The story of Jews in the Russian Empire

My thanks to Tatyana Maximova for alerting me to this film newly available on Youtube. It is the first in a trilogy written and presented by the Russian journalist and TV host Leonid Parfenov telling the story of the Jewish people in the Russian Empire.

Parfenov, well-known in Russia for his work in TV news and documentaries and also former editor-in-chief of the Russian edition of Newsweek, leads us from the very earliest known evidence of Jews in Russia, in the tolerant society of medieval Kievan Rus, through to the partitions of Poland, when the Jewish lands became part of the Russian Empire, making Russia the country with the largest population of Jews (“The Jews did not come to Russia, it was Russia that came to the Jews”).

Through a mixture of contemporary filming combined with re-enactments, some wonderful old footage and Harry-Potteresque moving photographs, Parfenov moves from the traditional life of the shtetl to document the lives of notable Jews who entered wider Russian society – famous bankers, scientists and artists reshaping their attitude to the rites of their ancestry.

He recounts some wonderful anecdotes. I loved the story of the Odessa Commercial School, founded by a Jewish convert, which had a 50% quota for Jewish students, rather than the usual 5% that existed in Russian schools. But to enrol you had to “bring your own Russian with you” – Jewish parents would persuade a Russian family to allow their child to attend the school too and pay for both children, for “otherwise why would a Russian kid go there?”

The film moves on to tell how the Russian word “pogrom” entered foreign lexicons after the waves of violence that rocked Jewish communities following the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881, and the first wave of Jewish emigration, when New York was thought to be “like Odessa but without the Tsar and Cossacks”.

The notorious case of Mendl Beilis, the Jew accused in 1911 of murdering a 12-year old Christian boy to use his blood in Passover rituals, is recounted in some detail. Even though Beilis was eventually acquitted – against the will of the authorities – the case shocked both the country and the world, for blood libel trials had been impossible elsewhere in Europe for more than 100 years. But in Russia, newspapers that criticised the prosecution were fined and sometimes entire print runs were confiscated.

The film ends with the 1917 revolution – and the involvement of Jews such as Trotsky and Zinoviev in the leading echelons of the Bolshevik party. Zinoviev had spent a month in hiding on the shores of Lake Razliv with Lenin after an armed demonstration turned violent in July 1917, both of them seeking to avoid arrest. Once Zinoviev was declared an enemy of the people and shot in 1936, the experience he shared with Lenin was airbrushed from history, and for 50 years, it was officially considered that that Lenin was alone in Razliv.
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The next two films of the trilogy covering the more recent history of Russian Jews and will be released in May.