April 2, 1917
The Russian Provisional Government abolished the Pale of Settlement for Jews. Six million people received rights equal to other citizens.
We are no longer bound by the line,
We are free on Russian soil,
And now with garlic sausage
We can trade even in the Kremlin
(poem from a postcard, 1917)
The term "Pale of Settlement" appeared back in the Nicholas I and marked the boundary of the Jewish diaspora. However, the Provisional Government's decree made no mention of it (nor of the word "Jews"). Officially, the document was titled "On the Abolition of Religious and National Restrictions." But everyone understood what it was referring to.
By that time, more than half of all the Jews on the planet lived in Russia – about 6 million. They had been limited in their rights since Catherine II, when, after the partition of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, they found themselves on the territory of the Russian Empire and became its subjects.
In many ways, the Pale of Settlement arose as a response by the tsarist authorities to the discontent of Russian merchants, frightened by competition: in 1790, they accused 72 Jewish merchants of dumping and smuggling (they kept prices low due to connections with co-religionists abroad and were eventually expelled along with their families from Moscow и Smolensk).
In essence, this was the first internal deportation of Jews in Russia.
(historian Pavel Polyan)
A year later, in 1791, the empress passed a law restricting Jews to the western provinces (present-day Lithuania, Latvia, Poland, Belarus, Ukraine, and Moldova). They were also prohibited from settling in certain cities (Mykolaiv, Yalta, Sevastopol, and parts of Kyiv), as well as in rural areas (due to competition with peasants). Exceptions were made at various times for first-guild merchants, doctors, university graduates, artisans, and retired tsarist army personnel.
The government's policy is based not on the "harmfulness" of the Jews, but on the fact that, thanks to their millennial culture, they are an element stronger mentally and spiritually than the still uncultured Russian people.
(Chief Prosecutor Konstantin Pobedonostsev, 1880s)
Due to restrictions and persecution, Jews lived in crowded and poor conditions. Historian Walter Laqueur noted that in the early 1880s, most of them lived much worse than the poorest Russian peasants and were doomed to slowly die out from hunger.
After one of the Jewish pogroms in 1903 Lev Tolstoy wrote:
I felt a sense of horror towards that terrible government with its clergy, which brings people to such a state.
The abolition of the Pale of Settlement was proposed at various times Speransky, Witte, Stolypin, Milyukov. He also advocated for the emancipation of the Jews “for the sake of Great Russia” Peter Struve.
Among all the foreigners there is no element that could more easily than the Jews be put into the service of Russian statehood and assimilated into Russian culture.
(Petr Struve)
The Jewish question was discussed in the “Nikolaev” Council of Ministers, and attempts were made to resolve it in the First and Third State Dumas (the Jews had 12 and 3 mandates, respectively).
My inner voice keeps telling me more and more insistently not to take this decision upon myself.
(Nicholas II to Peter Stolypin)
The Pale of Settlement effectively ceased to exist with the outbreak of World War I, when hundreds of thousands of Jews were deported from the frontline areas into Russia. But this was no act of goodwill: on the contrary, the government considered Jews disloyal and sought to resettle them further from the border.
De jure, the Pale of Settlement was abolished two weeks after the abdication. Nicholas II — by decree of the Minister of Justice Alexander Kerensky.
However, in 1918-1920, new waves of Jewish pogroms swept through, with the number of victims numbering in the tens of thousands.
