Vladimir Jabotinsky's Russian Years, 1900-1925. Brian J. Horowitz

      THE 1905 REVOLUTION PRODUCED A GROWTH SPURT IN Jabotinsky. He developed as a Zionist theorist, a thinker on nationalism, and a leader in the movement. He rightfully calculated that the revolution could help him promote his role as a propagandist and also a devoted activist, and he worked hard on his self-presentation to attain a new status in the eyes of Russian Zionists and, without exaggerating, Russian politicians too. The upheaval in the country was breaking down ossified hierarchies and advancing new leaders. Chlenov stated, “Zionism has ceased being a hobby, fashion, and has become a question of life, shapes one’s worldview.”¹

      In later days, Jabotinsky described himself as part of the generation shaped by the Revolution of 1905.² Known as “Russia’s first revolution,” it began as a struggle for political reform among liberals, but then passed into the hands of radicals. Russia’s defeat in the 1904 Russo-Japanese War had shaken the entire system and elicited calls for change that intensified after Bloody Sunday in January 1905.³ The revolution was extinguished thanks mainly to the tsar’s concession in October 1905, his Manifesto on the Improvement of the State Order, in which he outlined political reforms, including elections to a parliament, dubbed the State Duma, and the rights to political assembly and public expression without censorship.⁴ Some of these rights were ignored in reality and were partially reversed in 1907.

      The year 1905 offered unexpected opportunities for the establishment of democratic politics generally and Jewish politics in particular. For decades, the government had resisted political change. It jailed revolutionaries and battled liberals; anyone who wanted change was targeted as an enemy. The government of Nicholas II had little trust in society; it censored the press and expected submission from the people.⁵ Regarding Jews, the government continued, and at times intensified, discriminatory decrees. To deal with Jews, government officials were comfortable with the traditional institution of Jewish intercession (Shtadlanut)—wealthy Jews made private requests and deals with government officials on behalf of the Jewish community.⁶

      However, in the years before 1905, a new kind of politics was emerging, led by the intelligentsia. Lawyers tried to use trials as public forums to show the injustice of the current system and embarrass the government.⁷ Scholars and writers had long used cryptic, or “Aesopian,” language to express their discontent. Gradually a new politics broke with the past: instead of private requests or trading favors, a system of pressure politics was taking shape. The revolutionary parties and public opinion began to matter more. Although the revolution failed to attain all its goals, the October Manifesto extended the franchise (voting) to Jews, and that concession triggered legal Jewish political activism across a broad spectrum. In 1906, elections to the First Duma took place.

      The revolution transformed people. Jabotinsky followed the same emotional arc as many other Russians: ecstasy in the spring of 1905, cautious hope after the publication of the tsar’s manifesto in October, and distrust after the dispersal of the First Duma in June 1906. Like other Jews, Jabotinsky was appalled by the anti-Jewish pogroms, including a major one in his native Odessa, in October 1905. These were particularly painful: hundreds were killed; Jews were singled out for violence; the revolution, which had promised to unify the multiethnic population, had failed to do so. In October 1905 especially, it appeared to many Jews that the revolutionaries would accept a bargain with the government: liberation for Russians, but the denial of rights for others.

      The revolution made an indelible impression on Jabotinsky because it showed that reactionary forces, while powerful, would not necessarily win. The possibility of a different Russia, characterized by freedom, equality, democracy, and unity between Russians and the country’s national minorities, had emerged, and now that it had emerged, it would be hard to put the genie back in the bottle.⁸

      In Story of My Life, Jabotinsky poetically describes the general attitude at the time. “Youth was not only inside us—it was in the air; the youth of the entire country, the youth of the whole of Europe. Such periods in the history of the world do not occur often—periods when many peoples quiver with hopeful expectancy, like a young boy waiting for his girl. Such was the case for Europe before the year 1848, as it was also at the beginning of the twentieth century, that deceitful century that frustrated so many of our hopes.”⁹ Now comes his self-conscious confession:

      To say that we were naïve then, without experience, that we believed in easy and cheap progress—like an instantaneous leap from darkness to light—would be incorrect. We had already witnessed murder on the cusp of the holiday [the October pogroms of 1905], and especially then, precisely that winter, we already knew that all the reactionary elements were shaping their ranks into a huge, mighty, and powerful army. But in spite of all these facts, faith, the charm of the nineteenth century, had not died in our hearts. We were certain in our belief in abstract principles, in sacred slogans—freedom, fraternity, justice—and despite everything, we were certain that the day of their triumph had come and would overcome all obstacles.¹⁰

      It is important to remember that Jews were a small minority in Russia, just 4 percent of the population; despite being overrepresented in the revolutionary movement, they were still only minor partners. Although Zionist revolutionary groups were emerging at this time, most Zionists, especially non-Marxists, aligned themselves with Russian liberals.¹¹ They viewed themselves as struggling for essential rights that could be attained only through the transformation of the tsarist regime from a monarchy with limitless powers to a government restrained by a constitution. Therefore, although previously Zionists tended to regard Jewish members of the Kadet (Constitutional Democratic) party as “assimilators” (a word they bandied about to disparage their opponents), now there was reconciliation.¹² Zionists realized that, to have any impact, they would need allies, and liberals were the best they could find, since the Kadets supported equal rights for Jews. In fact, they supported equal rights for all the national minorities in Russia.

      During the revolution not only the Zionists but all the Jewish political organizations to the right of the Bund joined liberal Russia. Viktor Kel’ner has written, “By the beginning of the new century a considerable part of the Jewish intelligentsia fully associated itself with the general Russian liberal movement. They saw the fate of the Jews of Russia only through the prism of their active, shared participation in the political struggle with autocracy.”¹³

      During