We have called the present struggle a war of liberation. We entered the war with the avowed purpose of liberating those who are situated at a distance from us. While liberating distant strangers, why then do we oppress those who live close by our side? We wage war against tyranny outside of Russia, and we allow oppression to reign within her. We pity everybody but the Jews. Why? Are they not dying on the battlefields for our sake? Do they not love us--who hate them? Do we not hate them--who love us? If we continue to act as we have done in the past, would not everybody lose faith in us, and would not the nations of the earth be justified in saying to us: "You can love only from afar. You are liars!" We believed our righteousness to be our strongest weapon. We wanted to conquer brute force by the truth. If we persist in this desire, let us not lie; let us not weaken our truth by falsehood. The Teutons say: "We fight to be the rulers of the world,"--and they act accordingly. We say: "We fight for universal peace, for the emancipation of the world," but we do not act accordingly. Let us begin then with the liberation of the Jews at home. Let the oppressed nations in our land bear in mind, however, that only a free Russian people will be able to give them freedom. Let the Jews remember that the Jewish question is a Russian question. * * * * * CONCERNING THE IDEOLOGY OF THE JEWISH QUESTION _Vyacheslav Ivanovich Ivanov was born in 1866. A poet of great mastery and a refined critic, his thought, is steeped in hellenism and in the most abstruse mystic lore._ CONCERNING THE IDEOLOGY OF THE JEWISH QUESTION BY VYACHESLAV IVANOV One of the wiliest and the most harmful doctrines of our times is, I believe, the fashionable ideology of spiritual anti-Semitism. It attributes to Aryanism, which by the way, is a quantity ethnically if not linguistically enigmatical, many excellent and splendid qualities, while in the Semitic influences and admixtures to the Aryan element it sees nothing but negative energies, which have always hindered the free unfolding of the creative powers of the Aryan genius. This doctrine would deprive Hellenism of Aphrodite, who came to the Hellenes from the Semites, and would cut the main and most profound root of Christianity, namely its faith in a "transcendental," or, plainly, living God. Spiritual anti-Semitism cuts the body of Christianity into two halves, and keeps only that half whose forms are justified by analogies borrowed from the Greek religious thought, justified, in the eyes of learned dodgers who choose to play the part of Romanticists of Aryanism.