Out of the six or seven million Jews in the world, over five million live within the boundaries of the Russian Empire. Russia is therefore the motherland of the Children of Israel; though, perhaps, the phrase step-motherland would express more truly the actual relationship, both in its origin and its character. Russia has inherited her tremendous responsibilities towards the Hebrew race from Poland, and her vexed "Jewish question" is in part a just punishment for her complicity in the wicked partitions of that country in the eighteenth century. The matter, however, goes back much farther than the eighteenth century. In the Middle Ages Poland was a more powerful state than Russia, and comprised territory stretching from the Gulf of Riga to the Black Sea and from the Oder to the Dnieper. She was also the one country in Europe which offered to the Jews security from persecution and an opportunity of developing the commercial instincts of the race without interference. The result was that Jews settled in large numbers all over the King of Poland's possessions, and the presence of Jews in any part of modern Russia is almost a sure sign that that particular town or province has been Polish territory in former times. The Russian Government has never, except for a short period, allowed the Jews to live in Russia proper, and it is very rare to find Jews in north or central Russia. Even in large cities like Petrograd and Moscow their numbers are small, while it is interesting to note that the Finns have copied the rest of Russia in this respect at least that they have always resolutely refused to admit the Hebrew. Where Russia found Jews among the new subjects which she acquired by her gradual encroachments upon Poland, she had of course to let them remain, but she has confined them strictly to these districts. The existence of this Jewish pale is one of the grievances of the Jews of Russia, but it is not the heaviest. The liberal-minded Alexander II. had shown himself lenient to them; but his assassination in 1881 at the hands of terrorists and the accession of the reactionary Alexander III. began a period of persecution which has continued until the present day.
Alexander III. was much influenced by his tutor, Pobiedonostsev, who for the next thirty years was the most prominent exponent of the philosophy of Slavophilism. This, which in its modern form may be traced back to 1835, was in fact nothing else than a perverted glorification of the Russian national characteristics which have been dwelt upon above. The Slavophils declared not only that the Russians were a great and admirable nation, which few who really know them will be disposed to deny, but that their institutions—and in particular, of course, autocracy and bureaucracy—were a perfect expression of the national genius which could hardly be improved upon. Furthermore, it was maintained that, since all other countries but Russia had taken a wrong turn and fallen into decadence and libertinism, it was Russia's mission to bring the world back into the paths of rectitude and virtue by extending the influence of her peculiar culture—and in particular again, of course, its special manifestations, autocracy and bureaucracy—as widely as possible. A variant of Slavophilism is Panslavism, which works for the day when all members of one great Slav race will be united in one nation, presumably under the Russian crown. Both these movements are examples of that nationalism run mad to which reference has been made in the second chapter.[1] But the Slavophils, who are of course ardent supporters of the Orthodox Church, were faced at the outset with a great difficulty; the western provinces of Russia, from the Arctic to the Black Sea, contained masses of population which were neither Russian nor Orthodox. The Finns in the north were Lutherans; the Poles in the centre, though Slavs, were Roman Catholic in religion and anti-Russian in sentiment; and the Jews in the centre and south were—Jews. The first step, therefore, towards the Slavophil goal was the "Russification" of the subject peoples of Russia. In theory "Russification" means conferring the benefits of Russian customs, speech, and culture upon those who do not already possess them; in practice it amounts to the suppression of local liberties and traditions.
[Footnote 1: See p. 57.]
It is obvious that it is no easier to make a Jew into a Russian by force than to change the skin of the proverbial Ethiopian; nor is it likely that the Russian Government ever entertained the idea of making such an attempt. If it had any definite plan at all, it was to render things so uncomfortable to the unfortunate Hebrews that they would gradually leave the country. Real persecution began at the accession of Alexander III. in 1881, when it spread into Russia, significantly enough, from Germany, where a violent anti-Semite agitation had sprung up at the beginning of the year. Riots directed against the Jews, and winked at if not encouraged by the authorities, broke out in the towns of Southern Russia. Edicts followed which excluded the Jews from all direct share in local government, refused to allow more than a small percentage of Jews to attend the schools and universities, forbade them to acquire property outside the towns, laid special taxes upon their backs, and so on. This attitude of the Government encouraged the populace of the towns to believe that they might attack the Jews with impunity. The Jews are regarded in modern Russia in much the same light as they were regarded by our forefathers in the Middle Ages. They are hated, that is to say, on two counts: as unbelievers and as usurers. The condition of affairs in a township where the population is half-Jewish, half-Christian, and where the Christians are financially and commercially in the hands of the Jews, and the Jews are politically and administratively in the hands of the Christians, is obviously an extremely dangerous one. Add to this the presence of a large hooligan section which is found in almost every Russian town of any size, the open disfavour shown towards the Jews by the Government, and the secret intrigues and incitement of the police, and you get a train of circumstances which lead inevitably to those violent anti-Semitic explosions, known as pogroms, which have stained the pages of modern Russian history. The revolutionary movement has complicated matters still further; for Jews are naturally to be found in the revolutionary ranks, and the bureaucracy and its hooligan supporters have tended to identify the Jewish race with the Revolutionary Party. Nothing can excuse the treatment of the Jews in Russia during the last thirty-five years, and the guilt lies almost entirely upon the Government, which, instead of leading the people and educating them by initiating an enlightened policy towards the Jews, a policy which might in fact have done more than anything else to "Russify" the latter, has persistently aided and abetted the worst elements of the population in their acts of violence. It has reaped its reward in the rise of one of the most formidable of the revolutionary parties in modern Russia, the so-called Jewish "Bund." The Governor of Vilna, in a confidential report written in 1903, declared that "this political movement is undoubtedly a result of the abnormal position of the Jews, legal and economic, which has been created by our legislation. A revision of the laws concerning the Jews is absolutely urgent, and every postponement of it is pregnant with the most dangerous consequences."
Yet when we condemn Russia for her pogroms and her Jew-baitings, we must not forget two facts: first, that these occurrences are the work, not of the real Russian people, the peasantry which has been described above, but of the dregs of the population which are to be found at the base of the social structure in the towns of Russia as in towns nearer home; second, that Russia is not the only country in the world that has these racial problems to face. I once heard a Russian and an American discussing the comparative demerits of their respective lands, and I am bound to say that the former held his own very well. When, for example, the American said, "What about the Jews?" the other answered, "Well, what about the negroes?" and he parried the further question, "What about pogroms?" with another of his own, "What about lynching?" The problems are not, of course, quite on all fours, nor do two wrongs make a right, but a reminder that similar problems exist in other parts of the world will perhaps be enough to show that the Jewish question in Russia is neither unique nor at all easy to solve. Let us, instead of visiting the sins of a few townships upon the heads of the entire Russian nation, be thankful that we have no such problems in our own islands. Recent riots outside the shops of German pork-butchers in different parts of the country do not, it must be confessed, lead one to hope that our people would behave much more calmly and discreetly than the Whites of the Southern States or the Christians of South-West Russia, were they placed in the same circumstances.
The Polish question is at once simpler and its story less damaging to the Russian Government than that of the Jews. The partitions, an account of which has already been given,[1] were of course iniquitous, but, as we have seen, Prussia must bear the chief blame for them. In any case, the Tsar Alexander I. did his utmost for Poland at the Congress of Vienna in 1815. He pleaded eloquently for a reunited Poland, and he almost won over Prussia by making arrangements to compensate her for her Polish territory at the expense of Saxony. But France, England, and Austria opposed his project, and he was obliged to yield to the combined pressure of these powers. Russia is, therefore, not more but less guilty of the present dismembered state of Poland than her Western neighbours, among whom we must not forget ourselves;[2] and she is to-day only attempting to carry out the promise which she made, but was not allowed to fulfill, a century ago. Disappointed as he was, Alexander I. made the best of a bad job by granting a liberal constitution to that part of Poland which the Congress assigned to Russia. Indeed he did everything possible, short of a grant of absolute independence, which at that time would have been absurd, to conciliate public opinion in the Grand-Duchy of Warsaw. Unfortunately the experiment proved a complete failure, largely owing to the factious and self-seeking Polish nobility who have always been the worst enemy of their country. Alexander after a time lost patience, and in 1820 he felt compelled to withdraw some of the liberties which he had conferred in 1815. After this the breach between the Russian Government and the Polish people began to widen, partly owing to stupid and clumsy actions on the side of Russia, partly to the incurable lack of political common-sense on the side of the upper classes in Poland, partly to the fact that the country could never be anything but restless and unsatisfied while it remained divided. The history of Russian Poland since the time of Alexander is the history of two great failures to throw off the Russian yoke, the failure of 1830 and of 1863. These risings were marked by heroism, disunion, and incapacity on the one side, and by relentless repression on the other. The upshot was that Poland was deprived of her constitutional rights one by one, until finally she became nothing more than so many provinces of Russia itself. To some extent, however, the failure of 1863 proved a blessing in disguise. The rising had been almost entirely confined to the nobility; Russia therefore turned to the peasants of Poland, released them from all obligations to work upon the estates of the large landowners, and handed over to them at least half the land of the country as freehold property. The result of this measure, and of the removal of the customs barrier between the two countries in 1877, was twofold: the power of the factious nobility was shattered for ever, and a marvellous development of industry took place in Poland which has united her to Russia "with chains of self-interest likely to prove a serious obstacle to the realisation of Polish hopes of independence."[3] It is indeed doubtful whether at this date the Poles cherish any such hopes. What they desire is national unity and self-government rather than sovereign independence, and they know that they are at least as likely to receive these from Russia as from Prussia.
[Footnote 1: Pp. 24-27.]
[Footnote 2: As a matter of fact our representative, Lord Castlereagh, was Alexander's chief opponent at the Congress in the question of Poland. See Camb. Mod. Hist. vol. x. p. 445.]
[Footnote 1: Camb. Mod. Hist. vol. xi. p. 629.]
While of late years the relations between Russia and Poland have steadily improved, those between Russia and Finland, on the contrary, have grown rapidly worse. Until 1809 Finland was a Grand-Duchy under the Swedish crown, but in that year, owing to a war which had broken out between Russia and Sweden, she passed into the control of the nearer and more powerful State, after putting up a stubborn resistance to annexation which will always figure as the most glorious episode in the annals of the country. Alexander I., who was at that time Tsar, adopted the same policy towards Finland as he did towards Poland. He refused to incorporate the new province into the Russian State-system, he took the title of Grand-Duke of Finland (thereby implying that she lay outside the Empire), and he confirmed the ancient liberties of the Finns. Later on they even secured greater liberty than they had possessed under Sweden by the grant of a Finnish Diet, on the lines of the Swedish Diet in Stockholm, which should have full control of all internal Finnish affairs. Finland, therefore, gained much from the transfer; she possessed for the first time in her history complete internal autonomy. This state of things lasted for practically ninety years, during which period Finland made wonderful progress both economic and intellectual, so that by the end of the nineteenth century she was one of the happiest, most enlightened, and most prosperous countries in Northern Europe. "As regards the condition of Finland," Alexander I. had declared, "my intention has been to give this people a political existence, so that they may not feel themselves conquered by Russia, but united to her for their own clear advantage; therefore, not only their civil but their political laws have been maintained." This liberal policy was continued by the various Tsars throughout the century, the reformer Alexander II. taking particular interest in the development of the Grand-Duchy, which he evidently regarded as a place where experiments in political liberty were being worked out that might later be applied to the rest of Russia. The weakness of Finland's position lay in the fact that her liberties really depended upon the personal whim of the Grand-Duke: in theory her constitutional laws were only alterable by the joint sanction of monarch and people; in practice the small but courageous nation had no means of redress should the Tsar, swayed by bureaucratic reaction, choose to go back upon the policy of his ancestors. And in 1894 a Tsar mounted the throne, Nicholas II., who did so choose.