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In Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, Freud puts forward in the same paragraph two apparently contradictory accounts of the crowd and its behaviour. On the one hand he says: “when people are put together in a mass all individual inhibitions fall away and all the cruel, brutal, destructive instincts that lie dormant in the individual as a leftover from primitive times are roused to free drive-satisfaction” [Freud, 1921/2004, p. 26]. But in the very next sentence, Freud says: “However, masses are also capable, under the influence of suggestion, of great feats of renunciation, disinterestedness, and devotion to an ideal.” [Freud, p. 26]. I want to apply Freud's two-sided analysis of the mass/crowd (depending on whether one is using the Standard or the Penguin edition) to the issue of antisemitism and the Russian Revolution, and to suggest that Fromm's social character analysis is useful here.
During the latter part of the 19th century and first years of the 20th, the European country which witnessed the most severe antisemitism was not Germany but the Russian Empire. The Tsarist state police would regularly organise pogroms during which drunken Black Hundreds or Cossacks would attack Jewish villages, murdering inhabitants and destroying their property. When Peter the Great, who ruled Russia from 1682 till 1725, was asked about admitting Jews into the empire, he replied, “I prefer to see in our midst nations professing Mohammedanism and paganism rather than Jews. They are rogues and cheats” (Levitat, pp. 20-21).
During the reign of Catherine II from 1762 until 1796 Jewish habitation was restricted to the Pale of Settlement. The Pale took away many of the rights that the Jews of late 17th century Russia had enjoyed. From then on they were restricted to a small area of what is currently Belarus, Lithuania, Poland and Ukraine. More active discriminatory policies began with the partition of Poland in the late 18th century. For the first time in its history Russia a