THE CZAR TAKES COURAGE.
Alexander III. and his court moved to the long-deserted imperial palace
at Gatchina, a village 28 English miles from St. Petersburg. The young
Czar and his entourage were in a state of nervous tension. Economically,
the country was in the throes of hard times. Districts rich in the
potentialities of industry and prosperity were in the grip of famine.
Driven by bad crops and extortionate taxes, thousands of village
families were abandoning their homes to go begging. Cities were crowded
with such mendicants from surrounding villages, and the industrial
centres were full of workmen out of employment. Politically, a
demoralising feeling of suspense hung over the empire. The masses had
seen one Czar--the ward of a vigilant guardian angel--prostrated. The
crown's prestige was shaken, and the Czar's seeking refuge in a secluded
village did anything but retrieve it. The number of _lese majeste_ cases
had suddenly grown so large that by a special imperial ukase these
offences were transferred from the publicity of the courts to the
obscure depths of "justice by administrative order." From several places
came reports of riots against the police, while the universities
manifested their hostility to the throne quite openly. Subscription
lists for a monument to the assassinated Czar were torn to pieces and
those who circulated them were publicly hissed and insulted. The
portents of turbulence were in the air.
Loris-Melikoff submitted to the new Czar the "constitution" of which
Alexander II. had approved an hour before his violent death. Alexander
III. read it and wrote on the margin of the paper: "Very well
conceived"; and two days later, after the project had been carried at a
cabinet meeting by a vote of eight against five, the Czar, while
conversing with his brother, Grand Duke Vladimir, on the measure to be
introduced, said, joyfully:
"I feel as though a mountain had rolled off my shoulders."
But the conservative party at court had the support of a new power
behind the throne. M. Pobiedonostzeff, formerly tutor of the present
Czar and now his favourite adviser, was a man of much stronger purpose
than Loris-Melikoff. He fought against the innovation tooth and nail,
and the publication of it in the _Official Messenger_ was postponed from
day to day. The leader of the Panslavists was invited from Moscow; every
conservative influence was brought to bear upon a Czar who was
absolutely incapable of forming his own opinion. All this was done in
the strictest secrecy from Loris-Melikoff.
* * * * *
Meanwhile, during Easter week, seven days after the approval of the
"constitution" by a majority of the ministers and twelve days subsequent
to the execution of the regicides, a furious anti-Jewish riot broke out
in Elisavetgrad, a prosperous city in the south. A frenzied drink-crazed
mob had possession of the town during two days, demolishing and
pillaging hundreds of houses and shops, covering whole streets with
debris and reducing thousands of people to beggary. And neighbouring
towns and villages followed the example of the larger city.
The Czar took alarm. It looked like the prelude to a popular upheaval.
"It's only an anti-Semitic disturbance, your Imperial Majesty,"
Pobiedonostzeff reassured him. "There was one like that ten years ago,
in Odessa."
The Elisavetgrad outbreak was, indeed, a purely local affair, but it
happened at a time that was highly favourable to occurrences of that
nature. Originally organised by some high-born profligates, victims of a
gang of Jewish usurers, it had nothing to do with the general situation
save in so far as there was in the hungry masses a blind disposition to
attack somebody; a disposition coupled with a feeling that the usual
ties of law and order had been loosened. When, in addition, the target
of assault happened to be the stepchild in Russia's family of peoples,
the one forever kicked and cuffed by the government itself, the rioters'
sense of security was complete. Moreover, among the victims of Jewish
usurers were hundreds of army officers and civil officials who lived
beyond their means, and from these came a direct hint at impunity. The
attack had been carefully planned, but the imbruted mob acted on its own
logic, with the result that thousands of artisans, labourers, poor
tradesmen, teachers, rabbis, dreamers, were plundered and ill-treated
while the handful of usurers escaped.
The promise of impunity was fulfilled. Neighbouring towns and villages
followed the example of Elisavetgrad, and ten days later, May 8-9,
similar atrocities, but with a far greater display of fury and
bestiality, occurred in Kieff, where a dozen murders and an enormous
list of wounded and of outraged women was added to the work of
devastation and plunder. The Kieff authorities encouraged all this in a
thousand ways, while individual officers and men took part in the
pandemonium of havoc and rape.
"Easy, boys," said the governor of the province, with an amused smile,
as he drove past the busy rioters at the head of a procession of
fashionable spectators.
Loris-Melikoff was scarcely to be held responsible for these
occurrences. He had his own cares to worry him. The reins were fast
slipping out of his hands. Indeed, the attitude of governors, chiefs of
police, military officers, toward the spreading campaign against the
Jews was a matter of instinct. The "spirit of the moment," as it had
become customary to denote the epidemic of anti-Jewish feeling in
official circles, gleamed forth clear and unequivocal, and local
authorities acted upon it on their own hook. The real meaning of this
"spirit of the moment" lay in the idea that if there was a state of
general unrest threatening the safety of the throne, it was spending
itself on anti-Semitic ferocity; that if a storm-cloud was gathering
over the crown, an electric rod had been found in the Chosen People.
The Czar took courage.
Two days after the Kieff riot he promulgated a manifesto, framed by
Pobiedonostzeff, and proclaiming the continuance of unqualified
iron-handed absolutism. The "constitution" went into the archives.
Loris-Melikoff's public career had come to a close. General Ignatyeff, a
corrupt time-server, was appointed Minister of the Interior and a policy
of restriction and repression was adopted that brought back the days of
Nicholas I.
Ignatyeff encouraged the "spirit of the moment" with all the means at
his command. One of the very first things he did was to order the
expulsion of thousands of Jews from Kieff. At the trial of some of the
rioters the state attorney unceremoniously acted as advocate for the
defendants.
The effect of all this upon the public mind was a foregone conclusion.
The general inference was that anti-Jewish riots met with the
government's approval. The outrages passed from Kieff to neighbouring
cities; from there to Odessa; from Odessa to other sections of the
south. They were spreading throughout the region in which Miroslav is
located with the continuity of a regular crusade and with a uniformity
of detail that was eloquent of a common guiding force.
It was a new phase of White Terrorism.
* * * * *
To Pavel the crusade against Clara's race was a source of mixed
encouragement and anxiety.
"Hurrah, old fellow," he said to Godfather one morning. "It does look as
though the Russian people could kick, doesn't it?"
"Yes, if they can attack Jewish usurers, I don't see why they could not
turn upon the government some day."
"And, while they are at it, upon the land-plundering nobility, upon
fellows like you and me, eh?" He poked Urie in the ribs gleefully.
In his conversations with Clara, however, the subject was never
broached, and this gave him a sense of guilt and uneasiness. He could
not help being aware that instead of usurers the chief target of attack
in every riot, without a single exception, were Jewish artisans,
labourers, teachers and the poorest tradesmen. And this, so far as Clara
was concerned, meant that the common people of Pavel's race, for whose
sake she was facing the solitary cell and the gallows, that these
Christian people were brutally assaulting and pillaging, reducing to
beggary and murdering poor honest, innocent people of her own blood,
Jews like her father, mother, sister, like herself.
But this bare fact did not fit in with Nihilist theory. That golden halo
which had been painted about the common Christian people by the
ecstasies of the anti-serfdom movement of twenty years ago had not yet
faded. The Gentile masses were still deified by the Nihilists. Whatever
the peasant or workman of Slavic blood did was still sacred,--an
instinctive step in the direction of liberty and universal happiness.
The Russian masses were rioting; could there be a better indication of a
revolutionary awakening? And if the victims of these riots happened to
be Jews, then the Jews were evidently enemies of the people.
That the crusade was part and parcel of the "white terror" of the throne
had not yet dawned upon the revolutionists.
As to Clara, she was so completely abandoned to her grief over the death
of Sophia and the four men that so far the riots (no unheard-of thing in
the history of the Jews by any means) had made but a feeble appeal to
her imagination. Centuries seemed to divide her from her race and her
past. The outbreaks seemed to be taking place in some strange, distant
country.
The execution of the five regicides had been described quite fully in
the _Official Messenger_ and the account had been copied in all other
newspapers. Clara kept the issue of the _Voice_ containing the report in
a book, and although she knew its salient passages by heart, she often
consulted the paper, now for this paragraph, now for that. There was a
sacred mystery in the letters in which the description was printed.
"The five prisoners approached the priests almost at the same moment and
kissed the cross; after which they were taken by the hangmen each to his
or her rope." Clara beheld the ropes dangling and Sophia placed under
one of them, but her aching heart coveted more vividness. Her
imagination was making desperate efforts to reproduce the scene with the
tangibility of life. Each time she read how the hangman, dressed in a
red shirt, slipped the noose about Sophia's neck amid the roll of drums,
and how he wrenched the stool from under her feet, so that she plunged
with a jerk, and how the next instant her body hung motionless in the
air, each time Clara read this she was smitten with an overpowering pang
of pity and of helpless, aimless, heart-tearing affection. Sometimes she
would fancy Sophia and her four comrades rescued from the hangman's
hands a second before their execution, and carried triumphantly through
the streets by an army of victorious revolutionists, but the next moment
it would come back to her that this had not been the case, and then the
re-awakening to reality was even more painful than the original shock.
If a rescuing force were now ready to attack the hangman and the
thousand-bayoneted guard around him, it would be too late. Sophia was
dead, irretrievably dead; there was nobody to rescue. And Clara's heart
sank in despair. At such moments she would seek relief in those passages
of the report where the calmness of the condemned revolutionists was
depicted. "Jeliaboff whispered to his priest, fervently kissed the
cross, shook his hair and smiled. Fortitude did not forsake Jeliaboff,
Sophia and particularly Kibalchich (the man with the face of Christ) to
the very moment of donning the white-hooded death-gown"--these passages
gave Clara thrills of religious bliss.
Pavel often talked to her about the execution, raved, cursed the
government; but Clara usually remained gloomily taciturn. The wound in
her soul was something too sacred to be talked about. Words seemed to
her like sacrilege. Their hearts understood each other well enough, why,
then, allow language to intrude upon their speechless communion? Some of
his effusions and outbursts jarred on her. On the other hand, her
silences made him restless.
"You'll go insane if you keep this up," he once said, irascibly.
"I don't care if I do," she answered. "Don't nag me, Pashenka, pray."
"But the thing is becoming an _idee fixe_ in your mind, upon my word it
is. Can't you try and get back to your senses? What is death after all?
Absolute freedom from suffering, that's all. There is nothing to go
crazy over anyhow. There is nothing but a dear, a glorious, a beautiful
memory of them, and that will live as long as there is such a thing as
history in the world."
She made no reply. She tried to picture Sophia free from suffering, but
this only sharpened her pain. Sophia not existing? The formula was even
more terrible than death. In reality, however, her atheism was powerless
to obliterate her visions. Sophia existed somewhere, only she was
solemnly remote, as though estranged from her. Clara could have almost
cried to her, imploring for recognition.
* * * * *
But this mood of hers could not last forever. Sooner or later she would
awaken to the full extent of the riots and to the fact that they were
raging in the vicinity of Miroslav, threatening the safety of her
nearest relatives. How would she take it then? The question intruded
upon Pavel's peace of mind again and again.
For the present, however, she was taken up with her thoughts of Sophia,
Zachar or Hessia. Poor Hessia! They had robbed her of her baby, the
thugs, even as they had that woman of the "gay bard's" poem. "To lead a
married life under conditions such as ours is pure madness," she said to
herself.
One afternoon, as she and her lover sat on the lounge, embracing and
kissing deliriously, she suddenly sprang to her feet, her cheeks
burning, kissed Pavel on his forehead and crossed over to the window.
He shrugged his shoulders resentfully.