Inheritance of Blood: Official Anti-Semitism and the Last of the Romanovs 

by Greg King and Penny Wilson

The Russian Empire inherited by Nicholas II in 1894 contained fully half of the world's Jewish population, who formed the largest ethnic minority in the country. According to the official 1897 census, 5.2 million Jews lived within the Russian Empire.1 Of this number, all but 300,000 lived within the infamous Pale of Settlement.2 St. Petersburg had 21,000 Jews; Moscow, 9,000; Kharkov, 14,000; and there were 10,500 in Smolensk.3 

At the turn of the century, some 650 anti-Jewish statutes stood as official law in Imperial Russia.4 In no other country in the world was anti-Semitism so deeply ingrained, from the lowest level bureaucrats and ordinary Russian soldiers who formed the Imperial Army, to the Russian Orthodox Church, the Government, and the Emperor himself. These forces, which regulated and controlled the lives of the millions who fell under their authority, were nearly unanimous in their suspicion, fear, and outright hatred of Russia's Jews. Under Nicholas II, these Jews were to suffer in ways and numbers previously unimagined. 

All too often, and in most popular biographies, Nicholas II is generously depicted as a simple middle-class man -- a loving husband, a doting husband - existing in a vacuum of simple Victorian decency. Yet the inescapable and unpleasant truth is that this man was also the Emperor and Autocrat of all Russia. By definition, his Autocracy made him responsible not only for the policies of his Government, enacted by thousands of bureaucrats whom he never met, but also for brutalities which he often personally endorsed. In Russia, where the very nature of Autocracy demanded the Emperor's personal approval for such minor requests as changes of name and divorce, the complicity of Nicholas II in the persecution of his country's Jewish citizens stands all the more ominous, in sharp contrast to the popular image which has, in recent decades, clouded any accurate, dispassionate examination of his character and reign. 

Jews had lived in Russian territory from times even preceding the creation of Peter the Great's Empire. Here, they found themselves able to exist peacefully and, for the most part, without persecution alongside their Polish, Tartar, and Russian neighbors; they were even welcomed into Moscow with open arms. In 1478, Ivan III brought two rabbis to his capital to attend to the gathering numbers of Jews. These two men found favor at the Court, and "were so effective in gaining converts to their cause," noted one historian, "that for a time almost the entire Government consisted of Jewish sympathizers."5 

This tolerance, however, quickly vanished with the establishment of the Romanov Dynasty: within a hundred years of Michael Romanov's election to the Throne, a pattern of repression and legislated separation began. In 1727, under the easily pliable eleven-year-old Emperor Peter II, the Senate promulgated a regulation that decreed: "All Jews found to be residing in the Ukraine shall be forthwith expelled beyond the frontier."6 Twelve years later, this was followed by an edict from Empress Anna, which ordered the expulsion of all Jews from any Russian territory. In 1746, Empress Elizabeth, on receipt of a petition from Jewish merchants to be allowed to continue their agricultural endeavors, replied sternly, "From the enemies of Christ I wish neither grain, nor profit."7 

In 1772, Russia unwillingly gained a half million Jewish subjects when Poland was partitioned.8 Even more Jewish subjects were added when Catherine the Great annexed the Ukraine and Crimea. In response, the infamous Pale of Settlement was created in 1791, under the advice of the Imperial Senate. The Pale was to function as a kind of expansive ghetto to house the Empire's most undesirable subjects.9 The Pale stretched along the Western edge of Russia into Eastern Poland and Lithuania, and South to encompass the Ukraine and Bessarabia; as such, it was larger than most European nations, yet its boundaries enclosed the only world allowed to the Empire's Jewish subjects, and here, the vast majority of Russia's Jews were condemned to live their entire lives. 

The creation of the Pale of Settlement had not been Empress Catherine's own idea; in principal, and under the influence of the Enlightenment, she favored a more democratic solution. She toyed with the idea of granting her Jewish subjects equal rights, but worried about the effect on her Christian subjects, and let the question go unresolved.10 She was also susceptible to the suspicions thrust upon her by members of her Government, who warned that the Empire's Jews represented "a perpetual menace to the continued well-being of the Russian State."11 The French Revolution did much to harden her views, and entrench a fear -- often raised by suspicious officials -- that Freemasons and Jews had been responsible for the events in Paris. Worried about the stability of her own Throne, Catherine bowed to these arguments and did nothing to alleviate the restrictions on Russia's Jews.12 

Rather surprisingly, it was Catherine's son and successor, Paul I, who first broke the mold of repression. He granted the Jewish residents of Courland municipal rights and freedom of movement, and vetoed the Government's plan to forcibly exile them to the Pale. He also intervened in numerous judicial cases on their behalf, opposing judges and courts when he believed that their basic human rights were being violated.13 

Paul's example was followed by his son, Alexander I. In 1804, he formed the Committee of the Welfare of the Jews, a Government commission designed to examine their complaints and offer recommendations on new policies. After several sessions - influenced by the Emperor's enlightened leadership -- they determined that it would be in the best interests of the Empire to grant Russia's Jews full civil rights, remove all restrictive laws, and thus place them on an equal footing with their Christian neighbors.14 Before the plan could be enacted, however, Alexander became consumed with the growing military threat of Napoleon, and the idea quietly slipped away into obscurity.15 

Any positive action taken by Paul and Alexander I was entirely undermined by Nicholas I; most of these measures were rescinded, and replaced with odious new regulations. "To Nicholas I," wrote one historian, "the Jews were an anarchic, cowardly, parasitic people, damned perpetually because of their Deicide and heresy. They were best dealt with by repression, persecution, and -- if possible -- conversion."16 

In 1827, Nicholas I issued a decree compelling every Jewish community to deliver a certain number of their young men into the service of the Imperial Army. These conscripts were subject to the regular term of service, which was twenty-eight years; however, the draftable age of eighteen was lowered to twelve in the case of many Jewish recruits. For those boys under eighteen, special Jewish military units, called Cantonist Battalions, were formed, whose unofficial goal was the conversion of every member.17 

Jews who served in the Imperial Army did so without hope of promotion: regulations forbade them from rising in rank. Throughout the course of the 19th Century, according to one historical survey, a total of just over 125,000 Jews served in the Army.18 Of this number, only one, Captain Yankel Tsam, was ever promoted to the rank of an officer, and this took place in 1893, after forty-one years of service, and six months short of his retirement.19 

In marked contrast to his father's reactionary tendencies, and in line with his own liberal leanings, Alexander II eased many restrictions on his subjects in the first years of his reign. In 1879, he granted full freedom of movement to all Jews who held diplomas of higher education, and, a year before his untimely death, he allowed the first Jewish student, Lev Mandelshtam, into a Russian university.20 "In the springtide of Alexander's II's regime," recalled Vladimir Medem, "the attitude toward Jews was liberal, and the Jewish community responded ardently in its desire to fuse with the Russian people."21 As with all Alexander's liberal policies, everything changed with his assassination by the radical Nihilist group Narodnaya Volya in 1881. "The sun," wrote Pauline Wengeroff, "which had risen on Jewish life in the 1860s, suddenly set…. Anti-Semitism erupted, the Jews were forced back into their ghettoes; without ceremony, the gateways to education were closed."22 

Thus Alexander III came to the Russian Throne, amid the terror of his father's assassination. A reactionary at heart, the new Emperor suspected everyone who held liberal views of indirect complicity or assent. He trusted no one in St. Petersburg, which one English visitor described as "reeking of dynamite-a nest of invisible assassins."23 Predictably, the rather simplistic Alexander III became convinced that his father's liberal policies had opened a dangerous floodgate of revolutionary thought. It was a movement that Alexander was determined to stop. In this, he was fully supported by one of the country's most feared and reactionary political minds, Konstantin Pobedonostsev, the "grey eminence" of his reign.24 

Pobedonostsev was the very picture of a Russian bureaucrat: pale and narrow-eyed, with thick glasses, receding hair, and an aesthetic chill about him which struck fear in the hearts of even the most determined of revolutionaries. "One could freeze to death, just listening to him all the time," Alexander once allegedly declared of him.25 He had taken a law degree and taught at the University of Moscow before being appointed tutor to Alexander II's eldest son and heir, Tsesarevich Nicholas Alexandrovich. After Nicholas's death, Pobedonostsev assumed the responsibilities for the new heir, the future Alexander III. Appointed a State senator in 1868, and a member of the ruling State Council in 1872, he reached the zenith of his power in 1880, when he was appointed Procurator of the Holy Synod, in essence Minister of Religion. 

Alexander III relied heavily on Pobedonostsev's advice when he came to the Throne. While solidifying the Autocracy, Alexander III also launched the Russian Empire on a disastrous, brutal and Imperially-endorsed wave of anti-Semitism which became enshrined government policy and continued under Nicholas II virtually unchecked. At that time, there was nothing particularly startling in these royal prejudices; the future King Edward VII of Great Britain was perhaps the only notable exception to the wide-ranging anti-Semitism that permeated most European royal houses. But the fanatic virulence exhibited by both Alexander III and his son Nicholas II was unrivaled in the civilized world, and became a mark of shame over the last years of the Dynasty. 

Alexander III, in common with most aristocratic Russians, harbored strong anti-Semitic prejudices. He believed they were behind all revolutionary movements, that their voices, influence and money urged others to political unrest and socialism. "In my heart," he once wrote, "I am very happy when they beat the Yids, even though the practice cannot be permitted."26 In this, he was also influenced by Pobedonostsev, who regularly referred to "Yids" in his personal letters.27 In 1879, for example, Pobedonostsev, who maintained a regular correspondence with the brilliant author Feodor Dostoyevsky (who also shared his anti-Semitic views), wrote: "What you write about the Yids is completely just. They have engrossed everything, they have undermined everything, but the spirit of the century supports them. They are at the root of the revolutionary socialist movement and of regicide, they own the periodical press, they have in their hands the financial markets, the people as a whole fall into financial slavery to them; they even control the principles of contemporary science and strive to place it outside of Christianity."28 Pobedonostsev once famously declared that Russia's "Jewish problem" would only be solved when one third of the Empire's Jews were forced to emigrate, one third forced to convert, and one third killed.29 

Alexander III unreasonably believed the Jews to be responsible for his father's death, contravening the fact that an investigation proved all but one of the members of the Narodnaya Volya were ethnic Russians. The only exception, Gesya Gelfmann, a seventeen-year-old Jewish girl, was duly tried along with the other conspirators and sentenced to death by hanging. Because she was pregnant, however, the Court reduced her death sentence to one of life imprisonment and hard labor. She died scarcely two months after becoming incarcerated, however. The forced work and atrocious conditions induced premature labor, and both she and her baby died within two days of each other.30 

In the weeks following Alexander II's assassination, a number of pogroms erupted across the Empire, based on the misconception that Jewish revolutionaries had murdered him. The Jewish quarter of Elizabethgrad was sacked and burnt, leaving some 10,000 Jews homeless; this was followed by another pogrom in Kiev, in which 2,000 Jewish homes were looted and burnt.31 All of this took place, if not with the direct permission of the authorities, then with their tacit approval, for all authority stood aside and did nothing to stop the violence or to prosecute those responsible for it.32 

While the official inquiry showed that Jewish revolutionaries had not participated in any way in Alexander II's murder, it remained an idea in popular circulation. The Narodnaya Volya even went so far as to distance itself from the Jews, issuing a statement that confirmed that Jews did not form a part of their membership. Typical Russians themselves, the Narodnaya Volya, actually welcomed the pogroms, for not only did they consider that Jews were undesirable elements in Russian society, but they also saw the pogroms as empirical demonstration that the masses could be incited to organized violence. "You have already begun to rise against the Jews," they announced. "That is fine, and desired. For soon a revolt will start all over Russia against Tsarism, the landowners, and the Jews."33 

Alexander III, as we have seen, held determinedly the belief that his father's assassination was the work of Jewish revolutionaries. He seems to have been greatly influenced by a book written by Major Osman Bey Kibridzli Zade, and published in Berne in 1886. Called Disclosures About the Assassination of Emperor Alexander II, it was, in the words of historian Walter Laqueur, "one of the most remarkable books ever written outside a lunatic asylum."34 

The author of Disclosures, possibly a Roumanian originally named Milliner, made a number of startling claims in his book. He began by proclaiming that although he himself had single-handedly won the Russo-Turkish War of 1878 and helped defeat the anarchist movement, power-hungry bureaucrats and petty officials in the Government had kept him from his just rewards. Forced by circumstance into European exile, he learned there of an extraordinary world conspiracy headed by the Alliance Israelite Universelle, financed by a group of wealthy Jews including the Rothschilds. He claimed that all rabbis in Prussia and Silesia were, in fact, military officers of the Alliance in disguise, awaiting the signal to over-run Russia. Jews everywhere in Eastern Europe were not only suspected but implicated as members or supporters, hardened soldiers disguised as peasant women and children; they had plotted the overthrow of the Orthodox Empire in their religious crusade and quest for world domination because Holy Christian Russian represented the only true hope for the future of the world. Their first steps -- student unrest, railway strikes, wars, and rebellions - led naturally enough to regicide in 1881, and they were determined to murder every member of the Romanov Dynasty.35 

Absurd as such claims were, they were readily believed by members of the Russian Government and even the last two Romanov sovereigns, Alexander III and Nicholas II. After reading a report about Disclosures and the Jewish plot, Nicholas II would write, "I fully share the opinions expressed here."36 

As a punitive measure against the Jews he believed were responsible for his father's murder, Alexander III ordered Count Nicholas Ignatiev, his new Minister of the Interior, to conduct an inquiry into the "Jewish question," a civil and judicial farce which ultimately declared that the Jews had brought the pogroms on themselves by their unfair economic practices.37 Novoye Vremyia, the official government newspaper, went so far as to declare that while pogroms were desirable, the Jews would suffer more if the government itself undertook repressive measures against them.38 

The culmination of Alexander's policy, advised by Pobedonostsev, and happily put into practice by Ignatiev, were the "Temporary Orders Concerning Jews," issued on 3 May, 1882, and known derisively thereafter as the "May Laws."39 As one scholar has pointed out, inclusion of the word temporary was "a cunning trick" which "made it unnecessary for the orders to obtain the approval of the State Council, where Ignatiev feared opposition; temporary orders required only the acquiescence of the Cabinet and the signature of the Tsar."40 Had the measures been submitted to the State Council, Sir Bernard Pares wrote, they would almost certainly never have been approved.41 

The new laws "constituted a permanent administrative pogrom against the Jews," wrote one historian. "They were valid only for the Pale of Settlement but their spirit made itself felt over the whole Russian Empire."42 Amongst other provisions, the "May Laws" narrowed the confines of the Pale of Settlement, and forbade Jews from owning mortgages or leases. The laws were retroactive, and so thousands of Jewish families were rendered homeless, unable to purchase property, or even to continue payments on existing properties.43 For those left on the streets, there was no financial compensation, and Jewish families lost millions of rubles.44 "The intent of this enactment," commented one scholar, "was to make it completely impossible for Jews to have anything to do with land, or to reside in the arable districts."45 

Worse still, the "May Laws" decreed that Jews were "forbidden to settle anew outside of towns and boroughs, exceptions being made only in the case of existing agricultural colonies."46 Freedom of movement within the Pale was restricted to the point of virtual arrest. Jews were forbidden to leave their villages, for example, to spend the night with a parent or relative in a different town; under the "May Laws," this was considered emigration, which was expressly prohibited.47 If a Jew traveled to a different town on a market day and found himself unable to return home that same night, he was subject to arrest for violation of the emigration laws.48 Jews were thus precluded from taking holidays, or from visiting relatives more than a few hours distant.49 Even Jewish soldiers on leave were forced to remain in barracks, as they were not allowed to travel and return home.50 

In 1886, all Jewish officials who served in bureaucratic or Government posts were dismissed from office.51 Admissions for Jewish students at universities within the Pale of Settlement were limited to ten percent, with a five percent quota on educational institutions beyond the Pale. In Moscow and St. Petersburg, the numbers were even further reduced, to three percent of the student population.52 In 1887, this law was extended to secondary schools.53 

In 1888, Jews were expressly forbidden to enter the legal profession without special written permission from the Ministry of Justice, and those currently enrolled in legal classes were expelled without compensation.54 All former Jewish officials who had been employed in Government service and received a pension were forced to either officially convert and register as Orthodox, or forgo future payments.55 That same year, Alexander III instituted a third set of restrictions, designed to eliminate Jews from the Russian Army.56 All Jews were banned from entering military schools and academies, and only those already in their last year were allowed to continue and graduate.57 By the beginning of 1888, Jews were forbidden from taking Army exams, and thus precluded from ever becoming officers.58 That same year, they were banned from medical dispensaries and, in 1889, from all military bands.59 

An entire series of new regulations and special taxes were also implemented, designed to keep ordinary Jews within the Pale of Settlement impoverished. Special taxes were implemented on kosher meat, and Jewish shops were forced to pay an additional tax-officially said to help finance Jewish schools, but more often than not filling the coffers of dishonest provincial officials.60 Synagogues were also subjected to an "operating tax," which forced the closure of many rural places of worship which could not afford to pay.61 Jewish merchants were forbidden to open their stores or trade on Sundays and Christian holidays; since they could not work on Saturdays, and their own holy days, this measure, according to one calculation based on 1897 figures, reduced the number of days on which Jewish businesses could operate to 197 out of 365 days, as opposed to the 309 permitted to Orthodox merchants.62 

These new laws were so restrictive that the Russian Empire came under heavy opprobrium from Europe and, particularly, America. Andrew Dixon White, the United States Ambassador to Russia, complained in his official reports of the "difficulties" the Emperor's Jewish policies were causing in relations between the two countries. Repeatedly, on behalf of the American Government, he urged the Emperor to ease the restrictions, but to no avail.63 

Eventually, the Russian Senate declared that the most oppressive of the restrictions were unlawful, and they were repealed, allowing Jews more freedom of movement and education.64 Yet the bulk of the "May Laws" remained in place until 1914, and in the first few years of Nicholas II's reign many of the policies the Senate had previously declared to be illegal were allowed to slip back into law, eagerly enforced by overly-enthusiastic provincial bureaucrats and endorsed by the Emperor himself.65 

"The anti-Jewish codes of Tsarist Russia thus succeeded," wrote one historian, "in corrupting every element in the state service. They were an extraordinary amalgamation of past and future-they looked back to the medieval ghetto and forward to the Soviet slave-state. What they did not do was 'solve' the Jewish problem. Indeed, by radicalizing the Jews, they ended, it could be said, in solving the Tsarist problem."66 

A particularly odious example of Romanov anti-Semitism came in 1891, when Grand Duke Serge Alexandrovich, brother of Emperor Alexander III, was appointed Governor-General of Moscow. "My brother Serge," the Emperor commented, "won't take up his post until the city is cleansed of the Jews."67 In the weeks leading up to the Grand Duke's appointment, Moscow fell under the most restrictive Jewish laws then in place in the Empire.68 Within the first twelve months of his appointment as Governor-General, he had expelled some 20,000 Jews who had been living in the city, sending them to the infamous Pale of Settlement in Western Russia.69 His hatred was pathological. "All Jews," he publicly declared at one gathering, "ought to be crucified."70 

Those who did remain were faced with a distasteful choice: renounce their religion and become Orthodox, or face expulsion.71 The only exception to this rule were young Jewish girls; Serge allowed them to remain in the city without converting, provided they officially register as prostitutes.72 To those wealthy Jewish merchants, he offered a third alternative: hand over several thousand rubles to him personally, or leave Moscow immediately.73 

Serge Alexandrovich ordered that all Jewish merchants who in the former capital must identify their stores as such by removing all signs in Cyrillic and other languages, and replacing them with placards in Hebrew, which gave only the owners' name. These signs were not allowed to carry their full names, however, but only diminutives and patronyms - a petty degradation of adult businessmen. He further declared that Jewish students could no longer adopt Christian names, as had been customary, during their education, and incarcerated hundreds of young men and women who failed to comply.74 

On the first day of Passover in 1891, the Grand Duke ordered the new Grand Synagogue, which had just been completed and was scheduled to open for services, closed to religious worship. It could remain open, he declared, only if it operated as a almshouse.75 On the same day, he ordered the expulsion of over 5,000 Muscovite Jews.76 Only the Jewish Cemetery was left untouched -- the Grand Duke, commented one writer, "evidently recognized the Jewish cemetery as a useful institution."77 

Nor did St. Petersburg escape similar restrictions. It took twenty-seven years for the Jewish community in the capital to gain official permission to finally build a synagogue, but this came with unusual restrictions.78 The officials had first to obtain the written permission of all building owners within a half-mile. Officials further declared that it could not be built within a half-mile of any existing Christian church. When permission was finally granted, the Synagogue was, by special law, forced to remain a distance of some two hundred feet from all other buildings, and a hundred feet from the public sidewalk and roadway.79 The building finally opened in 1893, but frequently became subject to virulent anti-Semitic attacks; in one 1905 event, the building's windows were broken, its sanctuary desecrated, and doggerel was scrawled across its front doors. 

Thus Alexander III's reign set Russia on a disastrous path, which his son Nicholas was careful to follow. "History probably could have unfolded rather differently, and the impact of the Revolution, which was apparently already inevitable, could have been softened by a more flexible and progressive policy," writes Russian historian Valentina Chernukha.80 Alexander, however, was relentless in pursuing his vision of autocratic rule, subverting his family and his subjects to this idealized and ultimately fatal phantom, and creating unbearable pain for his Jewish subjects. In so doing, he unwittingly set Russia on the course that inevitably led his son down the road to Revolution. 

Nicholas II himself shared his father's vehement anti-Semitism. Gentle though he may have been in his private life, Nicholas II, in his own lifetime and in the judgment of history, cannot be separated from his ruinous reign. As an autocrat, he was responsible for Russia, and as he stubbornly clung to its power, so must the ultimate responsibility for the Empire's misfortunes be laid at his feet. Many unfortunate incidents of his reign are well known; just as many are not. And it is this second category, which casts Nicholas as an imperious and anti-Semitic Autocrat, stubborn, lacking vision and imagination, capable of tyrannical behavior and ruthlessness on a scale to match any of his forbidding Romanov predecessors, which paints such a contrasting portrait to the gentle, modest, loving family man so beloved of Romanov devotees. 

Nicholas II, wrote one historian, "inaugurated the two worst decades in the bloody history of the Jews in Russia."81 At the beginning of his reign, fully 94% of all Russian Jews were confined within the Pale of Settlement.82 Between 1894-1917, they were to suffer at the hands of the Emperor's Government. This official anti-Semitism, as one historian explained, "was partly due to the colossal ignorance of the masses, to the bigotry of the Church, and to the stupid incompetence of the ruler. It was assuredly complicated by the fact that the five million Jews of the Empire refused to fall in line with the Russification policy of the Pan-Slavists."83 

An early example of the Emperor's anti-Semitism comes in a letter written to his mother during a visit to his uncle the Prince of Wales at Sandringham House in Norfolk. Nicholas noted: "The house party was rather strange. Most of them were horse dealers, among others a Baron Hirsch. The cousins rather enjoyed the situation and kept teasing me about it, but I tried to keep away as much as I could and not to talk."84 The Baron Hirsch mentioned was, in fact, Baron Maurice de Hirsch, one of the Prince of Wales's closest friends, and his chief financial advisor. He was one of many Jews who composed the Prince's circle of trusted friends, a rare example of royal tolerance and enlightenment in the 19th Century. 

Nicholas II firmly believed in some sort of shadowy Jewish conspiracy against the Russian Empire in general and himself in particular. He once referred to the English derisively as "Yids," and in 1907 complained to the German Ambassador to Russia of an international Jewish conspiracy.85 At the turn of the century, an orchestra containing several Jewish players was denied permission to perform at the Yalta Municipal Gardens in Crimea on the excuse that there were too many Jews among the musicians; although attempts were made to receive special dispensation, Nicholas II refused. On learning that the widow of a Jewish doctor in Yalta had been evicted from her home and applied for permission to return, the Emperor dismissed her request by writing on her petition, "There are too many Yids already."86 

These are not isolated incidents, nor is there any evidence that Nicholas ever altered his views. Nor was Empress Alexandra much more tolerant in her views, carrying not only the prejudices common to her class and era but also those she inherited from her husband and his country. Like Nicholas, her letters are peppered with anti-Semitic references, though, unlike her husband, she seems at least to have recognized the inequity inherent in Russian law. 

But, if Alexandra at least understood the problem in principle, she also failed to do as she herself suggested to her husband in numerous letters -- distinguish between, in her words, "the good and bad Jews."87 To the Empress, nearly all Jews fell into the latter category. Like her husband, she believed that the Jews were largely behind all social unrest and disorder in Russia, although she, in contrast to Nicholas, does not appear to have harbored any real personal anti-Semitic feelings based on either race or religion. Her anger at the Jews in general stemmed from what she believed to be their involvement in anarchist groups. 

Under Nicholas II, the restrictive and often punitive measures exacted against the Jews began in the first years of his reign. Between 1894-96, the Government introduced an alcohol monopoly, which ruined many Jewish brewers and merchants.88 Restrictions on those who lived within the Pale of Settlement were further tightened, with two additional regulations put in place. The first declared that, in selected cities-mainly in the Ukraine and Crimea-Jews could only patronize Christian businesses with the written permission of Provincial authorities.89 The second, designed to further reduce the rolls of official education amongst Russia's Jews, declared that the quotas previously employed in universities and secondary schools were to be enforced upon grammar schools.90 In a city such as Kharkov, where Jews accounted for just over fifteen percent of the total population, this meant that fully a third of all Jewish children under the ages of twelve were forbidden by the Russian Government from ever attending a school or receiving an education.91 

Such punitive measures were perhaps logical extensions of an Imperial policy, which, since 1881, had done everything within its power to bring ruin on Russian Jews. These policies followed naturally from father to son in the Autocracy, learned by the first and bred into the second. Neither was the situation improved by the fact that the Russian Orthodox Church itself was often rabidly anti-Semitic, nor made little secret that it shared the most zealous points of view. 

As bad as the situation had become under Alexander III, however, it climbed new heights under his son. Between 1895-1905, the Russian Government embarked on a series of repressive measures and pogroms with the full knowledge and endorsement of the Emperor himself. This State-sponsored terrorism culminated in a wave of pogroms that carried the Russian Empire across the threshold of officially-sanctioned racial genocide and into the 20th Century. In the process, the dark underbelly of a morally corrupt system was shown in all its ugliness as the world watched in horror. 

The most notorious of these pogroms took place in Kishinev, at Easter, 1903. Forty-seven Jews were murdered, and some 600 were beaten and tortured, not only by a mob but by the local police as well. By the end of three days, more than fifteen hundred Jewish shops and homes had been looted and burnt, the authorities either idly standing by and either doing nothing, or participating in the devastation themselves.92 

The Easter Pogrom was the brainchild of Vyacheslav Plehve, the Minister of the Interior, who, as Sir Bernard Pares later wrote, "almost openly authorized" the massacre.93 Plehve was an extremist in every sense: a vehement monarchist, he was devoutly Orthodox, and rabidly anti-Semitic. These qualities appealed greatly to Nicholas II, but Plehve gained his appointment with the assistance of an unlikely source: Grand Duchess Elizabeth Feodorovna, Alexandra's sister and wife of Grand Duke Serge Alexandrovich. 

In 1902, the Russian Empire erupted in a series of chaotic strikes, political assassinations, and rising protests. One of those who fell victim to the revolutionaries was Dimitri Sipyagin, the Minister of the Interior. Nicholas II toyed with the idea of naming Plehve as his replacement, but hesitated in making his decision. When she learned of this, Ella wrote him a letter that not only meddled in political affairs, but also repeated many of the same phrases that would later appear in her sister's War-time letters to the Emperor. She recommended that Nicholas appoint Plehve, and also that he crush the very spirit of revolution with ruthless brutality: "Serge does not know of this letter, it will probably be unlogical and over feminine, but I have picked other brains and kept my ears open and as we hear much and through clever, devoted people with experience and love for their sovereign and country I thought who knows even a woman can be of use in heavy times. Nicky dear, for heaven's sake, be energetic now, more deaths may be in store…put an end to this time of terror-forgive me if I write straight out without phrases and as if I were dictating, I don't expect your doing what I say. I only put it so in case these ideas might be of use to you. I would have directly named your new minister, every day your looks will do harm-why not Plehve who has experience and is honest. Don't be so gentle-all think you are wavering and weak, they no more speak of you as kind and it makes my heart ache so bitterly. I fear I must be cruel and say more…a firm decision counter-ordered is worse than none at all, it becomes fatal and now this new sorrow-oh, is it really not possible to judge such brutes with a drum-head court? And let all Russia know that such crimes are punishable by death."94 And so, Nicholas appointed the experienced, "honest" Plehve, the same man who, within a year, planned and watched with delight as the pogrom in Kishinev erupted under his direction. 

The Grand Duchess possibly may have been politically naïve, but certainly she knew what sort of man Plehve was, particularly with her own husband's reactionary, anti-Semitic views to enlighten her. If such action stands in stark contrast to the carefully crafted modern image of this Grand Duchess, it was nevertheless not her only venture into the promotion of anti-Semitic views. 

The Kishinev pogrom-and Plehve's endorsement of it-seems to have resulted not only from his own anti-Semitism, but also from a desire to divert attention from the internal chaos enveloping Russia. Industrial unrest, student strikes and demonstrations, political assassinations, and a growing sense of approaching catastrophe, led many in the Russian Government to speculate-correctly-that the country was poised on the edge of a volcano, with simmering tensions awaiting a spark to erupt into chaos. These ominous signs led Plehve to openly support provoking the Russo-Japanese War-"a small, victorious war to stem the tide of Revolution," as he famously put it.95 If the flood came, as many were convinced it would, those like Plehve wanted to be able to quickly produce direct evidence of Jewish involvement in the revolutionary movement. War or pogroms -- all served the same purpose, in focusing public outrage against a scapegoat and away from the decaying Imperial regime itself.96 

In 1902, shortly after he gained his appointment, Plehve hired Alexei Lopukhin, supervisor of the Moscow branch of the Okhrana, as Director of the Imperial Police Department. He had been impressed at Lopukhin's ability to infiltrate revolutionary groups, and with his handling of Jewish problems in the Moscow Province. Lopukhin got to know the grim Plehve well; both men shared the same reactionary views, and conspired to subvert the revolutionary movement at its core which, to them, meant the Jews. "I will choke the revolution in the blood of the Yids!" Plehve once proudly declared, and this was no idle threat, as Lopukhin soon learned.97 

It was Plevhe who charged Lopukhin with over-seeing the direction of the Kishinev pogrom. Broadsheets and leaflets incited both the general population and the local authorities to an Easter Pogrom. As Lopukhin later revealed, the Ministry of Internal Affairs printed these leaflets under the direction of Plehve himself, and paid for them with funds furnished by the Emperor; General Trepov, the Court Commander, personally approved the texts on Nicholas's behalf.98 Thus Nicholas knew in advance, according to Lupokhin, that the pogrom was to take place. That he was telling the truth was made clear when, after his arrest in 1906, Lopukhin was prevented by Prime Minister Peter Stolypin from mounting a defense in which he would have revealed the full extent of the Imperial Government's-and the Emperor's-complicity.99 

Nicholas himself was certainly satisfied with the results of the Kishinev pogrom. General Kuropatkin, the Minister of War, noted in his diary that he met with both the Emperor and Plehve on 14 April, 1903 at the Alexander Palace. During this audience, Nicholas expressed his pleasure at the pogrom, and he and Plehve told Kuropatkin that the Jews "ought to be taught a lesson, that they have got above themselves and are taking the lead of the revolutionary movement."100 

The world, however, reacted with shock as news of the brutality at Kishinev leaked out. Even the Kaiser, himself notoriously anti-Semitic, expressed his outrage to the Emperor, declaring that "such inhumanity was unheard of."101 Kishinev set the pattern for the anti-Jewish violence that followed, as one scholar noted. "The Nazis were to use exactly the same technique of violence-led legislation."102 

Reaction was particularly strong in the United States, one of the few countries largely free of anti-Semitism at the beginning of the 20th Century. President Theodore Roosevelt received a total of 504 letters and petitions from outraged Americans, who read the horrific details in their newspapers. The papers themselves were far from silent on the event, with over 150 editorials roundly condemning both the pogrom and the Russian Government that had seemingly permitted it. The New York Times declared that the Russian Empire "could no longer be called civilized," a view echoed in the highest levels of the American Government. When John W. Riddle, the American Charge d'affaires in St. Petersburg, attempted to present a petition signed by thousands of his countrymen, the Russian Foreign Minister refused to receive it.103 

In Russia, too, there was outrage. Prince Urusov, the Governor-General of Bessarabia, resigned in protest after authorities failed to arrest and prosecute those responsible for the pogrom.104 Plehve himself became perhaps the most despised man in Russia, and a natural target for terrorists. On 28 July 1904, he was blown up while riding in his carriage in St. Petersburg. "In the person of the good Plehve," Nicholas wrote in his diary, "I have lost a friend and irreplaceable Minister of Internal Affairs."105 

The protests and pressures did nothing to alter the Emperor's own views. Indeed, they were strengthened, from a most curious and infamous source: The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The driving force behind this nefarious collection of anti-Semitic accusations was none other than Alexandra's sister Grand Duchess Elizabeth Feodorovna. 

Several years after her marriage, Ella had converted from Lutheranism to Orthodoxy, and with the passage of time her fervor only grew, until it became an obsession. "Although himself pious and scrupulous in observance of all the rites of Orthodoxy," recalled Grand Duchess Marie Pavlovna, "Uncle Serge regarded with anxiety his wife's increasing absorption in things spiritual, and ended by regarding it as immoderate."106 

It was Ella who was responsible for introducing the infamous Protocols of the Elders of Zion to Nicholas II. One of the most incendiary books ever written, the version of The Protocols as published at beginning of the 20th Century had its roots in an obscure meeting of scholars and rabbis convened by Emperor Napoleon I between February and March of 1807. The group, called the Sanhedrin, quickly became suspected of plotting some shadowy-though unknown-conspiracy against France. Later that same year, a reactionary French clergyman named Abbe Barruel published a book called, Memoire pour servir a l'histoire du jacobinisme.107 This work "adumbrated most of the fantasies later set forth in myths about the 'Elders of Zion' and their secret plots," wrote one historian.108 

Barruel's little book attracted attention far beyond its merit; most interested were France's aristocrats, many reactionary of view and suspicious, since the Revolution, of any intrigue. In time, they managed to influence important officials, who likewise suspected that Barruel's book hid the complexity of some terrible plot.109 Agents of the French police began to track those believed to be involved, and an entire secret network evolved dedicated to stamping out the perceived threat.110 

No one, of course, was able to prove anything, and there the issue might have died had it not been for another obscure French author, Maurice Joly, who, in 1864, published a book entitled Dialogue aux enfers entre Machiavel et Montesquieu ou la Politique de Machiavel au XIXme siecle (Dialogues in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu, Or Machiavellian Politics in the 19th Century).111 Joly, a reactionary French lawyer, published the book anonymously in Brussels in 1864; it was again re-published in Brussels in 1868, and in Geneva as well. As written, it was intended as a scathing but satirical attack on the policies and personality of Emperor Napoleon III.112 Joly was a close friend of author Victor Hugo, who may have influenced the content and allegorical style; there is also some evidence to suggest that Joly drew much of his cabalistic rhetoric from his time as a member of the Order of the Rose-Croix, the 19th Century equivalent of the Rosicrucian Society.113 

Joly's book drew heavily on Barruel, utilizing allegations of a conspiracy to support his contention that the French Emperor was bent on world domination. Eventually, Napoleon III's police discovered that Joly had produced the work, and he was arrested and tried for dissention, receiving a fifteen month prison sentence.114 

Dialogue aux enfers entre Machiavel et Montesquieu consisted of twenty-five dialogues between Machiavelli and Montesquieu, divided into four sections.115 In his Introduction, Joly asserted that the passages "personified a political system which has not varied in its application for a single day since the fatal and alas! Too distant date when it was enthroned." This was a heavy hint as to the true intent, but Joly made overt reference to the "Haussmannisation" of Paris; to certain "repressive measures" of the "French Emperor," including his financial irregularities; and to his suspect relations with the Vatican.116 

The actual dialogues of the book-imagined philosophical conversations between the ghosts of Machiavelli and Montesquieu, took the form of the latter questioning the former about the political methods and ideologies through which one could exert control over the world. Machiavelli's explanations -- how he, the cynical author of The Prince, would advise a ruler in 19th Century Europe-contain the genesis of the actual Protocols themselves.117 It is clear, however, that Joly's Machiavelli was, in fact, a representation of Napoleon III himself, and thus, the plans described were asserted to be those of the French Emperor.118 

Joly's book made no reference in his book to Jews. It might have vanished into obscurity had it not been for an Englishman, Sir John Retcliff, who, in 1868, issued a novel called Biarritz under the pseudonym Hermann Goedsche. Written in German and published in Berlin, Biarritz heavily plagiarized Joly's work without citing it as a source.119 In particular, his chapter entitled "The Jewish Cemetery in Prague and the Council of the Representatives of the Twelve Tribes of Israel" utilized much of Joly's alleged conspiracy, in turn drawing upon Barruel's work, but now there was a substantial difference: instead of Napoleon III instigating a world-wide conspiracy, Retcliff named the Jews as the prime agents of destruction.120 

It was Retcliff's book that would one day reappear as The Protocols. According to Biarritz, the Jewish Sanhedrin met once every hundred years in Prague, at the grave of Simeon bar Yehuda, to discuss their plans for world domination, and work out strategies for the coming century.121 Though a novel, Biarritz was marketed through a cunning plan as a sort of "historical mystery" and readers were asked if these things might not just be possible.122 

The history of The Protocols is one of plagiarism, and, true to the form of his previous authors, the German writer Theodor Fritsch took wholesale portions of Retcliff's book, without crediting them, to use in his own, more extravagantly anti-Semitic piece of propaganda, Die geheimen Ziele des Judentums, published at the end of the 19th Century in Berlin.123 Although Fritsch acknowledged that the story had originated elsewhere in the form of a work of fiction, he himself had little doubt that it represented some historical truth. "Even if the speech was not delivered in this very form," he argued, "even if it is only fiction, nobody will dispute that it aptly characterizes the aims of the Jews."124 

In 1901, Fritsch's work -- composed of Retcliff's single chapter -- was again published, under the new title, Antisemitische Korrespondenz, in Berlin in February.125 This time, there was no pretense at toning down the accusation. The new pamphlet presented the work as "the speech of the Chief Rabbi," uncovered, it was said, in 1897 during the World Congress of Jewry in Basel, Switzerland.126 Apparently, someone had been careless enough to leave a copy of this blueprint for world control conveniently lying about to be discovered by the unsuspecting gentiles.127 

Fritsch's original publication apparently came to the attention of the strongly anti Semitic agents of the Berlin branch of the Okhrana shortly after Nicholas II acceded to the Throne, and they eagerly devoured this piece of racial malevolence.128 They were quick to see the propaganda value in such a disturbing allegation, true or not. It was eventually brought to the attention of an odious man, Colonel Feodor Rachkovsky, an Okhrana agent, petty bureaucrat, and paid informer, who later connived with both Father Gregory Gapon and the notorious Azev, who planned the assassination of Grand Duke Serge Alexandrovich in 1905.129 Together with a man called General Orgeyevsky, these Okhrana agents took Fritsch's book and re-wrote portions of it to further implicate the Jews in a world-wide conspiracy.130 

In 1903, the Protocols received their first Russian publication, in the St. Petersburg newspaper Znamya, a conservatory, anti-Semitic journal dedicated to upholding the Autocracy. The editor, Peter Krushevan, was a "noted and militant anti-Semite," wrote one historian. This version relied heavily on the work by Fritsch, though the text itself was substantially altered by Okhrana agents to include further incendiary anti-Semitic remarks.131 Two years later, Colonel George Butmi, a retired officer in the Imperial Guard, further elaborated on the Znamya text in a pamphlet he edited and published in St. Petersburg. A close friend of Krushevan, he had apparently received his complete copy of the materials from the newspaper editor.132 

Although this first, Okhrana version of The Protocols appeared in Znamya in 1903, it apparently received little notice. A second plan, therefore, was undertaken, to bring them to a larger audience; at the same time, they would be re-written and presented in such a way to the Emperor that he would have no doubt that the Jews were behind a conspiracy to organize a revolution in Russia. 

It was at this point that Grand Duchess Elizabeth entered the picture. Shortly after the turn of the century, the Emperor and Empress had become enamored of the French mystic Philippe Nazier-Vachot, a former butcher from Lyon.133 The Court was in an uproar, and several times Ella visited her sister, imploring her to denounce the man as an adventurer. In August, 1902, Alexandra wrote to Nicholas that Ella had "assailed me about Our Friend [Philippe]. I remained very quiet and gave dull answers."134 

There was more at work here than a sister worried over the mystical influence of a potentially corrupt character. Since 1894, both Serge Alexandrovich and Elizabeth Feodorovna were accustomed to wielding great influence at Court. Serge was not only Nicholas's uncle but his brother-in-law as well, and he frequently advised his nephew on policy issues. Of all the Imperial Family, only Serge and Ella held such an influential position that, when the Emperor and Empress planned the redecoration of their new rooms in the Alexander Palace at Tsarskoye Selo, they had a suite specially set aside for them. Neither the Grand Duke nor his wife was willing to watch quietly as this influence slipped from their hands in favor of an obscure foreign mystic. Thus, The Protocols became an instrument through which Serge and Ella could undermine the position of Philippe at Court while re-establishing their own hold over the Imperial couple. With this goal in mind, The Protocols were once again re-written, this time to include not only allegations against the Jews but also against the Freemasons, a group with which Philippe was known to be involved.135 

To ensure that the plan succeeded, Ella herself found an author to bring its new form forward. This was Serge Alexandrovich Nilus, a narrow-minded, reactionary, ultra-Orthodox writer known for his controversial publications. Nilus was married to a certain Ozerova, who happened to have been one of Ella's Ladies-in-Waiting, and the author and the Grand Duchess had frequently met, according to Count du Chayla, a friend of Nilus.136 Now, to guarantee success, Ella and her husband introduced Nilus to influential members of the Court, and helped him raise the necessary funds to publish his work.137 

Nilus himself later gave highly contradictory accounts of how he had obtained the Protocols. In 1905, he stated that he was given them by an unnamed woman, who herself had stolen them from "one of the most influential and most highly initiated leaders of Freemasonry," in Paris, "that nest of Jewish conspiracy." In a later edition, he claimed that they had been discovered at the Parisian headquarters of the Society of Zion. In 1917, he elaborated on this, alleging that the documents were secretly removed from a file at the Grand Lodge of the Orient Freemasons of the 33rd Degree in Paris by Alexei Sukhotin, later Vice-Governor of Stavropol.138 

With the money granted through Serge and Ella, and their circle of friends, Nilus was able to publish a book in 1903, The Great in the Small: The Antichrist as an Imminent Political Possibility.139 This was a highly peculiar work, in which the author repeatedly asserted that the end of the world was near. He proclaimed the coming Apocalypse, and warned that revolutionary foment in the Empire, engineered by socialist, Jews, and Freemasons, was rapidly paving the way for the chaos he was sure would follow. Nilus warned that he hoped to put "on their guard those who still have ears to hear and eyes to see events are precipitated in the world at a terrifying speed: quarrels, wars, rumors, famines, epidemics, earthquakes-everything which even yesterday was impossible, today is an accomplished fact…Secular quarrels and schisms [must] be forgotten in the imminent need of preparing against the coming of the Anti-Christ."140 

Nilus made reference to a world-wide Jewish conspiracy, citing the Protocols as evidence. The series in Znamya had recently been published, and undoubtedly Nilus had access to these materials, for he referenced them in his book, completed before Krushevan himself made them public.141 

The Great in the Small was little more than an intensely hysterical book fueled by the author's deep paranoia and racial hatred; setting aside the anti-Semitic remarks, it, in fact, bears an uncanny resemblance to much of the present day Fundamentalist Christian rhetoric which warns of impending Armageddon. As such, it received little attention, except amongst the most rabidly conservative, reactionary and anti-Semitic elements. But, into this latter group fell both Serge Alexandrovich and his wife. Nilus was clearly impressionable, and susceptible to influences, which were the precise traits the pair were seeking.142 This led them into a dangerous game, which was to leave a lasting legacy of hate upon the world, and play a part in the extermination of millions of Jews in the 20th Century. 

The Great in the Small was duly presented by Serge and Ella to Nicholas, who eagerly devoured it.143 Its intended mission, however, failed. Philippe fell from favor at Court, but only after he unsuccessfully predicted several pregnancies for the Empress. The seed, however, had been planted. Nicholas saw before him not a clumsy forgery but a statement of political and religious truth. "What depth of thought!" he wrote of Nilus's book. "Everywhere one sees the directing and destroying hand of Jewry!"144 

Two years later, Nicholas II himself had the book re-published. This new, second edition included the complete text of the Protocols as an appendix. The new version was, with permission, dedicated to Nicholas II, who himself had paid for its publication by the Court Chancellery at Tsarskoye Selo.145 

As presented in The Great in the Small, the Protocols were lifted almost entirely from earlier source material, without any attribution. Principally, they followed Joly's 1864 book-so closely, in fact, that fully fifty complete paragraphs were word-for word transcriptions.146 Historian Norman Cohn, who analyzed the original texts, noted that "over 160 passages in the 'Protocols,' totalling two-fifths of the entire text, are clearly based on passages in Joly; in nine of the chapters the borrowings amount to more than half the text, in some they amount to three-quarters, and in one (Protocol VII) to almost the entire text."147 

Nilus presented the Protocols as his own discovery, as previously noted, and claimed that they were the actual plans of Theodor Herzl, delivered to the 1st Congress of World Jewry in Basle, Switzerland, in August, 1897.148 While the anti-Semitic content of the book greatly appealed to Nicholas II, others were less certain, and Nilus was frequently asked to explain the origin of the purported documents and prove their authenticity. "We must not search for direct evidence," he once declared in self-defense.149 As late as 1913, Nilus complained, "My book was published eight years ago, and I can't believe that no one takes it seriously!"150 

Nicholas II was not the only monarch to be taken in by The Protocols. Wilhelm II also expressed his belief in the plot they were said to have uncovered.151 After a few years, however, Prime Minister Peter Stolypin ordered an investigation into the mysterious book carried out which revealed the Okhrana's hand in their formulation. With some reluctance, Nicholas II ordered the Court Chancellery to stop its distribution of the book, writing, "A just cause cannot be defended through dirty means."152 

Even after this exposure, neither the virulently anti-Semitic establishment nor the Russian Orthodox Church was willing to admit the truth. The Church in Russia had always been bitterly anti-Semitic, and these firmly held beliefs reached their zenith under the reign of Nicholas II. The book was, in fact, never out of print in Imperial Russia, though the Emperor himself withdrew his own funding before the beginning of the First World War. In 1917, it was once again published, in its final, Russian version. The 1917 edition underwent a change in title, from the somewhat ambiguous The Great in the Small to the rather more direct He is Near, At the Door! Here Comes the Antichrist and the Reign of the Devil on Earth! This last Russian edition was published under the authority of the Holy Synod, by the Holy Troitsky-Sergeievsky Monastery near Moscow.153 

With belief in such wild, plagiarized assertions embraced from the Emperor on down, it is scarcely surprising that the wave of repression and pogroms should continue unabated in the Russian Empire. Although there were scattered pogroms between 1903-1904, the year that brought defeat to Imperial Russia in its War against Japan, 1905, also saw a rising tide of anti-Semitic violence. In an eleven day period, from 18-29 October of 1905, there were a total of 690 separate pogroms, which left thousands dead, and an unknown number of Jews homeless.154 

The worst episode took place in the city of Odessa. Historian Simon Dubnow, a Russian Jew who witnessed the slaughter, left a harrowing account of the episode: 

"The so-called Progressive Elements arranged street processions, adorned by the red flags of the Left parties, designed to provide the necessary clash with authorities. Simultaneously, the participants in the patriotic demonstrations in favor of the Monarchy-consisting mostly of the scum of society, of detectives, and of police officials in plain clothes-emerged, carrying portraits of the Emperor under the shadow of the National flag, and singing the National Anthem. As they walked through the city, they shouted, "Hurrah! Beat the Yids! The Yids are eager for liberty! They go against our Emperor to put a Yid in his place! Beat the Yids!" These patriotic demonstrations were accompanied by police and Cossack patrols, and soldiers, ostensibly to preserve order, but in reality to enable the hooligans to attack and maltreat the Jews and prevent the victims from defending themselves. As soon as the Jews assembled to defend themselves, they would be driven off by the police and troops. As soon as they broke into a run, the patriotic demonstrators dispersed into small groups, running after them across the city, beating them, slitting throats, breaking into Jewish homes and plundering Jewish stores, and even slaughtering entire families."155 

Over the course of four days, Jews were killed at a rate of more than a hundred a day in Odessa, butchered in the streets with sabers and axes in front of their horrified families as the police looked on in approval.156 On the fourth day, Colonel Neidhard, the Chief Magistrate of Odessa, finally stepped in, congratulated those who had conducted the killing and looting, and sent them on their ways home with the words, "Enough, brothers!" Neidhard's assistant reassured a worried policeman by telling him, "Don't worry. We all sympathize most heartily with this pogrom."157 

The aftermath of this carnage, like Kishinev before it, scandalized the world. Stories, filed by intrepid journalists, quickly filled the pages of magazines and newspapers in both Europe and the United States. Photographs quickly followed, showing the streets piled high with the battered, bloody corpses of Jewish victims, faces beaten in, eyes hanging loose from sockets, throats severed to the windpipe.158 One haunting photograph, showing a group of young children dead in the street, was deemed so powerful that it later became a postcard, to raise funds for Jewish refuges and emigres.159 Horrifying as they were, these images and stories failed to capture the brutality of what had taken place. "It was the most unimaginable, horrific event," wrote Dubnow, "beyond description in its savagery, a true hell on earth."160 

The numbers from the Odessa pogrom were staggering. Official Government estimates set the number of dead at just under 400, although the real number was certainly higher. More than 5,000 Jews were seriously wounded, over 600 Jewish children were orphaned, and some 4,000 Jewish houses and shops were destroyed.161 

A deadly, ominous silence fell over the city. Everyone anticipated that some sort of government condemnation would follow, but from St. Petersburg there was only silence. On the contrary, as Nicholas wrote in a letter to his mother, he quite understood and even approved of what had taken place: "The subversive elements raised their heads, but a strong reaction set in quickly and a whole mass of loyal people suddenly made their power felt. The result was obvious, and what one would expect in our country. The impertinence of the socialists and revolutionaries had angered the people once more; and because nine-tenths of the troublemakers are Jews, the people's anger turned against them. That's how the pogroms happened. It is amazing how they took place simultaneously in all the towns of Russia and Siberia....Cases as far apart as Tomsk, Simferopol, Tver and Odessa show clearly what an infuriated mob can do: they surrounded the houses where revolutionaries had taken refuge, set fire to them, and killed everybody trying to escape."162 To Nicholas, there was no distinction between revolutionaries and Jews, "trouble-makers" and butchered women and children. He saw the pogroms, as Richard Pipes has noted, as "justifiable punishment."163 

It is not surprising that the Government should take no action. Like the Kishinev pogrom of April, 1903, the Odessa pogrom was itself approved and enacted with the knowledge and cooperation of authorities in St. Petersburg. Once again, the printing presses of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the St. Petersburg Police Department were used to publish the broadsides and posters inciting the masses to rise against the Jews.164 These were personally approved by an official named Michael Komisarov, and shipped by train across Russia to the Crimea, where they were distributed to various official organs-the military, the police, and the local administration.165 

In the aftermath of the 1905 Revolution, Nicholas was forced to relent somewhat and, with great reluctance, he consented to the abolition of the most oppressive domiciliary regulations which had formed his father's "May Laws."166 He refused, however, to make further concessions. When the new constitution was drawn up, it granted universal suffrage to all Russians, but not to Jews, who, by Imperial wish, were excluded from participation in the coming Duma.167 

In the fall of 1906, the Council of Ministers unanimously recommended that the most restrictive measures against the Jews be lifted. Nicholas, however, refused to give any further ground. On 10 December, 1906, Nicholas wrote to his Prime Minister Peter Stolypin: "Peter Arkadievich: I return you the memorandum on the Jewish question unconfirmed. Long before it was submitted to me, I may say that I thought and meditated on this question day and night. In spite of the most convincing arguments in favor of a decision in the affirmative, an inner voice ever more insistently repeats to me that I should not take this decision upon myself. So far my conscience has never deceived me. Therefore, in this case also, I intend to follow its dictates. I know you, too, believe that 'the Emperor's heart is in God's hand.' So be it. I bear a terrible responsibility before God for all authorities set up by me and at any time I am ready to answer for them to Him."168 

In the aftermath of the 1905 Revolution and the publication of The Protocols, Russian anti-Semitism became more firmly entrenched, supported as it was by the Emperor himself. Amidst the chaos arose several odious groups, the Black Hundreds, and the Union of the Russian People, both intermingled to an incestuous degree, whose missions were to uphold the last vestiges of the vanished autocracy and promote pogroms against the Jews. The Union of the Russian People was founded in 1905 by Dr. Alexander Dubrovin, a St. Petersburg physician described by one contemporary as a "coarse, repulsive animal" and a "vile parasite."169 The extreme right-wing Duma member Vladimir Purishkevich, one of the future assassins of Rasputin, was a leading member. Another leading light was N. Markov. Like Purishkevich, he was rabidly anti-Semitic; he once declared that all Jews should be killed in pogroms.170 

Both the Union and the Black Hundreds firmly believed that Jews were purely and simply evil.171 In the speeches of their leaders, their bulletins, and their propaganda, they made their positions quite clear: not only were certain Jewish elements responsible for the revolutionary movement, but all Jews were revolutionaries and, as such, not to be trusted. There was, according to this scheme, not a single ethnic Russian involved in the revolutionary movement. Jews wanted to exploit the peasants and workers, and, they warned, if these same bodies did not support the Union and its policies, they would be engulfed forever when the tide of a Jewish revolution swept across Russia.172 Like Nilus's version of The Protocols, Freemasons were coupled to the Jews, their nefarious agents in subverting governments and working toward ultimate ruin.173 

Not surprisingly, both the Union and the Black Hundreds found an enthusiastic and ardent supporter in Nicholas II. Although at times he questioned whether the ferocious methods of the Union were the correct ones, he stood wholeheartedly behind their aims and believed fiercely in their views. Thus, on 23 December, 1905, he happily received a deputation from the Union headed by Dubrovin himself, and accepted honorary membership in its rolls for both himself and his son Alexei.174 He encouraged the Union with these words: "Unite the Russian people-I am counting on you!"175 

He was likewise steadfast in his support for the Black Hundreds. He once told Count Konovnizin, one of their leaders: "I know that Russian courts are too severe toward the participants in the pogroms. I give you my Imperial word that I shall always lighten their sentences, on the application of the Union of the Russian People, so dear to me." As historian Robert Warth points out: "During the next decade, the Union submitted 325 petitions for amnesty on behalf of 476 individuals found guilty of participating in pogroms. Those whose conviction involved crimes against Jews were invariably pardoned."176 

The Union was also actively supported by the Imperial Government. In one year, they received some 2.5 million rubles for their propaganda, money paid from the State Budget.177 The Emperor and Empress also supported its activities with private contributions from the Imperial Treasury.178 With this money, the Union embarked on a fresh series of pogroms. One of their officials bragged, "We can handle a job of any size-a ten man pogrom or a ten thousand man pogrom, whatever you please."179 

A reporter for the New York Tribune happened to attend one meeting of the Union of the Russian People in 1906, and filed a startling article in response. He noted that the meeting was held in the Imperial Horse Guards Menage in St. Petersburg, with the permission of the Emperor, as Dubrovin made clear during his speech. During the meeting, Dubrovin read from a Union proclamation, printed on the presses of the St. Petersburg Police Department, and approved by the Imperial censor, which asserted that "the authors of Russia's misfortunes are the Jews, who throughout the world hate Russia and want to rob the peasants of their land and make them slaves." Jews, Dubrovin's proclamation continued, all worked toward a common goal, to "unfrock the priests and turn our churches into Jewish stables and pigsties." He declared that "the Americans, English and Germans want to destroy Russia and divide our country among its enemies." It ended on a chilling note, calling upon "the faithful" to seek out Jews and "tear the Christ sellers to pieces."180 

There can be little doubt that these sentiments, approved as they were by the Emperor himself, reflected Nicholas's own personal feelings. While the Emperor apparently backed away from some of this more extreme rhetoric in the years that followed, his endorsement of such incendiary remarks was genuine enough. Even after this speech, he actively support both Dubrovin and his Union through financial contributions, making clear his approval for their ultimate aims, if not their precise methods.181 

Through the extreme right newspapers Novyoe Vremya and Dvuglavy Orel, the Union and the Black Hundreds were able to spread their hatred to a much wider audience.182 In 1908, Purishkevich left the Union when the group refused to demand that the Third Duma disenfranchise all Jews. He himself founded the competing Union of the Archangel Michael, named for the founder of the Romanov Dynasty, and stated that its aims were "preservation of the autocracy, supremacy of Russian Orthodoxy, and defense of the property of the nobility."183 Two years later, the Union of the Russian People itself changed leadership, with Markov replacing Dubrovin.184 

The Union of the Russian People and the Black Hundreds both rose to great political influence during the sitting of the Third Duma, often interrupting proceedings to denounce Jews, and passionately seizing on any opportunity, as Paul Miliukov explained, to incite pogroms: "If the Army was being discussed they proposed to exclude the Jews from the Army; if projects for city and zemstvo self government were under discussion, they proposed to exclude the Jews from that area too; on the occasion of the debates over the school system, they demanded that the Jews be barred from admission, and Jews were to be excluded also from the liberal professions of law and medicine."185 

Not surprisingly, under such repressive and deadly conditions, more than half a million Russian Jews voluntarily emigrated between 1903-07, ninety percent to the United States.186 These were the fortunate ones; in three years, between 1908-1911, some 100,000 Jews were either arrested and sent into exile, or forced into emigration without their possessions.187 

The American Government, not surprisingly, made repeated protests and pleas to Russia, urging them to change their policies and intervene to stop the massacres. In 1909, President William Howard Taft presided over a White House conference on the state of Jews in Russia. A special commission was appointed to study the issue and make formal recommendations, which came only after two years of hearings. In 1911, they recommended that the United States formally terminate their business treaty of 1832, which had paved the way for American investment in Russia. This meant the loss of 100 million dollars of bank loans, manufacturing and industrial jobs and companies, and a very public rebuke of Imperial policies. The Congress voted overwhelming to support the recommendations, and charged Guild, the American Ambassador in St. Petersburg, with delivering the news to Serge Sazonov, the Russian Foreign Minister.188 

Guild found this an unexpected ordeal. On the advice of American Secretary of State Knox, he first attempted to negotiate some settlement of the issue, but Sazonov refused to listen. "Russia," the Minister declared, "takes the grounds that no self respecting nation can act under pressure from abroad to change her treatment of the Jews within her borders. Russia's experience has been that the presence of the Jews within her borders is a perpetual menace, not only to the integrity of the country, but to law and order." Instead, Sazonov suggested that Russia simply exile all of its Jews-5.2 million people-to the United States.189 

When he learned of this, George Bakhmetev, the Russian Ambassador to the United States, was outraged. "The American Jews," he declared, "adroitly deceived the Congress. This whole story proves that Americans are still at a very primitive stage of social development. Any concessions on our part are naturally out of the question, but it would be practical, in view of our future political and trade interests, to sugar the pill for the Americans."190 

With anti-Semitic rhetoric freely discussed, and taken quite seriously, in the Russian parliament, with government-owned newspapers printing attacks on Jews, with local authorities inciting the masses to act, it was inevitable that a crisis would erupt. When it came, in March, 1911, it involved the murder of a thirteen-year-old boy, and drew attention and reprobation from most of the world. 

The murder took place in Kiev, itself a hotbed of anti-Semitism. Vassili Shulgin, a right-wing politician and member of the Duma, published a paper, the Kievlyanin, in whose pages he frequently advocated the expulsion of Jews from all aspects of public life, and questioned whether or not the occasional pogrom might not be a good thing for the Empire.191 He nearly got his wish in 1911. 

In March of that year, a thirteen-year-old boy, Andrei Yushchinsky, was found murdered, his body floating in the Dnieper River near one of the poorer sections of the city; he had been stabbed forty-seven times, and his body was almost completely devoid of blood.192 Very quickly, in the public imagination, the murder assumed a ritual quality, and the local press clamored for Jewish blood. Although a police investigation indicated that a band of local Russian thieves had murdered the boy, they were told by their superior officers to "find a Yid" on whom to pin the murder.193 The work of the investigators was ignored by Chaplinsky, the Kiev District Prosecutor, who was determined to use the crime to his advantage against the Jews. In one indiscrete moment, Chaplinsky declared candidly that the issue was not to find the real criminal but to use the crime to prove that Jews practiced ritaul murder.194 It took some time, but the Prosecutor, "with the personal blessing of the Emperor," was finally able to uncover a "witness" of questionable honesty, who declared that he had seen a young Jewish brickmaker, Mendel Beilis, kidnap and murder the young boy with a group of accomplices.195 Beilis was arrested in August, but it took Chaplinsky two years to fabricate a case against him, and the matter only came to court in the fall of 1913, in violation of the Russian criminal code of law which promised a speedy trial.196 

Had this been the extent of the case-corrupt bureaucrats and an anti-Semitic population willing to assume the worst-the Beilis affair might simply have joined the long list of human rights' abuses suffered by the Jews under the Imperial Regime. But, as in so many cases, the Imperial Government and Nicholas II himself stepped in, throwing their support behind the equivalent of a modern witch-hunt. 

Very early on, Nicholas himself received the official police reports, which outlined the true facts of the case, and even named the Russians believed to be responsible for the murder; this was confirmed with further inquiries, in which the Kiev investigators assured Nicholas that the evidence against Beilis was either manufactured or non-existent; and that the defense had numerous witnesses who could support his innocence.197 The Emperor, however, was loathe to lose an opportunity to promote the idea of ritual Jewish murder and a world-wide conspiracy against Orthodox Russians, and, even though he knew Beilis was innocent, he allowed his Government to conspire with Chaplinsky in Kiev to frame him for the crime.198 

Thus, I. G. Shcheglovitov, the Minister of the Justice, assisted Chaplinsky in pursuing his prosecution.199 He appointed O. Iu. Vipper, the Assistant Public Prosecutor of the St. Petersburg District, to serve as the State's representative.200 Together, Chaplinsky and Vipper paid witnesses to testify against Beilis, and forced the physician who had performed Yushchinsky's autopsy to change his report to support the theory that a ritual murder had been committed.201 When the police investigators protested, they were either bribed or dismissed, while important defense witnesses were arrested and sent to the safety of Siberian exile, where they could not testify.202 

Just before the case opened, the right-wing newspaper Russkoye plamya declared: "The Government is obliged to acknowledge that the Jews as a people are as dangerous to humanity as wolves, scorpions, adders, poisonous spiders, and other creatures subject to extermination for their predatoriness, a people whose destruction is encouraged by law…The Jews must be forcibly put into such conditions that they will continually die off. This, then, is the obligation of the Government and of the best people of the country."203 To help ensure victory, Nicholas II himself summoned the judge who was to preside over the trial, gave him a gold watch, and promised him a future promotion if he guaranteed that the Government won the case.204 Against this background, the Beilis trial opened on 27 September, 1913 in Kiev. 

On the day the trial opened, Vassili Shulgin wrote a lengthy editorial in his right-wing newspaper the Kievlyanin, which exposed, as Paul Miliukov later wrote, "a vile picture of perjury, bribed experts, and obliging efforts on the part of the prosecutor to wring out a verdict of 'guilty' from the specially selected, semi-literate peasant jurors."205 It marked a stunning turn for Shulgin, who had previously prided himself on his fierce anti-Semitic views, and the effect was immediate: authorities in Kiev confiscated issues of the paper, provoking a crisis.206 In protest, Shulgin eventually quit his right-wing Nationalist Party and joined the more moderate Centrists.207 

Paul Miliukov later declared that the Beilis trial embodied "all the falsehood of the regime, all its personal violence."208 On 28 October, 1913, as the prosecutor loudly protested that "the Jews would destroy Russia!" the jury found Beilis not guilty.209 It was stunning news, received with disbelief within the Imperial Government. The 30 October, 1913 issue of the government newspaper Novyoe Vremya went so far as to declare, "all Russia has suffered a defeat."210 

When he learned of the verdict, Nicholas II wrote, "I am happy that Beilis has been acquitted, because he is innocent." Of course, the Emperor knew all along that he was innocent, and had conspired with his Government to subvert the justice system, himself bribing the presiding judge to effect a favorable ruling. Perhaps he felt some moral relief in knowing that, despite his best efforts, Beilis had gone free. But if there was any such spark of conscience, it was tempered by his continued prejudices: "It is certain that there was a ritual murder," he declared, despite all evidence to the contrary.211 

In the midst of the Beilis trial, Nicholas attended a performance of The King of Judea, a play written by his cousin Grand Duke Konstantin Konstantinovich. In September, 1912, he wrote to the Grand Duke, admitting that as he watched, "I was also fired by a hatred of the Jews, who crucified Christ." He explained that, for this reason, he could not permit it to be performed publicly, for fear that it would incite "the common Russian man" to commit new pogroms.212 

The First World War did little to lessen either the Emperor's attitudes, or the restrictions imposed on Russian Jews. Jewish soldiers in the Imperial Army-an estimated 175,000 men-were frequently subjected to petty regulations not imposed on their Christian comrades.213 And, while they fought valiantly for Imperial Russia, there was a strict policy in the press of not reporting any heroic action undertaken by Jewish soldiers, or making mention of any award or decorations received except in the most exceptional of cases.214 Jewish soldiers were forcibly cleared out of much of Poland, and forbidden to fight alongside their Russian counterparts.215 If a Jewish soldier was wounded in action, he was sent back to the Pale of Settlement for treatment, and denied care in the military hospitals and Red Cross ambulance trains, which were reserved for Christians.216 

In 1915, with the shifting tide of War, so many Jews were uprooted and forced from their homes that the Government found it necessary to relent and list the domiciliary and travel restrictions which had previously confined them to the Pale of Settlement.217 In so doing, however, the Ministry of Internal Affairs emphasized that the lifting of the ban was only "temporary," and that ordinary regulations would remain in force following the conflict.218 

It is difficult to gauge the attitude of the Imperial couple toward Russia's Jews in these years. Their Wartime correspondence contains frequent, pejorative references to Jews, occasionally in the abstract, more often in relation to some specific incident. And while Alexandra may not have shared the breadth and depth of her husband's anti-Semitism, she was not above giving free rein to her feelings in their private correspondence. In a letter of 13 April, 1915, for example, she complained of "vicious, rotten" Jews who she believed guilty of inciting discontent.219 

The Empress, however, did recognize the inequity of the state sponsored anti-Semitism. In April, 1916, she wrote to Nicholas of a young wounded soldier in Grand Duchess Olga Alexandrovna's military hospital: "He is a Jew, has lived since 10 years in America. He was wounded and lost his left arm on the Carpathians…Ten years ago he left for the United States to find the opportunity to become a useful member of human society to the fullest extent of his capabilities, as here is difficult for a Jew who is always hampered by legislative restrictions. Though in America he never forgot Russia and suffered much from homesickness and the moment the War broke out he flew here to enlist as soldier to defend his country. Now that he lost his arm serving in our army, got the St. George's Medal, he longs to remain here and have the right to live wherever he pleases in Russia, a right the Jews don't possess…One sees the bitterness and I fully grasp it-surely such a man ought to be treated the same as any other soldier who received such a wound…Though he is a Jew one would like him to be justly treated and not different to the others with similar losses of a limb…To me it seems one ought always to choose between the good and bad Jews and not be equally hard upon all-it's so cruel to my mind. The bad ones can be severely punished."220 

Nicholas received this request and reported to his wife that he had approved the man's petition and sent it on to Boris Sturmer, the Minister of the Interior and Minister of Foreign Affairs.221 This did not, however, reflect any change of attitude on the Emperor's part, as will be seen. One need only examination the Emperor's later behavior and words in exile to uncover ample evidence of this. Rather, it seems more in line with his usual pattern of simply relenting to his wife's demands. 

The letter certainly indicates that the Empress was cognizant of the difficulties faced by Russian Jews. Unlike her husband, she seemed to have understood, intellectually at least, the moral dilemma in their continued maltreatment. Yet this does not reflect any great enlightenment on her part, for most of her prejudices remained securely intact. In Alexandra's case, this was all the more despicable, especially as she-unlike her husband-appears to have known that such feelings, beliefs, and restrictions were wrong, and at odds with her own personal faith. Yet she did little to either alter her views, or attempt to convince her husband to relent. The letter quoted above is one of the only known instances in which she apparently spoke up for Russia's Jews. More often than not, her letters to her husband continued to make reference to "Jews," who filled the soldiers' "ears with bad ideas."222 

By 1916, the official and Imperial anti-Semitism had become such a problem that a number of prominent Russians, including Maxim Gorky, Alexander Kerensky, and the composer Rimsky-Korsakov, signed an appeal to Nicholas which pleaded for a cessation of the terrible restrictions: "Russian Jews have rendered honest service in all domains left open to them. They have given ample proof of their desire to offer supreme sacrifices for their Country. Hence, the curtailment of their civil rights is not only a crying injustice but also injurious to the best interests of the State."223 

In the months before the Revolution, Russia came under intense pressure from the Allies, particularly Great Britain, and the Government of the United States, to change its Jewish policies. The Allies found it increasingly difficult to count the Russian Empire, and its Autocratic ruler, in their fight for freedom, despite the best propaganda efforts of the state-controlled media. With the United States poised on the verge of entering the conflict, these pleas for change became near demands if the European Allies were to continue their fight alongside Russia.224 

This led, in the fall of 1916, to lessen restrictions on the Jews in Russia, to ensure continued Allied cooperation and remove one of the last obstacles which remained for the Americans. It was, like the granting of the Duma in 1905, an issue largely forced upon Nicholas II, against his will, and under duress. He was at least cognizant of the proposal, though he seems to have little understood the implications. In February, 1917, Grand Duke Alexander Mikhailovich visited the Alexander Palace and raised the issue with his brother-in-law the Emperor and with the Empress. In a letter to his brother Serge Mikhailovich, he reported that Nicholas "appeared confused" about the proposal, "replying that it was equality only in the sense of a widening of the Pale of Settlement; I protested as strongly as I could, saying that concessions or new rights for the Jews were unthinkable, that we could not afford to be merciful to a race which the Russian people hate even more now because of their negative attitude towards the war and outright treason; it was noticeable that Alix didn't protest, obviously such projects do exist."225 

It is clear, then, that this proposal did not reflect any particular change in attitude of the Emperor. After the Revolution, his views remained intolerant. As a prisoner in Tobolsk, he complained bitterly to one of his children's tutors that the "Yids" had incited the Russian people to Revolution.226 Nor was Nicholas's denunciation of The Protocols apparently a reflection of genuine feeling. Rather, it seems to have been made only for the sake of appearance, for the eyes of his Prime Minister, Peter Stolypin. For all of his words of agreement with Stolypin's report, he continued to believe in the truth of Nilus's work. When he went into Siberian exile, it was one of the books Nicholas took with him, and he frequently read aloud from it to his family. Both the Emperor and his wife regularly noted their progress through the book, which they continued reading while incarcerated at the Ipatiev House in Ekaterinburg.227 If Nicholas truly believed, as his comments to Stolypin seemed to indicate, that the work was a hoax, it is inexplicable that he should continue his study of it. On 27 March, 1918, for example, he noted in his diary that it made for "very timely reading."228 

Such evidence of virulent, pathological, and continued anti-Semitism on the part of Nicholas II does not sit easily with those who seek to rehabilitate his character and the devotees who regard him as a saint. One particular website, for example, goes so far as to claim, in complete contradiction to the historical record, that Nicholas "was never the rabid anti-Semite that many in Russia were at the time. He was certainly less so than most members of his family and he was castigated for this by them."229 

Such hopeful, yet naïve, revisionist views are common in the Romanov story. The personal drama of the last Russian Imperial Family, with greater concentration on their personalities and emphasis on their home life, filtered through a nostalgic lens and paved with wishful good intentions, has all but subsumed the reality of the political situation which helped contribute to their downfall. Yet the evidence of anti-Semitism is incontrovertible, a legacy of hatred and oppression inaugurated by Alexander III and brought to its logical, violent conclusion by his son and successor. The Empire's treatment of its Jewish subjects stands as a mark of shame which neither time, nor the alteration of fact, can lessen. 

Note: The bulk of this article is drawn from The Fate of the Romanovs by Greg King and Penny Wilson; see bibliography below for further details. 

Source Notes 

1. Baron, 211. 

2. Dubnow, 2:424. 

3. Ibid., 2:425. 

4. Baron, 210. 

5. Tarsaidze, 320. 

6. Ibid., 320-21. 

7. Greenberg, 64. 

8. Dubnow, 1:117. 

9. Sacher, 311. 

10. Dubnow, 1:125. 

11. Baron, 75. 

12. Levitats, 23. 

13. Tarsaidze, 321. 

14. Levitats, 43-44. 

15. Tarsaidze, 321. 

16. Stanislawski, 10. 

17. Tarsaidze, 321. 

18. Dubnow, 2:211. 

19. Levitats, 67. 

20. Tarsaidze, 321. 

21. Dawidowicz, 428. 

22. Ibid., 167. 

23. Quoted in Tisdall, 97-8. 

24. Charques, 47. 

25. Essed-Bey, 20. 

26. Zaionchkovsky, 269. 

27. Byrnes, 205. 

28. Ibid., 205. 

29. Levitats, 189. 

30. Frankel, 198. 

31. Charles Lowe, 207. 

32. Pares, 412. 

33. Yarmolinsky, 308. 

34. Laqueur, Russia, 96. 

35. Osman Bey, Enthuellungen, 210 passim, cited in Laqueur, Russia, 96. 

36. Laqueur, Russia, 96. 

37. Sachar, 318. 

38. Cited, Elbogen, 210. 

39. Dubnow, 2: 351. 

40. Elbogen, 210. 

41. Pares, 412. 

42. Elbogen, 211. 

43. Aronson, 43. 

44. Sacher, 318. 

45. Elbogen, 211. 

46. Sachar, 318. 

47. Aronson, 46. 

48. Dubnow, 2:360. 

49. Berk, 117. 

50. Elbogen, 212; see also Elbogen, Chapter 3, Part 2, Russia Under Alexander III, for extensive details on Alexander III's reign and the Jews; and Dubnow, 2:360-82.) 

51. Dubnow, 2:367. 

52. Aronson, 67. 

53. Pares, 412; Sachar, 318-19. 

54. Sachar, 318-19. 

55. Pares, 412. 

56. Aronson, 71. 

57. Dubnow, 2:373. 

58. Berk, 89. 

59. Johnson, 361-62. 

60. Lederhendler, 143. 

61. Frumkin, 19. 

62. Dubnow, 2:363. 

63. Tarsaidze, 323. 

64. Berk, 119. 

65. Elbogen, 212. 

66. Johnson, 363. 

67. Dubnow, 2:372. 

68. Byrnes, 207. 

69. Ibid., 207. 

70. Ular, 77. 

71. Berk, 156. 

72. Elbogen, 219. 

73. Ular, 76-77. 

74. Charques, 44. 

75. Berk, 158. 

76. Dubnow, 2:374. 

77. Greenberg, 2:46. 

78. Beizer, 284. 

79. Ibid., 286. 

80. Chernukha, 46-47. 

81. Sachar, 319. 

82. Gurock, 69. 

83. Sachar, 309. 

84. Bing, 84. 

85. Witte, 589; Ascher 2:256, quoting German Foreign Office archive in Bonn, in Warth, 132. 

86. Krymskii Vestnik, 14 September, 1917. 

87. Alexandra Feodorovna to Nicholas II, 6 April, 1916, in GARF, f. 601, op. 1, d. 1151. 

88. Löwe, 184. 

89. Frumkin, 231. 

90. Dubnow, 2:425. 

91. Ibid., 427. 

92. Johnson, 365; Sachar, 320. See also Judge, 22-179. 

93. Pares, 407. 

94. Grand Duchess Elizabeth Feodorovna to Nicholas II, 3 April, 1902, quoted in Maylunas and Mironenko, 213-14. 

95. Rogger, 243. 

96. Graves, 11. 

97. Elbogen, 393. 

98. Elbogen, 396-97; Oldenburg, 3:188-90. 

99. See Oldenburg, 3:189-90, note, for further information. 

100. Krasni Arkhiv, Volume II, 1922, 43. 

101. Elbogen, 383. 

102. Johnson, 365. 

103. Tarsaidze, 324. 

104. Pares, 413. 

105. Nicholas II, Diary, 28 July, 1904, in GARF, f. 601., op. 2, d. 119. 

106. Marie Pavlovna, 17. 

107. Elbogen, 513. 

108. Johnson, 310. 

109. Elbogen, 513. 

110. Johnson, 310-11. 

111. Bernstein, 43. 

112. Cohn, 11. 

113. Graves, 7; Johnson, 455; Laqueur, Russia, 96-97. 

114. Elbogen, 513; Graves, 8; Johnson, 455; Cohn, 36-40; Laqueur, Russia, 96-97. 

115. Cohn, 67. 

116. Bernstein, 56. 

117. Ibid., 58. 

118. Graves, 8. 

119. Laqueur, Russia, 97. 

120. Elbogen, 745-47, note; Johnson, 455. 

121. Laqueur, Russia, 95-96. 

122. Klier, Pogroms, 119. 

123. Ibid., 118. 

124. Fritsch, Die geheimen Ziele des Judentums, 47, cited in Laqueur, Russia, 95. 

125. Bernstein, 87. 

126. Cohn, 54. 

127. Laqueur, Russia, 95-96; John S. Curtiss, An Appraisal of the Protocols of Zion, 1942, pp. 70-80, cited, Elbogen, 732 note; Graves,8-9. 

128. Cohn, 103. 

129. Bernstein, 78. 

130. Laqueur, Russia, 95-97; see also John S. Curtiss, An Appraisal of the Protocols of Zion, 1942, pp. 70-80, cited, Elbogen, 732 note. 

131. Cohn, 65-66. 

132. Ibid., 66. 

133. Bernstein, 87. 

134. In Maylunas and Mironenko, 216-17. 

135. Laqueur, Russia, 99-100; Bernstein, 50. 

136. Bernstein, 57. 

137. Bernstein, 50; Cohn, 97-98; Poslednie Novosti, 1 May, 1921; La Tribune Juive, 14 May, 1921; and Schwartz-Bostunich, Juedischer Imperialismus, 359, cited in Laqueur, Russia, 100-101. 

138. Graves, 11-12. 

139. Bernstein, 57. 

140. Cohn, 52. 

141. Bernstein, 63. 

142. Cohn, 78. 

143. Bernstein, 51. 

144. V. L. Burtsev, Protokoly sionskikh mudretsov' dokazannia podlog, Paris, 1938, pages 105-06, cited in Warth, 158. 

145. Laqueur, Russia, 100-101; Cohn, 90-98; Elbogen, 397, 563; Bernstein, 50. Nicholas II's own copy of Nilus's book is now in the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. See Elbogen, 734 note. 

146. Graves, 11. 

147. Cohn, 75-76. 

148. Bernstein, 87. 

149. Elbogen, 513. 

150. Laqueur, Russia, 93. 

151. Cohn, 104. 

152. V. L. Burtsev, "Protokly sionskikh mudretsov" in Dokazannyu podlog, Paris 1938, page 106, quoted in Laqueur, Russia, 79; and Ananich and Ganelin, 72. 

153. Laqueur, Russia, 101; Bernstein, 56; Dubnow, 2:614. 

154. Elbogen, 394. 

155. Dubnow, 3:128. 

156. Judge, 126. 

157. Johnson, 365; Elbogen, 395; Sachar, 321. 

158. Judge, 134. 

159. Ibid., 136. 

160. Dubnow, 3:130. 

161. Sachar, 321; Elbogen, 395. 

162. Nicholas II to Marie Feodorovna, 27 October, 1905, in Bing,190-91. 

163. Pipes, Russian Revolution, 174. 

164. Klier, Pogroms, 123. 

165. Pares, 435. 

166. Elbogen, 389. 

167. Ibid., 393-94. 

168. Krasni Arkhiv, Volume V, 105; Kokovtsov, 166-68. 

169. Laqueur, Black Hundred, 23. 

170. See testimony of N. E. Markov of July 1917 in Shchegolev, Volume 6:175-265; Laqueur, Russia, 80. 

171. Frankel, 264. 

172. Rogger, 184. 

173. Laqueur, Russia, 83; Soyuz Russkovo Naroda, Edited by A. Chernovskii, Moscow, 1929, 411, cited in Laqueur, Russia, 80. 

174. Rogger, 198. 

175. Oldenburg, 2:178; Warth, 102; Laqueur, Russia, 83-84. 

176. Tager, 11-12. 

177. Rogger, 178. 

178. Laqueur, Russia, 83-84. 

179. Frumkin, 43. 

180. The New York Tribune, 11 March, 1906. 

181. Rogger, 205. 

182. Laqueur, Russia, 72. 

183. Oldenburg, 3:196-97. 

184. Ibid., 3:197. 

185. Miliukov, 214. 

186. Gurock, 85; Elbogen, 396. 

187. Johnson, 365. 

188. Tarsaidze, 326-27; see also Cohen, 176. 

189. Tarsaidze, 326-27. 

190. Ibid., 328. 

191. Laqueur, Russia, 92. 

192. Tager, 187. 

193. Shulgin, 102; Oldenburg, 3:131. 

194. Shulgin, 103; Oldenburg, 3:131-32. 

195. Shulgin, 103-05; Samuel, 26-7; Cohn, 90-98; Pipes, Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime, 255-57; Engelstein, 299-300; Rogger, 40-55. 

196. Oldenburg, 3:130; Shulgin, 105. 

197. Oldenburg, 1:132; Shulgin, 105-07. 

198. Shulgin, 107-08; Samuel, 55-59; Cohn, 125; Tager, 47. 

199. Rollins, in Oldenburg, 3:214 note. 

200. Shulgin, 110. 

201. Tager, 126. 

202. Shulgin, 110-112; Cohn, 108. 

203. Shulgin, 109. 

204. Samuel, 67; Cohn, 136. 

205. Miliukov, 285. 

206. Shulgin, 112. 

207. Oldenburg, 3:132. 

208. Miliukov, 285. 

209. Tager, 174. 

210. Oldenburg, 3:132. 

211. Spiridovich, 2:447. 

212. Nicholas II to Grand Duke Konstantin Konstantinovich, 14 September, 1912, in Maylunas and Mironenko, 353. 

213. Dubnow, 3:11. 

214. Ibid., 3:19. 

215. Aronson, 264. 

216. Dubnow, 3:22. 

217. Ibid., 3:32. 

218. Ibid., 3:33. 

219. Alexandra Feodorovna to Nicholas II, 13 April, 1915, in GARF, f. 601, op. 1, d. 1150. 

220. Alexandra Feodorovna to Nicholas II, 6 April, 1916, in GARF, f. 601, op. 1, d. 1151. 

221. Nicholas II to Alexandra Feodorovna, 7 April, 1916, in GARF, f. 640, op. 1, d. 110. 

222. Alexandra Feodorovna to Nicholas II, 20 September, 1916, in GARF, f. 601, op. 1, d. 1151. 

223. Baron, 197. 

224. Johnson, 264. 

225. Grand Duke Alexander Mikhailovich to Grand Duke Serge Mikhailovich, 14 February, 1917, in Maylunas and Mironenko, 532. 

226. Testimony of Klaudia Bittner to Nicholas Sokolov, 4 August, 1919, in Ross, 422. 

227. For further details, see King and Wilson, Chapter 1. 

228. Nicholas II, Diary, 27 March, 1918, in GARF, f. 601, op. 1, d.266. 

229. Bob Atchison, on The Alexander Palace Time Machine, at http://www.alexanderpalace.org/palace/newstudy.html) 

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