Tsarist autocracy

This conference happened in the city of Petersburg in the year 1843.

The reason that the people, the rabbis, had gathered at this conference is because the Tsarist government at the time was trying to implement some major changes to secularize the Jewish education system.

that Tzemach Tzedek was so bent on stopping or rejecting these changes and keeping the status quo that he defied the government to the extent, to the degree that they felt it necessary to arrest them 22 times.

The minister, because everything that was being said at this conference was being closely monitored by the authorities.

I am Lama Yud.

But says Rav Asher Weiss, those three, those three, symbolize a different type of Tsarist that we've been through in our history.

We have the Aesop type of Tsarist, those who want to destroy us physically, right? The Hamans and the Hitler's Yamach Shammams and the Hamas, right? Then there are those that want to destroy us spiritually.

You could live, but spiritually, right? Lavan and Tsarist Russia and many other times, the Hanukkah story.

So those are the types of Tsarists.

That's the two types of Tsarists.

He says the third one is the Yosef one, the inner fighting amongst fellow Jews.

and the Sinas Chinam, Sinas Achim, these are the three types of sorrows that we have, and the third one is the one that's in our control, and that's the one that Rahman al-Islam was still suffering from, Ad Hayom Azeh, Ad Hayom Azeh.

But, I mean, he's also living in a profoundly dangerous time and place for someone of his background.

Tsarist Russia was notorious for its treatment of Jewish communities.

Oh, absolutely brutal.

And the Imperial Army in particular was essentially a death sentence, right?

An audit in mid-1919 confirmed Kolchak's government held approximately 650 million rubles in gold.

This was essentially the core of the former Tsarist bullion reserve, though this had been bolstered with further seizures of wealth along the way.

Controlling this gold also gave Kolchak's Siberian administration significant clout among Russia's allies.

The Admiral's possession of the imperial gold was a cornerstone of his authority and symbolically represented the gilded nest egg of continuity with the old Russian state.

New political groupings began to emerge in this more permissive political environment.

For example, Mikhail Bakunin founded modern collectivist anarchism in Russia in the mid-19th century, which theorized the complete dismantling of centralized state authority in response to the autocratic Tsarist regime.

Other groups such as the Emancipation of Labour Party and the Narodniks argued for socialism in Russia in the 1870s and 1880s, following the political ideas of the German political theorist Karl Marx.

Their ideas began to find increasing support in Russia from 1891 onwards, following a catastrophic famine that year which claimed the lives of approximately half a million Russians.

Later, in 1898, he joined the newly formed Russian Social Democratic Labour Party.

Following his arrest at Nikolaev in 1898, Trotsky had been sent to Moscow to face trial for his actions in organizing revolutionary groups in southern Ukraine.

After months of inaction in 1900, he was sentenced to four years hard labor in Siberia, the thinly populated vast region of eastern Russia which served as a penal colony for dissenters against the Tsarist regime.

His life in exile in the East was tempered somewhat by his marriage to Alexandra Sokolovskaya in the summer of 1899.

it got worse and worse and worse.

Of course, as we know, the Tsarist government at a later point, the Tsarist government, contrary to what people, we remember the Jewish memory of Tsarist Russia is all the end of the Tsarist era.

That first 40-ish years, approximately from 1780-ish, 1770, 1780, until 1820, 1825, which is a significant period of time.

That's largely forgotten, largely forgotten.

And if you look back at what people wrote at the time, you'll see that the Jewish people in Eastern Europe actually considered the Tsarist Russia an improvement over quasi-anarchical Poland, for the records.

I mean, the Polish Republic was quasi-anarchical, and that's the facts of life.

And they saw it largely, you know, that first period when the Russians, they did institute, it's true they instituted what's called the Pale of the Settlement, because Russians are xenophobic and anti-Semitic.

The normal citizens of Russia had no say in anything.

It was the Tsarist who ran everything.

And...

As a result of that, you had some people like Marx, like Lenin, some of these guys who preached a message, an economic message and a message of not only economic equality, but political equality, which was very well received.

So I point that out only as a warning for us in the United States before we say, well, that could never happen here.

You know, that's happened in other countries at other times.

I am sure that there were those among the French aristocracy and among the Tsarists and in England and, you know, the Shah's people who said it could never happen here.

And yet it did.