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It should be said that conditions in the Imperial army were not quite as grim as they may
sound today. Soldiers were allowed to marry and live with their families in their place of
garrison, and at the end of their 25 years of service could be given land
in agricultural colonies or
legal residence in towns and cities to practice a trade. Jews, however, were conditioned to a
sedentary life in the more desirable cities and provinces of the Empire. Jewish soldiers found it
difficult
to maintain their faith, keep the Sabbath, adhere to
the kosher dietary laws, and so on.
Jewish youngsters in the cantonment schools found it still more difficult to remain “good
Jews” in the face of deliberate state pressure to secularize and adapt themselves to the modern
world. One of the first things they were taught was to read and write in Cyrillic Russian, thus
giving them intellectual access to the world outside the
shtetl. It is difficult to determine how
effective the cantonments were in secularizing or converting Jewish pupils. Jewish literature and
oral tradition from this period are full of horror stories of abuse and coerced conversion, Jewish
children drowned in rivers if they refused to become Christians, and so on. (800 of them at one
go, according to legend, in a botched attempt at mass baptism.) At this distance in time it is hard
to ascertain the degree of truth in these allegations, especially given the historical propensity of
the Jewish people to embellish the undoubted reality of their suffering down through the
centuries. It is certain that Nicholas I and his government proceeded with a deliberate policy of
separating the Jewish students in the military cantonment schools from their heritage and
dragging them into the modern world willy-nilly. However, stories of hundreds of Jewish
children drowned in rivers by Czarist bureaucrats may probably be disregarded.
Obviously some of the students in the cantonments must have converted in order to
obtain the benefits of full participation in Russian society, and it was later to their advantage to
exaggerate in the eyes of the Tribe the degree of force and coercion to which they were
subjected. Also, as took place in Spain and elsewhere down through the centuries, many of the
conversions were false conversions of convenience, and those involved continued to practice
Judaism in secret.
After a Belarusian famine in 1822 Alexander I had sent inspectors to the Pale, and they
essentially returned with the same conclusions that Derzhavin made a quarter of a century
before. In 1823 the Czar established a Jewish Committee consisting of four ministers to address
yet again the issue on what to do with the Jews and how to transform them into useful and
productive citizens of the Russian state living in at least some semblance of peace and harmony
with their Christian neighbors. In 1825 this Jewish Committee of ministers was replaced by a
Director’s Committee (the fifth in a row) consisting of directors of departments, which studied
and largely evaded the problem for another eight years.
Nicholas I was too impatient to await this committee’s final report and so he unilaterally
introduced Jewish conscription, as described above. Once again the Czar decreed a three-year
period for the expulsion of the Jews from the villages of the western provinces, to at least try and
get them away from the border areas, as well as a ban on their selling wine and liquor. Later he
prohibited actual ownership or leasing of taverns and inns by Jews, but as was the case with all
such measures, enforcement was spotty at best. In 1827 Nicholas introduced what amounted to a
national liquor licensing system throughout the Empire, along with an attempt to turn many
taverns throughout the Empire into government postal stations and lease them out to Christians,
but without the Jews there were not enough bidders. What inevitably occurred was that official
licenses for the sale of alcohol and tavern and inn leases fell into the hands of Jews, through
various acts of chicanery or simple outright bribery of local officials. State efforts to compel
Jews to perform productive physical labor failed time and again.
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Another prominent Jewish economic activity in Imperial Russian history was the hated
practice of tax farming. In addition to the high level of income though both legitimate and
corrupt taxation, tax farmers under the Czars enjoyed full rights of residence and freedom of
movement, and lived freely in the capital and other cities outside the Pale. Some tax farmers
became prominent Jewish public figures, such as Feigin and Litman Evzel Gunzburg who went
on to found a St. Petersburg banking house, the largest in Russia, and later took part in the
placement of Russian and foreign government loans.
In 1826, Nicholas I ordered the eviction back to the Pale of Settlement
of Jewish distillers
and tavern keepers who had infiltrated into Great Russia, and in an attempt to replace them the
state-owned and state-operated liquor industry was born, but with little success as far as barring
Jews went. Jews infiltrated the state distilleries such as those in Irkutsk.
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