Conscription and the Search for Modern Russian Jewry

1. Stepchildren of the Tsar: Jewish Cantonists and the Official Origins of Russian Jewry

13 1 STEPCHILDREN OF THE TSAR: JEWISH CANTONISTS AND THE OFFICIAL ORIGINS OF RUSSIAN JEWRY making russian jewry In the second half of the nineteenth century Russian-Jewish writers raised the figure of the Nicholaevan recruit to the status of an icon, the cultural signifier of the difficult origins of Russian Jewish Enlightenment. Through their imaginative mediation, the story of Jewish conscription into the army of Nicholas I came to exemplify the defining moment in the creation of a common Russian-Jewish past. The singular dedication of post-Nicholaevan Jewish intellectuals to investing the conscription tale with contemporary meaning in an attempt to distill a modern Russian-Jewish ethnos out of the tangle of social, economic, and cultural differences that defined the lives of Jewish men and women in the Pale of Settlement emerged against the background of its precedent in tsarist policy. In fact, the nature and extent of the Russian government’s investment in constructing Russian Jewry, a project dictated more by the changing definition of imperial raison d’état than by any Jewish agenda, anticipated and informed the concerns of the Russian-Jewish intelligentsia long past the age of Nicholas I down to the fall of the Romanov empire. 14 conscription and the search for modern russian jewry The imposition of the conscription decree in 1827 marked the inception of the state’s ambitious program of social engineering, a project that aimed at using Russia’s extensive military resources to transform a generation of Jewish boys into a model Russian Jewry. Reared at the expense of the state, Jewish minors, drafted first into cantonist battalions and then, once they came of age, into regular army ranks, exemplified to their superiors both the reach and the limits of the government’s ambitious efforts to reform its Jewish subjects. The ambiguities implicit in this situation found reflection in official discourse before Nicholaevan conscription became a commonplace in the repertoire of Jewish storytellers. The earliest version of the conscription tale appeared in the form of a bureaucratic narrative that chronicled the struggle of the military administration, specifically the Department of Military Settlements (DMS) to realize, in spite of substantial difficulties of principle and practice, the tsar’s uncompromising vision of Jewish manhood reborn in Nicholas’s own image. Driven by the growing discrepancy between ends and means, the official story of Jewish conscription under Nicholas I stands up to historical scrutiny far more consistently than its normative Jewish version given to posterity and retold in a variety of ways to the present day. This, for a number of reasons: first, the bureaucratic narrative concerns the immediate realities of Nicholaevan conscription. Conscription literature, produced almost in its entirety by Jewish authors in the post-reform period, is, to the same extent, contemporary; that is, it subordinates the interest in the Nicholaevan past to the cultural concerns of its own moment; Jewish conscription literature derives its historical character precisely from its imaginative relationship to the past, from all of the ways, in other words, that it gets history wrong. Second, the bureaucratic narrative reproduces a variety of different, competing voices. These voices include the tsar, the local command, the administration, regimental priests, the minister of war, parents of Jewish recruits, sometimes even the recruits themselves. Conscription literature, contrary to the contemporary notion that its essential truthfulness is rooted in the authenticity of Jewish vernacular memory ostensibly undisturbed by the passage of time between the reign of Nicholas I and the end of the imperial period, developed and changed in accordance with the power of individual authorial control. Unselfconsciously polyphonic, the bureaucratic narrative often speaks against the avowed interest of the state which it ostensibly serves. At such moments, it gets closest to the historical contingencies of conscription, vastly more complicated and confusing than its expressly ideological—normative —representation, either in the tsar’s law or in Jewish literature, allows. The bureaucratic narrative emerges as a kind of historical, secular, we might say, commentary on the programmatic confessional and political interest of the autocracy, enunciated in the tsar’s decree. Conscription literature, by contrast, constitutes its narrative teleology against the grain of secular historical experience. Every single one of its Jewish authors read the Nicholaevan 15 stepchildren of the tsar past as past in relation not only to his (it is, without exception, his and not hers, in itself a...