Within the Pale: The True Story of Anti-Semitic Persecution in Russia

by Michael Davitt

The Russian officer is not averse to the Jew as a soldier, but he must never be—a Russian officer.

Finally, the Government of Russia looks upon the Jew as the most dangerous of disturbing factors in the rapid development of the industrial life of the Empire, and as a political enemy within the ambit of its most vulnerable western frontier. He is believed to be the active propagandist of Socialism, and he is known to have powerful political and financial allies among the pressmen and financiers of France, England, and Germany—allies who can strike at Russia’s financial credit, external policies, and moral prestige, in retaliation for the legal outlawry of their race within the dominions of the Tsar.

Against these governmental, religious, industrial, social, and national forces of a huge empire combined, what chance has a proscribed race, alienised by law, of obtaining redress? It is a hopeless struggle, look at it how we may. The duties and obligations of civilised rule may be put before the Russian Government, and the pleas of an enlightened jurisprudence advanced in behalf of the Russian Jew, but with what result? Russia makes answer, “These people are not of us, any more than the Chinese of San Francisco, or the ten millions of emancipated Negroes, are free citizens of the United States Republic. They are a danger to the Empire from within, more so than the existence of the Boer Republics of South Africa ever was a menace to the prestige of the British Empire, the removal of which, nevertheless, required a great and costly war. We claim the right to resort to our own measures, as other Powers have done, as France is doing to-day, to safeguard the peace of the realm, and to minimise the risks involved in having an unfriendly element, composed of five or six millions of an unpopular race, located where a German or an Austrian attack might some day be made upon our Western frontier. We cannot expect, or induce, other countries to open the gates of emigration to these undesirables, but we will not permit any Power or people to coerce us to admit this race to the common rights of Russian citizenship or nationality.”

This may be despotic, irrational, and all the rest, but it is the answer which every external attempt to nationalise the Semitic alien will obtain from the Russian Empire. The voices of Maxime Gorky, and of Tolstoy, and of a few other noble spirits to the contrary are but moral foils which exhibit by contrast the omnipotent strength of the resisting and resistless ruling influences behind the Tsar; military, religious, social, and industrial; which stand remorseless and irremovable between the Russian Jew and justice and equality.

Russia’s point of view must be understood if she is to be rightly judged in this matter, and if the friends of a persecuted people are to be persuaded to concentrate their sympathetic energies upon some feasible remedy for an intolerable wrong. Socialism has, as yet, about as much of a hold and of a hope in Russia, as Protestantism has in Spain, or Catholicity in Turkey. The soil is not congenial; but the propaganda is a most serious danger which the Russian powers that be fear more as a potential future element of industrial and political agitation than as a present trouble to the forces of law and order. Socialism is like the Jew, an unwelcome intruder, and both are inseparably associated in the ruling and official mind of the Empire.

Russia’s industrial development, like the extension of her power and prestige, must be along lines selected by herself. She wants no external tutelage, and will have no outside meddling in her domestic affairs. Nor, is she taking this stand out of any unwillingness to see labour rightly rewarded, or from any desire that a favoured class or protected interest shall sweat or treat unjustly the growing industrial population of her manufacturing centres. Any such imputation would be untrue and unfair. There is scarcely a practicable reform in the social and industrial programme of Trades-Unionism which some department of Russian administration is not trying its best, at the present time, to put into operation, in some tentative way, for the benefit of the mill, and foundry, and general workshop hands of Russia’s manufacturing activities;—old-age pensions, profit-sharing, sanitation of mills and mines, healthy housing of workers, even to the copying of the Arbeiterstadt of Mülhausen, in the Cité ouvrière of Dago-Kertell. But there shall be no Trades-Unionist combination in Russia except what emanates from and is sanctioned by a paternal government.

In many respects and ways Russian autocracy is ahead of constitutional countries in enlightened efforts to solve the complex labour problem of our day. The manifold evils of overcrowded urban centres are recognised and guarded against in the encouragement of rural manufacturing villages. Plans for enabling artisans to acquire the ownership of their homes are the work of Commissions and Societies subsidised by the Government for this special task. There are apprenticeship schools for the children of mechanics, “public workshops” for the unemployed in times of distress, and other progressive schemes having the social and moral betterment of the worker in view. These and kindred reforms are engaging the serious and earnest attention of the Tsar’s ministerial advisers.

In one other most important respect the Russian Government is setting an example in beneficent industrial enterprise which more progressive countries might follow with marked advantage to their labouring classes. This is the national encouragement offered to the “Koustari,” or rural, industries. These play an essential part in the national economy of the Russian people. They help to keep families together, and to minimise migratory labour. These cottage industries give remunerative employment during slack seasons and winter months to several million people, and yield an addition to the general wage fund of the country averaging five hundred million roubles a year. All these industries have direct economic relation to the greatest of all Russian industries, that of agriculture. They, therefore, play a doubly profitable part in the social welfare of the people, in helping to maintain a due economic balance between rural and urban labour, and in upholding the primary importance of land industries to the physical and moral health of the nation.

Russia, unlike England, recognises the national danger of physical degeneracy through overcrowded manufacturing cities. Knowing how the prospect of better wages in these centres attracts the workers of the soil to the employment of mills and foundries, she sets herself the task of encouraging the growth of such counter-industries as will tend to minimise the extent of this movement. Not alone does she want to remove mills from the unhealthy environment of crowded towns by placing them amidst rural surroundings, she also wisely tries to add to the necessarily scant money earnings of farmers’ families the profits of the Koustari occupations, the better to preserve the home influence and the healthy atmosphere of village industrial life for the general benefit of the people’s physique and to the great moral advantage of the Russian masses.

All this is necessary to be understood in order to comprehend the antipathy, economic and political, which the Russian Jew excites in the official and the general Russian mind.