolensk Regional Archives Administration for their assistance, and to Rex Wade, Robert Weinberg, Sidney Tarrow, Steven Averill, Simon Cordery, Luke Springman, William Hudon, and Susan E. Stemont for comments on earlier versions.

1. Dates are given according to the Julian calendar until 1/14 February 1918.

2. The literature on 1917 contains little on ethnic minorities in predominantly Russian cities. Besides works on "ethnic homelands," see the anecdotal account by Ingeborg Fleischhauer, "The Ethnic Germans in the Russian Revolution," in Edith Frankel, et. al., Revolution in Russia: Reassessments of 1917 (Cambridge, 1992), 274-284; and the brief discussions in Donald Raleigh, Revolution on the Volga: 1917 in Saratov (Ithaca, 1986). Ronald Suny and others, by contrast, have provided extensive discussions of urban ethnic politics in non-Russian regions. See, for instance, The Baku Commune: Class and Nationality in the Russian Revolution (Princeton, 1972).

3. The best overview is Lional Kochan's brief essay in The Blackwell Encyclopedia of the Russian Revolution (New York, 1988), 207-216. 1917 is presented as a golden period of Jewish freedom with no real analysis in Gregor Aronson, "Jewish Communal Life in 1917-1918" in Gregor Aronson et. al., Russian Jewry (1917-1967) (New York, 1969), 13-38; S. Ettinger, "The Jews in Russia at the Outbreak of the Revolution," in Lional Kochan, ed., The Jews in Soviet Russia Since 1917 (London, 1970), 14-28; Nora Levin, The Jews in the Soviet Union Since 1917: Paradox of Survival, vol 1. (New York, 1985). Zvi Gitelman's excellent Jewish Nationality and Soviet Politics: The Jewish Sections of the CPSU, 1917-1930 (Princeton, 1972) presents anecdotal accounts of provincial politics in 1917, as does the classic 1951 work of Solomon M. Schwarz, The Jews in Soviet Russia. Jonathan Frankel's important Prophecy and Politics: Socialism, Nationalism, and the Russian Jews, 1862-1917 (Cambridge, 1981) does not explore 1917 events. Most recent Jewish local studies simply recover lost histories, e.g., Yonah Shneider, "Jewish Educational Institutions in Petrograd, 1917-1918," Jews in Eastern Europe 1 (20): 34-44; V. Lebedeva-Kaplan, "Evrei Petrograd v 1917-om godu," Vestnik Evreiskogo universiteta v Moskve 2 (1993): 4-19. See Vladimir Levin's "Jewish Local History in the Former Soviet Union," Jews in Eastern Europe 2, no. 24: 59-71. A few, though, dig into local politics, e.g., Mikhail Beizer, "Petrogradskaia evreiskaia obshchina v 1917 godu," in Istoricheskie sud'by evreev v Rossii i SSSR: nachalo dialoga (sbornik statei), vol. 1, ed. by I. Krupnik (Moscow, 1992), 165-174; Boris Pudalov, "Zionist Activity in Nizhnii Novgorod, 1914-1920," Jews in Eastern Europe 2 (21): 27-34; Oleg Budnitskii, "The Jews in Rostov-on-Don in 1918-1919," Jews and Jewish Topics in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe 3 (19): 16-29.

4. See Sud'by natsional'nykh men'shinstv na smolenshchina, 1918-1938 gody: dokumenty i materialy (Smolensk, 1994), and A. Kruglov, "Unichtozhenie evreev smolenshchiny i brianshchiny v 1941-1943 godakh," Vestnik Evreiskogo universiteta v Moskve 3 (7): 193-220. There are fleeting references to Smolensk in the Russian and Yiddish-language literature on Jewish politics produced in the 1920s - for instance, the (misleading) description of Smolensk's Jews in 1918 in S. Augerskii, ed., Di Oktyabr-Revoliutsie in Vaysrusland (Minsk, 1927) - but the city is absent from standard works by Dimanshtein and Rafes. Nor was it discussed in issues of the Israeli journal He'avar devoted to the revolution (e.g., its special 1968 issue on "The Revolutionary Year 1917 and the Jews" ["Shenat ha'mahapecha 1917"]).

5. My analysis here is influenced by recent studies of contentious politics, and in particular by work on political opportunity structure, mobilizing structures, and framing. Political opportunity structure refers to aspects in the political environment that facilitate or discourage collective action. Put differently, it opens or closes the gate to collective action. Sidney Tarrow has argued that when the gate opens, people can become engaged in social movements and collective action, and by doing so often create new political opportunities. Organizing, sustaining, and spreading collective action requires the existence of mobilizing structures, which are social networks and public (as opposed to state) institutions that facilitate collective action. In building networks of support, activists schematize and explain events and social relationships by framing issues in a manner that resonates with their audience and differentiates between competing movements or groups. This framing process reflects master frames (or meta-narratives), through which activists and their supporters make sense of and order various strands of social reality. According to David Snow and Robert Bendford, master frames "provide the interpretive medium through which collective actors associated with different movements . . . assign blame for the problem they are attempting to ameliorate." David A. Snow and Robert D. Bendford, "Master Frames and Cycles of Protest," in Aldon Morris and Carol McClurg Mueller, Frontiers in Social Movement Theory (New Haven, 1992), 139. For further explication of these concepts, see Sidney Tarrow, "Mentalities, Political Cultures, and Collective Action Frames," in Morris and Mueller, Frontiers in Social Movement Theory, 174-202; Idem, Power in Movement: Social Movements, Collective Action, and Politics (New York, 1994); Charles Tilly, European Revolutions, 1492-1992 (New York, 1993).

6. For discussion of tensions between the Menshevik and SR leaderships and organized workers see Ziva Galili, The Menshevik Leaders in the Russian Revolution: Social Realities and Political Strategies (Princeton, 1989).

7. As Ezra Mendelson pointed out 25 years ago, "While traditional historians, writing of Russian Jewry, have emphasized unity of the community as against its gentile oppressors, the community was in fact rent by internal dissension of great magnitude." Mendelson, Class Struggle in the Pale: The Formative Years of the Jewish Workers' Movement in Tsarist Russia (New York, 1972), 98.

8. Defined in terms of narrative theory, the idea of class conflict provided Jewish artisans and clerks with a narrative identity by which they made sense of their relations with others in Jewish society. See Margaret R. Somers, "Narrativity, Narrative Identity, and Social Action: Rethinking English Working Class Formation," Social Science History 16, no. 4: 591-630; Margaret Somers and Gloria Gibson, "Reclaiming the Epistemological 'Other': Narrative and the Social Construction of Identity," in Craig Calhoun, ed., Social Theory and the Politics of Identity (Cambridge, MA, 1994), 37-99.

9. As late as 1858, only 229 Jews lived in all of Smolensk Province. On Jews in Smolensk before the Great Reforms, see Evreiskaia entsiklopediia, vol. 14 (SPb, 1912), cols. 402, 408; Russko-Evreiskii arkhiv. Dokumenty i materialy dlia istorii evreev v Rossii, vol. 1, Dokumenty i regsty k istorii litovskikh evreev (1388-1550), ed. by S. A. Bershadskii (SPb, 1882), 77-80; John Doyle Klier, Russia Gathers Her Jews: The Origins of the Jewish Question in Russia, 1772-1825 (DeKalb, 1986), 33, 75; Sistematicheskii ukazatel' literatury o evreiakh na russkom iazyke co vremeni vvedeniia grazhdanskago shrifta (1708 g.) po dekabria 1889 g. (SPb, 1892), entry 150.

10. Jews with university degrees, doctors, dentists, and pharmacists could live and travel outside the Pale, as could retired soldiers; midwifes, male nurses, and pharmacy and dental assistants had conditional rights to reside outside the Pale; artisans in certain trades also could live outside the Pale if granted permission by a town Trades Board; merchants who paid over 1,000 rubles in taxes could enter Russian cities by registering as First Guild Merchants. See Alexis Goldenweiser, "Legal Status of Jews in Russia," in Jakob Frumkin, et. al., Russian Jewry (1860-1917) (New York, 1966), 100.

11. Smolenskii vestnik, 20 June 1880. See also John Doyle Klier, Imperial Russia's Jewish Question, 1855-1881 (Cambridge, 1995), 325.

12. Smolenskii vestnik, 16 May 1893.

13. Figures on the city's Jewish population are inconsistent. The 1897 census recorded over 8,000 Jewish residents in Smolensk, the total population of which was just under 47,000. See S. P. Pisarev, Pamiatnaia kniga g. Smolenska (Smolensk, 1898), 91. Evreiskaia entsiklopediia notes that in 1904 Jews accounted for only 4 percent of the city's 63,000 residents, but the American Jewish Yearbook for 1905-06 listed the city's population as 46,899, which included 4,650 Jews. Zemstvo statistics compiled in 1911 list the city population at 70,711, at least 8 percent of whom were Jews (Kratkiia khoziaistvennostatisticheskiia svedeniia po Smolenskoi gubernii [Smolensk, 1912], 21, 30). On the growth of Smolensk's Jewish population in general, see L. G. Zinger, ed., Evreiskoe naselenie SSSR (dvizhenie za vremia s 1897 po 1923 g. i raspredelenie po respublikam i poseleniiam (Moscow, 1927), 37, 39.

14. See Michael C. Hickey, "Revolutionary Smolensk: The Establishment of Soviet Power in Smolensk Province, 1917-1918," unpublished PhD dissertation (Northern Illinois University, 1993), 34-49.

15. B. D. Brutskus, "Ekomomicheskoe polozhenie evreev i voina," Russkaia mysl', 1915, no. 4: 33.

16. First Guild Merchant Naum Vladimirovich Shvarts, for instance, owned local flax-press and hemp-breaking plants as well as several lumbermills. He was the director of the Smolensk Merchants' Bank, and sat on the board of several local manufacturing associations. P. A. Orlov and S. T. Budagov, Ukazatel' fabrik i zavodov Evropeiskoi Rossii, materialy dlia fabrichno-zavodskoi statistiki, 3rd ed. (SPb, 1894); Ministerstvo Finansov i Ministerstvo Torgovli i Promyshlennosti, Spisok fabrik i zavodov Rossii 1910 g. po offitsial'nym dannym fabrichnago podatnogo i gornago nadzora (Moscow, 1910); Sovetov S"ezdov Predstavitelei Promyshlennnosti i Torgovli, Fabrichno-zavodskiia predpriiatiia Rossiiskoi imperii (iskliuchaia Finliandiiu), 2nd ed. (Petrograd, 1914).

17. By 1900, the city had five private Jewish religious schools, or khedars.

18. Posledniia izvestiia, 14 October 1903; "From Kishineff to Bialystok," American Jewish Yearbook, 1906-07: 40. The 1904 pogrom took no lives, but pogromshchiki looted and burned sixty-nine shops.

19. As there are no adequate local histories, it is unclear to what extent Jews took part in Smolensk's noble-dominated liberal movement. On liberals, see Christoph Gassenschmidt, Jewish Liberal Politics in Tsarist Russia, 1900-1914: The Modernization of Russian Jewry (New York, 1995) and Alexander Orbach, "The Jewish People's Group and Jewish Politics in Tsarist Russia, 1906-1915," Modern Judaism 10, no. 1: 1-16.

20. Iskra, 1 November 1902. Jewish artisans sympathetic to the Bund had made contact with Smolensk's nascent Marxist circles as early as 1899. V. Rozanov, "V Smolenske," Katorga i ssylka 3/52 (1929), 157-158.

21. Smolensk left no traces in the party's financial records, nor is it discussed in the classic works. See Archives of the Jewish Labor Movement (The Bund Archive), Record Group MG 1, file 150; Henry Tobias, The Jewish Bund in Russia: From its Origins to 1905 (Stanford, 1972); Mendelson, Class Struggle in the Pale. Yet Smolensk Bundists contributed to the party press. See Posledniia izvestiia, 26 June 1902; 4 December 1902; 13 March 1903; 24 May 1903; 14 October 1903; 29 November 1903; 4 December 1903.

22. Smolensk's SERP organization has received no attention from historians, although by 1907 it was one of the largest chapters outside the Pale. See Protokoly vtorogo (ekstrennago) s" ezda Partii Sotsialistov-Revoliutsionerov, ed. by C. J. Rice (White Plains, NY, 1986), 102.

23. This was the case in the large October 1905 pogrom in Viazma. Die Judenpogrome in Russland, vol. 2 (Koln and Leipzig, 1910), 530-533.

24. Hickey, "Revolutionary Smolensk," chapter 2.

25. Frankel, Prophecy and Politics, provides the best discussion of the ideological differences between Jewish factions in Russia before 1917. Yoav Peled provides a brief summary of the varieties of Zionist socialism in Class and Ethnicity in the Pale: The Political Economy of Jewish Workers' Nationalism in Late Imperial Russia (New York, 1989): "the main difference between them being that the Zionist-Socialist Party [known as the SS, its Russian acronym MH] adhered to a 'territorialist' view that the land of Jewish autonomy need not be Palestine, while Poalei-Zion believed that the reterritorialization of the Jews could take place only in their ancestral homeland" (p. 80). See also A. Geiman, Sotsialisticheskiia fraktsii v zionism (SPb, 1906).

26. Michael C. Hickey, "Politicheskaia kul'tura i mezhpartiinoe sotrudnichestvo v Smolenske," in D. I. Budaev and A. A. Il'iukov, eds., Obshchestvennaia mysl' i politicheskie deiateli Rossii XIX i XX vv.: Materialy nauchnoi konferentsii (Smolensk, 1996), 207-210.

27. Razsvet, 22 March 1908.

28. Gromyko later claimed he played no role in the organization. Soiuz russkogo naroda po materialam chrezvychainoi sledstvennoi komissii vremennogo pravitel'stva 1917 g., ed. by A. Chernovskii (Moscow-Leningrad, 1929), 364, 374-75.

29. Di Yidishe Virklikhkeit, 31 December 1906.

30. The appeals court upheld the ruling. Pinkus appeal to the Imperial Senate, which heard the case on 24 September. Soiuz russkogo naroda, 375; Evreiskaia zhizn', 4 October 1915.

31. M. Altshuler, "Russia and her Jews - The Impact of the 1914 War," The Wiener Library Review, vol. XXVII (1973/74): 12-16; Steven J. Zipperstein, "The Politics of Relief: The Transformation of Russian Jewish Communal Life During the First World War," in Jonathan Frankel, ed., Jews and the Eastern European Crisis, 1914-1921 (Oxford, 1988), 22-40.

32. For a discussion of the scapegoating of Jews during the war, see chapter 11 of Heinz-Dietrich Lowe, The Tsar and the Jews: Reform, Reaction and Anti-Semitism in Imperial Russia 1772-1917 (Chur, Switzerland, 1993).

33. Michael F. Hamm, "Liberalism and the Jewish Question: The Progressive Bloc," Russian Review 31, no. 2: 163-172; R. Ganelin, "Gosudarstvennaia duma i antisemitiskie tsirkuliary 1915-1916 godov," Vestnik Evreiskogo universiteta v Moskve 3 (10): 4-37.

34. Reports Received by the Joint Distribution Committee of Funds for Jewish War Sufferers (New York, 1916), 14, 19-21, 45.

35. Zipperstein, "The Politics of Relief"; Ilya Trotsky, "Jewish Institutions of Social Welfare, Education, and Mutual Assistance," in Frumkin, et al, Russian Jewry, 1860-1917, 416-433. See also G. Erlich's criticism of elite "bureaucratism" preventing democratic public participation (obshchestvennost') in the EKO (Jewish Colonization Society) and the ORT (Society for the Promotion of Artisan and Agricultural Labor Among Jews) in Evreiskaia vesti, 22 October 1916.

36. Evreiskaia nedelia 7 June 1915; Reports Received by the Joint, 32.

37. Evreiskaia zhizn' 23, 30 August 1915.

38. Evreiskaia nedelia, 12 July 1915; Smolenskii vestnik, 4 January 1917.

39. Evreiskaia nedelia, 2 August 1915.

40. Evreiskaia zhizn' 16 August 1915; Evreiskaia nedelia, 13 September 1915.

41. Evreiskaia zhizn', 30 August 1915; 15 May 1916. Smolensk's war-time population was 85, 526.

42. On shortages of food and housing, see Smolenskii vestnik, 24 February 1917; Evreiskaia zhizn', 20 September 1915; 4 October 1915.

43. On 25 August 1915 the governor accused merchant Meliakh Polonskii of speculation. Evreiskaia nedelia, 20 September 1915. Police arrested Issak Moiseevich Izraelitan for Zionist activity at around the same time. On 30 September, when the Smolensk District Court heard his case, Izraelitan explained that neither his views nor the fact that he had sent his children to study in Palestine threatened the Russian state. The court sentenced him to two weeks in prison. On 28 March 1916, Izraelitan took his case to the Moscow Appeals Court, which fined him an additional 50 rubles. Evreiskaia zhizn', 18 October 1915; 24 April 1916. From mid-1916 police swept the city for illegal residents. And in Fall 1916, the Provincial Governor's Chancellery ordered police to intensify their investigation of private contributions to Jewish religious organizations. Smolensk Regional State Archives (GASO), f. 1, op. 8, d. 935. Police chief Gromyko accused Jewish hospital employees of scheming to release cholera and siberian flu into the city water system; he also accused Jewish women of seducing Russian soldiers for secrets to send the Germans. Smolenskii vestnik, 30 January 1917; 17 April 1917.

44. Evreiskaia zhizn', 12 June 1916. EVOPO's complaint to the governor was signed by N. V. Shvarts and S. G. Gurevich. The governor responded by ordering a search of Gurevich's apartment. GASO, f. 1, op. 8, d. 839.

45. GASO, f. 1, d. 8, 1. 921; f. 65, op. 2, ed. khr. 1759.

46. Evreiskaia nedelia, 4, 18 September 1916. EKOPO organized similar loan schemes in more than thirty-five towns. The rationale behind these loans was that responsible Jewish refugees could set themselves up in business (and therefore avoid being "demoralized" by welfare). Reports Received by the Joint, 25.

47. Evreiskaia nedelia, 1 January 1917.

48. Evreiskaia nedelia, 10 January 1917.

49. Evreiskaia nedelia, 12 February 1917.

50. Michael C. Hickey, "Discourses of Public Identity and Liberalism in the February Revolution: Smolensk, Spring 1917," Russian Review 55, no. 4: 615-637.

51. Smolenskii vestnik, 24 February 1917.

52. The Provisional Government promised to dissolve legal restrictions based upon religion, nationality, and estate on 6 March 1917. On 21 March it formally repealed all such restrictions and issued a long Act of Legal Equality. Vestnik Vremennago Pravitel'stva, 7 March 1917; Sbornik ukazov i postanovlenii Vremennogo Pravitel'stva 1 (March-May 1917), no. 400.

53. For an account by a Jewish soldier, see Leivik Hodis, Biografie und Schriften, ed. by Sophia Dubnov-Erlich (New York, 1962), 17.

54. GASO f. 65, op. 2, ed. khr. 1770; Smolenskii vestnik, 23 March 1917. E. S. Lur'e argued in Smolenskii vestnik (17 March) that the Commissars' Council should include Jews and other representatives of the city's nationalities.

55. Smolensk had one RSDRP organization until late April 1917, when Bolsheviks formed a separate organization. See Z. Galili et al., eds., Mensheviki v 1917 god, vol. 1, Ot ianvaria do iiul'skikh sobytii (Moscow, 1994), 699-700, 654.

56. Smolenskii vestnik, 20 March 1917; 7 April 1917.

57. Smolenskii vestnik, 23 March 1917; 11 March 1917; 17 April 1917.

58. A month after the Minsk Military District Staff had formally lifted the ban on Yiddish and Hebrew communications, local Jews still encountered blanket censorship of telegraphic messages. Smolenskii vestnik, 7 May 1917. On the politics of providing kosher meat and matzo, see Ibid., 25, 29 March 1917; 16 April 1917.

59. Emphasis mine. Smolenskii vestnik, 9 March 1917.

60. Smolenskii vestnik, 11, 12, 25 March 1917.

61. Of fifteen members of the new EVOPO board on whom I have adequate data, seven were SERPists and one a Bundist. Jewish elites held a slight minority. Elections to the OZE board on 27 May yielded similar results: Bundists and SERPists shared places with prominent physicians, most of whom were liberals or non-socialist Zionists. Smolenskii vestnik, 1 June 1917.

62. "Der Ieshive-Borkher" featured refugee-employees from EVOPO's envelope-making workshop. Proceeds went to aiding liberated political prisoners. Smolenskii vestnik, 18, 19 March 1917.

63. Smolenskii vestnik, 14 March 1917.

64. Smolenskii vestnik, 18 March 1917.

65. Three of the club's 20 March Organizational Committee were professionals: editor S. G. Gurevich, teacher E. L. Poviazher, and Dr. Levengart, all of whom were SERP activists. The rest were artisans or white-collar workers: clerk N. M. Paikin was a Bundist; bookkeeper S. S. Landau was a Socialist Zionist; carpenter G. A. Gurevich and tailor Bensman declared no party loyalty. The Executive Committee elected on 1 April included these seven, plus attorney Ia. I. Popil'skii (Bund), and soldiers L. Hodis (Bund) and G. A. Gurevich (SERP). The same group, plus soldier M. Itin, commercial employees N. M. Papkin and I. L. Gerson, and A. S. Shneerson (the latter two were Bundists) rounded out the club leadership elected on 10 April. Poviazher became chairman, Landau secretary, and Papkin the treasurer. The others filled posts in the club's administrative sections. Smolenskii vestnik, 23, 28 March 1917; 6, 10 April 1917.

66. The first lecture commemorated the birth of Perets Smolenskin, and was the first public event conducted in Hebrew in 1917. Smolenskii vestnik, 17, 18, 29 March 1917; 2, 8 April 1917.

67. Smolenskii vestnik, 17, 19, 28 March; 2 April 1917.

68. Smolenskii vestnik, 31 March 1917.

69. Smolenskii vestnik, 7 April 1917.

70. Smolenskii vestnik, 12 April.

71. Smolenskii vestnik, 7, 11, 13 April 1917.

72. Smolenskii vestnik, 14 April 1917.

73. See the detailed and revealing instructions to parade participants, calls for participation from the Jewish parties, and descriptions in Smolenskii Vestnik, 16, 18, 20 April 1917.

74. Smolenskii vestnik, 19 April, 4 June 1917. The non-Marxist Zionist labor party Tseire-Zion (Young Zion) drew very few followers in Smolensk.

75. Smolenskii vestnik, 11, 13 May 1917.

76. Smolenskii vestnik, 3, 7 May 1917. Unfortunately it is not clear how much influence "secular" or "democratic" Zionists wielded within the Smolensk Zionist Organization. It appears that most members gravitated towards the Mizrachi movement, which opposed secular Zionist cultural activity. All seem to have agreed with the principles of the "synthetic Zionism" laid out at the 1906 Zionist Conference in Helsinki, which had stressed the goals of legal equality and national autonomy in the Diaspora.

77. Smolenskii vestnik, 21 May 1917.

78. Smolenskii vestnik, 6, 7, 8, 16 June 1917. Agudas [Agudat] Israel was an anti-Zionist organization of Orthodox Jews founded in Kattowitz in 1912, which had adherents across central and Eastern Europe.

79. Smolenskii vestnik, 13 May 1917.

80. Club member Ia. Lesitin (in his own letter!) chided Lur'e for airing a Jewish dispute before a non-Jewish audience. No one had censored Lur'e; it had all been a misunderstanding, and the club was open to all "who wish to take part and will follow its charter." Smolenskii vestnik, 14, 20 May 1917.

81. Smolenskii vestnik, 17, 18, 20, 25 April 1917.

82. The details of the supply question in Smolensk during 1917 are extremely complex, and deserve separate treatment. Nearly every day of the local newspaper contained stories on the supply problem. See in particular GASO f. 65, op. 2, ed. khr. 1770.

83. Smolenskii vestnik, 18 May 1917.

84. Smolenskii vestnik, 4 June 1917.

85. Smolenskii vestnik, 19 May 1917.

86. Smolenskii vestnik, 28 May 1917.

87. Smolenskii vestnik had begun running editorials on the duma elections a week earlier. In keeping with the Provisional Government's guidelines, all city residents age twenty or older could register to vote.

88. Ten of the seventy-four Socialist Bloc candidates represented the Jewish socialist parties. At least five other candidates were Jewish members of "Russian" parties.

89. Smolenskii vestnik 20 June 1917.

90. Smolenskii vestnik 22, 25 June 1917.

91. Smolenskii vestnik 22 June 1917. Gurevich took up the theme again on 24 June.

92. Smolenskii vestnik 25 June 1917.

93. Smolenskii vestnik 23 June 1917.

94. Smolenskii vestnik 1 July 1917.

95. The committee included lumbermill owners G. I. Miter and M. O. Levitin, and merchants Kh. D. Ryvkin, N. V. Shvarts, I. A. Popil'skii, and A. I. Gil'man.

96. Smolenskii vestnik, 1 July 1917.

97. Smolenskii vestnik, 13 July 1917. Gurevich made the same argument in greater detail in responding to a critical letter from "S. I. G." on 16 July and in a second editorial on 18 July. The letter from "S. I. G." attacked the Bund for lacking loyalty to Jewish tradition or culture. The Smolensk Bund Committee responded in its own letter on 18 July 1917. In the last interventions in this debate, on 21 July 1917, the Jewish Electoral Committee refuted Gurevich's criticisms and stressed that the committee's candidates represented the broad spectrum of Jewish society; V. Gindlin of Smolensk's tiny Tseire-Zion faction, on the other hand, condemned the "bourgeois" non-party slate as "immoral."

98. The results were as follows: Kadets, 5,820; Non-Party Jews, 550; Socialist Bloc, 20,880; Bolsheviks, 1,235; Inhabitants of the Bogoslavskaia-Svirskaia District, 1; Bread Bakery Owners, 45; and Non-Party Homeowners, 300. The Kadets therefore took 15 duma seats, the Non-Party Jews 1, the Socialist Bloc 54, the Bolsheviks 3, and the NonParty Homeowners 1. Smolenskii vestnik, 25 July 1917; Golos' Bunda, 8, 19 August 1917.

99. The involvement of Jewish women in public life deserves more attention. Jewish women were very actively involved in public life. The Bund went to great lengths to organize women workers and held several women's meetings in 1917. Liberal women in Smolensk organized a non-party women's political club, in which Jewish women took an active part. Women belonged to the leadership circles of all Jewish party groups with the exception of the Orthodox religious party Agudas Israel, and women accounted for 12 out of 140 candidates in Jewish obshchina elections in November. Women also were critical supporters and members of the Needle Shop union.

100. Smolenskii vestnik, 29 June 1917. He-Haver was formed by Russian emigree students in Berlin in 1912 and had underground branches in Jewish schools in several Russian cities. The organization had its own newspaper, Evreiskii student, published in Berlin in 1912-1914, and in Petrograd in 1915-1918. In April 1917 there were 100 He-Haver branches across Russia.

101. The previous paragraph is based upon daily advertisements. See reviews, particularly of "Shar Gashirim," in Smolenskii vestnik, 25 April 1917.

102. This paradox is explored in detail in Michael C. Hickey, "Local Government and State Authority in the Provinces: Smolensk, February-June 1917," Slavic Review 55, no. 4: 863-881.

103. As a result of this election, the Bolsheviks increased their representation on the Soviet's 26-member executive committee, from 2 to 6 places. There was also a shift towards the "left" in both the Menshevik/Bund and the SR/OESRP fractions. Smolenskii vestnik, 28 September 1917. The only existing archival records for the Smolensk Soviet (GASO f. 1354, op. 1, dd. 1, 2) are outgoing correspondence from this period, but even these reflect the socialists' waning influence over soviet affairs.

104. Smolenskii vestnik, 4, 5, 6, October 1917; Evreiskaia nedelia, 15 October 1917; Rech', 6 October 1917.

105. Obshchina election guidelines recognized the voting rights of all registered Jews age twenty or older. Smolenskii vestnik, 22, 23, 25 August 1917; 8, 15 October 1917. Meetings concerning the All-Russian Jewish Congress took a similar course; while each party eventually chose delegates, the Zionists and Agudas Israel dominated the organizational discussions.

106. On 7 November members of each of the Jewish political factions gathered for a large public meeting. The obshchina electoral commission explained voting procedures, and each group presented its platform. On 12 November the commission posted a list of voters and set 18 November as the deadline for citizens to make corrections. 18 November also marked the deadline for parties and groups to submit their lists of candidates.

107. The Zionists ran 36 candidates, the Bund 27, the OESRP 18, the non-party democratic group 18, the Nizhnii-Riabatskaia synagogue 11, Poalei-Zion 6, the Hasidic synagogue 5, the Kadetskaia synagogue 3, and the Kadetskaia synagogue 3. The entire list of 140 candidates was published in Smolenskii vestnik, 21 November 1917.

108. Each day of Smolenskii vestnik between 12 and 26 November contained an announcement for at least two electoral meetings.

109. Smolenskii vestnik, 23, 25 November 1917.

110. See the advertisement in Smolenskii vestnik, 24 November 1917. Gurevich published a long personal statement in Smolenskii vestnik on 25 November explaining to voters why the OESRP best represented the interests of the Jewish democracy.

111. Smolenskii vestnik, 26 November 1917.

112. Smolenskii vestnik, 28 November 1917.

113. See, for instance, Smolenskii vestnik, 8 November 1917.

114. Smolenskii vestnik, 16, 17, 19 November 1917.

115. The matter was raised at meetings of the Bund and the Zionist committee on 28 November. Smolenskii vestnik, 1, 2 December 1917.

116. Smolenskii vestnik, 8 December 1917; Novyi luch', 14 December 1917; Nash vek, 17 December 1917; Hodis, Biografie und Schriften, 17.

117. Smolenskii vestnik, 13 December 1917.

118. Smolenskii vestnik, 15 December 1917.

119. Smolenskii vestnik, 19, 23, 26, 28, 30, 31 December 1917; Evreiskaia rabochaia khronika, 27 January 1918.

120. Smolenskii vestnik, 24, 28 December 1917.

121. Smolenskii vestnik, 17, 30 December 1917.

122. Smolenskii vestnik, 28 December 1917.

123. See the discussion of March-May 1918 negotiations between the obshchina and Soviet officials in Biulleten' soveta Smolenskoi Evreiskoi Obshchiny, 1 August 1918. The obshchina's financial crisis damaged its ability to carry out charitable work at the very time when the Germans refused permission to re-evacuated Jews to resettle in the Pale. See details of an extended discussion of the refugee problem at obshchina's May 1918 session, as well as financial reports in Biulleten' soveta Smolenskoi Evreiskoi Obshchiny, 1 August 1918.

124. For documents on the Union of Jewish Soldiers and details concerning the pogrom and Rachinskii's arrest, see Biulleten' soveta Smolenskoi Evreiskoi Obshchiny, 1 August 1918.