HARVARD UKRAINIAN STUDIES - See also - Harvard University

194 м. MiSHKiNSKYduring the general nineteenth-century Jewish migration from thenorthwestern region southwards (which was spurred by the acceleratedeconomic development of the Ukraine), a sizeable Jewish communitygrew up in Kiev, notwithstanding restrictive laws, expulsions, andadministrative persecution.Problems between nationalities were reflected not only in the compositionof the socialist-revolutionary organization, but also by differencesin matters of principle. One issue was the question of whetherorganizational uniformity or multiformity was to prevail. Such revolutionariesas the Ukrainians V. Debohorii-Mokriievych and Iakiv Stefanovych,and his intimate friend, the Jew Lev Deich, had the cosmopolitanview that separate organizational forms, not to say specificaims, were superfluous for the different national groups inhabiting theempire (again excluding Poland). Another important issue was theinterrelationships between the different nationalities in general andJew-baiting or Judophobia 11in particular. Early in the 1870s theproblem had already been debated in Kievan revolutionary circles bymembers of the so-called Kievan Commune and by the buntari(rebels).Within the city, as well as beyond it, adherents of the differentradical camps shared views and experiences and then transmitted themto others. The mix of nationalities affected the programs of variouspolitical groups. The ideological milieu in Kiev was known for itsunorthodoxy. For instance, the local branches of such organizations asNarodnaia volia and Chernyi peredel and their respective circles ofsympathizers sometimes held their own dissenting views about certainmatters.The history of the Southern-Russian Workers' Union reflects thesedevelopments. The organization was founded by Elizaveta Koval'skaiaand Nikolai Shchedrin in the spring of 1880. 12From Kiev the unionexpanded to the nearby countryside and to the cities of Rostov,Kremenchuh, Odessa, Mykolaiv, and Katerynoslav (Dnipropetrovs'k).The activities of union members among the arsenal and11"Judophobia" (or the brash "Zhidophobia") was current as a Russian synonymfor "anti-semitism." The latter term was coined, as is well known, in Germany in1879, but, of course, the phenomenon has had a long history.12Koval'skaia circumstantially indicates April; Balabanov says it was May (Kistorii, pp. 75-76), which seems more accurate.