Far more intense than in the political life of Russia was the crisis in its social life. While a chilling wind was still blowing from the wintry heights of Russian officialdom, while a grim censorship was still holding down the flight of the printed word, the released social energy was whirling and swirling in all classes of Russian society, sometimes breaking the fetters of police restraint. The outbursts of young Russia ran far ahead of the slow progress of the reforms inspired from above. It blazed the path for political freedom which the West of Europe had long traversed, and which was to prove in Russia tortuous and thorny.
The phase of Jewish life which claimed the first thought of Alexander II.'s Government was the military conscription. Prior to the conclusion of the Crimean War, the Committee on Jewish Affairs [1] called the Tzar's attention to the necessity of modifying the method of Jewish conscription, with its fiendish contrivances of seizing juvenile cantonists and enlisting "penal" and "captive" recruits. Nevertheless the removal of this crying evil was postponed for a year, until the promulgation of the Coronation Manifesto [2] of August 26, 1856, when it was granted as an act of grace.
[Footnote 1: See above, p. 49.]
[Footnote 2: On the meaning of Manifesto see later, p. 246, n. 1.]
Prompted by the desire—the Manifesto reads—of making it easier for the Jews to discharge their military duty and of averting the inconveniences attached thereto, we command as follows:
1. Recruits from among the Jews are to be drafted in the same way as from among the other estates, primarily from among those unsettled and not engaged in productive labor. [1] Only in default of able-bodied men among these, the shortage is to be made up from among the category of Jews who by reason of their engaging in productive labor are recognized as useful.
2. The drafting of recruits from among other estates and of those under age is to be repealed.
3. In regard to the making up of the shortage of recruits, the general laws are to be applied, and the exaction of recruits from Jewish communities as a penalty for arrears is to be repealed.
4. The temporary rules, enacted by way of experiment in 1853, granting Jewish communities and Jewish individuals the right of presenting as recruits in their own stead coreligionists seized without passports [2] are to be repealed.
[Footnote 1: See on these designations pp. 64 and 142.]