The wife of a [Jewish] physician had come to Yalta to improve her shattered health. While she was suffering from severe bloodspitting, a policeman invaded the bedroom of the sick woman, insisting on her giving a written pledge to leave the place within twenty-four hours. The patient was terribly frightened. On the following day the deportation was stopped, in consequence of the testimony of her physician that the slightest motion was fraught with danger to the invalid. But the fright and uncertainty had intensified the cough; the young woman became worse, and soon afterwards died.
As it happened, the action of the police was subsequently found to be entirely unwarranted; for, as the wife of a physician, this victim of bureaucratic heartlessness was, even according to the letter of the law, entitled to the right of residence in Yalta.
A similar case was that of a sick Jewish student who had been sent by his physicians to Yalta to cure his lungs. He was expelled in the dead of winter and deported under a police convoy, together with a batch of prisoners, to Sevastopol, notwithstanding the fact that he was in a feverish condition. The correspondent of a local paper in Sevastopol reported that "along the entire road from the harbor to the prison, which was traversed by the batch, passers-by would stop in their walk, staggered by the extraordinary spectacle." The sufferer appealed to the Senate, but the latter found that the orders of the police "contained nothing contrary to the law." The highest tribunal of the empire went with equanimity on record that a Jewish student was liable to the penalty of being arrested and marched under a police escort, together with criminal offenders, for an attempt to heal his lungs in the warm southern climate.
But no place in the empire could vie as regards hostility to the Jews with the city of Kiev—this inferno of Russian Israel. Though surrounded on all sides by a string of towns and townlets with a dense Jewish population, the southwestern metropolis was guarded by a host of police watchdogs against the invasion of "aliens." Apart from the "privileged" Jews who formed part of the permanent population, the police were forced to admit into the city Jewish visitors who came to Kiev for a few days to attend to their affairs. Yet, haunted by the fear lest these visitors might stay there too long, the police arranged oblavas, or raids, to hunt them down like stray dogs. About once a week, during the night, the police would raid certain hostelries in which the Jews were wont to stop, put those that were caught under arrest, and then expel them from the confines of the city. This additional heavy "night work" called for a larger police staff, and to meet this increased expenditure, an annual sum of 15,000 rubles was appropriated—from the proceeds of the Jewish meat tax. This revenue, collected from the Jews for the purpose of maintaining the charitable and educational institutions of the Jewish communities, was now used to pay the police agents to enable them to hunt down these Jews and expel them in merciless fashion. To put it more plainly, the convict, after being sentenced to be hanged, was forced to buy the rope. The methods of the Russian inquisition gradually reached the top notch of efficiency. Even the "Kievlanin" ("The Kievian"), the anti-Semitic official organ of Kiev, was bound to confess on one occasion that "in the course of the month of July (of the year 1901) things have taken place in Kiev which are hardly conceivable."
As far as the general disabilities are concerned, the entire area of the Russian empire outside the Pale of Settlement, though open to foreigners of all nationalities, remained hermetically closed to the Jewish citizens of Russia, and the borders of that prohibited area were guarded even more rigorously than they had been during the previous reign. In the consistent enforcement of this principle the Government did not shrink from the most revolting extremes. A law passed in 1896 interdicted Jewish soldiers from spending outside the Pale of Settlement even the brief leave of absence which they were granted during their term of military service. A Jewish soldier serving in a regiment which was stationed, let us say, in St. Petersburg, Moscow, or even in far-off Siberia, was forced, under this law, to travel hundreds and even thousands of miles to the Pale of Settlement to spend his month of furlough there, being denied the right to remain in the city in which he was discharging his military duty, and it made no difference even if the furlough was granted to him for the purpose of recuperating his health.
In many places of the empire, the whimsicality of the local authorities in construing the law of residence was of a nature to suggest that they had no other end in view except that of making sport of the Jews. The administration of Siberia, for instance, invented the following regulation: a Jewish merchant or artisan who is registered in one of the Siberian cities shall have the right only to live in the particular city of his registration, and in no other. Since very many Jews resided outside the localities of their accidental registration, a transmigration of Siberian Jewry was the result. The Jews registered, e. g., in Tomsk, though they might have lived from the day of their birth in Irkutsk, were deported in batches to Tomsk, meeting on the way parties of exiled Jews from Tomsk who had the misfortune of having their names entered upon the records of Irkutsk. Human beings were shuffled like a pack of cards. This revolting practice of the Siberian authorities, which had begun at the end of the preceding reign, was sustained by the Senate in a decision handed down in 1897.
4. The Economic Collapse of Russian Jewry
The result of all these persecutions was the complete economic collapse of Russian Jewry. Speaking generally, the economic structure of the Russian Jews experienced violent upheavals during the first years of Nicholas II.'s reign. The range of Jewish economic endeavor, circumscribed though it was, was narrowed more and more. In 1894, the law placing the liquor trade under Government control was put into effect by Witte, the Minister of Finance. Catering to the prejudices of the ruling spheres of Russia, Witte had already endeavored to convince Alexander III. that the liquor state monopoly would have the effect of completely undermining "Jewish exploitation," the latter being primarily bound up with the sale of liquor in the towns and villages. In view of this, the monopoly was introduced with particular zeal in the western governments, where a little later, in the course of 1896-1898, during the reign of Nicholas II., all private pot-houses were replaced by official liquor stores, the so-called "imperial bar-rooms." In consequence of this reform, tens of thousands of Jewish families who had derived their livelihood either directly from the liquor trade, or indirectly from occupations connected with it, such as the keeping of inns and hostelries, were deprived of their means of subsistence. It goes without saying that, as far as the moral aspect of the problem was concerned, the best elements of Russian Jewry welcomed this reform, which bade fair to wipe out an ugly stain on the escutcheon of the Jewish people—the liquor traffic bequeathed to the Jews by ancient Poland. Known as the most sober people on earth, the Jews had been placed in the tragic position that thousands of them, in their search for a piece of bread, were forced to serve as a medium for promoting the pernicious Russian drunkenness. The memory of the days when the Jewish saloon was the breeding-place of pogroms, in which the Russian peasants and burghers filled themselves with Jewish alcohol to fortify themselves in their infamous work of demolishing the homes of the Jews, was still fresh in their minds. Cheerfully would the Jewish people have yielded its monopoly of the liquor trade to the Russian bar-room keepers and to the Russian Government who seemed genuinely attracted toward it, had it only been allowed to pursue other methods of earning a livelihood. But in closing the avenue of the liquor traffic to two hundred thousand Jews, the Government did not even think of removing the special restrictions which barred their way to other lines of endeavor. Having been robbed of the scanty livelihood they derived from their country inns, thousands of rural victims of the state monopoly flocked into the cities, only to clash with a host of urban victims of the same reform who had also been deprived of their means of sustenance. The growth of the proletariat within the Pale of Settlement, both in business and in the trades, assumed appalling proportions. The observers of economic life in the Pale, such as the well-known Russian economist Subbotin and others, called attention to the frightful increase of pauperism in that region. Between 1894 and 1898 the number of Jewish families in need of assistance increased twenty-seven per cent. as compared with former years. In 1897, the number of Jews without definite occupations amounted in certain cities to fifty per cent. and more. The number of destitute Jews applying for help before the Passover festival reached unheard of proportions, amounting in Odessa, Vilna, Minsk, Kovno, and other cities to forty and even fifty per cent. of the total Jewish population. The crop failures of 1899 and 1900 in the south of Russia resulted in a terrible famine among the impecunious Jewish masses. Whereas the peasants who suffered from the same calamity received financial assistance from the Government, the Jews had to resort to self-help, to the collection of funds throughout the empire to which only here and there liberal Christians added their mites.
Many of these Jewish proletarians were willing to take up agriculture, but the "Temporary Rules" of 1882 blocked their way to the country-side, and made it impossible for them to buy or even lease a piece of land. Prominent Jews of St. Petersburg, such as Baron Günzburg and others, petitioned the Government to allow the Jews to purchase small parcels of land for personal use, but, after long deliberations, their petition was rejected. Thus, at the end of the nineteenth century, the ruling spheres of the Russian empire proved more anti-Semitic than at the beginning of the same century, when the Government of Alexander I. and even that of Nicholas I. had endeavored to promote agriculture among the Jews and had established the Jewish agricultural colonies in the south of Russia.[13] The mania of oppression went so far as to prohibit the Jews from buying or leasing parcels of land which were part of a city, but happened to be situated outside the city line. A rich Jew of Minsk, by the name of Pollak, petitioned, in 1897, the local Town Council to sell him a piece of suburban property for the establishment of a Jewish agricultural farm, but his petition was refused. This refusal was thoroughly consistent. For the fact that the Jews were forbidden to own land made the training of Jews in the art of agriculture entirely superfluous. It may be added that this prohibition of land ownership was upheld by the Government even in the case of the Jewish students who had completed their course in the school of the Jewish Agricultural Farm near Odessa.
Similar methods were employed to check the development of arts and crafts, which were widely represented among the Jews, but stood on a very low technical level. Even the efforts to organize mutual help among the working classes were blocked by the Government in all kinds of ways. The well-known Jewish millionaire, Brodski, of Kiev, wishing to assist the toiling masses without distinction of creed, offered to open a trade bank in that city and to contribute towards that purpose the sum of 120,000 rubles. When, in 1895, he submitted the constitution of the proposed bank to the local authorities for their approval, he was required to insert a clause to the effect that the directors and the chairman of the bank council should always be Christians and that the council itself should not include more than one Jewish member. To this insolent demand Brodski made the only fitting retort: "Being myself a Jew, I cannot possibly agree that the constitution of an establishment which is to be founded with the money contributed by me and which is to bear my name shall contain restrictions affecting my coreligionists." He naturally withdrew his offer, and Kiev was deprived of a trade bank. The fact that the failure of the project also affected the Christian artisans did not disturb the authorities in the least. It was enough of a compensation that the Jews were made to suffer not only materially, but also morally, and the purpose of the highly-placed Jew-baiters was accomplished.