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History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Volume II by S.M. Dubnow

S >> S.M. Dubnow >> History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Volume II




[Footnote 1: Compare in particular his dispatch, dated September 25,
1890, published in _Executive Document_ No. 470, p. 141.]

[Footnote 2: _Foreign Relations_, 1891, p. 734.]

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 illustrating 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 illustrating 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 passports, "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 passports 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 assuring 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 assiduously 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 principal 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 harassing
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 principal 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 Passover, 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
passed 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 petition 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 class"--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
scrape 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
pronounced 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 passed, 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 passed 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 principal centers of the Pale of Settlement,
gathered carefully sifted documentary 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 assume 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 class has more fully cared for its own than the
Hebrew race. But the sudden transfer of such a multitude under
conditions that tend to strip them of their small accumulations 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 assurance 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 passed by the House of Representatives on July 21,
1892:

_Resolved_, That the American people, through their Senators and
Representatives in Congress assembled, 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
participate in the Russian loan. Nevertheless, the Government found
itself compelled to stem the tide of oppression for a short while.

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