The Russian Album by Michael Ignatieff Page B

is supposed to have asked them in reply. The western borders of the empire were open, he insisted. If they wanted to leave for their promised land, he would not stop them. And they did, by the hundreds of thousands over the next decade, streaming across Europe to the boats which took them to Ellis Island or to Palestine.
    When the Jews asked why they were not entitled to the same protection by the police as other Russian subjects, Ignatieff replied that they were not like other Russian subjects. In May 1882, he signed new legislation forbidding Jews to move into the countryside outside the Pale of Jewish Settlement, to acquire land, to trade in alcohol, or to open their shops on Sundays. When Jewish leaders came to him and protested, pointing out that the measures reversed the slow, incremental liberalization of restrictions on Jews introduced by Tsar Alexander II during the 1860s, Ignatieff insisted that he had taken the new measures to ‘protect’ the Jews from peasant pogroms in the countryside. To the Tsar himself, Ignatieff justified the decrees with memos that painted a familiar fantasy of a Jewish–Polish conspiracy with its hands on ‘the banks, the stock exchange, the bar, and a great part of the press’, a conspiracy that plundered the state treasury and preached ‘blind imitation of Europe’. The new legislation would remove ‘the abnormal conditions which exist between Jews and natives and protect the latter from the pernicious activity … which was responsible for the disturbances’.
    This was the dark side of Ignatieff’s pan-Slavism, the unacceptable face of the Orthodox nationalism that had made him an empire builder in Asia and a supporter of the Slavic Christian cause against the Turks. He gave respectability to the prejudices of his time and class, hoping that he could build himself an unassailable position with the Tsar in a Petersburg milieu seething with intrigues against him. But by May 1882 it became more and more difficult to keep his balance in the infighting of the court. Konstantin Pobedonostsev, the Tsar’s former tutor and chief confidant, once Ignatieff’s champion, became jealous of his influence and began to plot his downfall, scheming openly with the prefect of the Petersburg police. The Tsar himself, large, cautious and stupid, became resentful of the elegant verbal turns of a minister who seemed to think of himself as the autocracy’s saviour.
    Sensing that his time might be running out, Ignatieff chanced everything on a final throw of the dice. He drafted a statute for the convocation of a zemski sobor, an assembly which would bring together representatives from the peasantry, the merchant guilds and the landed proprietors to listen obediently to the Tsar’s plans for his empire, to offer respectful advice and to join with him in healing the rift between the autocracy and society. It was not to be a parliament with legislative or deliberative powers. Ignatieff shared the Slavophile suspicion of European democracy, with its unseemly popular clamours and open political discussion. Instead, the convocation of the zemski sobor was conceived of as a romantic gesture of political reconciliation, an attempt to meet the universal demand for political renewal by bringing back the good old days when Muscovite tsars met their boyars in a zemski sobor upon their coronation.
    Ignatieff begged the Tsar to keep his plans secret from Pobedonostsev and the court clique plotting against him. But when he came to the Cabinet room to discuss his proposals one May morning in 1882, he found a draft of the document open before every place and understood from the triumphant looks of Pobedonostsev and his clique that the game was up. When the Tsar asked him to begin discussion of the document, Ignatieff rose and left the room. He was never to return. At exactly fifty years of age, on the eve of an action that he believed would save the autocracy, he was