The White Terror and The Red: A Novel of Revolutionary Russia

by Abraham Cahan

In his conversations with Clara, however, the subject was never broached, and this gave him a sense of guilt and uneasiness. He could not help being aware that instead of usurers the chief target of attack in every riot, without a single exception, were Jewish artisans, labourers, teachers and the poorest tradesmen. And this, so far as Clara was concerned, meant that the common people of Pavel’s race, for whose sake she was facing the solitary cell and the gallows, that these Christian people were brutally assaulting and pillaging, reducing to beggary and murdering poor honest, innocent people of her own blood, Jews like her father, mother, sister, like herself.

But this bare fact did not fit in with Nihilist theory. That golden halo which had been painted about the common Christian people by the ecstasies of the anti-serfdom movement of twenty years ago had not yet faded. The Gentile masses were still deified by the Nihilists. Whatever the peasant or workman of Slavic blood did was still sacred,—an instinctive step in the direction of liberty and universal happiness. The Russian masses were rioting; could there be a better indication of a revolutionary awakening? And if the victims of these riots happened to be Jews, then the Jews were evidently enemies of the people.

That the crusade was part and parcel of the “white terror” of the throne had not yet dawned upon the revolutionists.

As to Clara, she was so completely abandoned to her grief over the death of Sophia and the four men that so far the riots (no unheard-of thing in the history of the Jews by any means) had made but a feeble appeal to her imagination. Centuries seemed to divide her from her race and her past. The outbreaks seemed to be taking place in some strange, distant country.

The execution of the five regicides had been described quite fully in the Official Messenger and the account had been copied in all other newspapers. Clara kept the issue of the Voice containing the report in a book, and although she knew its salient passages by heart, she often consulted the paper, now for this paragraph, now for that. There was a sacred mystery in the letters in which the description was printed.

“The five prisoners approached the priests almost at the same moment and kissed the cross; after which they were taken by the hangmen each to his or her rope.” Clara beheld the ropes dangling and Sophia placed under one of them, but her aching heart coveted more vividness. Her imagination was making desperate efforts to reproduce the scene with the tangibility of life. Each time she read how the hangman, dressed in a red shirt, slipped the noose about Sophia’s neck amid the roll of drums, and how he wrenched the stool from under her feet, so that she plunged with a jerk, and how the next instant her body hung motionless in the air, each time Clara read this she was smitten with an overpowering pang of pity and of helpless, aimless, heart-tearing affection. Sometimes she would fancy Sophia and her four comrades rescued from the hangman’s hands a second before their execution, and carried triumphantly through the streets by an army of victorious revolutionists, but the next moment it would come back to her that this had not been the case, and then the re-awakening to reality was even more painful than the original shock. If a rescuing force were now ready to attack the hangman and the thousand-bayoneted guard around him, it would be too late. Sophia was dead, irretrievably dead; there was nobody to rescue. And Clara’s heart sank in despair. At such moments she would seek relief in those passages of the report where the calmness of the condemned revolutionists was depicted. “Jeliaboff whispered to his priest, fervently kissed the cross, shook his hair and smiled. Fortitude did not forsake Jeliaboff, Sophia and particularly Kibalchich (the man with the face of Christ) to the very moment of donning the white-hooded death-gown”—these passages gave Clara thrills of religious bliss.

Pavel often talked to her about the execution, raved, cursed the government; but Clara usually remained gloomily taciturn. The wound in her soul was something too sacred to be talked about. Words seemed to her like sacrilege. Their hearts understood each other well enough, why, then, allow language to intrude upon their speechless communion? Some of his effusions and outbursts jarred on her. On the other hand, her silences made him restless.

“You’ll go insane if you keep this up,” he once said, irascibly.