Cantonist
The curriculum included grammar and arithmetic, and those with a corresponding aptitude were taught artillery, fortification, music and singing, scrivenery, equine veterinary science, or mechanics.
In 1798 a military "asylum-orphanage" was established in St Petersburg, and all regimental schools were renamed after it, the total enrollment reaching 16,400.
Several cantonist battalions became specialized: they prepared auditors, artillerists, engineers, military surgeons, cartographers.
[6] This system created a disproportionate number of Jewish cantonists, and betrayed the utilitarian agenda of the statute: to draft those more likely to be susceptible to external influence, and thus to assimilation.
The vast majority of Jews entered the Russian Empire with the territories acquired as the result of the last partitions of Poland of the 1790s; their civil rights were severely restricted (see Pale of Settlement).
Before 1827, Jews were doubly taxed en lieu of being obligated to serve in the army [12] and their inclusion was supposed to alleviate this burden.
Russia was divided into northern, southern, eastern, and western "conscription zones" and the levy was announced annually for only one of them.
Seeking to protect the socio-economic and religious integrity of Jewish society, the qahals did their best to include “non-useful Jews” in the draft lists so that the heads of tax-paying middle-class families were predominantly exempt from conscription, whereas single Jews, as well as "heretics" (Haskalah-influenced individuals), paupers, outcasts, and orphaned children were drafted.
They used their power to suppress protests and intimidate potential informers who sought to expose the arbitrariness of the qahal to the Russian government.
During this period the qahals leaders would employ informers and kidnappers (Russian: ловчики, romanized: lovchiki, khappers), as many potential conscripts preferred to run away rather than voluntarily submit.
All cantonists were institutionally underfed, and encouraged to steal food from the local population, in emulation of the Spartan character building.
On one occasion in 1856, a Jewish cantonist, Khodulevich, managed to steal the Tsar's own watch during military games at Uman.
[15][16] The boys in cantonist schools were given extensive training in Russian grammar (and sometimes literature), and mathematics, in particular geometry necessary in naval and artillery service.
The official policy was to encourage their conversion to the state religion of Orthodox Christianity and Jewish boys were coerced to baptism.
According to Benjamin Nathans, ... the formal incorporation of Jews into Nicolas I's army was quickly compromised by laws distinguishing Jewish from non-Jewish soldiers.
Less than two years after the 1827 decree on conscription, Jews were barred from certain elite units, and beginning in 1832 they were subject to separate, more stringent criteria for promotion, which required that they "distinguish themselves in combat with the enemy.
Some baptized cantonists eventually reached high ranks in the Imperial Army and Navy; among them were generals Arnoldi, Zeil; admirals Kaufman, Sapsay, Kefali.
While being convoyed to his exile in 1835 at Vyatka, Herzen met a unit of emaciated Jewish cantonists, some eight years old, who were marched to Kazan.
[20] The agony of Polish children incorporated into the Imperial Russian Army was presented in Juliusz Słowacki's narrative poem Anhelli.
