The October 1905 pogroms and the Russian authorities
This article analyzes the October 1905 pogroms in the Russian Empire. It explores the reasons for the pogroms, the perpetrators, the victims, and the consequences for the Jewish population. The article shows the differences and peculiarities of the pogroms, which occurred in the cities and shtetls, rural areas, on the railroads, and in the ports. The article also explores the attitude and involvement of the higher and local authorities, police, and troops in the pogroms. Historians continue to debate whether these pogroms occurred spontaneously or were organized by the Tsarist authorities. This article provides considerable evidence that the October 1905 pogroms were not a spontaneous reaction of conservatives to the revolutionary events, but rather was the policy of the Russian government directed toward the suppression of the revolutionary movement.
The Making of Jewish Revolutionaries in the Pale of Settlement: Community and Identity during the Russian Revolution and Its Immediate Aftermath, 1905–07 by Inna Shtakser (review)
In The Making of Jewish Revolutionaires in the Pale of Settlement, Inna Shtakser presents the story of Jewish working class youth at the time of the first Russian Revolution of 1905–1907. It tells of the emotional journey of revolutionary workers: the abandonment of the Jewish community, the adoption of a new identity as a working class revolutionary, and the return to that community at a time of trouble – during the anti-Jewish pogroms. It is the identities and feelings that are at the center of the author’s attention. The research is substantiated by two main types of sources, both held in the State Archive of the Russian Federation (GARF). The first type consists of the letters of young Jews involved in revolutionary activities, which were intercepted and copied by the Russian political police and have thus survived to our times. The second source is autobiographies лингвистическая группа рассеялась по миру после распада СССР. В настоящее время абсолютное большинство бухарских евреев живет за пределами Средней Азии: большинство в Израиле, где достаточно активно участвует в политической и общественной жизни еврейского государства,7 а также в Соединенных Штатах, Германии, России и других странах. Работа Кагановича восстанавливает сложный имперский контекст эволюции этой общины в диалоге и противостоянии с центральной, региональной и локальной властями, различными конфессиональными группами, экономическими сетями и агентами модернизации. Таким образом, эта книга задает модель для дальнейшего изучения эволюции бухарских евреев в советском и постсоветском контексте.
ROBERT HOOKE, MONUMENTS AND MEMORY
In June 1682, when Robert Hooke (1635–1703) delivered a lecture to the Royal Society on memory – his first and only excursion into human psychology – he had just witnessed a spectacularly public failure of memory when new texts were added to the Monument (1671–76), which he had designed with Christopher Wren. In a direct civic challenge to royal authority, these explained that the ‘Papists’ had set London's Great Fire of September 1666. This paper examines the tensions and accommodations between the City of London and Charles II that accompanied the Monument's erection; the column serves to dramatize the difficulties besetting would-be memorializers in Restoration England. It is suggested that Hooke's memory lecture must be read, not only in the light of specific political anxieties then attached to memory, but against the other ways in which he grappled with forms of signification, here treated as forms of historical witness.