THE LAST YEARS OF NICHOLAS I.

1.  THE “ASSORTMENT” OF THE JEWS

The beginning of the “Second Emancipation” of 1848 in Western Europe synchronized with the last phase of the era of oppression in Russia.  That phase, representing the concluding seven years of pre-reformatory Russia, was a dark patch in the life of the country at large, doubly dark in the life of the Jews.  The power of absolutism, banished by the March revolution from the European West, asserted itself with intensified fury in the land of the North, which had about that time earned the unenviable reputation of the “gendarme of Europe.”  Thrown back on its last stronghold, absolutism concentrated its energy upon the suppression of all kinds of revolutionary movements.  In default of such a movement in Russia itself, this energy broke through the frontier line and found an outlet in the punitive expedition sent to support the Austrians in the pacification of mutinous Hungary.  The triumphant passwords of political freedom which were given out on the other side of the Western frontier only intensified the reactionary rage on this side.  Since it was impossible to punish action—­for under the vigilant eye of the terrible “Third Section” [1] revolutionary endeavors were a matter of impossibility—­word and thought were subject to punishment.  Censorship ran riot in the subdued literature of Russia, tearing out by the roots anything that did not fit into the mould of the bureaucratic way of thinking.  The quiet precincts of the Russian intelligenzia, who, in the retirement of their homes, ventured to dream of a better political and social order, were invaded by political detectives who snatched thence numerous victims for the scaffold, the galleys, and conscription.  Such were the contrivances employed during the last years of pre-reformatory Russia to hold together the old order of things in the land of officialdom and serfdom, in that Russia which the poet Khomyakov, though patriot and Slavophile, branded thus: 

[Footnote 1:  Compare above, p. 21, n. 1.]

    Blackened in court with falsehood’s blackness,
    And stained by the yoke of slavery,
    Full of godless flattery, of vicious lying,
    And ev’ry possible knavery.

But the full weight of “the yoke of slavery” and “falsehood’s blackness,” by which pre-reformatory Russia was marked, fell upon the shoulders of the most hapless section of Russian subjects, the Jews.  The tragic gloom of the end of Nicholas’ reign finds its only parallel in Jewish annals in the beginning of the same reign.  The would-be “reforms” proposed in the interval, in the beginning of the forties, did not deceive the popular instinct.  The Jews of the Pale saw not only the hand which was holding forth the charter of enlightenment but also the other hand which hid a stone in the form of new cruel restrictions.  Soon the Government threw off the mask of enlightenment, and set out to realize its reserve program, that of “correcting” the Jews by police methods.