However often it may be true that “a prophet is without honor in his own country,” Tolstoi is honored and revered by the peasants in the villages of Tula, and his own influence throughout Russia is very great. Curiously enough, though, it is his unconscious influence which is greatest. Tolstoi, above all living men, is the apostle of “non-resistance” and “passive resistance.” But in Russia all resistance of necessity becomes active resistance. Tolstoi pamphlets on the horrors and evils of war perhaps more than any other influence have brought army service into disrepute with the people. The Russian people hold their enforced military service as one of their prime grievances, and to avoid such service every ruse and device is resorted to from bribery and perjury to open “passive resistance,” that is, stubborn refusal to carry arms. But the government views this attitude as opposed to its interests and consequently revolutionary. Refusal to bear arms in Russia is punished by imprisonment. Tolstoi told me of a peasant thus imprisoned who replied to the court that sentenced him: “Very well, imprison me. I shall pray for you and my unhappy country, whose rulers make men do evil.” The beginnings of resistance have been inspired by Tolstoi’s “peaceful” and “Christian” writings in thousands of cases, and eventually fruited in revolutionaryism and insurrection. This unconscious influence, which Tolstoi has exerted during the last decade, and more especially during the last two years, is enormous. Peasants in every section of Russia knew more or less about Tolstoi, and while not professing to be “Tolstoians,” nevertheless admit that the beginning of their criticism of the government, and the first inspiration to trust to their own thinking, came from one or another of Tolstoi’s writings. Doubtless there are thousands of people all over the world who owe, even if they do not recognize, a like debt to this great, restive spirit, the dynamic of whose life has been both innate and conscious moral earnestness. A moral leader of the force and caliber of Tolstoi can not fail to impress a generation, and this is Tolstoi’s contribution to life and the world: he has quickened men to thought and action, and he has pointed a goal and standard above all others in the God which dwells within each and every human being.
Upon leaving Tula I went south to the Crimea. On the train I read Tolstoi’s “Sebastopol Sketches,” which contain about the most graphic descriptions of war ever written. Curiously enough the season of the year when I first saw Sebastopol was the same as Tolstoi describes upon his arrival in the besieged city in 1854. During all my stay there I could not get away from the remarkable coincidental similarity in conditions—December, 1854, and December, 1906. To be sure, Sebastopol was not besieged by alien foes from without, but it was besieged by revolutionists from within. This, like most ports and all naval stations, is a revolutionary stronghold. Only the day before my arrival an admiral or port officer had been assassinated. Sentinels patrolled the streets at intervals of one hundred feet. The Hotel Kist was guarded. Small bodies of troops were moving in different parts of the city, and when the early morning mist lifted, a half-dozen warships were revealed lying at anchor. For several hours during the forenoon large forces of cavalry and light artillery were kept manœuvering in the plain across the narrow strip of water from the pristan. It might just as well have been a besieged city. Save for the lack of wounded and dead men, the outward aspects of the town were every whit as warlike, and everywhere were the signs of martial law.
These indications of unrest and readiness for trouble did not deter me from visiting Balaklava and lovely Yalta, or interesting Bakhtchi-Sarai, the old Crimean Tartar capital, and Tchoufout-Kali, the two thousand-year old Karaite[22] stronghold. After these visits I turned toward Odessa, which I reached via Eupatoria.
Odessa being one third a Jewish city has long been a city of trouble—not so much because of the Jews as on account of the powerful Black Hundred organization made up of water-front laborers and the lowest elements of a special city, who, under governmental tutelage, from time to time break loose upon the Jews. Incipient and real massacres are apt to break out there any time. The governor-general, Kaulbars, is a notorious reactionary, and encourages every form of repression.
I had studied the Jewish question in many other places, and in Odessa as in Warsaw, Vilna, and other Jewish centers, I became convinced that the Russian government, by its extraordinarily blind and stupid policy, has itself created the Jewish problem. If the 5,000,000 Jews who are now in Russia were scattered among the 140,000,000 people of the Russian empire, they would scarcely be noticed. But Russia chose the arbitrary part and closed to the Jews all but a tiny strip of the empire. In only nine governments and in Poland many Jews live, and these are the districts which constitute “the pale”—South Russia, Poland, and the Baltic provinces. Having corralled all the Jews over whom it has jurisdiction, the Russian government then proceeded to enact a long series of special, discriminative laws, and to inaugurate special Jewish taxes.
Stripped of every right and privilege of citizenship and manhood save one—the right to pay taxes—the Jews of Russia have had no other recourse than to develop their mental powers. This they have done most creditably under circumstances quite as adverse as learning arithmetic from a borrowed text-book, by the light of a rail fire during the hours between the end of the workday and sleep time. And now, because he has given himself devotedly up to the one thing left him and has been successful, he is feared. Whatever may have been the original motives of the czars in the restrictions they laid upon the Jews, the present attitude of Jew-baiting Russians is based upon jealous fear.
One thing all observers mark—outspoken bitterness against the Jews on the part of peasants flourishes in the parts where the Jews are not. Within the pale most often does one find champions of the Jew. Nearly every telegraph correspondent for the foreign press who hastened to Bielostok at the time of the massacre commented on the testimony of the townspeople that (to quote one of them) “the Jews and Christians had always lived together like brothers.” The Jew is much more apt to be suspicious of the Christian than is the non-Jew to nourish ill-will against the Jews whom he comes into frequent contact with. If it is not literally true that to know is to love, it at least may be said that to know is to tolerate, with regard to the Jews in Russia. The persecution of the Jews in Russia originates with official Russia, and the bitterness which their weakness and fears inspire is passed on to the people through the government’s agents—often the priests—through the government press, and through the scapegoat, underling officials who are immediately above the actual perpetrators of the dire deeds, and below the higher officials who are morally responsible.
The massacre of Bielostok was executed as a diabolical and fantastic orgy by the police and the soldiers. They deliberately shot little children. They ravished, then murdered, young girls, they tortured men by the wildest and most excruciating devices. And the police and soldiers, incidentally, looted Jewish shops and carried away pockets full of watches from jewelers, and cash when they could get it.
The governor of the district was removed, but not in disgrace. The actual perpetrators of these deeds still administer the “law” in Bielostok. The children and the families of the murdered see them every time they go out. I saw them when I was there. They walked about with heads in the air as if they had done a noble thing and were worthy, like war-heroes. And the story of Bielostok is practically the very same as the story of Gomel, of Kishineff and Odessa, save that in Odessa there is a stronger Black Hundred element of “hooligans” and rowdies, who, for a pittance, are glad to lend themselves to the unscrupulous and murderous police.
Such conditions drive the older and weaker Jews to America, and the more spirited of the younger generation to revolution. It is the height of absurdity for the Russian government to excuse its Jewish oppression on the ground that the Jews are revolutionary. By nature and by tradition they are the opposite of aggressive and militant. They are revolutionary because the Russian government is oppressive, and because they know no other course.