Pipes Talks on Jews in Czarist Russia

Richard C. Pipes, Baird Jr. Professor of History, said last night that "there is no place in Russia for Jews" because they have historically "been caught between the authority of the government and the anarchism of the masses."

Speaking at Lamont library, Pipes opened a two-week exhibition of Harvard-owned Russian Jewish materials in Widener Library. Pipes, whose speciality is early 20th-century Russian history, was recently named to President-elect Ronald Reagan's transition team as a foreign-policy adviser. He is also presently working on a multi-volume history of the Russian Revolution of 1917.

Pipes said that although the Russian czarist government, considering the Jews an internal security problem, vacillated between trying to assimilate or isolate them, it rarely persecuted them actively.

If the government tried isolating the Jews from the rest of the society, mass violence against them, as in the spontaneous pogroms of 1870 and 1881, could also turn against other groups or the government, Pipes said.

"The Russian peasant was the principal actor against the Jews" because he did not believe in private property or permanent laws and thus felt justified in attacking them, Pipes said. He added that the peasant saw the Jew as a business exploiter who did not farm the land, which the peasant thought should be held in common.

In response to complaints from merchants of unfair Jewish competition, Catherine the Great's government placed restrictions on the participation of Jews in public life, Pipes said.

He added that they could not be admitted to the civil service or the officer ranks in the Russian military, and no Jews were allowed to leave their designated settlements without special permission