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150 3 5 Concepts of Liberation In the first years of the twentieth century, contacts between Russia’s progressive nobles, zemstvo activists, socialists, and urban liberals continued to deepen. As diverse groups of imperial subjects joined together to demand political reform and the creation of a rule-of-law state that would offer all citizens equal rights, observers came to speak of them as constituting a unitary Liberation Movement.1 By 1905, liberationist activism had evolved into a full-fledged revolution that saw protesters of all social stations and ethnoconfessional backgrounds take to the empire’s streets demanding fundamental political reforms. In October of that year, liberationists achieved a remarkable victory, wresting substantial concessions, including guarantees of basic civil rights, from the autocracy. The 1905 revolution is typically seen as a momentous yet discrete event in Russian history—theculminationofpoliticalalliancesandpatternsofmobilizationthatbegan to emerge around the turn of the twentieth century.2 This chapter, which follows Kiev city politics through the tumultuous 1905 period, shows how the ongoing struggle for control of the city and its political institutions informed local political repertoires and cultures during the revolution. Ukrainophiles, non-Orthodox mercantile elites, and socialist activists—all of whom had articulated clear demands for political reform by the 1890s—unified under the Liberation Movement, joining the struggle for equal rights. Little Russian activists and the duma’s antiliberal populists led the local opposition to the movement, insisting that the creation of an equal rights regime would only reward and embolden the putative exploiters of the Rus′ people. Denouncing the liberationist platform as an attack on “truly Russian” values founded on local folk culture and Orthodox traditions, they insisted that popular liberation could occur only under the auspices of a strong state that prioritized the welfare of the East Slavs. As the two camps peddled divergent road maps to popular liberation and competed to win the loyalties of the urban masses, the Jewish question became the issue that activists on both sides used to rally their troops. Liberationists seized on the 1. See Galai, Liberation Movement. 2. The classic overview is Ascher, Revolution. Concepts of Liberation 151 discriminatory legal regimes that mandated where Jews could live and study as symbols of the political disenfranchisement that all tsarist subjects faced. The antiliberationist forces, by contrast, blamed the southwest’s cosmopolitan capitalist elite and its Jewish population for the suffering of its Orthodox majority; highlighting the centrality of the Jewish question in liberationist rhetoric, they presented the movement as a whole as a reflection of narrow Jewish national and economic interests.3 Over the course of 1905, both liberationists and their antiliberal opponents acquired a mass political following, convincing students, artisans, and workers to join their cause; the revolutionary upheaval produced new communities that unified diverse segments of the urban population behind well-defined ideological agendas. But the political activization of society also polarized the city and radicalized both political camps. By the second half of 1905, moderate liberationist leaders would struggle to retain control of their movement as radical activists advocated armed resistance against the state. Many opponents of the Liberation Movement, for their part, saw violence as a legitimate means of countering the unprecedented threats that they claimed the revolution had posed to the children of Rus′ and their traditions. In October 1905—at the precise moment that imperial society celebrated the concessions it had won from the autocracy—Kiev would descend into a maelstrom of violence that would see neighbors and coworkers attack one another. Although the events of 1905 demonstrated the organizational capacity of local society, then, they also revealed its self-destructive potential. Liberationist Forces Assemble By 1904, the critics of the imperial regime were growing more restive. Cells of SRs and SDs continued to proliferate rapidly in factories and on the campuses of St. Vladimir’s and the Polytechnical Institute; socialist activists had also grown more brazen in their outreach efforts, publishing regular broadsheets and pamphlets that depicted military forces, bureaucrats, and priests as murderers of struggling workers.4 Zionist and Bundist groups, which promised to resolve the economic and the national struggles of Jews, had made headway in neighborhoods with large Jewish populations.5 The Revolutionary Ukrainian Party (RUP)—the Ukrainian nationalist and socialist party founded by V. B. Antonovich’s son Dmytro—remained active in the countryside, and its members smuggled illegal literature from Austrian Galicia and called for a revolution to seize power from “landlords, the rich, bureaucrats, the government, the tsar.”6 3. Shulamit Volkov describes a...

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