Russka - Edward Rutherfurd [459]
Only when he was sure he had them with him did Peter Suvorin broach the real subject that was on his mind, and the reason why he had been so anxious to address them that night. Which was that they were Jewish.
He began carefully, and subtly, by alluding to some of their grievances: for in recent years the tsarist government, for reasons never explained, had undoubtedly turned vigorously against the Jewish community and treated them shabbily. Jews had been forbidden to buy land and told they must only live in towns; education quotas were being applied against them so that only a miserably small percentage of students in higher education could be Jews, even in the big cities in the Pale. And the laws of the Pale were suddenly being enforced with such viciousness that the previous year some seventeen thousand Jews had been thrown out of Moscow. Worse yet were the repeated outbreaks of violence since the pogroms of 1881, which the government had done little to prevent.
It was hardly surprising therefore if in recent years the Jewish workers had begun to think of setting up their own workers’ committees, quite independent of the others. Peter could hardly blame them. But this was exactly what he was anxious to combat.
‘The workers of the world must unite,’ he told them. ‘All groups, all nations, shall be one.’ He saw this vision so clearly. ‘And besides,’ he warned them, ‘as part of a larger movement, your voice will be much stronger than it ever would be as a separate group.’
They listened to him politely, but he could see they were uncertain. And then a tousle-haired young man near the front quietly addressed him. ‘You say we should remain part of a larger brotherhood. Well and good. But what are we to do if our non-Jewish brothers refuse to defend us? What then?’
It was the question Peter had been awaiting. For it was true, he knew, that Russian workers had mixed feelings about their Jewish brothers. In Russia proper, they were foreigners; in the Pale, they were competition; and there were even activists and Socialists who had failed to stand up against the pogroms for fear of alienating the workers they were trying to win over to their cause.
Peter was too honest to deny the problem, but it was a phase that would pass, he assured the young man. ‘Remember, we are at the very first beginnings,’ he said. ‘Even many of the activist workers have to be educated; but as the great brotherhood develops in size and consciousness, this problem will fall away. And,’ he added, ‘you will speed that process by staying on the inside, not by splitting off.’ There was a long pause. He was not sure if he had convinced the young man or not. Some other questions followed.
It was just as the meeting was about to end that the girl stood up. She had been sitting towards the back, just behind a large youth, and he had only been aware of her mass of black hair. Now, suddenly, she was staring at him, with huge, luminous eyes and a look of genuine puzzlement on her face. And indeed, Rosa Abramovich was puzzled. She had listened intently to all that Peter Suvorin had said. She had caught his vision of the great sweep of human history and the better world to come, and it had touched her profoundly: she had never heard anyone speak like that before. Yet when she considered her own life, and her memories of what had passed in the Ukraine, there was something she found she could not understand. And so now, she faced him a little awkwardly and asked in a soft voice: ‘But when the new world comes, when the Socialist state has been achieved, will that mean that the Jews are not persecuted any more – that men will have changed?’
Peter stared at her. It was a question of such dazzling stupidity that, for a moment, he had not known what to say. Was she trying to be funny? No.