Black Hundreds
The Black Hundred (Russian: Чёрная сотня, romanized: Chyornaya sotnya), also known as the black-hundredists (Russian: черносотенцы; chernosotentsy), were a reactionary, monarchist and ultra-nationalist movement in Russia in the early 20th century. It was a staunch supporter of the House of Romanov and opposed any retreat from the autocracy of the reigning monarch.[1] The name arose from the medieval concept of "black", or common (non-noble) people, organized into militias.[2]
The Black Hundreds were noted for extremism and incitement to pogroms, nationalistic Russocentric doctrines, and different xenophobic beliefs, including anti-Ukrainian sentiment[3] and anti-semitism.[4]
The ideology of the movement is based on a slogan formulated by Count Sergey Uvarov, "Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality".[5]
Terminology[edit]
The term was intended to be pejorative in revolutionary newspapers but adherents used it in their own literature. They traced the term back to the "black lands" where peasants, merchants and craftsmen paid taxes to the government (lands owned by the nobility and church were called "white lands"), and the hundred existed as a feudal administrative division. In the right wing extremist imagination it was the loyal people of the black hundreds who gathered to fight Poles and traitors when it was needed.[6]
Revolutionary newspapers identified the Black Hundreds as a threat describing "hooligan gangs" paid by the government to threaten political opponents, and reporting rumors that the government would bribe low class people with little interest in philosophy to act against the social revolutionaries. The term starts to appear in newspapers around 1905 warning 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 the anti-semitic pogroms that followed the October Manifesto.[6]
Predecessors[edit]
Members of the Black Hundreds organizations came from different social strata—such as landowners, clergymen, the high and petty bourgeoisie, merchants, artisans, workers and the so-called "declassed elements". The Postoyanny Sovyet Ob'yedinnyonnykh dvoryanskikh obshchshestv Rossii (United Gentry Council) guided the activities of the black-hundredists; the tsarist regime provided moral and financial support to the movement. The Black Hundreds were founded on a devotion to Tsar, church and motherland, expressed previously by the motto of Tsar Nicholas I: "Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality" (Pravoslaviye, Samoderzhaviye i Narodnost). The black-hundredists conducted oral propaganda: in churches by holding special services and during meetings, lectures and demonstrations. Such propaganda provoked antisemitic sentiments and monarchic "exaltation" and incited pogroms and terrorist acts, performed by the Black Hundreds' paramilitary groups, sometimes known as "Yellow Shirts".[11][12]
Black Hundred and the Ukrainian question[edit]
The Black Hundreds classified Ukrainians as Russians,[22] and attracted the support of many "Moscowphiles" who considered themselves Russian and rejected Ukrainian nationalism and identity.[23] The Black Hundred movement actively campaigned against what it considered to be Ukrainian separatism, as well as against promoting Ukrainian culture and language in general, and against the works of Ukrainian poet Taras Shevchenko, in particular.[24] In Odesa, the Black Hundreds shut down the local branch of the Ukrainian Prosvita society. This organization was dedicated to spreading literacy in the Ukrainian language and Ukrainian cultural awareness.[23]
All-Russian congresses[edit]
The black-hundredists organized four all-Russian congresses 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-hundredist 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.[25] After the February Revolution 1917, the remaining black-hundredist organizations were officially abolished.[26]
After emigrating abroad, many black-hundredists 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.[27]