Двести лет вместе (1795-1995)

A history of Russian-Jewish relations since the late 18th century, based largely on the works of Jewish historians and journalists. Argues that Russia was always marked by a tolerant attitude toward her Jews. Contends that Russian policies regarding Jews in the 19th century were not antisemitic. As an isolationist, non-agricultural and non-productive minority, Jews constituted a problem for the Russian government, which the policies aimed to solve. The anti-Jewish measures and popular eruptions, although deplorable, had reasons behind them. The pogroms of 1881-82 were not incited by the government, and the authorities took measures to suppress them. After 1881, the tsarist policy against the Jews was motivated by the fact that Jews took the place of ethnic Russians in the middle and educated classes, as well as by disproportionate Jewish participation in the revolutionary movement. States that Jews played a crucial role in the revolution, having stimulated the anti-government and anti-traditionalist atmosphere in Russia; they actively supported the Soviet regime after 1917. The pogroms of the early 1900s and of 1918-20 were a reaction to that. In the 1920s-30s, popular antisemitism in the USSR was nourished by Jewish overrepresentation in the Soviet apparatus, including in the NKVD. Stalin's antisemitic policies began after 1947, and boosted the rise of Jewish national sentiments among Soviet Jews.