History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Volume 3 of 3. From the Accession of Nicholas II until the Present Day

5. The Spread of Anarchy and the Second Duma

Two days later, when the deputies appeared before the Duma, they found the building closed, and on the doors was displayed an imperial manifesto dissolving the Duma which "has encroached upon a domain outside its jurisdiction, and has engaged in investigating the acts of the authorities appointed by us." The sudden dissolution of the Duma was answered by the "Vyborg Manifesto" which was signed by the entire parliamentary Opposition, calling upon the people to refuse to pay taxes to furnish soldiers to a Government which had driven asunder their representatives. The manifesto was also signed by all the Jewish deputies who subsequently had to pay for it with imprisonment and the loss of their electoral rights.

The revolutionary terrorism which had subsided during the sessions of the Duma broke out with redoubled violence after its dissolution. Attempts upon the lives of high officials – the most terrible being the explosion of a bomb in the summer residence of Stolypin, who had been appointed Prime Minister at the dissolution of the Duma – "expropriations," i. e., the plunder of state funds and private moneys for revolutionary purposes, anarchistic labor strikes, were the order of the day. The Government retorted with monstrous measures of oppression. A political court-martial was instituted which, in the course of five months (September, 1906-January, 1907) sentenced over one thousand people to death, among them many who were innocent or under age. Needless to say, a considerable portion of these victims were Jews.

Yet as far as the revolutionary attitude of the Jewish population was concerned, the Government was not satisfied to cope with it by "legal" executions, and therefore resorted, in addition, to the well-tried contrivance of wholesale executions, in other words, of pogroms. The chief of the political police in the city of Syedletz, Tikhanovich, engineered on August 27-28 a bloody military pogrom in that city, netting thirty dead and more than one hundred and fifty wounded Jews. The signal for the pogrom were shots fired at a sentry by an agent provocateur, whereupon the troops started an aimless musketry fire on the streets and even bombarded Jewish houses with grenades. Many soldiers, in a state of intoxication, committed incredible barbarities and looted Jewish property. Notwithstanding the official report of another agent of the local political police, Captain Pyetukhov, in which he asserted that the Jews had not given the slightest reason for the butchery and that the latter had been entirely engineered by the military and political authorities, the perpetrator of the pogrom, Tikhanovich, was not only allowed to go unpunished, but received from the governor-general of Warsaw an expression of thanks for his "energy and executive skill."

This being the attitude of the ruling spheres of Russia, it was out of the question to expect any initiative from that quarter in regard to the solution of the Jewish question. The Government of Stolypin, in a circular issued on August 24, 1906, had promised "to find out without delay which restrictions, being a source of irritation and manifestly obsolete, could be immediately repealed, and which others, affecting basically the relationship of the Jewish nationality to the native population, seem to be a matter of popular conscience, and should therefore be referred to the legislative institutions." The Council of Ministers laid before the Tzar a draft of moderate reforms in favor of the Jews, pointing to the necessity of appeasing the Jews who, as a result of their grievous restrictions, "had been forced to carry on a desperate struggle against the existing order." But these representations had no effect. Nicholas II. is reported to have said on that occasion: "So long as I am Tzar, the Zhyds of Russia shall not have equal rights." During that time, the power of the so-called "Second Government," the horrible camarilla around the Tzar, was in the ascendancy, and their mainstay were the Black Hundred now organized in the reactionary "League of the Russian People." These reactionary terrorists knew only of one way to solve the Jewish question – by exterminating the Jews.

There was only one ray of hope left – the second Duma which was to be convoked in February, 1907. The election campaign was carried on under Government pressure and was hampered by the threat of reprisals and pogroms on the part of the "Black." The elections resulted in a Duma with an anomalous complexion. The two extreme wings, the Socialists and Black Hundred, had gained in strength, whereas the Constitutional Democratic center had been weakened. The Jews had managed to elect only three deputies, apart from one Jewish Social-Democrat who ran on the ticket of his party. They were men of little renown, whereas of the deputies of the first Duma who were prosecuted for signing the Vyborg Manifesto not one was elected.

The entire energy of the new Parliament spent itself in the struggle between its left and right wing. The Jewish question was entirely relegated to the "Committee on the Freedom of Conscience." The Government had brought in a bill repealing all denominational restrictions, "except those affecting the Jews," but the Committee decided to eliminate this discriminating clause and in this manner carry through the emancipation of the Jews under the guise of the "Freedom of Conscience."

But this time, too, the hope for Jewish emancipation proved an illusion. The Duma was soon dissolved, under the pretext that a revolutionary conspiracy of the Socialistic deputies had been uncovered. On June 3, 1907, another coup d'état took place. The former electoral law which made it possible for the Russian democracy and the oppressed nationalities to send their representatives to the Duma was arbitrarily changed by the Tzar in order to insure a conservative pro-Government majority in the Russian parliament. There followed an era of dismal reaction.

CHAPTER XXXVII
EXTERNAL OPPRESSION AND INTERNAL CONSOLIDATION

1. The New Alignments Within Russian Jewry

The terrible quadrennium of 1903-1906 had an extraordinarily quickening effect upon the national and political thought of the classes as well as of the masses of Russian Jewry. The year of Kishinev and Homel, when the rightless Jews were made defenceless; the year of the Russo-Japanese War, when these rightless and defenceless pariahs were called upon to fight for their fatherland against the enemy from without; the year of the revolution when after the sanguinary struggle for liberty the Jews received a "constitutional charter wrapped up in pogroms"; finally, the first year of the Duma when indignant utterances of the Jewish deputies from the platform of the Duma were accompanied by the moans of the wounded Jews of Bialystok – these terrible upheavals might have proved fatal to Russian Israel had it not, during the preceding period, worked out for itself a definite nationalistic attitude towards the non-Jewish world. There were several varieties of this national-political formula. At the one pole stood Zionism, with its theory of a new "exodus." At the other pole was the Social-Democratic party with its premise that "the blood of the Jew must serve as lubricating oil upon the wheels of the Russian Revolution." But even these two poles came somewhat closer to one another at the moment of the great national danger, converging, in spite of all their differences in program and tactics, toward the central line above which floated the banner proclaiming the fight for the civil, political, and national rights of the Jewish people. Disfranchised, battered by pogroms, victimized by tyrannous Tzardom, the Jews of Russia never thought of degrading themselves to the point of begging equal rights "in instalments." They demanded their rights in full, and demanded them not merely as "the Jewish population," but as the Jewish people, as an autonomous nation among other nations with a culture of its own. The doctrine of "National-Cultural Autonomism"⁵⁰ was crystallized in definite slogans. These slogans were proclaimed, as we have seen, by the "League for the Attainment of Equal Rights for the Jewish People," which united on its platform all political Jewish groups, with the exception of the Social-Democratic partisans.

The years of storm and stress also forced Zionism to recede from its original position of denying the possibility of a national struggle in the Diaspora. Meeting during the most exciting days of the Russian Revolution, the Seventh Zionist Congress at Basle, held in July, 1905, mourned the loss of its prematurely cut-off leader, Theodor Herzl, and adopted a resolution voicing its strict allegiance to the Palestine idea and rejecting the temptations of Territorialism. This led to a formal split within the party, the Territorialists, headed by Zangwill, seceding and forming an organization of their own.

A year later, in November, 1906, the Russian Zionists met at Helsingfors, and adopted the platform of a "synthetic Zionism," that is, a combination of the Palestine idea with the fight for national and cultural autonomy in the Diaspora. The guiding resolution of the Zionist Convention was couched in the following terms:

The Zionist organization of Russia sanctions the affiliation of the Zionists with the movement for liberty among the territorial nationalities of Russia, and advocates the necessity of uniting Russian Jewry upon the principles of the recognition of the Jewish nationality and its self-government in all the affairs affecting Jewish national life.

 

This slogan of "national rights" was followed by the Zionists during the elections to the first Imperial Duma. It was acted upon to a lesser extent by the two Socialistic factions affiliated with Zionism, the Poale Zion and the Zionistic Socialists⁵¹; both groups confined themselves to the demand of a minimum of cultural autonomy in the Diaspora, concentrating their entire energy upon emigration, whether it be into Palestine, as advocated by the Poale Zion, or into any other territory, as preached by the Zionistic Socialists. During 1905-1906, a new Socialistic party with strong nationalistic leanings came into existence. In distinction from the other two Socialistic factions, it demanded a maximum of national autonomy in the Diaspora, including even a Jewish Diet as the central organ of Jewish self-government. The members of this party called themselves "Saymists" (from Saym, "Diet"), or went by the name of the "Jewish Socialistic Labor Party."

In the midst of all these partisan platforms stood the "League for the Attainment of Equal Rights for the Jewish People," disregarding all party and class affiliations.⁵² During the revolutionary period, this organization endeavored to unite all public-spirited Jews in the general Russian and national Jewish struggle for liberty, but with the decline of the revolutionary movement, the centrifugal forces within the League began to assert themselves. The divergence of views and tactics among the various groups composing the League proved stronger than their common interest in the nearest aim, which, with the advent of the political reaction, had become more remote.

Thus it came about that, at the beginning of 1907, the "League for the Attainment of Equal Rights" fell asunder into its component parts. The first to secede from it was the Zionist party, which preferred to carry on its own Gegenwartsarbeit under a separate party flag – although, properly considered, a far-reaching activity on behalf of national-Jewish rejuvenation in the lands of the Diaspora was scarcely compatible with the fundamental principle of political Zionism, the "negation of the Golus." The Helsingfors program of "synthetic Zionism," the child of the liberty movement, shrank more and more, as the hopes for a Jewish emancipation in Russia receded into the distance.

Out of the "League for Equal Rights" came further the "Jewish People's Group," a party which opposed the Zionist idea altogether and repudiated the attempt to find new Jewish centers outside of Russia. This group, headed by the well-known political leader, M. Vinaver, placed in the center of its program the fight for civil emancipation, in close contact with the progressive elements of the Russian people, whereas in the question of national-Jewish interests it confined itself to the principle of "self-determination" and to the freedom of Jewish culture in general outlines, without putting forward concrete demands of Jewish autonomy. The People's Group counted among its adherents many representatives of the Jewish intelligenzia who had more or less discarded the idea of assimilation and had come to recognize the necessity of a minimum of "Jewish-national rights."

The third group, which also took its rise in the "League for Equal Rights," and received the name Volkspartei, or Jewish National Party, stood firmly on the platform of national Jewish policies. The underlying principle of this organization, or, more correctly, of this far-reaching social current, which has its origin in the historic development of the Jewish people, was the same principle of national-cultural autonomism which had long before the revolution pursued its own line of development parallel to Zionism.⁵³ The simultaneous struggle for civil and national rights, the creation of a full-fledged national community, instead of the Kultusgemeinde of Western Europe, an autonomous national school, and the rights of both languages, the Hebrew and the Yiddish – such was, in general outlines, the program of the Volkspartei. At the same time, this party, taking the historic idea of the transplantation of Jewish centers in the Diaspora as its point of departure, recognized the emigration to America and the colonization of Palestine as great national factors destined to create two new centers of Judaism, one quantitatively powerful center in North America, and a smaller national center, but qualitatively, from the point of view of cultural purity, more valuable, in Palestine.⁵⁴

Finally, the "League for Equal Rights" gave birth to a fourth party, the Jewish Democratic Group, which is distinguished from the People's Group by its stronger leaning towards the political parties of the Left, the Russian radicals and Socialists.

Since the dissolution of the "League," these four groups have, as a rule, united in various coalitions. They are all represented on the permanent council at St. Petersburg which, together with the deputies of the Imperial Duma, discusses Jewish political questions as they arise from time to time. Thus, there emerged in Jewish public life a form of representation reflecting the national and political ideas which had assumed concrete shape during the years of the Russian revolution and counter-revolution. The only organization standing outside these federated groups and their common platform of national Jewish politics is the Jewish Social-Democratic party, known as the "Bund," which is tied down by its class program and is barred by it from co-operating with the bourgeoisie, or a non-class organization, even within the domain of national Jewish interests.

2. The Triumph of the "Black Hundred"

All these strivings and slogans were severely hit by the coup d'état of June 3, 1907, when a large part of what the revolution had achieved was rendered null and void. Owing to the amendment of the suffrage law by this clumsy act of autocratic despotism, the constitution became the handmaid of Tzardom. The ruling power slipped into the hands of the Black Hundred, the extreme monarchistic groups, which were organized in the "League of the Russian People" and openly advocated the restoration of autocracy. The head of the League, Dubrovin, congratulated the emperor upon his act of violence of June 3, and was assured in reply that henceforth the "League of the Russian People" would be the "trusted bulwark" of the Throne. Nicholas might have said with greater justification that the Throne was the bulwark of the League of the Black Hundred, the hirelings of the reaction, who were supplied with millions of rubles from the imperial counter-revolutionary fund, the so-called "black money." Street heroes and pogrom perpetrators became the masters of Russian politics. The sinister forces began the liquidation of the emancipation movement. Day after day the newspaper columns were crammed with reports concerning the arrests of politically "undependable" persons and the executions of revolutionaries. The gallows and the jails became, as it were, the emblems of governmental authority. The spectacle of daily executions which continued for two years (1907-1909) forced from the breast of the grand old man, Leo Tolstoi, the desperate cry: "I cannot keep silent."

Yet Nicholas II. continued his rôle of hangman. While young men and women, among them a great number of Jews, met their fate on the scaffold, the rioters and murderers from among the Black Hundred, who during the days of October, 1905, alone had ruined hundreds of Jewish communities, remained unpunished. The majority of them were not even put on trial, for the local authorities who were charged with that duty were afraid lest the judicial inquiry might establish their own complicity in the pogroms. But even those who were prosecuted and convicted on the charge of murder and plunder were released from punishment by orders from St. Petersburg. As a rule, the local branch of the League of the Russian People would appeal to the Tzar to pardon the participants in the "patriotic demonstrations" – the official euphemism for anti-Jewish riots – and the invariable response was an immediate pardon which was ostentatiously published in the newspapers. The petitions to the Tzar applying for the pardon of convicted perpetrators of violence went regularly through the Minister of Justice, the ferocious reactionary and anti-Semite Shcheglovitov. No one doubted that this amnesty was granted by virtue of an agreement concluded in 1905 between the Government and the pogrom ringleaders, guaranteeing immunity to the anti-Jewish rioters.

A different treatment was meted out to the Jewish self-defence contingents, which had the courage to oppose the murderers. They were dealt with ruthlessly. In Odessa, a court-martial sentenced six young Jews, members of a self-defence group which was active during the October pogroms, to long terms of hard labor, characterizing the "crime" of these Jews in the following words: "For having participated in a conspiracy having for its object the overthrow of the existing order by means of arming the Jewish proletariat for an attack upon the police and troops." This characterization was not far from the mark. The men engaged in defending the lives of their brothers and sisters against the murderous hordes were indeed guilty of a criminal offence against the "existing order," since the latter sought its support in these hordes, of whom "the police and troops," as was shown by the judicial inquiries, had formed a part. The appeal taken from this judgment to the highest military court was dismissed and the sentence sustained (August, 1907). The Jews who had done nothing beyond defending life and property could expect neither pardon nor mitigation. This lurid contrast between the release of the pogrom perpetrators and the conviction of the pogrom victims was interpreted as a direct challenge to the Jewish population on the part of Nicholas II. and his frenzied accomplices.

The Black Hundred had a right to feel that it was their day. They knew that the League of the Russian People formed, to use the phrase then frequently applied to it in the press, a "Second Government," which wielded greater power than the official quasi-constitutional Government of Stolypin. The dregs of the Russian populace gave full vent to their base instincts. In Odessa, hordes of League members made it a regular practice to assault the Jews upon the streets with rubber sticks, and, in case of resistance, to fire at them with pistols. Grigoryev, the city-governor, one of the few honest administrators, who made an attempt to restrain this black terrorism, was dismissed in August, 1907,⁵⁵ with the result that the assaults upon the Jews in the streets assumed an even more sanguinary character. All complaints of the Jews were dismissed by the authorities with the remark: "All this is taking place because the Jews were most prominent in the revolution."

The Government represented by Stolypin, which was anxious to save at least the appearance of a constitutional régime, was often forced to give way before the secret Government of the Black League, which commanded the full sympathy of the Tzar. By orders of the League, Stolypin decreed that one hundred Jewish students who had passed the competitive examination at the Kiev Polytechnicum should be excluded from that institution and that a like number of Russian students who had failed to pass should be admitted instead. The director and dean of the institution protested against this clumsy violation of academic freedom, but their protest was left unheeded, whereupon they tendered their resignation (September, 1907). Following upon this, the Ministry of Public Instruction, yielding to the pressure of the "Second Government," restored the shameful percentage norm, restricting the admission of Jews to institutions of higher learning, which, during the preceding years, had been disregarded by the autonomous professorial councils.

About the same time the Senate handed down a decision declaring the Zionist organization, which had been active in Russia for many years, to be illegal, and giving full scope to the police authorities to proceed with repressive measures against the members of the movement.