The "arrangement" alluded to consisted in spreading the expulsion from the villages over three years: one-third of the Jews were to be expelled in 1808, another third in 1809, and the last third in 1810. Committees were appointed to assist the governors in carrying out the expulsion decree. These committees were instructed to make it incumbent upon the Kahals to render financial assistance to the expelled, to those who were being pitilessly ruined by the Government.
The horrors of the expulsion began.
Those who did not go willingly were made to leave by force. Many were ejected ruthlessly, under the escort of peasants and soldiers. They were driven like cattle into the townlets and cities, and left there on the public squares in the open air. The way in which the expulsion from the villages was carried out in the Government of Vitebsk was particularly ferocious.[249]
Scores of exiled Jews petitioned the authorities to have them transferred to New Russia, to the agricultural colonies, in which several hundred Jewish families had found some kind of shelter. But the supply of arable land and the funds set aside for the transfer were found to be exhausted; the appeals therefore remained unheeded. The distress of the Jewish masses reached such colossal proportions that the governors themselves, in their reports to the central Government, declared that it was impossible to carry out the expulsion decree without subjecting the Jews to complete ruin. Accordingly a new ukase was issued in the last days of December, 1808, to the effect that the Jews be left in their former domiciles, pending special Imperial orders.
In the beginning of January, 1809, a new Committee (chronologically the third) was appointed in St. Petersburg for the purpose of examining all the phases of the problem of diverting the Jews from the rural liquor traffic to other branches of labor. This time the committee consisted of Senator Alexeyev,[250] who had made a tour of inspection through the western provinces, Privy-Councilor Popov, Assistant Minister of the Interior Kozodavlev, and others. In his instructions to Popov, who was chairman of the Committee, the Tzar admits that the impossibility of removing the Jews from the villages results from the fact that "the Jews themselves, on account of their destitute condition, have no means which would enable them, after leaving their present abodes, to settle and found a home in their new surroundings, while the Government is equally unable to undertake to place them all in new domiciles." It has therefore been found necessary "to seek ways and means whereby the Jews, having been removed from their exclusive pursuit of selling wine in the villages, hamlets, inns, and public houses, may be enabled to earn a livelihood by labor." At the same time the Committee was directed to take into consideration the "opinions" submitted previously by the Jewish deputies. After indulging in cruel vivisectionist experiments on human beings, the Government finally realized that mere paper orders were powerless to remodel an economic order, which centuries of development had created, and that violent expulsions and restrictions might result in ruining people, but not in effecting their "amelioration."
The Committee was at work for three years. The results of its labors were embodied in a remarkable report submitted in March, 1812, to Alexander I. Since Speranski's declaration of 1803, reproduced above,[251] this official document was the first to utter a word of truth on the Jewish problem.
It is proposed—the report declares—to remove the Jews from the rural liquor traffic, because the latter is considered harmful to the population. But it is obvious that the root of the drinking evil is not to be found with the saloon-keepers, but in the right of distilling, or "propination," which constitutes the prerogative of the squires and their main source of income. Let us suppose the sixty thousand Jewish saloon-keepers to be turned out from the villages. The result will be that sixty thousand Russian peasants will take their place, tens of thousands of efficient farm-hands will be lost to the soil, while the Jews cannot be expected to be transformed into capable agriculturists at a moment's notice, the less so as the Government has no resources to effect this sudden transformation of saloon-keepers into corn-growers. It is not true that the village Jew enriches himself at the expense of the peasant. On the contrary, he is generally poor, and ekes out a scanty existence from the sale of liquor and by supplying the peasants with the goods they need. Moreover, by buying the corn on the spot, the Jew saves the peasant from wasting his time in traveling to the city. Altogether in rural economic life the Jew plays the rôle of a go-between, who can be spared neither by the squire nor by the peasant. To transfer all village Jews to the cities and convert them into manufacturers, merchants, and artisans, is a matter of impossibility, for even the Jewish population already settled in the cities is scarcely able to make a living, and to create factories and mills artificially would be throwing money into the water, especially as the exchequer has no free millions at its disposal to enable it to grant subsidies to manufacturers. The recent experiments of the Government have had no effect. On the contrary, the Jewish people "has not only remained in the same state of poverty, but has even been reduced to greater destitution, as a result of having been forced out of a pursuit which had provided it with a livelihood for several centuries." Hence, "the Committee, realizing this situation of a whole people, and being afraid that the continuation of compulsory measures, in the present political circumstances, may only exasperate this people, already restricted to the utmost, deems it necessary ... to put a resolute stop to the now prevailing methods of interference by allowing the Jews to remain in their former abodes and by setting free the pursuits suspended by Clause 34."
The Government submitted. In yielding it was moved not so much by the clear and incontrovertible arguments of the Committee, which amounted to a deadly criticism of the current system of state patronage, as by the "political circumstances" alluded to in the concluding sentences of the report. Napoleon's army was marching towards the Russian frontier. The war which was to embroil the whole of Russia and subsequently the whole of Europe had broken out. At such a moment, when the French army was flooding the whole of Western Russia, it seemed far more dangerous to create groups of persecuted and embittered outcasts than it had been in 1807, when the French invasion was merely a matter of apprehension. In these circumstances the question whether the Jews should be left in the villages and hamlets found a favorable solution of itself, without any special ukase. Stirred to the core, Russia, in the moment of national danger, had to rely for her salvation upon the strenuous exertions of all her inhabitants, Jews included.
4. The Patriotic Attitude of Russian Jewry during the War of 1812
The part played by the Jews in the War of 1812 was not so insignificant as historians are generally disposed to assume, being misled by the fact that the Jews of Russia were not yet drafted into the army. It must be borne in mind that the great war was enacted in western Russia, more particularly in northwestern Russia, on territory inhabited by a compact Jewish population scattered all over the cities, townlets, and villages. The sympathy of this population with one or the other of the belligerents frequently decided the success or failure of the detachment situated in that locality. It is a well-known fact that the Poles of the western region were mostly on the side of Napoleon, from whom they expected the restoration of the Polish kingdom.