Kitabı oku: «History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Volume 3 of 3. From the Accession of Nicholas II until the Present Day», sayfa 7

4. The "Political Spring"

On the morning of July 15, 1904, the square before the Warsaw depôt in St. Petersburg presented a terrible sight. Upon the pavement lay the blood-stained body of Plehve, who had been smitten by the bomb of the Russian terrorist Sazonov while on his way to Peterhof where he was to report to the Tzar. This meant that the revolution had again raised its head. After two years of frenzied police terrorism, and in spite of all attempts to divert the attention of the public from the necessity of reforms, first by pogroms and then by the war against Japan – Plehve had insisted upon the declaration of war, hoping to drown the "seditious" movement in chauvinism – the revolutionary spectre was once more haunting the country. The martyrs of the autocratic inquisition perceived the "finger of God" in the calamities caused by the war and in the miserable end of Plehve. In February, 1904, the Russian censor confiscated an issue of the Voskhod in which a young Jewish sibyl, in a poem entitled "To Haman," referring to the biblical Mene, Mene, Tekel u-Farsin, predicted a shameful death for the new Haman who was easily identified as the hero of Kishinev. One could feel in the air the coming of a cleansing tempest. Even the reactionary Government was taken aback by the approaching storm. It did not dare to answer the terrorism of the revolution with police terrorism. On the contrary, it made an attempt to moderate the régime of serfdom.

On August 11, on the occasion of the birth of the heir-apparent Alexis, an imperial manifesto was issued, granting "favors" and "privileges" to the population, the most important of which consisted in the abrogation of corporal punishment for peasants and soldiers. On the same day, a ukase was promulgated in which the Tzar "thought it just to introduce, pending the general revision of the legislation affecting the Jews, several amendments in the enactments concerning their rights of residence at present in force." The amendments were trifling: the Jews with a higher education were permitted to live in the villages and acquire real property there, as well as to carry on business everywhere. Those who had participated in the Japanese war, and had distinguished themselves or had conducted themselves irreproachably were to be accorded the right of universal domicile. The wives and under-aged children of the Jews with a higher education were granted the right of residence even after the death of their husbands and fathers. These rights were the only ones which the Government thought it "just" to confer upon the Jews, who had sent thirty thousand people into the active army to fight on the fields of Manchuria. The Jewish public received this niggardly gift with chilly indifference, and turned its gaze to wider horizons which were then opening up before Russia. The country was on the eve of a "political spring."

On August 26 the post of Minister of the Interior was entrusted to Svyatopolk-Mirski, who in his previous capacity of governor-general of Vilna had displayed comparative administrative leniency. The new leader of internal Russian politics promised that he would strive for the restoration of "confidence" between the Government and the people by adjusting his actions to the demands of "true progress." The Jewish deputation which waited upon him at Vilna and the representatives of the foreign press were told that as far as the Jewish question was concerned, he would be guided by justice and "kindness." Unfortunately, at the very beginning he showed himself powerless to stem the new tide of pogroms. At the end of August, the Russian South was the scene of several "regular" pogroms, beginning with a quarrel in a Jewish store and ending with the demolition of Jewish stores and houses – as was the case in the town of Smyela, in the government of Kiev, on August 22, or in the city of Rovno, in Volhynia, where a similar attempt was made on the same day. Soon these "regular" riots gave way to a new variety of pogroms, which were distinguished by a peculiar coloring and might be termed "mobilization pogroms." The mobilized Russian reserve troops, wrought up over their impending departure to the fields of death in Manchuria where the Russian army suffered defeat after defeat, directed their protest along the line of least resistance – against the Jews. The soldiers, fortifying themselves with goodly doses of alcohol, began their "gallant exploits," and, accompanied by the street mobs, engaged in the task of devastating Jewish homes, maltreating their inmates, and looting their property. A sanguinary pogrom took place in Alexandria, in the government of Kherson, on September 6 and 7. On the sacred day of Yom Kippur a horde of intoxicated assassins invaded the synagogue which was crowded with worshippers, and butchered there twenty people in a most barbarous fashion. Among the severely wounded, who soon afterwards died from the wounds, were several gymnazium and university students. The police made no attempt to stop the killing and looting, and only on the second day, when the excesses were renewed, the Cossacks were summoned from an adjacent town, and succeeded in restoring order.

A month later, the mobilized Russian reservists began to perpetrate a series of pogroms in the North, in the region of White Russia. In the city of Moghilev the lawlessness of the soldiers and the local hooligans assumed appalling dimensions (October 10). The poorest quarters of the town suffered most. Among the victims of the riots were also the families of Jewish reservists who had gone to war. From the capital of the government the pogrom epidemic spread all over the region. Everywhere the intoxicated "crusaders," prior to their departure for Manchuria, engaged in destruction, looting, and incendiarism. In some places, as was the case in the government of Vitebsk, the rioters acted with perfect religious toleration, and even attacked the police, although the center of the "stage" was still occupied by the Jews.

The Government was manifestly unwilling to adopt energetic measures against the "defenders of the Fatherland" for fear of irritating them still further and spoiling the progress of mobilization. It was not until the end of October that the mobilization pogroms died out.

5. The Homel Pogrom Before the Russian Courts

In the same month of October, 1904, the case of the Homel pogrom of the previous year came up before the Court of Appeals of the Government of Kiev, which held its sessions at Homel. The department of justice had taken a whole year to prepare the evidence, prompted by the desire not so much to investigate the case as to entangle it and present it in a perverted political interpretation. The investigation which had started in the lifetime of Plehve and proceeded under the pressure of the anti-Semitic reactionary, Minister of Justice Muravyov, resulted in a bill of indictment which was a flagrant example of deliberate misrepresentation. The whole affair was pictured as an anti-Russian pogrom which had been perpetrated by the Jews. According to this version, the Jews of Homel, wishing to avenge the Kishinev massacre, had taken up arms and attacked the Christian population on August 29, thereby calling forth a counter-pogrom on the part of the Russian workingmen on September 1, when again the armed Jewish self-defence had taken an aggressive attitude and thereby forced the soldiers to shoot at them. Sixty people were indicted on this charge, among them thirty-six Jews, representing the part of the population which had been the victims of the pogrom. The Jews who had dared to defend themselves stood at the prisoners' bar side by side with their assailants. Yielding to the pressure of public opinion, the Government decided to have the Homel case tried in open court, but the president of the tribunal was instructed to eliminate from the judicial proceedings all political revelations which might embarrass the Government. The élite of the legal profession, both among Jews and non-Jews (Vinaver, Sliosberg, Kalmanovich, Ratner, Sokolov, Kupernik, Zarudny, and others), assembled at Homel to plead the cause of the indicted Jews and to defend the action for damages brought by the Jewish pogrom victims. The trial was drawn out for nearly three months, reducing itself to a duel between the counsel who endeavored to bring out the facts, and the bench which was anxious to suppress them. The depositions of the witnesses and the cross-examinations of the Jewish lawyers succeeded in demolishing the entire structure of the indictment, but when the case reached the stage which was bound to lead to the detection of the real authors of the pogrom and lay bare the conduct of the authorities, the president stopped the counsel despotically, denying them the floor. The gross partiality manifested by the president of the court had the effect that the counsel for the defence lost their patience, and on December 21, after a violent scene, refused to participate in the trial and demonstratively left the court-room.

This action aroused public opinion throughout Russia to an extraordinary degree; it caused a storm of indignation against this official miscarriage of justice, and the fearless defenders received innumerable expressions of sympathy. The indicted Jews, too, joined in the noble demonstration of their lawyers, which was in itself an eloquent plea for a righteous cause. The trial terminated in January, 1905, and ended in the acquittal of half of the accused Jews and Christians and a verdict of guilty against the other half from among both groups. The guilty were sentenced to comparatively light penalties – to imprisonment for brief terms – and, in addition, the court decided to petition the Tzar for a mitigation even of these penalties.

This verdict displayed the Jesuitic character of Russian politics. The reprobate murderers and plunderers from among the Russian group were either acquitted altogether, or were sentenced to trifling penalties and placed on the same level of culpability with the members of the Jewish self-defence whose only crime was that they had stood up for their life, honor, and property. The Russian law journal Pravo ("The Law"), the organ of the progressive Russian intelligenzia, published on this occasion a strong article which concluded with the following words:

The truth stands out in bold relief even in this verdict, and it does so against the wish of its authors. If, as is implied in this verdict, both the Jews and Christians are guilty of murder, violence, and plunder to a minimum degree only – for how could otherwise the extraordinary leniency of the verdict be justified? – then everybody is bound to ask himself the question: Who then is the real author of all the horrors that were perpetrated at Homel? Those who have followed the course of the judicial investigation with some degree of attention can only have one answer: Besides the Christians and the Jews, there is still a third culprit, the politically rotten officialdom. This culprit did not stand at the prisoners' bar, but the verdict is against him… The best elements of the Russian public, and the Jews in particular, have been thirsting for justice and for the disclosure of the truth, but it was just that third accomplice who was afraid of justice and has managed to cover it up by a general amnesty.

Such was the end of the two ill-fated years of Russian-Jewish history (1903-1904) – years, marked by the internal war against the Jews and by the external war against Japan, filled with the victories of the reaction at Kishinev and Homel and the defeats of the Russian arms at Port Arthur, Liao-Yang, and Mukden. This ghastly interval of reactionary terrorism, which began to subside only towards the end of 1904, drove from Russia to America more than 125,000 Jewish emigrants who fled for their very lives from the dominions of the Tzar.

However, at the end of the long nightmare, the political horizon began to clear up. The tide of the liberty movement surged forward again and it looked as if the Russian people, and with it tormented Russian Jewry, would soon behold the new dawn. Yet the six million Jews of Russia were destined to pass through two more stormy years, standing between the firing lines of autocratic despotism and the revolutionary movement, and suffering the excruciating agonies of suspense, while hovering between degradation and emancipation.

CHAPTER XXXV
THE REVOLUTION OF 1905 AND THE FIGHT FOR EMANCIPATION

1. The Jews in the Revolutionary Movement

The "political spring," manifesting itself in the attempt of the Government, headed by Svyatopolk-Mirski, to establish friendly relations with the liberal elements of Russia, gave the first impetus to an open movement for political emancipation. The liberal "conspirators," who had hitherto been secretly dreaming of a constitution, gave public utterance to this tabooed aspiration. In November, 1904, the conference of Zemstvo workers, assembled in St. Petersburg, adopted a resolution pointing out "the anomaly of the political order" of Russia which is founded on autocracy and proclaiming the necessity of associating the representatives of the people in the work of legislation. About the same time, a large mass-meeting, which took the form of a public banquet, attended by lawyers and littérateurs, adopted a similar resolution calling for "the repeal of all national and denominational restrictions." Taking advantage of the temporary relaxation of police despotism, the press spoke up more boldly, while the better elements of the population began to organize themselves in all kinds of public bodies.

The Government was slow in making concessions, and harshly condemned the "boisterous assemblages" which called for changes in "the unshakable foundations of our political order." Nevertheless, an imperial ukase, published on December 12, 1904, promised a number of partial reforms – improvement of the legal status of the peasantry, enlargement of the activities of the Zemstvos, the establishment of a state insurance for workingmen, relaxation of the severities of police and censorship, and likewise "a revision of the laws restricting the rights of aliens," with the retention of those provisions only "which are called forth by the genuine interests of the state and the manifest needs of the Russian people." It is almost needless to add that the latter clause held forth no promises to the Jews. For their disfranchisement could always be justified by "the genuine interests of the state" – a state built upon the foundations not of law, but of police force. The carrying into effect of the promised semi-reforms was entrusted to a bureaucratic body, the Committee of Ministers. The services of the popular representatives were repudiated.

The new movement for liberty forced further concessions from Russian officialdom, but these concessions could only be wrested from it in small doses and were granted only after a desperate resistance. The "bloody Sunday" of January 9, 1905, marked the beginning of the open revolution in which social, economic, and political demands were interwoven with one another. The demonstration of the striking workingmen of St. Petersburg, who marched in immense numbers to the Winter Palace to present a petition to the Tzar for economic and political reforms, ended in a tragedy. The petitioners who marched with crosses in their hands, under the leadership of the priest and demagogue Gapon, were received with a shower of bullets, resulting in a large number of victims from among the participants in the demonstration, as well as from among the public. There were also several Jews among them – a first-aid nurse, a dentist, a pharmacy student and a journalist. This scandalous conduct of the Tzar, who replied with bullets to a peaceful appeal for reforms, led to a series of demonstrations, labor strikes, and terrorist acts in the provinces.

In the Western governments and in the Kingdom of Poland the Jews played a conspicuous rôle in the revolutionary movement, counting as they did a large number of organized workingmen. In Odessa, a Jewish workingman by the name of Stillman fired at the Chief of Police and wounded him (January 19). In Moghilev, a Jewish youth made a vain attempt upon the life of the local Chief of Police who was accused of having instigated the pogrom which had taken place there in the fall of 1904. These incidents served in the hands of the reactionary Government – on January 9, Svyatopolk-Mirski had been dismissed for his excessive leaning toward liberalism – as an excuse for continuing its oppression of the Jews as the "ringleaders of the revolution." The president of the Committee of Ministers, Witte, was the only one who advocated a different point of view. At the meeting of the Committee, held on February 11, he contended that "the hostile attitude toward the Government, now noticeable among the Jews, is due to the sad material conditions in which the bulk of Russian Jewry lives, being weighed down by the pressure of restrictive laws." Witte prophesied that the police authorities would be bound "to fight with redoubled zeal against the anti-governmental activity of the Jews, until the amelioration of the condition of the aliens, promised in the ukase of December 12, would be carried into effect."

2. The Struggle for Equal Rights

Notwithstanding these pleas, the Government was slow in realizing even the moderate reforms which had been outlined in the imperial ukase. In the meantime the representatives of Russian Jewry had decided to place before it their own more comprehensive demands. In February, 1905, several mass petitions, demanding equal rights for Jews, were addressed to Witte. A petition signed by thirty-two Jewish communities – St. Petersburg, Vilna, Kovno, Homel, Berdychev, and others – began with these words:

The measures adopted for the last twenty-five years toward the Russian Jews were designed with the deliberate end in view to convert them into a mass of beggars, deprived of all means of sustenance, and of the light of education and human dignity. Consistency and comprehensiveness marked the system of oppression and violence which was skilfully planned and carefully executed… The entire machinery of the state was directed to one end – that of making the life of the Jews in Russia impossible.

The petition repudiates the idea, voiced in the ukase of December 12, 1904, of a gradual amelioration of the position of the Jews, and of a few "mitigations"; for "the insulted dignity of man cannot be reconciled to half measures; it demands the complete removal of rightlessness."

All the Jews of Russia are permeated at the present moment by one thought: that the cruel system of endless restrictions and disabilities undermines the very basis of their existence, that it is impossible to continue such a life… Worn out by all they have had to go through, and filled with grave anxiety about their future destinies, the Jews are waiting at last for their entire enfranchisement; they are waiting for a radical repeal of all restrictive laws, so that, enjoying freedom and equality with all others, they may, shoulder to shoulder with the other citizens of this great country, work for its welfare and prosperity.

A memorandum couched in more resolute terms was sent by twenty-six Jewish communities – Moscow, Odessa, and others – and by the radical groups of the communities which had signed the first petition.

We declare – the memorandum states – that we look upon the attempt to satisfy and appease the Jewish population by any partial measures of improvement as doomed to failure. We expect equal rights, as human beings in whom the feeling of human dignity is alive, as conscious citizens in a modern body politic.

The memorandum of the Vilna community made the following addition to the last clause: "As a cultured nation, we demand the same rights of national-cultural self-determination which ought to be granted to all the nationalities that go to make up the Russian body politic."

Memorials and telegrams, addressed to the president of the Committee of Ministers, with the demand for equal rights, were also sent by many individual Jewish communities.

In the meantime, the general revolutionary movement in Russia proceeded apace. Professional organizations were springing into existence, such as the leagues of railroad workers, engineers, and lawyers. Here and there, huge railroad strikes were called. The college youth were in a state of ferment, and often went on strike. The agitation was answered by rifle shots and Cossack whips which were used to disperse the demonstrators. The extreme wing of the Socialist party resorted to terroristic acts. A tremendous sensation was caused by the assassination of Grand Duke Sergius, the governor-general of Moscow (February 4), one of the most detestable members of the house of Romanov. The grand duke, whose name was bound up with the expulsion of tens of thousands of Jews from Moscow in 1891 and with the cruel oppression of the Jewish colony still left there, was the victim of a bomb thrown by a non-Jew, the Social-Revolutionist Kalayev.

The surging tide of the revolution intimidated Nicholas II., and wrested from him still another concession. On February 18, 1905, three enactments were published: an imperial manifesto condemning the revolutionary "unrest" at a time when "the sanguinary war in the Far East" was going on, and calling upon all "well-intentioned persons" to wage war against "the internal sedition." A rescript addressed to Bulyghin, Minister of the Interior, announced the decision of the Tzar "to invite the worthiest men, invested with the confidence of the nation and chosen by the population, to participate in the consideration of legislative projects" – in other words, a popular representation with merely consultative rights. Finally, an ukase addressed to the Senate granted permission to private persons and institutions to lay before the Government their "views and suggestions relating to the perfection of the wellbeing of the state."

The progressive elements of Russia were not in a mood to be reconciled to the duplicity of these enactments in which threats and concessions followed upon one another, or to the pettiness of the concessions in themselves. They took, however, full advantage of the permission to "lay" their views before the Government, and indulged in an avalanche of resolutions and declarations, demanding the substitution of a parliamentary system of government for the existing system of autocracy. The Jewish institutions joined in this general campaign. The oldest Jewish organization, the "Society for the Diffusion of Enlightenment Among the Jews," in St. Petersburg, at a meeting, held on February 27, adopted the following resolution:

The proper organization of Jewish education such as would be in keeping with the social and cultural peculiarities of the Jewish people, will only be possible when the Jews will be placed on a footing of complete equality of rights with the rest of the Russian population. As a firm guarantee of the untrammelled cultural development and the complete equality of all nationalities, it is necessary that the legislative power and the administrative control of the country shall have the co-operation of popular representatives, to be elected upon the basis of the universal, direct, and secret vote of all citizens of the country, without any distinction of nationality, denomination or calling.

The need of a non-partisan political organization to direct the struggle for Jewish emancipation which was to be waged by all classes of Jewry – outside the small fraction which had already been united in the labor organization of the "Bund" – was universally felt.

Such an organization was formed at the conference of public-spirited Jews which took place in Vilna at the end of March, 1905. It assumed the name of "The League for the Attainment of Equal Rights for the Jewish People in Russia," and proclaimed as its object "the realization to their full extent of the civil, political, and national rights of the Jewish people in Russia." The complete civil emancipation of the Jews, the assurance of their proportionate participation in the Russian popular representation, "the freedom of national-cultural self-determination in all its manifestations," in the shape of "a comprehensive system of communal self-government, the freedom of language and school education" – such was the threefold program of the League.

It was the first attempt of a Jewish organization in modern history to inscribe upon its banner not only the demand for the civil and political, but also for the national emancipation of the Jewish people, the first attempt to obtain liberty for Jewry as a nationality, and not as a mere denominational group, forming part of the dominant nation, as had been the case in Western Europe during the nineteenth century. The central bureau of the League was located in St. Petersburg, composed of twenty-two elective members, half of whom lived in the capital (M. Vinaver, G. Sliosberg, L. Bramson, and others), and the other half in the provinces (Dr. Shmaryahu Levin, S. M. Dubnow,⁴⁴ M. Ratner, and others).

The first resolutions adopted by the League were in substance as follows:

To demand universal suffrage at the elections to the future parliament, with a guarantee of proper representation for the national minorities; to influence the Russian public to the end that the general resolutions demanding equality for all citizens should contain an explicit reference to the emancipation of the Jews; to call upon all the Jewish aldermen in the municipal Dumas to resign their posts, in view of the fact that under the law of 1892, which had deprived the Jews of their franchise at the municipal elections,⁴⁵ these aldermen had not been elected by the Jewish population, but had been appointed by the administration – an act which implied an insult to the civic and national dignity of the Jewish people.

The last-mentioned clause of this resolution, adopted at the first conference of the League, proved effective. In the majority of cities, the Jewish members of the municipal Dumas began to tender their resignations, by way of protest against the disfranchisement of the Jews in the municipal self-government. At first, the authorities were somewhat embarrassed and made an attempt to appoint other Jews in lieu of those that had resigned, but seeing that the Jewish boycott continued, they became "reconciled" to the entire absence of Jewish representatives in municipal self-government. The protest of the Jewish aldermen was drowned in the general noise of protests and demonstrations which filled the air during the revolutionary year.