Tsarist officials blamed the victims to explain anti-Jewish pogrom violence.

Evidence

The extent to which official anxieties about the status of Jews had spread beyond elite circles in the 1870s exploded to the surface in 1881 when, following the assassination of Alexander II by populist revolutionaries, rioters targeted Jews in dozens of locales across the empire. Fuelled by rumours about Jewish culpability as well as by alcohol, these pogroms continued into 1882, claiming hundreds of lives and wrecking Jewish property and businesses. The autocratic state was slow to restore control, leading some contemporaries to conclude that the government had instigated the violence or at least condoned it. Scholars have since revised this view, emphasising the regime’s discomfort with popular mobilisation, especially when it led to a breakdown of public order. Still, government authorities were quick to cast blame: on the victims. If Russian peasants and townspeople had turned on their Jewish neighbours, these officials concluded, then it was because these simple people had been forced to resort to violence by the Jews who exploited them. — James Renton, Ben Gidley (eds.), Antisemitism and Islamophobia in Europe, 533

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the victim-blaming and scapegoating dynamics analyzed across the earlier chapters of this volume on antisemitism and Islamophobia.