Jews were key players in the complex political struggle in 19th Century Kiev. Jewish commercial domination in Kiev and the Southwest served to shape the Little Russian claim to defend the Orthodox, East Slav peasant masses from their “exploiters”, Polish landlords and Jewish merchants. Little Russian intellectuals and elite spokesmen (who often had as little in common with the recently acquired peasant population of the Southwest as most Poles and Jews) drew on pre-existing class and ethnic prejudice to further their visions of national grandeur. In the process, the East Slav ideologists strengthened the appeal of their movement by amplifying the hatred and violence directed at both groups.

On the other hand, the severe and violent treatment experienced by Kiev’s Jews is traced not only to endemic antisemitism; anti-Jewish animus is shown to have been fed by a complex legal, economic, and political situation from which Jews drew benefits as well as woes and to which they were drawn in increasing numbers throughout the 19th Century. From a small number before 1859, when limited settlement was legalized, Kiev’s Jewish population rose from 13,000 in 1874 to 70,000 by around 1910, an increase in their proportion of the city’s population as well.[204]

Hillis’s study aptly supplements Meir’s with a compelling portrait of capitalist Kiev, a booming center of aggressive investment, speculation, and wealthy family dynasties, including Jewish families. This not only broadens the characterization of the city’s 19th Century history supplied by Meir and Michael Hamm[205] but broadens our notion of the Jewish experience in the city, still best known as the site of civil war pogroms and Babi Yar. Like John Klier’s broad account of the 1881–2 pogroms, Faith Hillis’s history of the Little Russia idea makes Jews as much a part of Russia’s history as the authors of their own, both a part of and apart from Imperial Russian society.

Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern’s The Golden Age Shtetl treats the same three provinces as Hillis’s study, although in a lighter, though by no means less informative and well-documented manner.[206] Petrovsky surveys Right-Bank Ukraine from the viewpoint of ordinary Jews and Jewish pursuits in the period before Russia’s 1860s reforms, before the Haskalah‘s greatest influence, and before the 1881 pogroms redirected Russian Jewry toward an accelerated and socially disruptive modernization. He recreates a lost world of small town Jews and their assertive and enterprising pursuits as a foil to the standing stereotype of the shtetl attributed to Sholem Aleichem’s Tevye the Dairyman (or Fiddler on the Roof) as a rundown, poverty-stricken place where Jews were little more – outside their private lives – than victims of the Judeophobes and a predatory Tsarist government. Petrovsky’s shtetl, by contrast, was a lively place, where Jews controlled their lives, defied the law, competed and fought with each other and with gentiles, alongside whom they lived. If Jews suffered from being set outside Russian law, Petrovsky shows, many of them also profited from various outlaw roles. It is a world in which Jews held their own, apologized to no one, and mocked and ridiculed gentiles as much as gentiles did Jews.

The shtetl portrayed here stresses Jewish activities that pushed against bourgeois Jews’ self-image as well as against the limits of the Russian law: smuggling; liquor production, marketing, and monopoly; counterfeiting; even verbal and physical violence against gentiles and each other. The result is a kind of counter-stereotype with a tendency to essentialize Jewish life similar to that of the