The Tsardom and the Jews
It is by now conventional wisdom across ideological lines in the West that it was official policy in Imperial Russia to promote antisemitism as part of a (doomed) strategy to deflect popular resentment away from the Tsarist government and suppress the Revolutionary movement.1 This belief became widespread in Western Europe and the Americas shortly after the pogroms which erupted in the wake of the assassination of Tsar Alexander II by socialist terrorist-revolutionaries in March 1881, and has been a constant ever since.2 The narrative’s endurance, not only at the popular level but in scholarship, is remarkable because it is a “distortion of the evidence” so severe it amounts to a “conspiracy theory”.3
