It can hardly be questioned or doubted that if the
war had been bitterly resented by the masses it would have precipitated
revolution instead of retarding it. From this point of view the war was a
deplorable disaster. That no serious attempt was made to bring about a
revolution at that time is the best possible evidence that the declaration
of war did not enrage the people. If not a popular and welcome event,
therefore, the declaration of war by the Czar was not an unpopular one.
Never before since his accession to the throne had Nicholas II had the
support of the nation to anything like the same extent.
Take the Jews, for example. Bitterly hated and persecuted as they had been,
despised and humiliated beyond description; victims of the knout and the
pogrom; tortured by Cossacks and Black Hundreds; robbed by official
extortions; their women shamed and ravaged and their babies doomed to rot
and die in the noisome Pale--the Jews owed no loyalty to the Czar or even
to the nation. Had they sought revenge in the hour of Russia's crisis, in
howsoever grim a manner, it would have been easy to understand their action
and hard indeed to regard it with condemnation. It is almost unthinkable
that the Czar could have thought of the Jews in his vast Empire in those
days without grave apprehension and fear.
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