File: screenshot_2026-04-03_211512.png (103 KB, 288x463)

103 KB PNG

>>18416408
Page 200-201
It would be misleading, however, to describe the Jewish role in
Narodnaia Volia merely in terms of 'secondary functions', and to claim
moreover, as Tscherikower has done, that this role was a modest one (a
besheydene) since Jews were ' located basically between the leaders of the
party and the direct perpetrators of terrorist acts'. 'The strength of the
Jewish revolutionary', he argues, 'lay altogether in different spheres: he
was a pioneer of party-building, a great practitioner and technician of
revolution. '40 Much of this is true of course. But, as such, his role was
neither 'modest' nor always 'secondary'. As intermediaries between the
party's Executive Committee and its rank and file, the Jewish
Narodovoltsy occupied an important position in the propagation and
organization of political terrorism. Indicative of their high profile in
Narodnaia Volia is also the fact that they were well represented in the
higher echelons of the party. Of the thirty-one members of the Executive
Committee prior to 1 March 1881, two (or perhaps even three, that is,
Zundelevich, Zlatopolskii, and Tellalov) were Jewish. Equally promi-
nent was their share in the second highest rank of the party hierarchy. In
Helfman, Iokhelson, Fridenson, and Aronchik they supplied four, or
about 16 per cent of the Committee's 'principal agents'. Perhaps
Goldenberg should also be added to this latter category, although his
status has never been satisfactorily explained.41 Evidently, he and all the
other Jews who were associated with the Executive Committee were also
closely linked with the leading councils of the party.

>>18416412
In this relationship
they fulfilled not only an intermediary technical function between the
leadership and the terrorists in the field, but were themselves active and,
at times, influential members of the former. Actually, only Leizer
Tsukerman and Lev Zlatopolskii fit the type of Jewish Narodovolets
who, in Tscherikower's opinion, played a 'modest technical role'. As for
the others, they were indeed 'great practitioners and technicians' of the
revolutionary underground whose role however extended far beyond
mere secondary functions in the perpetration of Narodnaia Volia's
terrorism.
Though highly prejudiced in its assertion that Jews, along with Poles,
were the mainspring of the revolution, the tsarist government obviously
had a case in blaming' Jewish nihilists' for the wave of terrorism that had
rocked the ship of state since 1878-79 and even claimed its captain in
1881. In some ways, and in spite of their exaggerations, its officials had a
more accurate appreciation of the role of Jews in the terrorist movement
than the revolutionaries themselves or historians who joined them in
down-playing the Jewish contribution. Unfortunately, the facts of this
contribution were readily absorbed into an already existing framework of
traditional anti-Jewish prejudices. This, in turn, produced a new strain
of antisemitism that had terrible consequences for the Jews of Russia.
However, the alchemy of mixing fact and prejudice had already begun in
the early 1870s before it yielded a convenient product for popular
consumption in the aftermath of Alexander IPs assassination.

>>18416408
I hope so, Narodnaya Volya was incredibly based.