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The Black Hundreds were reactionary, Monarchism, and ultra-nationalist groups in Russian Empire in the early 20th century. They were staunch supporters of the House of Romanov, and opposed any retreat from the autocracy of the reigning monarch. Their name arose from the medieval concept of "black", or common (non-noble) people, organized into militias.
The Black Hundreds were noted for extremism and incitement of , nationalism Ethnocentrism doctrines, as well as various xenophobia beliefs, including anti-Ukrainian sentiment, anti-Polish sentiment, and anti-Semitism.
The ideology of the movement is based on a slogan formulated by Count Sergey Uvarov: "Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality".
Revolutionary newspapers identified the Black Hundreds as a threat, describing them as "hooligan gangs" paid by the government to threaten political opponents. The Mensheviks leader Julius Martov feared that the government would bribe lower class individuals to act against the social revolutionaries of the time. The term "Black Hundreds" started to appear in newspapers around 1905, along with warnings that the government would mobilize the Black Hundreds in pursuit of mass murder, and would even resort to inciting anti-Jewish pogroms and strife between different religious groups. They alleged that the Black Hundreds were being organized by the police, and called for resistance. The term became more closely associated with pogrom-like violence after thousands of people were killed in attacks on demonstrations, public assemblies, and in the Antisemitism pogroms that followed the October Manifesto.
A number of Black Hundred organizations formed during and after the Russian Revolution of 1905, such as:
Union of the Russian People ideologist Alexander Trishatny considered Russian nation to be the combination of three main ethnic groups: "Greater Russians", Belarusians and "Little Russians" (Ukrainians). In major urban centres Black Hundreds tended to see their nationalism in terms of political loyalty to the tsar. Among secular leaders of the Black Hundred movement there were many inorodtsy belonging to non-Slavic ethnicities, including people of Germans and French people origin.
Ethnic Russian nationalism, in comparison, was supported by a minority of Black Hundred organizations. Its supporters had their centre in Kyiv and promoted the idea of all East Slavs comprising a single ethic group. This could be seen as an attempt to counter the Ukrainian, Polish and Jewish national movements.
Until the early 1910s most Black Hundreds leaders saw Jews as their main enemy, but with the rise of the Ukrainian national movement their representatives started a campaign against what they saw as "Ukrainian separatism" promoted by "Ivan Mazepa", allegedly supported by Austria-Hungary and embodied in the figure of Mykhailo Hrushevsky.
Many representatives of the Black Hundreds were supporters of agrarianism.
Members of the Black Hundreds carried out raids (with unofficial government approval) against various revolutionary groups and pogroms, including inciting pogroms against Jews.
The historian of the Black Hundred movement Sergei Stepanov, writes that after the 1905 Russian Revolution, fighting squads of the Union of the Russian People and other extremist right-wing organizations became the weapons of the Black Hundred terror.
The fight against the Black Hundreds is an excellent type of military action, which will train the soldiers of the revolutionary army, give them their baptism of fire, and at the same time be of tremendous benefit to the revolution. Revolutionary army groups must at once find out who organises the Black Hundreds and where and how they are organised, and then, without confining themselves to propaganda (which is useful but inadequate) they must act with armed force, beat up and kill the members of the Black-Hundred gangs, blow up their headquarters, etc., etc.
On behalf of the Saint Petersburg Committee of the RSDLP, an armed attack was carried out on the Tver tea house, where the workers of the Nevsky Shipbuilding Plant, who were members of the Union of the Russian People, gathered. First, two bombs were thrown by the Bolshevik militants, and then those who ran out of the teahouse were shot with revolvers. The Bolsheviks killed two and wounded fifteen people.
Revolutionary organizations carried out many other terrorist acts, mainly against the chairmen of local departments of the Union of the Russian People. So, according to the police department, only in March 1908 in one Chernihiv province in the city of Bakhmach, a bomb was thrown at the house of the chairman of the local union of the RNC, in the city of Nizhyn the house of the chairman of the union was set on fire. The whole family died, in the village of Domyany the department's chairman was killed, two chairmen of departments were killed in Nizhyn.
The Socialist-Revolutionaries also killed prominent Black Hundreds such as Nikolai Bogdanovich and Gavril Luzhenovsky.
According to Klymentiy Fedevych, Black Hundreds and the wider monarchist movement in the Ukrainian lands of the Russian Empire had their own local specifics. Although their supporters from among ethnic Ukrainians were loyal to the tsar, this didn't contradict to their distinct identity as "Little Russians" and a sense of local patriotism. They tended to oppose ethnic Russification and frequently used the terms "Ukraine" and "Ukrainian" in their publications. In most cases, Black Hundreds in Ukraine tended to view Ukrainians ("Little Russians") as a separate ethnic group, distinct from "Russians" and "Belarusians", but united with them into a single Triune Russian nation. Moreover, their populist rhetorics had many common points with the programs of Ukrainian national-democratic movement.
These tendencies were especially widespread in Polish-Ukrainian border regions such as Volhynia, where the monarchist movement was the most popular political force among ethnic Ukrainians. Representatives of the Union of the Russian People in Ukrainian lands, such as Volhynian archbishop Antony Khrapovitsky, actively used elements and symbols of the Ukrainian national movement in their activities. In order to achieve more influence on the local population, supporters of the Black Hundreds among the clergy promoted the translation of the Gospel into Ukrainian, supported the publications of Ukrainian-language sermons and other literature, and even made attempts to introduce religious services in Ukrainian. In 1912 Nikon, bishop of Kremenets and one of the leaders of the Union of the Russian People in the State Duma, introduced a bill which would allow Ukrainian as a language of school instruction and support the studies of Ukrainian history in schools.
A number of Ukrainian political figures, most prominently Mykhailo Hrushevsky, recognized the Ukrainian adherents of Black Hundreds as part of the broader Ukrainian political movement representing its right wing, and made calls for cooperation with them. In Podolia many members of the monarchist movement from among the clergy simultaneously participated the Ukrainian national movement, with the local Orthodox bishop supporting both Prosvita and the Union of the Russian People. Activities of the Volhynian branch of Union of the Russian People in promoting the memorialization of Ukrainian history were positively evaluated by Dmytro Doroshenko, Ivan Ohienko and Olena Pchilka.
In 1909 the idea of the establishment of Kholm Governorate, which was promoted by Orthodox archbishop and notable monarchist Eulogius Georgiyevsky, found the support of progressive Ukrainian activists including Oleksander Lototsky, who saw it as a way to evade Polonization of local Ukrainians. In early 1914 Ukrainian Rada newspaper described members of Kyiv's Black Hundreds as "not alien to the Ukrainian movement" and praised them for recognizing the poetic talent of Taras Shevchenko and Ivan Kotliarevsky. Throughout the existence of the Black Hundred movement in Ukraine, Russian ethnic nationalists remained a minority in its ranks. After the fall of Russian monarchy in 1917, many Ukrainians who had formerly supported the Black Hundreds and used to sympathize with the Russian monarchy, adopted a purely Ukrainian identity. As a result, the lands of Western Volhynia, which had demonstrated the highest degree of support for the Black Hundreds before 1917, became the cradle of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army during the 1940s.
After emigrating abroad, many Black Hundreds were among the main critics of the White movement. They blamed the movement for not only failing to stress monarchism as its key ideological foundation but also supposedly being run under the influence of classical liberals and Freemasons. Boris Brasol (1885–1963), a former member of the Black Hundreds, was among those who later emigrated to the United States. There he befriended industrialist Henry Ford, who gave Brasol a job on The Dearborn Independent newspaper. Brasol also helped in the production of anti-Jewish propaganda such as The International Jew.
The movement maintains contacts with other Russian nationalist organizations (like the Russian Imperial Movement and the Union of Orthodox Banner-Bearers) and also participated in the early stages of the Russo-Ukrainian War on the side of pro-Russian separatists.
All-Russian congresses
The Black Hundreds organized four all-Russian to unite their forces. In October 1906, they elected the so-called glavnaya uprava (a kind of board of directors) of the new all-Russian Black Hundred organization "Ob’yedinyonniy russkiy narod" (Объединённый русский народ, or Russian People United). After 1907, however, this organization disintegrated, and the whole Black Hundreds movement became weaker as the membership rate steadily declined. After the February Revolution 1917, the remaining Black Hundred organizations were officially abolished.
Modern version
After the fall of the Soviet Union, the nationalist and monarchist movements were reborn in Russian society. In 1992, Alexander Shtilmark (former member of Pamyat) decided to found a modern Black Hundred movement.
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External links
Categories: Organizations Of The Russian Revolution, Anti-jewish Pogroms In The Russian Empire, Antisemitism In Russia, Far-right Political Parties In Russia, Eastern Orthodoxy And Far-right Politics, Eastern Orthodox Political Parties, Political Parties In The Russian Empire, Russian Nationalist Organizations, Anti-ukrainian Sentiment In Russia, Defunct Nationalist Parties In Russia, Monarchist Parties In Russia, Antisemitism In Ukraine, Xenophobia, Anti-communist Organizations In Russia, Organizations Of The Russian Revolution Of 1905, Orthodox Fundamentalism, Defunct Far-right Parties, Defunct Conservative Parties, Conservative Parties In Russia, Political Parties Established In 1905, 1905 Establishments In The Russian Empire, Political Parties Disestablished In 1917, 1917 Disestablishments In Russia, Autocracy, Proto-fascist Organizations
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