From Empire to Putin’s Russia: How the Abolition of the Pale of Settlement Helps Understand “Great Russian” Anti-Semitism

On April 2, 1917, the Provisional Government officially abolished religious and national restrictions in the former Russian Empire. For Jews, this meant the end of the Pale of Settlement — one of the most well-known systems of state discrimination in European history. Formally, the document was adopted on March 20, 1917, according to the old style, which is April 2 according to the new. It was this act that closed an era in which origin and faith determined where a person could live, what they were allowed to do, and to what extent they were recognized as a full-fledged resident of the country.

For the Israeli audience, this date is important not as a museum reference.

It is important because it shows the mechanism of anti-Semitism in action. First, the state declares the Jew a “special case.” Then it draws boundaries of permissible existence on the map. Then this administrative discrimination begins to affect education, trade, property rights, career, mobility, and security.

The history of the Pale of Settlement is not only about the past of the Russian Empire but also about how power turns the Jewish question into a tool of governance, suspicion, and pressure.

How the empire created an anti-Semitic geography

The Pale of Settlement did not arise out of nowhere.

After the partitions of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the second half of the 18th century, Russia acquired vast territories along with a large Jewish community. It was about 900,000 Jews who found themselves inside the empire after the partitions of Poland. The Russian authorities, who previously did not want to allow a mass Jewish presence within their old borders, decided not to equalize these people in rights but to allocate a special residential zone for them.

This is how the Pale of Settlement was formed. In 1783, 1791, and 1794, Catherine II issued decrees restricting the commercial rights of Jews to territories recently annexed from Poland and the Ottoman Empire. Later, this regime turned into a stable system: the Jewish population could be used in the new western and southern lands but was not allowed free integration into central Russia. Even in the descriptions of historians, it is clear that economic calculation and traditional anti-Jewish prejudices were combined here.

It is important to understand the scale.

The Pale of Settlement was not a small enclave but a vast area of almost 500,000 square miles, stretching from the Baltic to the Black Sea. It included large parts of present-day Ukraine, Poland, Belarus, Lithuania, Moldova, and other territories. But the large size did not make this regime softer. On the contrary: it was a gigantic zone of limited existence, within which additional prohibitions also applied. Jews were often forbidden to settle in certain municipalities, especially in rural areas, and living outside this zone was generally not allowed.

What the Pale of Settlement did to Jewish life in the lands of present-day Ukraine

For Ukraine, this history is especially important because a significant part of the Pale of Settlement passed through Ukrainian provinces.

By the beginning of the 20th century, the Pale included, in particular, the Kyiv, Podolia, Volhynia, Poltava, Chernihiv, Kherson, Yekaterinoslav, and Taurida provinces. According to the 1897 census, 4,899,300 Jews lived there — 94 percent of the entire Jewish population of the Russian Empire. Of these, 82 percent lived in cities, towns, and shtetls, and in the urban structure of the region, Jews made up 36.9 percent. In other words, the empire not only limited geography. It forcibly formed a special social world of crowding, forced urbanization, and constant legal vulnerability.

It was from this environment that the shtetls of Eastern Europe, familiar from family memory and Jewish literature, grew.

But this picture cannot be romanticized.

The shtetl was not a freely chosen form of life but largely a consequence of legal pressure. The Pale of Settlement directed Jews into trade, crafts, intermediary professions, small urban businesses because access to land, wide resettlement, and many other forms of normal economic life were restricted by law. Later, under Alexander II, exceptions appeared for some merchants, craftsmen, educated people, and those who served in the army, but this did not cancel the main principle: freedom for a Jew was considered not a right but a rare exception.

Such a system almost inevitably generated violence. At the beginning of the 20th century, a new wave of pogroms swept across Ukraine. After Kishinev in 1903 and Gomel in 1903, a series of attacks also engulfed Ukrainian cities, and in 1905, major pogroms occurred in Kamianets-Podilskyi, Yekaterinoslav, Kyiv, Kremenchuk, Mykolaiv, Odesa, Chernihiv, Simferopol, and other places.

When the state singles out a group as “alien” for decades, public violence receives a ready ideological framework.

It is no coincidence that millions of people began to leave. Between 1881 and 1914, about two million Jews left the tsarist empire and went to the West, primarily to the USA. This was an exodus not only from poverty but also from a political regime that explained to Jews from generation to generation that they lived in the empire conditionally, under supervision, and according to separate rules.

For many families in Israel, the memory of this era has been preserved not in textbooks but in the biographies of grandfathers and great-grandfathers. And therefore, in the material for NAnews — News of Israel | Nikk.Agency April 2 is not an abstract anniversary, but a date that is still heard in the family history of the Jewish East of Europe.

Formally, the system began to crumble during the First World War.

In 1915, significant parts of the Pale turned into a frontline zone, many Jews fled east, and the authorities were forced to lift some residence restrictions almost everywhere except the capitals. But legally, the point was only put by the Provisional Government in the spring of 1917. From that moment, the state no longer had the right to divide residents by national-religious criteria in matters of residence and civil rights.

Why this story resonates again today when it comes to Putin’s Russia

Of course, modern Russia is not the 19th-century Russian Empire, and a literal Pale of Settlement does not exist today.

But the historical logic of anti-Semitism has not disappeared. It has simply changed form.

If earlier the authorities restricted Jews through maps and laws, today they increasingly use the Jewish theme as a political tool, a propaganda plot, and a language of suspicion. The US State Department, in its report on religious freedom in Russia for 2023, wrote about the rise of openly anti-Semitic rhetoric in the public space. And in January 2024, the State Department released a separate material on how successive occupants of the Kremlin used anti-Semitism for disinformation and propaganda.

One of the most famous examples is the words of Sergey Lavrov in May 2022, when he, responding to a question about the Jewish origin of Volodymyr Zelensky, claimed that Hitler allegedly had Jewish roots. Israel called this an unforgivable lie and summoned the Russian ambassador, and the German government’s commissioner for combating anti-Semitism also condemned this statement. It was not about a marginal figure from the street, but about the foreign minister of a nuclear power.

A year later, Putin himself went even further.

In June 2023, he publicly stated that Zelensky was allegedly “a disgrace to the Jewish people.” This was said about the President of Ukraine, whose family is directly connected to the history of the Holocaust and whose Jewish origin has long been known. This approach is important not only for its crudeness. It shows the very principle: the Kremlin again turns to the theme of Jewishness not as a real human identity but as a tool for political humiliation, substitution, and manipulation.

In the fall of 2023, this atmosphere went beyond television rhetoric. In Makhachkala, an anti-Semitic crowd stormed the airport in search of passengers from a flight from Tel Aviv. People were “caught” right after arrival, and then Putin blamed the West and Ukraine for what happened, without providing evidence. A few days later, Reuters separately wrote that local Jews felt particularly vulnerable after these events. When the authorities play with xenophobic myths for years, they cannot seriously pretend that outbreaks of street hatred arise on their own.

In the summer of 2024, Dagestan was again at the center of events: armed attackers attacked a synagogue and a church in Derbent, as well as facilities in Makhachkala. Reuters noted that the synagogue caught fire, and the former chief rabbi of Moscow, Pinchas Goldschmidt, after these events, spoke about the worsening situation of Jews in Russia, ongoing anti-Semitism, and that many would be better off leaving the country. This is no longer a dispute about words. It is a matter of the physical safety of Jewish communities.

There is also another important symptom — pressure on Jewish organizations.

In 2022, the Russian Ministry of Justice demanded the liquidation of the Russian branch of “Sohnut,” a structure associated with the repatriation of Jews to Israel. Reuters noted at the time that many in Israel saw this as a political signal against the backdrop of Russia’s war against Ukraine and deteriorating relations with Jerusalem.

This episode itself is not equal to the Pale of Settlement, but it clearly shows the old habit of the state: Jewish autonomy, Jewish connections with the outside world, and Jewish self-organization are perceived as something that can be controlled and suspected at any moment.

That is why April 2, 1917, sounds modern again today.

Then not just an old norm was abolished, but the very idea that a Jew should live by separate rules. In the empire, these rules were drawn on the map.

In Putin’s Russia, they are more often drawn through propaganda, hints, conspiracy theories, xenophobic mobilization, and selective pressure. The form has changed, but the logic is recognizable: Jewishness is again turned not into part of normal civil life, but into a political object. And therefore, the memory of the abolition of the Pale of Settlement is not only about the past. It is also a way to more accurately see what is happening now.