Fear and Loathing in the Russian Empire

Abstract

The Russian empire was remarkably fertile ground for hostility towards Jews and Muslims. The Russian tsars had ruled Muslims since the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and Jews from the late eighteenth century. However, tsarist elites only came to see both groups as major challenges to the imperial order in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when Muslims and Jews became stock figures in an ominous pantheon of ethnic and religious groups that seemed to pose a threat to the imperial political order. The shared story of how they came to inhabit analogous, yet unique, positions in the anxious imaginations of Russian elites is the focus of this chapter.