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P
Pale of Settlement
A term that refers to the territory where Russian
Jews were legally allowed to reside, the Pale of
Settlement was established in 1791 by the gov-
ernment of
CATHERINE II
the Great and abolished
in 1917. As a result of the late 18th-century
POL
-
ISH PARTITIONS
, large numbers of Jews found
themselves under Russian rule for the first time.
The Pale included 25 provinces in the western
part of the Russian Empire, a region that coin-
cides with the present-day boundaries of the
republics of Latvia, Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine,
and parts of Poland. From 1804 to 1835, the Pale
of Settlement also included the provinces of
Astrakhan and the Caucasus region. During the
reformist period of the 1860s under
ALEXANDER
II
, the government relaxed restrictions on Jew-
ish residence. Nevertheless, by 1880, only about
5 percent of the Russian Empire's 5 million Jews
were living in varying degrees of legality outside
the Pale. As part of
ALEXANDER III
's overall repres-
sive response to the assassination of his father,
Alexander II, previous restrictions on Jewish res-
idence were reinforced and new ones were
added, beginning in 1882. From 1882 until
1905, the Temporary Rules of 1882 prohibited
Jews from residing outside of towns and large
villages. Inside the Pale and across the empire, a
large number of Jews responded to the govern-
ment's discriminatory practices and the increas-
ing number of
POGROMS
by emigrating. Between
1881 and 1914, more than 2 million Russian
Jews left the empire. The development of intel-
lectual and political movements such as the
Haskalah, Zionism, and the socialist
BUND
inside
the Pale was another response to Russian repres-
sion and the overall poverty of the Jewish
masses. The borders of the Pale were extended
eastward during World War I to accommodate
several hundred thousand Jews who, along with
ethnic Germans and Poles suspected of disloyalty
to the empire, had been resettled away from the
regions bordering Germany and Austria-Hun-
gary. The Provisional Government abolished the
Pale of Settlement in 1917.
pan-Slavism
A 19th-century intellectual current based on the
idea that the Slavic nations of eastern Europe had
common cultural traditions that should result in
international political solidarity among them.
Articulated as early as the 17th century, pan-
Slavism first began to take shape in the 1830s
under the influence of the ideas of the German
philosopher Johann von Herder, as a movement
to promote Slavic culture at a time when most
Slavic peoples, with the exception of Russians,
were under foreign rule. An important milestone
in the transformation of pan-Slavism into a
movement with more explicit political goals was
the First pan-Slav Congress held in Prague dur-
ing the revolutionary year of 1848. Presided over
by Frantisek Palacky, the congress brought
together Slavs from Bohemia, Poland, Croatia,
Serbia, Dalmatia, and Silesia, all under Austrian
rule, and had a strong anti-Russian bent.
To the extent that Russia was both an oppres-
sor of Slavic nations such as the Poles and
Ukrainians and a potential liberator of Slavs
under Austrian or Ottoman rule, its position
within the pan-Slav movement was always con-
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