Israel in Europe

by G. F. Abbott

The history of the Russian Empire from the seventeenth till the twentieth century is largely a history of individual emperors, and its spasmodic character of alternate progress and retrogression is vividly illustrated by the attitude of those emperors towards their Jewish subjects. Peter the Great welcomed them, his daughter Elizabeth expelled them, Catherine II. re-admitted them, Alexander I. favoured them. No democratic visionary was ever animated by a loftier enthusiasm for the happiness of mankind than this noble autocrat. By the Ukase of 1804 all Jews engaged in farming, manufactures, and handicrafts, or those who had been educated in Russian schools, were relieved from the exceptional laws against their race; while special privileges were granted to those who could show proficiency in the Russian, German, or Polish language. Other decrees, issued in 1809, ensured to the Jews full freedom of trade. These concessions, while testifying to the Emperor’s tolerant wisdom, show the severity of the conditions under which the race laboured normally. On the partition of Poland the Russian Empire had received an enormous addition to its Jewish population, and the Czars, with few exceptions, continued towards it the inhuman policy already adopted under Casimir the Great’s successors. The Jews were pent in ghettos, and every care was taken to check their growth and to hamper their activity. Among other forms of oppression, the emperors of Russia initiated towards their Jewish subjects a system analogous to the one formerly enforced by the Sultans of Turkey on the Christian rayahs: the infamous system of “child-tribute.” Boys of tender age were torn from their parents and reared in their master’s faith for the defence of their master’s dominions. Alexander I. determined to lift this heavy yoke, and, as has been seen, he took some initial steps towards that end. But, unfortunately, the closing years of the high-minded idealist’s life witnessed a return to despotism, and consequently a series of conspiracies, which in their turn retarded the progress of freedom and hardened the hearts of its foes.

♦1825♦

Alexander’s stern son, Nicholas I., was a nineteenth century Phalaris. His reign was inaugurated with an insurrectionary movement, whose failure accelerated the triumph of the Asiatic ideals in Russian policy. Nicholas, imbued with a strong antipathy to all that was Occidental, and convinced that the greatness of Russia abroad depended on tyranny at home, set himself the task of undoing the little his predecessors had done in the way of reform. ♦1830 and 1848♦ The Poles and the Hungarians experienced his relentless severity in a manner which, while filling Europe with horror, inspired little inclination for interference. In perfect consonance with the character and the principles of Nicholas was his treatment of the Jews, who, under him, lost all the poor privileges conferred upon them by his father, and were not only condemned again to the old sorrows of servitude, but by a special ukase, published in the beginning of September, 1828, they were for the first time subjected to the military conscription.

Under Alexander II., the Czar Liberator, some of those oppressive measures were mitigated, and permission was granted for three Jews to settle at each railway station. But the improvement, limited as it was, did not last long. Like some of his ancestors, Alexander II. vacillated between the two antagonistic forces which wrestle for mastery in Russia: the party of progress and freedom and the party of reaction and despotism. Devoid of initiative and strength of purpose himself, this amiable ruler was led now to right, now to left. The disasters of the Crimean War had already shown that absolutism had failed in the one thing which justified its existence—military efficiency. If Russia could not achieve foreign supremacy, she ought at least to secure domestic prosperity. ♦1855♦ The party of progress carried the day, and the Emperor Nicholas with it, who, however, did not live to work out his repentance, but left the task to his son. As early as 1856 Alexander II. had a plan of a Constitution drawn up; but the design was postponed owing to more pressing needs. The years 1861–1864, however, witnessed the emancipation of the serfs, the abolition of the terrible corporal punishment by the knout, the institution of the zemstvos, or provincial assemblies, and other measures of reform which awakened the hopes and the enthusiasm of the Russian people. Svobodnaya Rossia—Free Russia—was on every man’s lips. A new era had dawned for the cowering masses of the Empire. ♦1863♦ The Polish rebellion diverted this enthusiasm from internal reform to the defence of the Fatherland against its hereditary enemy, who, it was suspected, was aided by some foreign powers.

Military success abroad presupposes union at home, and union often means the sacrifice of the individual and his interests and rights. This common historical phenomenon now received a fresh illustration. Victory took away all the blessings conferred by defeat. The Poles were crushed, and with them the budding liberty of the Russians. The people and the press, in calling for the utter annihilation of the supposed enemy of their country, were unwittingly advocating their own doom—in extinguishing Poland, they extinguished the last hope of their country’s happiness. For the defeat of the Poles decided the struggle in favour of despotism, all schemes of constitutional reform were abandoned, and Alexander II.’s reign closed as Alexander I.’s had done: in a craven recantation of the principles which had distinguished its beginning. This backsliding created bitter disappointment in the hearts of all Russian friends of liberty, and drove the more desperate among them to the declaration of a war which culminated in the unfortunate monarch’s murder. ♦1881 March 13♦ The crime of the Nihilists, however, defeated its own object and ruined the cause it was meant to serve. At the very moment of his death the Czar was actually meditating a plan for some form of representative government, to begin with the convocation of an Assembly of Notables. The intention died with him. Henceforth the relations between the Government and the governed are more than ever marked by mutual distrust.[154] The assassination of the humane Emperor, far from weakening, strengthened the hands of the champions of autocracy and intolerance, and these champions were reinforced by the advocates of Nationalism or Panslavism—a movement which, like Nihilism, derives its theories from modern Teutonic speculation, but applies them after a primitive fashion purely Russian.

Russian national consciousness is a recent growth. It sprang up at the beginning of the nineteenth century under the stimulus of Napoleon’s invasion. Hatred of the foreign invader brought patriotism into being, and the exultation of victory forced it to precocious maturity. The Polish rebellions of 1830 and 1863 assisted its development, which was also accelerated by the spread of education and the growth of the press. The extreme partisans of the Nationalist idea, henceforth the ruling body in the Empire, were imbued with the conviction that the preservation of the Russian nation required the forcible assimilation or, failing that, the utter extermination of all that is not Russian. Under the fell influence of that conviction a systematic campaign was entered upon for the Russification of all the alien races which had been incorporated in the Empire during the preceding century. After the complete subjugation of the Poles—brought about by Muravieff in a manner which earned him the title of “Hangman of Warsaw”—came the turn of the inhabitants of the Baltic provinces, who, partly German by blood, had long adopted the German tongue, German culture, and German ideals, and who since their conquest by the Russians, in the eighteenth century, had furnished the Empire with some of its best statesmen, warriors, and scientists. The Panslavic zeal for assimilation was intensified by the fear of German expansion. Prussia by her brilliant war against Austria in 1866 laid the foundations of that national edifice which was completed by the war, even more brilliant, against France in 1870, thus realising the national dream of German unity. It was feared by the Russians that the absorption of the Germanised provinces of the Baltic would be the next step of Pan-germanic ambition. Impelled by those motives, Russia inaugurated the amalgamation of these regions in 1867. Alexander II., notwithstanding his personal sympathies and his public assurances to the natives of the Baltic provinces, was carried away by the Panslavic current, which gained further strength from the national conflict with Turkey in 1877.

♦1881–1894♦

Under Alexander III. the period of partial reform, thanks to the industry of MM. Pobiedonostseff, Katkoff, and Count Ignatieff, and the indecision of their Liberal opponents, gave way to one of reaction in all directions. In administrative matters Alexander III., despite the advice of so firm a believer in the divine origin of kingship as the German Emperor William I., reverted to the methods of his own grandfather, Nicholas I.: the press censorship was revived, the village communes were placed under the absolute power of the police, flogging was restored as an instrument of “educating” the peasants; and the very mention of the Czar Liberator’s name became a punishable offence. At the same time the work of Russification proceeded, and side by side with the policy of racial uniformity was carried on a crusade for religious conformity. ♦1880–1890♦ Panslavism rooted out the national institutions and language of the Baltic provinces; Panorthodoxy stamped out their heretical and schismatic doctrines. The Holy Synod in 1893, inspired by the Imperial Procurator, M. Pobiedonostseff—who, though a layman, wielded an absolute control over the Russian Church and was by his opponents nicknamed “Lay Pope”—demanded the suppression of Protestants, Roman Catholics, Mohammedans, Buddhists, and other dissenters throughout the Empire. The thirteen years of Alexander III.’s reign form one of the gloomiest pages in a history not remarkable for brightness.

♦1894♦

Comparative tolerance followed upon the Czar’s death, and high hopes were built on the reputed liberality of his successor, Nicholas II. But these hopes have never been fulfilled. On the contrary, obscurantism continued to reign supreme, and of late years the Panslavist and Panorthodox programme has been vigorously pursued in the Caucasus, in Poland, and in Finland, as well as among the Buddhists of the trans-Baikalian district. In all these provinces national institutions have been attacked with a remorseless fury and a brutal thoroughness worthy of the Inquisition in its worst days. The Armenian Church was plundered,[155] and Russian bishops were inflicted upon a population whose language they did not understand. The Tartars, once loyal and contented, were roused to appeal to the Sultan of Turkey and the Western Powers for relief from the tyranny of the Czar. In their petition these Russian Mohammedans describe how their religious tribunals have been suppressed, how their children are forced into Russian schools, how when serving in the army they are made to eat food condemned by the law of Islam, and how they are compelled to observe Christian festivals and to abandon their faith.[156] But in no part of the Empire was more systematically repeated the process which, under Alexander III., had achieved the Russification of the Baltic provinces than in Finland. Nothing more inhuman or more insane than Russia’s treatment of that country has been known in Europe since the revocation of the Edict of Nantes by Louis XIV. The constitution of Finland, which Alexander I. on annexing the country in 1809 had solemnly pledged himself to respect, was abolished; its press was silenced; its University degraded; its religion trampled under foot; its best men were banished; ♦1899–1903♦ and all means were employed in the patriotic endeavour to grind down this highly cultured, but non-Slavonic and non-Orthodox, province of the north to the level of the rest of the Empire; with the result that the most loyal and prosperous section of the Czar’s subjects has been turned into the most disloyal and miserable. Thus Germans, Esthonians, Poles, Finns, Circassians, Georgians, Armenians, Mongols, Tartars—all have experienced the Russian rage for uniformity national and religious; and so have even dissenters of Russian blood, like the Old Believers and the Dukhobors, not to mention the Polish and Lithuanian Uniates, whose churches have been confiscated and converted to other uses, whose clergy has been suppressed, and who are forced, under severe penalties, to worship, to be married and buried, and to have their children christened according to the rites of the Orthodox Church.[157]