330 Towards a Modern Army, 1825-1874As regards exemptions a cenain irony wa.~ involved. J. S. Curtiss remarks
nicely that Nicholas 'sought in various ways to lighten (the burden of military
service). in part by compelling additional categories of people to submit to
it'.^34 Precisely so: these groups consisted mainly of ethnic and religious
minorities that had hitherto escaped, such as Jews. Their privileged situation
did not accord with the desire for uniformity that animated administrators in
the Nicolaevan era, and its abolition was calculated to appeal to chauvinistic
sentiments among the masses. Jews were now conscripted in the same way as
other subjects of the tsar, except that their communities formed separate sec-
tions in each province.J~ It was only a small step from segregation on practical
grounds to overt discrimination, in the army as elsewhere. The spirit of official
policy is conveyed by a decree of 1832 that Jewish soldiers should not be pro-
moted to non-commissioned rank unless they had demonstrated valour in
battle.^36 The military establishment took the view that the Jews' distinct life-style
made them unsuited for all the rigours of the service. This was the ostensible
rationale behind the ruling that Jewish recruits might be taken at the tender
age of 12,^37 and then assigned to cantonists' battalions for a six-year training
period designed to remould their minds and bodies.
The lot of these boy soldiers was harsh indeed. They were generally treated
even worse than Russian cantonists were. In his memoirs Aleksandr Herzen
records that, when on his way to exile in Vyatka in 1835, he came across a party of
children aged only eight or nine who were being driven to Kazan·; their well-
disposed but powerless escorting officer exrccted that half of them would die
of exhaustion or hunger before they reached their destination.JK The law
prescribed that Jewish soldiers should be free to profess their religion, but this
right was usually ignored in practice and in 1843 a wave of forced conversions
began.^311 A sympathetic (Russian) former boy-soldier states that the life of
those who resisted this pressure was 'worse than forced labour', since they
incurred hostility at every level in the military hierarchy. He tells of one Berko
Finkelstein, a 15-year-old boy who remained true to .I udaism and was sub-
jected by his company commander to a succession of sadistic tortures-being
made to stand barefoot on a hot stove or hung upside down by his heels-yet
refused to recant. Subsequently Finkelstein became a model soldier, where-
l4 Curti~s. Russian Army, p. 234.
JI II PSZ ii. 1330 (26 Aug. 1827); iii. 2045 (22 Ma~ 1828). Other decree' >imply applied lo
Jewish soldier' the regulatiom gcnerally in rorce: lor cxampk. 'iii(i). 5987 (Feb. 1833); xiii(ii).
11386 (3 July 1838).
J~ 11 PS7. vii. S.:128 ( 12 June 1102)
(^17) In practice ,ome of them we1c a' yo1111!! ·" L'lght. S. 1\1. DulHH>\. lhe eminent .lcwi'h
hi>torian, di,cern> anti-Scmiti..: bia' in tlm (/li.1wrr o/ til<' ./e11·1 i11 l'o/u11d and R11111t1 ... I 19161.
reprinted New York. 1975, ii. 19, 23), hut as we k1Hm Ku,-.ian cantoni,rs faced a 'irnilar fate; lhe
lat1er were, however, in the military Gt\le and nor rc..:ru11\ rrom the civilian population.
. ix A. I. Her ten, M.1' Pust und lhrmgh/1, tr. C. (iarnctl. n:vi>ed hy H. Higgin" London, 1968, 1.
219.
w Ginzhurg, 'Muchcniki-deri', p. 56.