Thursday, October 2, 2008

The Revolution In Russia

William Elroy Curtis


National Geographic Magazine for May, 1907 (pp. 313-314).

PREMIER STOLYPIN IS ABLE AND BRAVE

[...]

He referred to the starving Jews, and while he did not feel at liberty to grant them the full rights enjoyed by other subjects without the concurrence of the douma [i.e. the Russian parliament -- Irmin], he has relieved them from the most severe of the restrictions under which they have been suffering, and now they can go about Russia with an ordinary passport. They may engage in any business, but are not yet allowed to buy land outside of the pale of settlement. Jewish children are now admitted to all the schools and universities of Russia without condition. The members of that race are now enjoying nearly all the liberties of those of other races and religions, except that there has been no change in passport regulations, which has been promised from year to year. Foreign Jews are still compelled to explain the object of their visit before they are permitted to pass the boundary. Mr. Stolypin will undoubtedly remove that humiliation in due time.

THE VENGEANCE OF THE JEWS

Perhaps these reforms are the cause of the present tranquillity, because the revolutionary leaders nearly all belong to the Jewish race and the most effective revolutionary agency is the Jewish Bund, which has its headquarters at Bialystok, where the massacre occurred last June. The government has suffered more from that race than from all of its other subjects combined. Whenever a desperate deed is committed it is always done by a Jew and there is scarcely one loyal member of that race in the entire Empire. The great strike which paralyzed the Empire and compelled the Czar to grant a constitution and a parliament was ordered and managed by a Jew named Krustaleff, president of the workingmen's council, a young man only thirty years old. He was sent to the penitentiary for life, and had not been behind the bars more than three weeks when he organized and conducted a successful strike of the prison employees.

Maxim, who organized and conducted the revolution in the Baltic provinces, is a Jew of marvelous ability. Last fall he came over here lecturing and collecting money to carry on the revolutionary campaign, but for some reason has vanished and nobody seems to know what has become of him.

Gerschunin, the most resourceful leader of the terrorists, who was condemned to life imprisonment in the silver mines on the Mongolian frontier, has recently escaped in a water cask, and is supposed to be in San Francisco. He is a Polish Jew only twenty-seven years old. I might enumerate a hundred other revolutionary leaders and every one of them would be a Jew. Wherever you read of an assassination or of the explosion of a bomb you will notice in the newspaper dispatches that the man was a Jew. The most sensational and dramatic episode that has occurred since the mutinies was on October 27, when, in the very center of Saint Petersburg, at the entrance of Kazan Cathedral, four Jews held up a treasury wagon and captured $270,000. They passed the package to a woman, who instantly vanished, and no trace of her has ever been found; but they were all arrested and were promptly punished. On the 8th of November a few Jewish revolutionaries entered a treasury car near Ragow, in Poland, got $850,000, and disappeared.

Every deed of that kind is done by Jews, and the massacres that have shocked the universe, and occurred so frequently that the name "pogrom" was invented to describe them, were organized and managed by the exasperated police authorities in retaliation for crimes committed by the Jewish revolutionists.

MANY REFORMS ALREADY INSTITUTED BY PREMIER STOLYPIN

But Mr. Stolypin has evidently arranged a truce. He has crushed out the conspirators in the police department who organized and directed the "pograms" [sic. -- KAS] and has given the Jews more liberty and more justice than they ever enjoyed before. He has appointed a commission to prepare a law placing them upon the same footing as Protestants, Roman Catholics, and members of other religious faiths.

Mr. Stolypin is an able, honest, and grave man, of broad horizon and liberal views and a high sense of justice. He has already done wonders. Every week some important reform is ordered, some tyrannical regulation revoked, some concession granted.

[...]

(end of article excerpt)


From a speech given to the National Geographic Society, Washington, DC, on December 14, 1906. Transcribed by Kevin Alfred Strom, June 1998. In 1911 Peter Stolypin was assassinated in a Kiev theater, in the presence of the Russian Royal Family, by a Jew, Mordka Bogrov. (Irmin)

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