History of the Jews in Russia and Poland Volume II Part 31

While the Russian Government, abashed by the voices of protest, made an effort to justify itself in the eyes of Europe and America and perverted the truth with its well-known diplomatic skill, the _Russkaya Zhizn_ ("Russian Life"), a St. Petersburg paper, which was far from being pro-Jewish, published a number of heart-rending facts ill.u.s.trating the trials of the outlawed Jews at Moscow. It told of a young talented Jew who maintained himself and his family by working on a Moscow newspaper and, not having the right of residence in that city, was wont to save himself from the night raids of the police by hiding himself, on a signal of his landlord, in the wardrobe. Many Jews who lived honestly by the sweat of their brow were cruelly expelled by the police when their certificates of residence contained even the slightest technical inaccuracy. By way of ill.u.s.trating the "religious liberty" of the Jews in the narrower sense of the word, the paper mentioned the fact that after the opening of the new synagogue in Moscow, which accommodated five hundred worshippers, the police ordered the closing of all the other houses of prayer, to the number of twenty, which had been attended by some ten thousand people.

The governor of St. Petersburg, Gresser, made a regular sport of taunting the Jews. One ordinance of his prescribed that the signs on the stores and workshops belonging to Jews should indicate not only the family names of their owners but also their full first names as well as their fathers'

names, exactly as they were spelled in their pa.s.sports, "with the end in view of averting possible misunderstandings." The object of this ordinance was to enable the Christian public to boycott the Jewish stores and, in addition, to poke fun at the names of the owners, which, as a rule, were mutilated in the Russian registers and pa.s.sports to the point of ridiculousness by semi-illiterate clerks.

Gresser's ordinance was issued on November 17, 1890, a few days before the protest meeting in London. As the Russian Government was at that time a.s.suring Europe that the Jews were particularly happy in Russia, the ordinance was not published in the newspapers but nevertheless applied secretly. The Jewish storekeepers, who realized the malicious intent of the new edict, tried to minimize the damage resulting from it by having their names painted in small letters so as not to catch the eyes of the Russian anti-Semites. Thereupon Gresser directed the police officials (in March 1891) to see to it that the Jewish names on the store signs should be indicated "clearly and in a conspicuous place, in accordance with the prescribed drawings" and "to report immediately" to him any attempt to violate the law. In this manner St. Petersburg reacted upon the cries of indignation which rang at that time through Europe and America.

CHAPTER XXIX

THE EXPULSION FROM MOSCOW

1. PREPARING THE BLOW

The year 1891 had arrived. The air was full of evil forebodings. In the solitude of the Government chancelleries of St. Petersburg the anti-Jewish conspirators were a.s.siduously at work preparing for a new blow to be dealt to the martyred nation. A secret committee attached to the Ministry of the Interior, under the chairmanship of Plehve, was engaged in framing a monstrous enactment of Jewish counter-reforms, which were practically designed to annul the privileges conferred upon certain categories of Jews by Alexander II. The princ.i.p.al object of the proposed enactment was to slam the doors to the Russian interior, which had been slightly opened by the laws of 1859 and 1865, by withdrawing the privilege of residing outside the Pale which these laws had conferred upon Jewish first guild merchants and artisans, subject to a number of onerous conditions.

The first object of the reactionary conspirators was to get rid of those "privileged" Jews who lived in the two Russian capitals. In St.

Petersburg this object was to be attained by the edicts of Gresser, referred to previously, which were followed by other similarly hara.s.sing regulations. In February, 1891, the governor of St. Petersburg ordered the police "to examine the kind of trade" pursued by the Jewish artisans of St. Petersburg, with the end in view of expelling from the city and confiscating the goods of all those who should be caught with articles not manufactured by themselves [1]. A large number of expulsion followed upon this order. The princ.i.p.al blow, however, was to fall in Moscow.

[Footnote 1: See above, p. 170 et seq., and p. 347 et seq.]

The ancient Muscovite capital was in the throes of great changes. The post of governor-general of Moscow, which had been occupied by Count Dolgoruki, was entrusted in February, 1891, to a brother of the Tzar, Grand Duke Sergius. The grand duke, who enjoyed an unenviable reputation in the gambling circles of both capitals, was not burdened by any consciously formulated political principles. But this deficiency was made up by his steadfast loyalty to the political and religious prejudices of his environment, among which the blind hatred of Judaism occupied a prominent place. The Russian public was inclined to attach extraordinary importance to the appointment of the Tzar's brother. It was generally felt that his selection was designed to serve as a preliminary step to the transfer of the imperial capital from St.

Petersburg to Moscow, symbolizing the return "home"--to the old-Muscovite political ideals. It is almost superfluous to add that the contemplated change made it necessary to purge the ancient capital of its Jewish inhabitants.

The Jewish community of Moscow, numbering some thirty thousand souls who lived there legally or semi-legally, had long been a thorn in the flesh of certain influential Russian merchants. The burgomaster of Moscow, Alexeyev, an ignorant merchant, with a very shady reputation, was greatly wrought up over the far-reaching financial influence of a local Jewish capitalist, Lazarus Polakov, the director of a rural bank, with whom he had clashed over some commercial transaction. Alexeyev was only too grateful for an occasion to impress upon the highest Government spheres that it was necessary "to clear Moscow of the Jews," who were crowding the city, owing to the indulgence of Dolgoruki, the former governor-general. The reactionaries of Moscow and St. Petersburg joined hands in the worthy cause of extirpating Judaism, and received the blessing of the head of the Holy Synod, Pobyedonostzev. This inquisitor-in-chief appointed Istomin, a ferocious anti-Semite, who had been his general utility man at the Holy Synod, the bureau-manager of the new governor-general, and thus succeeded in establishing his influence in Moscow through his acting representative who was practically the master of the second capital.

The secret council of Jew-haters decided to accomplish the Jewish evacuation of Moscow prior to the solemn entrance of Grand Duke Sergius into the city, either for the purpose of clearing the way for the new satrap, or in order to avoid the unpleasantness of having his name connected with the first cruel act of expulsion. Pending the arrival of Sergius the administration of Moscow was entrusted to Costanda, the chief of the Moscow Military District, an adroit Greek, who was to begin the military operations against the Jewish population. The first blow was timed to take place on the festival of Israel's liberation from Egyptian bondage, as if the eternal people needed to be reminded of the new bondage and of the new Pharaohs.

2. THE HORRORS OF EXPULSION

It was on March 29, 1891, the first day of the Jewish Pa.s.sover, when in the synagogues of Moscow which were filled with worshippers an alarming whisper ran from mouth to mouth telling of the publication of an imperial ukase ordering the expulsion of the Jews from the city. Soon afterwards the horror-stricken Jews read in the papers the following imperial order, dated March 28:

Jewish mechanics, distillers, brewers, and, in general, master workmen and artisans shall be forbidden to remove from the Jewish Pale of Settlement as well as to come over from other places of the Empire to the City and Government of Moscow.

This prohibition of settling in Moscow _anew_ was only one half of the edict. The second, more terrible half, was published on the following day:

A recommendation shall be made to the Minister of the Interior, after consultation with the Governor-General of Moscow, to see to it that measures be taken to the effect that the above-mentioned Jews should gradually depart from the City and Government of Moscow into the places established for the permanent residence of the Jews.

At first sight it seemed difficult to realize that this harmless surface of the ukase, with its ambiguous formulation, [1] concealed a cruel decree ordering the uprooting of thousands of human beings. But those who were to execute this written law received definite unwritten instructions which were carried out according to all the rules of the strategic game.

[Footnote 1: The Byzantine perfidy of this formulation lies in the phrase "above-mentioned Jews," which gives the impression of referring to those that had "removed" to Moscow from other parts of the Empire, i.e., settled there _anew_, whereas the real object of the law was to expel _all_ the Jews of the "above-mentioned" categories of master workmen and artisans, even though they may have lived in the city for many years. This amounted to a repeal, illegally enacted outside the Council of State, of the law of 1865, conferring the right of universal residence upon Jewish artisans. Moreover, the enactment was given retroactive force--a step which even the originators of the "Temporary Rules" of May 3 were not bold enough to make. In distinction from the May Laws, the present decree was not even submitted to the Council of Ministers, where a discussion of it might have been demanded; it was pa.s.sed as an extraordinary measure, at the suggestion of the Ministry of the Interior represented by Durnovo and Plehve. This is indicated by the heading of the ukase: "The Minister of the Interior has applied most humbly to his Imperial Majesty begging permission to adopt the following measures." This succession of illegalities was to be veiled by the ambiguous formulation of the ukase and the addition of the hackneyed stipulation: "Pending the revision of the enactments concerning the Jews in the ordinary course of legislation."]

The first victims were the Jews who resided in Moscow illegally or semi-legally, the latter living in the suburbs. They were subjected to a sudden nocturnal attack, a "raid," which was directed by the savage Cossack general Yurkovski, the police commissioner-in-chief. During the night following the promulgation of the ukase large detachments of policemen and firemen made their appearance in the section of the city called Zaryadye, where the bulk of the "illegal" Jewish residents were huddled together, more particularly in the immense so-called Glebov Yard, the former ghetto of Moscow. The police invaded the Jewish homes, aroused the scared inhabitants from their beds, and drove the semi-naked men, women, and children to the police stations, where they were kept in filthy cells for a day and sometimes longer. Some of the prisoners were released by the police which first wrested from them a written pledge to leave the city immediately. Others were evicted under a police convoy and sent out of the city like criminals, through the transportation prison. [1] Many families, having been forewarned of the impending raid, decided to spend the night outside their homes to avoid arrest and maltreatment at the hands of the police. They hid themselves in the outlying sections of the city and on the cemeteries; they walked or rode all over the city the whole night. Many an estimable Jew was forced to shelter his wife and children, stiffened from cold, in houses of ill repute which were open all night. But even these fugitives ultimately fell into the hands of the police inquisition.

[Footnote 1: Transportation prisons are prisons in which convicts sentenced to deportation (primarily to Siberia) are kept pending their deportation. Such prisons were to be found in the large Russian centers, among them in Moscow.]

Such were the methods by which Moscow was purged of its rightless Jewish inhabitants a whole month before Grand Duke Sergius made his entrance into the city. The grand duke was followed soon afterwards, in the month of May, by the Tzar himself, who stopped in the second Russian capital on his way to the Crimea. A retired Jewish soldier was courageous enough to address a pet.i.tion to the Tzar, imploring him in touching terms to allow the former Jewish soldiers to remain in Moscow. The request of the Jewish soldier met with a quick response: he was sent to jail and subsequently evicted.

The establishment of the new regime in Moscow was followed, in accordance with the provisions of the recent ukase, by the "gradual"

expulsion of the huge number of master workmen and artisans who had enjoyed for many years the right of residence in that city and were now suddenly deprived of this right by a despotic caprice. The local authorities included among the victims of expulsion even the so-called "circular Jews," i.e., those who had been allowed to remain in Moscow by virtue of the ministerial circular of 1880, granting the right of domicile to the Jews living there before that date. This vast host of honest and hard-working men--artisans, tradesmen, clerks, teachers--were ordered to leave Moscow in three installments: those having lived there for not more than three years and those unmarried or childless were to depart within three to six months; those having lived there for not more than six years and having children or apprentices to the number of four were allowed to postpone their departure for six to nine months; finally the old Jewish settlers, who had big families and employed a large number of workingmen, were given a reprieve from nine to twelve months.

It would almost seem as if the maximum and minimum dates within each term were granted specifically for the purpose of yielding an enormous income to the police, which, for a substantial consideration, could postpone the expulsion of the victims for three months and thereby enable them to wind up their affairs. At the expiration of the final terms the unfortunate Jews were not allowed to remain in the city even for one single day; those that stayed behind were ruthlessly evicted. An eye-witness, in summing up the information at his disposal, the details of which are even more heart-rending than the general facts, gives the following description of the Moscow events:

People who have lived in Moscow for twenty, thirty, or even forty years were forced to sell their property within a short time and leave the city. Those who were too poor to comply with the orders of the police, or who did not succeed in selling their property for a mere song--there were cases of poor people disposing of their whole furniture for one or two rubles--were thrown into jail, or sent to the transportation prison, together with criminals and all kinds of riff-raff that were awaiting their turn to be dispatched under convoy. Men who had all their lives earned their bread by the sweat of their brow found themselves under the thumb of prison inspectors, who placed them at once on an equal footing with criminals sentenced to hard labor. In these surroundings they were sometimes kept for several weeks and then dispatched in batches to their "homes" which many of them never saw again. At the threshold of the prisons the people belonging to the "unprivileged" estates--the artisans were almost without exception members of the "burgher cla.s.s"--had wooden handcuffs put on them....[1]

It is difficult to state accurately how many people were made to endure these tortures, inflicted on them without the due process of law. Some died in prison, pending their transportation. Those who could manage to sc.r.a.pe together a few pennies left for the Pale of Settlement at their own expense. The sums speedily collected by their coreligionists, though not inconsiderable, could do nothing more than rescue a number of the unfortunates from jail, convoy, and handcuffs. But what can there be done when thousands of human nests, lived in for so many years, are suddenly destroyed, when the catastrophe comes with the force of an avalanche so that even the Jewish heart which is open to sorrow cannot grasp the whole misfortune?....

Despite the winter cold, people hid themselves on cemeteries to avoid jail and transportation. Women were confined in railroad cars. There were many cases of expulsions of sick people who were brought to the railroad station in conveyances and carried into the cars on stretchers.... In those rare instances in which the police physician p.r.o.nounced the transportation to be dangerous, the authorities insisted on the chronic character of the illness, and the sufferers were brought to the station in writhing pain, as the police could not well be expected to wait until the invalids were cured of their chronic ailments. Eye-witnesses will never forget one bitterly cold night in January, 1892. Crowds of Jews dressed in beggarly fashion, among them women, children, and old men, with remnants of their household belongings lying around them, filled the station of the Brest railroad.

Threatened by police convoy and transportation prison and having failed to obtain a reprieve, they had made up their mind to leave, despite a temperature of thirty degrees below zero. Fate, it would seem, wanted to play a practical joke on them. At the representations of the police commissioner-in-chief, the governor-general of Moscow had ordered to stop the expulsions until the great colds had pa.s.sed, but ... the order was not published until the expulsion had been carried out. In this way some 20,000 Jews who had lived in Moscow fifteen, twenty-five, and even forty years were forcibly removed to the Jewish Pale of Settlement.

[Footnote 1: Under the Russian law (compare Vol. I, p. 308, n. 2) burghers are subject to corporal punishment, whereas the higher estates, among them the merchants, enjoy immunity in this direction.]

3. EFFECT OF PROTESTS

All these horrors, which remind one of the expulsion from Spain in 1492, were pa.s.sed over in complete silence by the Russian public press. The cringing and reactionary papers would not, and the liberal papers could not, report the exploits of the Russian Government in their war against the Jews. The liberal press was ordered by the Russian censor to refrain altogether from touching on the Jewish question. The only Russian-Jewish press organ which, defying the threats of the censor, had dared to fight against official Russian Judaeophobia, the _Voskhod_, had been suppressed already in March, before the promulgation of the Moscow expulsion edict, "for the extremely detrimental course pursued by it." A similar fate overtook the _Novosti_ of St. Petersburg which had printed a couple of sympathetic articles on the Jews.

In this way the Government managed to gag the independent press on the eve of its surprise attack upon Moscow Jewry, so that everything could be carried out noiselessly, under the veil of a state secret.

Fortunately, the foreign press managed to unveil the mystery. The Government of the United States, faced by a huge immigration tide from Russia, sent in June, 1891, two commissioners, Weber and Kempster, to that country. They visited Moscow at the height of the expulsion fever, and, travelling through the princ.i.p.al centers of the Pale of Settlement, gathered carefully sifted doc.u.mentary evidence of what was being perpetrated upon the Jews in the Empire of the Tzar.

While decimating the Jews, the Russian Government was at the same time anxious that their cries of distress should not penetrate beyond the Russian border. Just about that time Russia was negotiating a foreign loan, in which the Rothschilds of Paris were expected to take a leading part, and found it rather inconvenient to stand forth in the eyes of Europe as the ghost of medieval Spain. It was this consideration which prompted the softened and ambiguous formulation of the Moscow expulsion decree and made the Government suppress systematically all mention of what happened afterwards.

Notwithstanding these efforts, the cries of distress were soon heard all over Europe. The Russian censorship had no power over the public opinion outside of Russia. The first Moscow refugees, who had reached Berlin, Paris, and London, reported what was going on at Moscow. Already in April, 1891, the European financial press began to comment on the fact that "the Jewish population of Russia is altogether irreplaceable in Russian commercial life, forming a substantial element which contributes to the prosperity of the country," and that, therefore, "the expulsion of the Jews must of necessity greatly alarm the owners of Russian securities who are interested in the economic progress of Russia." Soon afterwards it became known that Alphonse de Rothschild, the head of the great financial firm in Paris, refused to take a hand in floating the Russian loan of half a billion. This first protest of the financial king against the anti-Semitic policy of the Russian Government produced a sensation, and it was intensified by the fact that it was uttered in France at a time when the diplomats of both countries were preparing to celebrate the Franco-Russian alliance which was consummated a few months afterwards.

The expulsion from Moscow found a sympathetic echo on the other side of the Atlantic. President Harrison took occasion, in a message to Congress, to refer to the sufferings of the Jews and to the probable effects of the Russian expulsions upon America:

This Government has found occasion to express in a friendly spirit, but with much earnestness, to the Government of the Czar its serious concern because of the harsh measures now being enforced against the Hebrews in Russia. By the revival of anti-Semitic laws, long in abeyance, great numbers of those unfortunate people have been constrained to abandon their homes and leave the Empire by reason of the impossibility of finding subsistence within the Pale to which it is sought to confine them. The immigration of these people to the United States--many other countries being closed to them--is largely increasing, and is likely to a.s.sume proportions which may make it difficult to find homes and employment for them here and to seriously affect the labor market. It is estimated that over 1,000,000 will be forced from Russia within a few years. The Hebrew is never a beggar; he has always kept the law--life by toil--often under severe and oppressive restrictions. It is also true that no race, sect, or cla.s.s has more fully cared for its own than the Hebrew race. But the sudden transfer of such a mult.i.tude under conditions that tend to strip them of their small acc.u.mulations and to depress their energies and courage is neither good for them nor for us.

The banishment, whether by direct decree or by not less certain indirect methods, of so large a number of men and women is not a local question. A decree to leave one country is in the nature of things an order to enter another--some other. This consideration, as well as the suggestion of humanity, furnishes ample ground for the remonstrances which we have presented to Russia; while our historic friendship for that Government cannot fail to give a.s.surance that our representations are those of a sincere well-wisher.[1]

[Footnote 1: Third Annual Message to Congress by President Harrison, December 9, 1891, _Messages and Papers of the Presidents_, Vol. IX, p. 188.]

The sentiments of the American people were voiced less guardedly in a resolution which was pa.s.sed by the House of Representatives on July 21, 1892:

_Resolved_, That the American people, through their Senators and Representatives in Congress a.s.sembled, do hereby express sympathy for the Russian Hebrews in their present condition, and the hope that the Government of Russia, a power with which the United States has always been on terms of amity and good will, will mitigate as far as possible the severity of the laws and decrees issued respecting them, and the President is requested to use his good offices to notify the Government of Russia to mitigate the said laws and decrees. [1]

[Footnote 1: _Congressional Record_, Vol. 23, p. 6533.]

The highly-placed Jew-baiters of St. Petersburg were filled with rage, The _Novoye Vremya_ emptied its invectives upon the _Zhydovski_ financiers, referring to the refusal of Alphonse de Rothschild to partic.i.p.ate in the Russian loan. Nevertheless, the Government found itself compelled to stem the tide of oppression for a short while.

We have already had occasion to point out that the Government had originally planned to reduce the Jewish element also in the city of St.

Petersburg, whose head, the brutal Gresser, had manifested his att.i.tude toward the Jews in a series of police circulars. Following upon the first raid of the Moscow police on the Jews, Gresser ordered his gendarmes to search at the St. Petersburg railroad stations for all Jewish fugitives from that city who might have ventured to flee to St.

Petersburg, and to deport them immediately. In April there were persistent rumors afloat that the Government had decided to remove by degrees all Jews from St. Petersburg and thus make both Russian capitals _judenrein_. The financial blow from Paris cooled somewhat the ardor of the Jew-baiters on the sh.o.r.es of the Neva. The wholesale expulsions from St. Petersburg were postponed, and the Russian anti-Semites were forced to satisfy their cannibal appet.i.te with the consumption of Moscow Jewry, whose annihilation was carried out systematically under the cover of bureaucratic secrecy.