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Why the Jews in the Russian Empire were dissatisfied? As distinct from all other non-Russian
peoples within the borders of the Russian state, the Jews could live only in the governorates
within the so-called Pale; the right to settle temporarily or permanently outside these borders
was limited to certain groups of the Jewish population.
The shortsightedness of the Romanovs (granddad Alexander II, son Alexander III and grandson
Nicholas II) buried the regime: first, the Russian public regarded the Pale as an instrument of
subjugation of the Jews and an arbitrary treatment of this population group bred protest senti-
ments in Russian society; second, the Jewish population inside the Pale was an inexhaustible
source of revolutionaries, Zionists and opposition of all hues. In fact, the leading radical political
parties that challenged czarism appeared within the Pale, including the Bund (Vilno, 1897) and
the RDLP (Minsk, 1898).
AT THE TURN of the twentieth century, the Jewish question acquired political dimensions and
became a factor of domestic policies in many countries; anti-Semitic manifestations swept coun-
tries and continents.
The Russian emperor deliberately avoided any opportunity to play the anti-Semitic card. Having
discussed the Report on the Situation in the Country after the Revolutionary Events of 1905-
1907, the government informed the emperor that the armed uprisings in both capitals, big cities
and industrial centers had been stirred up by Jewish revolutionaries who had also set up organs
of Soviet power. Nicholas II, however, did not instruct the law and order bodies to single out
Jewish cases for separate proceedings.
It should be said that the Romanovs failed to learn from failure of Catherine II's project of set-
tling Jews in Russia and organizing their lives. Until the last day of the Russian Empire, the ruling
dynasty remained riveted to her instructions and her assessments of the Russian Jews as a social
stratum. This explains why the autocrats staked in their legislative efforts on the "Jewish trade
and industrial class," the visible part of the iceberg of the Jewish community.
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