MODERN RUSSIAN HISTORIOGRAPHY ABOUT THE PLACE AND ROLE OF THE JEWS IN REVOLUTIONARY RUSSIA IN THE RUSSIAN EMPIRE

Abstract

More than a hundred years have passed since the largest continental empire in the world has fallen. The Russian Revolution of 1917, which stopped three hundred-year rule of the Romanov dynasty, ripened in the depths of the Russian revolutionary movement, the problems of the formation and development of which are of vital interest to contemporary researchers. A significant participation of the Jews in the history of the revolutionary movement in the Russian Empire is considered one of the understudied problems, although the Jews together with the Poles, Armenians and Latvians tried to break the autocratic regime at the beginning of the 20th century.Over the past quarter of the century the representatives of contemporary Russian historiography have managed to catch up with the study of those problems of the historical past, which, in the Soviet times, were considered ideologically incorrect themes in the development of the Soviet historical science.The main idea of the article is to determine the priority directions and the most urgent problems in contemporary Russian historiography of the participation of the Jews in the revolutionary movement in the Russian Empire, on the basis of a critical analysis of the results of the latest research of the Russian historians.The notion of “revolutionary movement in the Russian Empire” is understood by the author as the development of all known at that time all-Russian revolutionary organizations that were distinguished by their activity, especially at the beginning of the 20th century, which aimed at overthrowing autocracy.It is proved that among contemporary Russian historians who studied the processes of formation and development of the revolutionary movement in Russia, only a small group of them paid appropriate attention to the active participation of the Jews in the activities of the Russian revolutionary organizations.The scientific works of O. V. Budnitsky, B. M. Mironov, Yu.V. Anisina, Yu. V. Varfolomeyev and others should be noted among such researchers, who were convinced that the Jews played an important, though not a key role in the development of the revolutionary movement in the Russian Empire.The Russian researchers did not deny the fact that the Jews were active participants in both Russian revolutions in 1905 and 1917, which by their nature were not exclusively “Jewish”. Accordingly, the Russian revolutionary movement had its own historical logic of development. Priority directions in contemporary Russian historiography were the problems of determining the number of the Jews in the leading revolutionary groups and parties, the attitude of the Russian and Jewish revolutionary figures towards the Jewish pogroms, finding out the reasons that pushed the Jews into the ranks of the Russian revolutionary movement, as well as analyzing their role in the revolutionary processes in general.At the same time, little attention was paid to the problems of personal motivation of the Jewish revolutionaries. In the history of the revolutionary movement in the Russian Empire there is almost underestimated, rather complex phenomenon as a revolutionary nature of the Jews, the emergence of which, from our point of view, was associated with certain socio-cultural changes within the Jewish ethnic group on the one hand, but on the other hand, was the consequence of the exacerbation of the Jewish question in the Russian Empire.