Investor Presentaiton

came to hold higher levels of literacy, education, and government participation compared to other nationalities. 38 After 1905, the next major change in Russian political and social life came with the outbreak of the First World War and then the following two revolutions in 1917. The unrest which had almost a decade earlier forced Tsar Nicholas II, at least temporarily, to relinquish some of his power to the Duma only intensified. Continued injustices from the Imperial government, and staggering defeats in World War I were only two of the varied and multiple issues which sparked the Tsar's ultimate downfall. The Provisional Government that followed Nicholas II's abdication of the throne in March 1917 also failed and lasted only months before the Bolsheviks secured its defeat in October. The Civil War that was fought primarily between the Bolshevik Red Army and the opposing monarchist White Army was furthermore divided based on how the two groups treated Jews; much of the public associated tsarism with anti-Semitism and the White Army was similarly associated because of how many detachments “murdered and robbed tens of thousands of Jewish civilians."39 During the Civil War the Bolsheviks realized that anti-Semitism and pogroms were primary tools of the Whites and in turn officially denounced anti-Semitism. 40 Jews were never identified as an enemy group by the Red Army because while some Jews fell into the "bourgeois" category, the Bolsheviks were more interested in class distinctions than ethnic ones. 41 38 Slezkine, The Jewish Century, 222-225. 39 Slezkine, The Jewish Century, 174. 40 Low, Soviet Jewry and Soviet Policy, 30. 41 Slezkine, The Jewish Century, 173-174. 16

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