Author Topic: Nicholas II and Anti-Semitism.  (Read 151144 times)

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Offline grandduchessella

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Re: Nicholas II and Anti-Semitism.
« Reply #45 on: June 14, 2006, 10:17:13 AM »
That's okay--I never really came to a lot of these threads before but try to at least drop in more of them now. Like I said, I'm enjoying the discussion as I usually don't study the more political aspects--there's so much to keep track of!
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Nathalie

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Re: Nicholas II and Anti-Semitism.
« Reply #46 on: June 14, 2006, 10:49:34 AM »
Well, Nicholas was the head of the state-therefor, like it or not, he was indeed responsible for many things happened during his reign. And Russia was not that classical  democracy...he could had easily stopped pogroms, if he'd wanted. He was master of life and death.
Yet he didn't.
You are right, that we shouldn't take out a certain historical event from its specific historical time and context, but then again, Nicholas and Alexandra werent a muzhik couple from the middle of Siberia, knowing nothing, beleiving blidnly what the popa said, they were western-educated people, lived or visited other countries such as England or france, where there was one thing not liking Jews, that happens even nowadays at some people, but at least Nicholas must had known, Denmark or England didn't organize pogroms and other bad things.

Then again I wonder about Radzinsky's book, how did he speak about a Jewess being the first love of Nicholas, ignoring Toria and others...never read about this anywhere else, where did he get that info?... :-?

David_Pritchard

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Re: Nicholas II and Anti-Semitism.
« Reply #47 on: June 14, 2006, 01:39:03 PM »
The reading of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion by Nikolai II to his children comes as a real surprise to me. A shock indeed, rather like finding out that Hitler believed that a Communist Pole burnt down the Reichstag or that Polish troops fired first in 1939 and started World War II. I find it disturbing that the leader of an autocratic regime was unaware of the falsehoods of the propaganda of his own secret police. My opinion of Nikolai II dops even more.

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Offline RichC

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Re: Nicholas II and Anti-Semitism.
« Reply #48 on: June 14, 2006, 06:30:14 PM »
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The reading of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion by Nikolai II to his children comes as a real surprise to me. A shock indeed, rather like finding out that Hitler believed that a Communist Pole burnt down the Reichstag or that Polish troops fired first in 1939 and started World War II. I find it disturbing that the leader of an autocratic regime was unaware of the falsehoods of the propaganda of his own secret police. My opinion of Nikolai II dops even more.

David

This is one of the mysteries.  We know what Nicholas and Alexandra wrote in their diaries in 1918, but there is evidence from other sources that Stolypin exposed the Protocols in 1905 as a faked document created by the Tsarist secret police.  When Nicholas learned of this he repudiated the Protocols.  If that's true, why suddenly read it again many years later??


Offline Ortino

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Re: Nicholas II and Anti-Semitism.
« Reply #49 on: June 14, 2006, 06:45:50 PM »
Quote
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The reading of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion by Nikolai II to his children comes as a real surprise to me. A shock indeed, rather like finding out that Hitler believed that a Communist Pole burnt down the Reichstag or that Polish troops fired first in 1939 and started World War II. I find it disturbing that the leader of an autocratic regime was unaware of the falsehoods of the propaganda of his own secret police. My opinion of Nikolai II dops even more.

David

This is one of the mysteries.  We know what Nicholas and Alexandra wrote in their diaries in 1918, but there is evidence from other sources that Stolypin exposed the Protocols in 1905 as a faked document created by the Tsarist secret police.  When Nicholas learned of this he repudiated the Protocols.  If that's true, why suddenly read it again many years later??


From what I understand, a full version of Protocols was published in the appendix of Nilius' The Great and Small. Perhaps he was interested in the larger book and Protocols was simply included in it. Stolypin did expose the book as a fraud in 1905, but I believe that the details of the investigation were not made public in order to protect Rachkovsky and his agents.  

Quote
Then again I wonder about Radzinsky's book, how did he speak about a Jewess being the first love of Nicholas, ignoring Toria and others...never read about this anywhere else, where did he get that info?...

The term "Jewess" is an offensive one, so please don't use it. "Jew" or "Jewish girl" is sufficient. Radzinky's mentions that there was a rumor circulating in St. Petersburg that Nicholas had fallen in love with a Jewish girl, but that Alexander III sent her and her entire household away. I've never heard this before either, and frankly it doesn't sound plausible.
« Last Edit: December 31, 1969, 06:00:00 PM by Ortino »

Janet_W.

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Re: Nicholas II and Anti-Semitism.
« Reply #50 on: June 14, 2006, 07:01:31 PM »
And yet in a letter from Toblosk his oldest daughter Olga writes that "Father asks to . . . remember that the evil which is now in the world will become yet more powerful, and that it is not evil which conquers evil, but only love . . . "

Historians have often dismissed Nicholas as a dull fellow but I find him rather complex. Beneath the handsome yet bland exterior I think he was far more complicated than just about anyone--even his closest  family members--were aware. (Alexandra, of course, and possibly his eldest daughter being the exceptions.) To apply a more modern term, he was certainly "button down" . . . the sort of person a corporation would gladly hire. He learned the rules and followed them, all the while displaying a convivial hail-fellow-well-met personality. Yet he was expected to lead, and that had to have been excruciatingly difficult for him.

After loosing his occupation and home, plus being humiliated and seeing his family and associates likewise humiliated . . . well, on the surface he presented a calm, go-with-the-flow attitude. But inside it must have cut to the very depth of his soul.

When we are wounded by exterior forces we question what we could have done better but also--a very human tendency--place blame on others. In recent months I've heard vociferous commentary--much of it accusatory--regarding "illegal immigrants and what they do to us." Decades ago I heard similar charges leveled against "uppity black people." So when someone fitting the description of the group you dislike/fear is found to be breaking the law and/or committing a heinous act, it's very easy to get on the bandwagon about EVERYONE who belongs to that ethnic/racial/religious/whatever group.

No doubt about it, the revolution was fueled by, among other people, Jews. But there were also non-Jewish revolutionaires (Lenin, to begin with) as well as Jewish people who did not identify or wish to be associated with the movement. It would be easy, though, given his youthful inculcation plus his rarified situation for Nicholas to feel that anarchist=Jew and Jew=anarchist.  

We don't know what tone and attitude Nicholas took while reading this book to his children. Perhaps it was similar to the manner in which my father used to make sure I was aware that such-and-such a crime had been committed by a Negro. (Funny, he never pointed out crimes committed by middle class white guys like himself . . . and there were, to be sure, plenty of those as well!) Or, perhaps Nicholas was just throwing it out to them for their commentary. So, was he taking the attitude of a high school civics teacher, exposing his children to an opinion . . . or trying to ingrain a philosophy?

Another thought: What looks and sounds reasonable to us now may seem laughable, grieviously stupid, highly embarrassing, or even worse several decades from now. I know of a number of people, now in their seventies, who would deny, up and down, that they had ever made inflamatory and enormously hostile comments about racial parity. But guess what . . . they did.


David_Pritchard

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Re: Nicholas II and Anti-Semitism.
« Reply #51 on: June 14, 2006, 07:23:48 PM »
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[The term "Jewess" is an offensive one, so please don't use it. "Jew" or "Jewish girl" is sufficient.

[ch1054][ch1088][ch1090][ch1080][ch1085][ch1086],

The word Jewess is offensive when it is used with a derogatory modifier, otherwise it is better described as an outdated word that has fallen from common parlance. Most words of this type have fallen into disuse such as laundress, mistress, negress (a word that now has only offensive intent), etc. I have even noticed that the word actress is slowly being replaced by actor.

David

Offline Tsarfan

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Re: Nicholas II and Anti-Semitism.
« Reply #52 on: June 14, 2006, 09:08:09 PM »
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This is one of the mysteries.  We know what Nicholas and Alexandra wrote in their diaries in 1918, but there is evidence from other sources that Stolypin exposed the Protocols in 1905 as a faked document created by the Tsarist secret police.  When Nicholas learned of this he repudiated the Protocols.  If that's true, why suddenly read it again many years later??

There is evidence that Nicholas' view of Jews ranged from hostility to some level of tolerance and even sympathy, especially during WW I.  However, it rose to a torrent of vitriol during the period around the Revolution of 1905.  There are documented instances of his blaming the revolution explicitly  -- and almost exclusively -- on the Jews, and it was during this period that he wrote his mother an absolutely vicious letter, essentially calling the Jews "Christ killers" and saying that he could barely contain his fury at their perversities.

Even as his ill-advised war with Japan exposed the bankruptcy of Russian foreign and military policy and the corruption of the bureaucracy and supply services, Nicholas nursed the fantasy that everything in his empire was just as the masses of good Russians wanted it . . . if only the Jewish rabble-rousers could be silenced.

I suspect this same scenario was at play in 1918 at Tobolsk.  It was difficult for Nicholas to face the fact that much of the Romanov clan had become suicidally disgusted with his rule, that Rasputin had turned the imperial family into a laughing stock, that millions of ill-equipped and poorly-led soldiers had deserted the field, that supply lines into the cities and to the battelefields had broken down due to graft and incompetence, and that his own ministers were fed up with his remoteness and indecision in the critical weeks before the February 1917 Revolution.  Instead, there on the shelf sat a book that explained it all as the inevitable outcome of a Jewish conspiracy allowed to fester and seize control of events.  Even knowing the work to have been a fabrication of his own secret police and put into circulation by his own Ministry of the Interior, it must have delivered a message Nicholas very, very much needed to hear on a deep psychological level.  Maybe the words themselves were written by his own secret police . . . but that did not necessarily make the message untrue.  Even forgers attempt to capture something real.

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Re: Nicholas II and Anti-Semitism.
« Reply #53 on: June 15, 2006, 09:37:02 AM »
I think much of Nicholas' attitude could be more understandable to modern readers if they substitute "homosexual" for Jew and look at the Republican party.  Nicholas was well aware that the vast majority of his power base, the Cossacks, Military high command, local police and gendarmes and his own family were rabidly Anti-Semitic.

Prince Vladimir Petrovich Metschersky was one of Nicholas' closest friends and advisors. Nicholas II considered him almost as a father. The Prince knowing his was old, ill and dying finally felt compelled to address the one subject which had always been "off limits" with the Emperor, in what was to be their final meeting, as Metschersky died shortly afterward:

"You don't know, my friend, how difficult it was to speak to the Emperor…Even thinking about that reception is painful for me...I spoke about the Jewish question. The Emperor listened to me without interrupting me and with great attention.  From time to time, in his kind face, I saw the shadow of displeasure.  I did everything I could to force him to respond to me.  But he kept silent.  Knowing well his intelligence, the fineness of his spirit, I was wounded that he did not want to face the evidence.  When I had finished with the Jewish question, the Emperor thought for several minutes, looked me fixed in the eyes and slowly smiled as if he wanted to soften his response, said to me: 'Excuse me, my old friend, but I am not in agreement with you.  I thank you very much for the advice which you have given me and which has been dictated by your devotion to me, by the love for our Mother Russia, but…you know that it is often that I do not wish to follow your advice.  I must take into consideration many other circumstances which you do not know about, which escape your attention…My responsibility towards Russia is so great that I do not have the right to consider a question of such great importance to the State on just one side alone, although I should find it personally desireable. You do not know all of these circumstances which I do, which I do not have the right to ignore, and which, quite to the contrary, I must take into consideration…"

Nathalie

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Re: Nicholas II and Anti-Semitism.
« Reply #54 on: June 15, 2006, 10:44:09 AM »
The term "Jewess" is an offensive one, so please don't use it. "Jew" or "Jewish girl" is sufficient. Radzinky's mentions that there was a rumor circulating in St. Petersburg that Nicholas had fallen in love with a Jewish girl, but that Alexander III sent her and her entire household away. I've never heard this before either, and frankly it doesn't sound plausible.

Oh, thanks. I always said Jewess, never knew it was a bad form, sorry, my mother tongue is not English..But I saw this term in a magazine, called "The American Jewess," what describes itself as " the only magazine in the world devoted to the interests of Jewish women." So I was like fine..maybe it was in the past.
Also I read Radzinsky's book in translation and perhaps it is a mistake of the translator, but the story is not a hearsay in his interpretation but a fact. I hope its ony mistranslation, not the author's mistake.

thanks for correction.:)

No doubt about it, the revolution was fueled by, among other people, Jews. But there were also non-Jewish revolutionaires (Lenin, to begin with)

As far as I know, Lenin was coming from a Jewish family that reverted to Christianity-if thats matter.
Well...If i had been a Jew back in those days, being threated as Jews were threated during the Tzars, I guess its natural, they were among the opposition, why would they love the regime? I think their step was just a reply for the rules and alws against them, natural.
« Last Edit: December 31, 1969, 06:00:00 PM by Nathalie »

Offline Ortino

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Re: Nicholas II and Anti-Semitism.
« Reply #55 on: June 15, 2006, 12:45:25 PM »
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As far as I know, Lenin was coming from a Jewish family that reverted to Christianity-if thats matter.
Well...If i had been a Jew back in those days, being threated as Jews were threated during the Tzars, I guess its natural, they were among the opposition, why would they love the regime? I think their step was just a reply for the rules and alws against them, natural

Lenin's maternal grandfather was Jewish and later converted to Christianity. It is also said that his wife was Jewish and spoke Yiddish at home. Trotsky was also Jewish, changing his name from Lev Bronstein to Leon Trotsky in 1902. It shouldn't be surprising that many of the revolutionary leaders were Jewish--their treatment in Tsarist Russia was less than kind and therefore their response not wholly unexpected.
« Last Edit: December 31, 1969, 06:00:00 PM by Ortino »

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Re: Nicholas II and Anti-Semitism.
« Reply #56 on: June 15, 2006, 02:11:59 PM »
Every single Jew in Russia could have united in a rebellion against the tsar, and the monarchy would have held if it had retained the confidence of the ruling classes, the military, and the Orthodox peasant masses.

One should remember that the first attempt to dismantle autocracy in Russia was the Decembrist uprising of 1825, led by aristocratic young officers.  Its dreams of a constitutional government for Russia had been born not of Jewish revolutionary propaganda, but of exposure to the decidedly-non-Jewish Englightenment ideals of western Europe.  As Nicholas I consolidated his rule in part by creating a secret police, this revolutionary sentiment was driven underground, but its embers did not die out.

The monarchy fell because of a prolonged series of missteps which several generations of revolutionaries -- Jew and gentile alike -- exploited but did not create.

Alexander III and Nicholas II built a treaty structure that put Russia on a collision course with Germany.  Their pan-Slavism deliberately heightened tensions in the powderkeg they knew the Balkans to be.  The disastrously-conceived and politically-unnecessary Japanese war revealed Russia as a second-rate military power trying to play in the big leagues.  Knowing that the peasant craving for land was building to an eventual explosion, Nicholas gave only half-hearted support to the land reforms attempted first by Witte and more seriously by Stolypin.  Having barely survived an assault on the throne in 1905, Nicholas set out to undermine the new representative government instead of trying to find a working accord with it.  Warnings from within the imperial family that Nicholas was becoming dangerously isolated and that Rasputin was undermining the reputation of the tsar's immediate family went unheeded or forcefully rejected.  Pleas from his ministers not to become personally associated with the disasters at the front in 1915-1916 were brushed aside.  Knowing his wife was popularly perceived to be a German spy, Nicholas left these ministers to report to her during his prolonged -- and largely ineffective -- stints at Stavka.  And, finally, the corruption and incompetence of the transport system left the industrial populations of his cities and his troops at the front without food and fuel.

The Bolshevik (or, if you prefer, the "Jewish") revolution unseated a provisional government.  Lenin, that scion of a converted Jewish family, remained in Switzerland until April of 1917, having despaired of any chance of unseating the Romanovs.

Nicholas was not overthrown by Jews or anyone else.  His military and civilian leaders simply walked away from him in frustration and disgust and found someone else to follow.

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Re: Nicholas II and Anti-Semitism.
« Reply #57 on: June 16, 2006, 07:20:03 PM »
"Redamber" was just another alias of the long banned Rskkiya and the other sock puppet names she used. Her posts and this fake user name are removed.

Offline grandduchessella

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Re: Nicholas II and Anti-Semitism.
« Reply #58 on: June 19, 2006, 11:49:48 PM »
Referring back to Spiridovitch, has anyone heard of this book?

General Spiridovich (Head of Czar's security) -- "Great War and February Revolution" Volume II (1916). Book includes many rare photos of Nicholas II, members of Czar's family, Grand Dukes and Duchesses, Generals and Ministers. This is a H/C book, New York, 1960. 240 pp. Book in Russian

It's up on ebay right now.
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ferngully

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Re: Nicholas II and Anti-Semitism.
« Reply #59 on: June 21, 2006, 07:43:43 AM »
Quote
The term "Jewess" is an offensive one, so please don't use it. "Jew" or "Jewish girl" is sufficient. Radzinky's mentions that there was a rumor circulating in St. Petersburg that Nicholas had fallen in love with a Jewish girl, but that Alexander III sent her and her entire household away. I've never heard this before either, and frankly it doesn't sound plausible.

actually its now used as a term of pride, made famous as far as i know, by golda meir
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