![History of the Jews in Russia and Poland, Volume 2 [of 3] / From the Death of Alexander I until the Death of Alexander III (1825-1894) cover](/books/content/15729/OEBPS/1190945675794117880_15729-cover.png)
CHAPTER XXI
THE ACCESSION OF ALEXANDER III. AND THE INAUGURATION OF POGROMS
1. THE TRIUMPH OF AUTOCRACY
On March 1, 1881, Alexander II. met his death on one of the principal thoroughfares of St. Petersburg, smitten by dynamite bombs hurled at him by a group of terrorists. The Tzar, who had freed the Russian peasantry from personal slavery, paid with his life for refusing to free the Russian people from political slavery and police tyranny. The red terrorism of the revolutionaries was the counterpart of the white terrorism of the Russian authorities, who for many years had suppressed the faintest striving for liberty, and had sent to gaol and prison, or deported to Siberia, the champions of a constitutional form of government and the spokesmen of social reforms. Forced by the persecutions of the police to hide beneath the surface, the revolutionary societies of underground Russia found themselves compelled to resort to methods of terrorism. This terrorism found its expression during the last years of Alexander II. in various attempts on the life of that ruler, and culminated in the catastrophe of March 1.
Among the members of these revolutionary societies were also some representatives from among the young Jewish intelligenzia. They were in large part college students, who had been carried away by the ideals of their Russian comrades. But few of them were counted among the active terrorists. The group which prepared the murder of the Tzar comprised but one Jewish member, a woman by the name of Hesia Helfman, who, moreover, played but a secondary role in the conspiracy, by keeping a secret residence for toe revolutionaries. Nevertheless, in the official circles, which were anxious to justify their oppression of the Jews, it became customary to refer to the "important role" played by the Jews in the Russian revolution.
It was with preconceived notions of this kind that Alexander III. ascended the throne of Russia, a sovereign with unlimited power but with a very limited political horizon. Being a Russian of the old-fashioned type and a zealous champion of the Greek-Orthodox Church, he shared the anti-Jewish prejudices of his environment. Already as crown prince he ordered that a monetary reward be given to the notorious Lutostanski, who had presented him with his libellous pamphlet "Concerning the Use of Christian Blood by the Jews." [1] During the Russo-Turkish war of 1877, when as heir-apparent he was in command of one of the Balkan armies, he allowed himself to be persuaded that the abuses in the Russian commissariat were due to the "Jewish" purveyors who supplied the army. [2] This was all that was known about Judaism in the circles from which the ruler of five million Jews derived his information.
[Footnote 1: See p. 203.]
[Footnote 2: The business firm in question was that of Greger, Horvitz, and Kohan, of whom the first was a Greek, and the second a converted Jew. See above, p. 202, n. 1.]
In March and April, 1881, the destinies of Russia were being decided at secret conferences, which were held between the Tzar and the highest dignitaries of state in the palace of the quiet little town of Gatchina, whither Alexander III. had withdrawn after the death of his father. Two parties and two programs were struggling for mastery at these conferences. The party of the liberal Minister Loris-Melikov, championing a program of moderate reforms, pleaded primarily for the establishment of an advisory commission to be composed of the deputies deputies of the rural and urban administrations for the purpose of considering all legal projects prior to their submission to the Council of State. This plan of a paltry popular representation, which had obtained the approval of Alexander II. during the last days of his life, assumed in the eyes of the reactionary party the proportions of a dangerous "constitution," and was execrated by it as an encroachment upon the sacred prerogatives of autocracy. The head of this party was the procurator-general of the Holy Synod, Constantine Petrovich Pobyedonostzev, a former professor at the University of Moscow, who had been Alexander III.'s tutor in the political sciences when the latter was crown prince. As the exponent of an ecclesiastical police state, Pobyedonostzev contended that enlightenment and political freedom were harmful to Russia, that the people must be held in a state of patriarchal submission to the authority of the Church and of the temporal powers, and that the Greek-Orthodox masses must be shielded against the influence of alien religions and races, which should accordingly occupy in the Russian monarchy a position subordinate to that of the dominant nation. The ideas of this fanatic reactionary, who was dubbed "The Grand Inquisitor" and whose name was popularly changed into Byedonostzev [1] carried the day at the Gatchina conferences. The deliberations culminated in the decision to refrain from making any concessions to the revolutionary element by granting reforms, however however modest in character, and to maintain at all cost the regime of a police state as a counterbalance to the idea of a legal state prevalent in the "rotten West."
[Footnote 1: Byedonostzev means in Russian "Misfortune-bearer," a play on the name Pobyedonostzev which signifies "Victory-bearer."]
Accordingly, the imperial manifesto [1] promulgated on April 29, 1881, proclaimed to the people that "the Voice of God hath commanded us to take up vigorously the reins of government, inspiring us with the belief in the strength and truth of autocratic power, which we are called upon to establish and safeguard." The manifesto "calls upon all faithful subjects to eradicate the hideous sedition and to establish faith and morality." The methods whereby faith and morality were to be established were soon made known, in the "Police Constitution" which was bestowed upon Russia in August, 1881, under the name of "The Statute concerning Enforced Public Safety."
[Footnote 1: A manifesto is a pronouncement issued by the Tzar on solemn occasions, such as accession to the throne, events in the imperial family, declaration of war, conclusion of peace, etc., accompanied, as a rule, by acts of grace, such as conferring privileges, granting pardons, and so on. Compare also above, p. 115.]
This statute confers upon the Russian satraps of the capitals (St. Petersburg and Moscow) and of many provincial centers—the governors-general and the governors—the power of issuing special enactments and thereby setting aside the normal laws as well as of placing under arrest and deporting to Siberia, without the due process of law, all citizens suspected of "political unsafety." This travesty of a habeas corpus Act, insuring the inviolability of police and gendarmerie, and practically involving the suspension of the current legislation in a large part of the monarchy, has ever since been annually renewed by special imperial enactments, and has remained in force until our own days. The genuine "Police Constitution" of 1881 has survived the civil sham Constitution of 1905, figuring as a symbol of legalized lawlessness.
2. THE INITIATION OF THE POGROM POLICY
The catastrophe of March 1 had the natural effect of pushing not only the Government but also a large part of the Russian people, who had been scared by the spectre of anarchy, in the direction of reactionary politics. This retrograde tendency was bound to affect the Jewish question. The bacillus of Judaeophobia [1] became astir in the politically immature minds which had been unhinged by the acts of terrorism. The influential press organs, which maintained more or less close relations with the leading Government spheres, adopted more and more a hostile attitude towards the Jews. The metropolitan newspaper Novoye Vremya ("The New Time") [2] which at that time embarked upon its infamous career as the semi-official organ of the Russian reaction, and a number of provincial newspapers subsidized by the Government suddenly began to speak of the Jews in a tone which suggested that they were in the possession of some terrible secret.
[Footnote 1: The term used in Russia for anti-Semitism.]
[Footnote 2: See above, p. 205.]
Almost on the day following the attempt on the life of the Tzar, the papers of this ilk began to insinuate that the Jews had a hand in it, and shortly thereafter the South-Russian press published alarming rumors about proposed organized attacks upon the Jews of that region. These rumors were based on facts. A sinister agitation was rife among the lowest elements of the Russian population, while invisible hands from above seemed to push it on toward the commission of a gigantic crime. In the same month of March, mysterious emissaries from St. Petersburg made their appearance in the large cities of South Russia, such as Yelisavetgrad (Elizabethgrad), Kiev, and Odessa, and entered into secret negotiations with the highest police officials concerning a possible "outburst of popular indignation against the Jews" which they expected to take place as part of the economic conflict, intimating the undesirability of obstructing the will of the Russian populace by police force. Figures of Great-Russian tradesmen and laborers, or Katzaps, as the Great Russians are designated in the Little-Russian South, began to make their appearance in the railroad cars and at the railroad stations, and spoke to the common people of the summary punishment soon to be inflicted upon the Jews or read to them anti-Semitic newspaper articles. They further assured them that an imperial ukase had been issued, calling upon the Christians to attack the Jews during the days of the approaching Greek-Orthodox Easter.
Although many years have passed since these events, it has not yet been possible to determine the particular agency which carried on this pogrom agitation among the Russian masses. Nor has it been possible to find out to what extent the secret society of high officials, which had been formed in March, 1881, under the name of "The Sacred League," with the object of defending the person of the Tzar and engaging in a terroristic struggle with the "enemies of the public order," [1] was implicated in the movement. But the fact itself that, the pogroms were carefully prepared and engineered is beyond doubt: it may be inferred from the circumstance that they broke out almost simultaneously in many places of the Russian South, and that everywhere they followed the same routine, characterized by the well-organized "activity" of the mob and the deliberate inactivity of the authorities.
[Footnote 1: The League existed until the autumn of 1882. Among its members were Pobyedonostzev and the anti-Jewish Minister Ignatyev.]
The first outbreak of the storm took place in Yelisavetgrad (Elizabethgrad), a large city in New Russia, [1] with a Jewish population of fifteen thousand souls. On the eve of the Greek-Orthodox Easter, the local Christians, meeting on the streets and in the stores, spoke to one another of the fact that "the Zhyds are about to be beaten." The Jews became alarmed. The police, prepared to maintain public order during the first days of the Passover, called out a small detachment of soldiers. In consequence, the first days of the festival passed quietly, and on the fourth day, [2] on April 15, the troops were removed from the streets.
[Footnote 1: On the term New Russia see p. 40, n. 3.]
[Footnote 2: The Greek-Orthodox Passover lasts officially three days, but an additional day is celebrated by the populace.]
At that moment the pogrom began. The organizers of the riots sent a drunken Russian into a saloon kept by a Jew, where he began to make himself obnoxious. When the saloon-keeper pushed the trouble maker out into the street, the crowd, which was waiting outside, began to shout: "The Zhyds are beating our people," and threw themselves upon the Jews who happened to pass by.
This evidently was the prearranged signal for the pogrom. The Jewish stores in the market-place were attacked and demolished, and the goods looted or destroyed. At first, the police, assisted by the troops, managed somehow to disperse the rioters. But on the second day the pogrom was renewed with greater energy and better leadership, amidst the suspicious inactivity both of the military and police authorities. The following description of the events is taken from the records of the official investigation which were not meant for publication and are therefore free from the bureaucratic prevarications characteristic of Russian public documents:
During the night from the 15th to the 16th of April, an attack was made upon Jewish houses, primarily upon liquor stores, on the outskirts of the town, on which occasion one Jew was killed. About seven o'clock in the morning, on April 16, the excesses were renewed, spreading with extraordinary violence all over the city. Clerks, saloon and hotel waiters, artisans, drivers, flunkeys, day laborers in the employ of the Government, and soldiers on furlough—all of these joined the movement. The city presented an extraordinary sight: streets covered with feathers and obstructed with broken furniture which had been thrown out of the residences; houses with broken doors and windows; a raging mob, running about yelling and whistling in all directions and continuing its work of destruction without let or hindrance, and, as a finishing touch to this picture, complete indifference displayed by the local non-Jewish inhabitants to the havoc wrought before their eyes. The troops which had been summoned to restore order were without definite instructions, and, at each attack of the mob on another house, would wait for orders of the military or police authorities, without knowing what to do. As a result of this attitude of the military, the turbulent mob, which was demolishing the houses and stores of the Jews before the eyes of the troops, without being checked by them, was bound to arrive at the conclusion that the excesses in which it indulged were not an illegal undertaking but rather a work which had the approval of the Government. Toward evening the disorders increased in intensity, owing to the arrival of a large number of peasants from the adjacent villages, who were anxious to secure part of the Jewish loot. There was no one to check these crowds; the troops and police were helpless. They had all lost heart, and were convinced that it was Impossible to suppress the disorders with the means at hand. At eight o'clock at night a rain came down accompanied by a cold wind which helped in a large measure to disperse the crowd. At eleven o'clock fresh troops arrived on the spot. On the morning of April 17 a new battalion of infantry came, and from that day on public order was no longer violated in Yelisavetgrad.
The news of the "victory" so easily won over the Jews of Yelisavetgrad aroused the dormant pogrom energy in the unenlightened Russian masses. In the latter part of April riots took place in many villages of the Yelisavetgrad district and in several towns and townlets in the adjoining government of Kherson. In the villages, the work of destruction was limited to the inns kept by Jews—many peasants believing that they were acting in accordance with imperial orders. In the towns and townlets, all Jewish houses and stores were demolished and their goods looted. In the town of Ananyev, in the government of Kherson, the people were incited by a resident named Lashchenko, who assured his townsmen that the central Government had given orders to massacre the Jews because they had murdered the Tzar, and that these orders were purposely kept back by the local administration. The instigator was seized by the police, but was wrested from it by the crowd which thereupon threw itself upon the Jews. The riots resulted in some two hundred ruined houses and stores in the outskirts of the town, where the Jewish proletariat was cooped up. The central part of the town, where the more well-to-do Jews had their residences, was guarded by the police and by a military detachment, and therefore remained intact.
3. THE POGROM AT KIEV
The movement gained constantly in momentum, and the instincts of the mob became more and more unbridled. The "Mother of Russian cities," ancient Kiev, where at the dawn of Russian history the Jews, together with the Khazars, had been the banner-bearers of civilization, became the scene of the lawless fury of savage hordes. Here the pogrom was carefully prepared by a secret organization which spread the rumor that the new Tzar had given orders to exterminate the Jews, who had murdered his father, and that the civil and military authorities would render assistance to the people, whilst those who would fail to comply with the will of the Tzar would meet with punishment. The local authorities, with Governor-General Drenteln at their head, who was a reactionary and a fierce Jew-hater, were aware not only of the imminence of the pogrom, but also of the day selected for it, Sunday, April 26.
As early as April 23 a street fight took place which was accompanied by assaults on Jewish passers-by—a prelude to the pogrom. On the day before the fateful Sunday, the Jews were warned by the police not to leave their houses, nor to open their stores on the morrow. The Jews were nonplussed. They failed to understand why in the capital of the governor-general, with its numerous troops, which, at a hint from their commander, were able to nip in the bud disorders of any kind, peaceful citizens should be told to hide themselves from an impending attack, instead of taking measures to forestall the attack itself. Nevertheless, the advice of the police was heeded, and on the fateful day no Jews were to be found on the streets. This, however, did not prevent the numerous bands of rioters from assembling on the streets and embarking upon their criminal activities. The pogrom started in Podol, a part of the town densely populated by Jews. The following is the description of an eye-witness:
At twelve o'clock at noon, the air saddenly resounded with, wild shouts, whistling, jeering, hooting, and laughing. An immense crowd of young boys, artisans, and laborers was on the march. The whole city was obstructed by the "bare-footed brigade." [1] The destruction of Jewish houses began. Window-panes, and doors began to fly about, and shortly thereafter the mob, having gained access to the houses and stores, began to throw upon the streets absolutely everything that fell into their hands. Clouds of feathers began to whirl in the air. The din of broken window-panes and frames, the crying, shouting, and despair on the one hand, and the terrible yelling and jeering on the other, completed the picture which reminded many of those who had participated in the last Russo-Turkish war of the manner in which the Bashi-buzuks [2] had attacked Bulgarian villages. Soon afterwards the mob threw itself upon the Jewish synagogue, which, despite its strong bars, locks and shutters, was wrecked in a moment. One should have seen the fury with which the riff-raff fell upon the [Torah] scrolls, of which there were many in the synagogue. The scrolls were torn to shreds, trampled in the dirt, and destroyed with incredible passion. The streets were soon crammed with the trophies of destruction. Everywhere fragments of dishes, furniture, household utensils, and other articles lay scattered about. Barely two hours after the beginning of the pogrom, the majority of the "bare-footed brigade" were transformed into well-dressed gentlemen, many of them having grown excessively stout in the meantime. The reason for this sudden change was simple enough. Those that had looted the stores of ready-made clothes put on three or four suits, and, not yet satisfied, took under their arms all they could lay their hands on. Others drove off in vehicles, carrying with them bags filled with loot…. The Christian population saved itself from the ruinous operations of the crowd by placing holy ikons in their windows and painting crosses on the gates of their houses.
[Footnote 1: The Russian nickname for a crowd of tramps.]
[Footnote 2: Name of the Turkish irregular troops noted for their ferocity.]
While the pogrom was going on, troops were marching up and down on the streets of the Podol district, Cossaks were riding about on their horses, and patrols on foot and horse-back were moving to and fro.
Here and there army officers would pass through, among them generals and high civil officials. The cavalry would hasten to a place whence the noise came. Having arrived there, it would surround the mob and order it to disperse, but the mob would only move to another place. Thus, the work of destruction proceeded undisturbed until three o'clock in the morning. Drums were beaten, words of command were shouted, the crowd was encircled by the troops and ordered to disperse, while the mob continued its attacks with ever-increasing fury and savagery.
While some of the robber bands were "busy" in Podol, others were active in the principal thoroughfares of the city. In each case, the savage and drunken mob—"not a single sober person could be found among them," is the testimony of an eye-witness—did its hideous work in the presence of soldiers and policemen, who in a few instances drove off the rioters, but, more often, accompanied them from place to place, forming, as it were, an honorary escort. Occasionally, Governor-General Drenteln himself would appear on the streets, surrounded by a magnificent military suite, including the governor and chief of police. These representatives of State authority "admonished the people," and the latter, "preserving a funereal silence, drew back," only to resume their criminal task after the departure of the authorities.
In some places there were neither troops nor police on the spot, and the rioters were able to give full vent to their beastly instincts. Demiovka, a suburb of Kiev, was invaded by a horde of rioters during the night. They first destroyed the saloons, filling themselves with alcohol, and then proceeded to lay fire to the Jewish houses. Under the cover of night indescribable horrors were perpetrated, numerous Jews were beaten to death or thrown into the flames, and many women were violated. A private investigation carried on subsequently brought out more than twenty cases of rape committed on Jewish girls and married women. Only two of the sufferers confessed their misfortune to the public prosecutor. The others admitted their disgrace in private or concealed it altogether, for fear of ruining their reputation.
It was only on April 27—when the pogrom broke out afresh—that the authorities resolved to put a stop to it. Wherever a disorderly band made its appearance, it was immediately surrounded by soldiers and Cossaks and driven off with the butt ends of their rifles. Here and there it became necessary to shoot at these human beasts, and some of them were wounded or killed. The rapidity with which the pogrom was suppressed on the second day showed incontrovertibly that if the authorities had only been so minded the excesses might have been suppressed on the first day and the crime nipped in the bud. The indifference of the authorities was responsible for the demolition of about a thousand Jewish houses and business places, involving a monetary loss of several millions of rubles, not to speak of the scores of killed and wounded Jews and a goodly number of violated women. In the official reports these orgies of destruction were politely designated as "disorders," and The Imperial Messenger limited its account of the horrors perpetrated at Kiev to the following truth-perverting dispatch:
On April 26, disorders broke out in Kiev which were directed against the Jews. Several Jews received blows, and their stores and warehouses were plundered. On the morning of the following day the disorders were checked with the help of the troops, and five hundred men from among the rioters were arrested.
The later laconic reports are nearer to the facts. They set the figure of arrested rioters at no less than fourteen hundred, and make mention of a number of persons who had been wounded during the suppression of the excesses, including one gymnazium and one university student. Yet even these later dispatches contain no reference to Jewish victims.
4. FURTHER OUTBREAKS IN SOUTH RUSSIA
The barbarism displayed in the metropolis of the south-west communicated itself with the force of an infectious disease to the whole region. During the following days, from April to May, some fifty villages and a number of townlets in the government of Kiev and the adjacent governments of Volhynia and Podolia were swept by the pogrom epidemic. The Jewish population of the town of Smyela [1] and the surrounding villages, amounting to some ten thousand souls, experienced, on a smaller scale, all the horrors perpetrated at Kiev. It was not until the second day, May 4, that the troops proceeded to put an end to the violence and pillage which had been going on in the town and which resulted in a number of killed and wounded. In a near-by village a Jewish woman of thirty was attacked and tortured to death, while the seven year old son of another woman, who had saved herself by flight, was killed in beastly fashion for his refusal to make the sign of the cross.
[Footnote 1: In the government of Kiev.]
In many cases the pogroms had been instigated by the newly arrived Great-Russian "bare-footed brigade" who having accomplished their "work," vanished without a trace.
A similar horde of tramps arrived at the railway station of Berdychev. But in this populous Jewish center they were met at the station by a large Jewish guard who, armed with clubs, did not allow the visiting "performers" to leave the railway cars, with the result that they had to turn back. This rare instance of self-defence was only made possible by the indulgence of the local police commissioner, or Ispravnik, who, for a large consideration, blinked at the endeavor of the Jews to defend themselves against the rioters. In other places, similar attempts at self-defence were frustrated by the police; occasionally they made things worse. Such was the case in the town of Konotop, in the government of Chernigov, where, as a result of the self-defence of the Jews, the mob passed from plunder to murder. In the villages the ignorant peasants scrupulously discharged their "pogrom duty," in the conviction that it had been imposed upon them by the Tzar. In one village in the government of Chernigov, the following characteristic episode took place. The peasants of the village had assembled for their work of destruction. When the rural chief, or Elder, [1] called upon the peasants to disperse, the latter demanded a written guarantee that they would not be held to account for their failure to comply with the imperial "orders" to beat the Jews. This guarantee was given to them. However, the sceptical rustics were not yet convinced, and, to make assurance doubly sure, destroyed six Jewish houses. In various villages the priests found it exceedingly difficult to convince the peasants that no "order" had been issued to attack the Jews.
[Footnote 1: The president of the village assembly.]
The series of spring pogroms was capped by a three days' riot in the capital of the South, in Odessa (May 3-5), which harbored a Jewish population of 100,000. In view of the immense riff-raff, which is generally found in a port of entry of this size, the excesses of the mob might have assumed terrifying dimensions, had not the authorities remembered that the task entrusted to them was not exactly that of forming an honorary escort for the rioters, as had actually been the case in Kiev. The police and military forces of Odessa attacked the rioting hordes which had spread all over the city, and, in most cases, succeeded in driving them off. The Jewish self-defence, organized and led by Jewish students of the University of Odessa, managed in a number of cases to beat off the bloodthirsty crowds from the gates of Jewish homes. However, when the police began to make arrests among the street mob, they drew no line between the defenders and the assailants, with the result that among the eight hundred arrested persons there were one hundred and fifty Jews, who were locked up on the charge of carrying fire-arms. In point of fact, the "arms" of the Jews consisted of clubs and iron rods, with the exception of a very few who were provided with pistols. Those arrested were loaded on three barges which were towed out to sea, and for several days were kept in that swimming jail.
The Odessa pogrom, which had resulted in the destruction of several city districts populated by poor Jews, did not satisfy the appetites of the savage crowd, whose imagination had been fired by stories of the "successes" attained at Kiev. The mob threatened the Jews with a new riot and even with a massacre. The panic resulting from this threat induced many Jews to flee to more peaceful places, or to leave Russia altogether. The same lack of completeness marked the pogroms which took place simultaneously in several other cities within the jurisdiction of the governor-general of New Russia. In the beginning of May the destructive energy characterizing the first pogrom period began to ebb. A lull ensued in the "military operations" of the Russian barbarians which continued until the month of July of the same year.
CHAPTER XXII
THE ANTI-JEWISH POLICIES OF IGNATYEV
1. THE VACILLATING ATTITUDE OF THE AUTHORITIES
In the beginning of May, 1881, the well-known diplomatist Nicholas Pavlovich Ignatyev was called by the Tzar to the post of Minister of the Interior. At one time ambassador in Constantinople and at all times a militant Pan-Slavist, Ignatyev introduced the system of diplomatic intrigues into the inner politics of Russia, earning thereby the unenviable nickname of "Father of Lies."
A programmatic circular, issued by him on May 6, declared that the principal task of the Government consisted in the "extirpation of sedition," i.e., in carrying on a struggle not only against the revolutionary movement but also against the spirit of liberalism in general. In this connection, Ignatyev took occasion to characterize the anti-Jewish excesses in the following typical sentences:
The movement against the Jews which has come to light during the last few days in the South is a sad example, showing how men, otherwise devoted to Throne and Fatherland, yet yielding to the instigations of ill-minded agitators who fan the evil passions of the popular masses, give way to self-will and mob rule and, without being aware of it, act in accordance with the designs of the anarchists. Such violation of the public order must not only be put down vigorously, but must also be carefully forestalled, for it is the first duty of the Government to safeguard the population against all violence and savage mob rule.
These lines reflect the theory concerning the origin of the pogroms, which was originally held in the highest Government spheres of St. Petersburg. This theory assumed that the anti-Jewish campaign had been entirely engineered by revolutionary agitators and that the latter had made deliberate endeavors to focus the resentment of the popular masses upon the Jews, as a pre-eminently mercantile class, for the purpose of subsequently widening the anti-Jewish campaign into a movement directed against the Russian mercantile class, land-owners and capitalists in general. [1] Be this as it may, there can be no question that the Government was actually afraid lest the revolutionary propaganda attach itself to the agitation of those "devoted to Throne and Fatherland" for the purpose of giving the movement a more general scope, "in accordance with the d signs of the anarchists." As a matter of fact, even outside of Government circles, the apprehension was voiced that the anti-Jewish movement would of itself, without any external stimulus, assume the form of a mob movement, directed not only against the well-to-do classes but also against the Government officials. On May 4, 1881, Baron Horace Günzburg, a leading representative of the Jewish community of St. Petersburg, waited upon Grand Duke Vladimir, a brother of the Tzar, who expressed the opinion that the anti-Jewish "disorders, as has now been ascertained by the Government, are not to be exclusively traced to the resentment against the Jews, but are rather due to the endeavor to disturb the peace in general."
[Footnote 1: John W. Poster, United States Minister to Russia, in reporting to the Secretary of State, on May 24, 1881, about the recent excesses, which "are more worthy of the dark ages than of the present century," makes a similar observation: "It is asserted also that the Nihilist societies have profited by the situation to incite and encourage the peasants and lower classes of the towns and cities in order to increase the embarrassments of the Government, but the charge is probably conjectural and not based on very tangible facts." See House of Representatives, 51st Congress, 1st Session. Executive Document No. 470, p. 53]
A week after this visit, the deputies of Russian Jewry had occasion to hear the same opinion expressed by the Tzar himself. The Jewish deputation, consisting of Baron Günzburg, the banker Sack, the lawyers Passover and Bank, and the learned Hebraist Berlin, was awaiting this audience with, considerable trepidation, anticipating an authoritative imperial verdict regarding the catastrophe that had befallen the Jews. On May 11, the audience took place in the palace at Gatchina. Baron Günzburg voiced the sentiments of "boundless gratitude for the measures adopted to safeguard the Jewish population at this sad moment," and added: "One more imperial word, and the disturbances will disappear." In reply to the euphemistic utterances concerning "the measures adopted," the Tzar stated in the same tone that all Russian subjects were equal before him, and expressed the assurance "that in the criminal disorders in the South of Russia the Jews merely serve as a pretext, and that it is the work of anarchists."
This pacifying portion of the Tzar's answer was published in the press. What the public was not allowed to learn was the other portion of the answer, in which the Tzar gave utterance to the view that the source of the hatred against the Jews lay in their economic "domination" and "exploitation" of the Russian population. In reply to the arguments of the talented lawyer Passover and the other deputies, the Tzar declared: "State all this in a special memorandum."
Such a memorandum was subsequently prepared. But it was not submitted to the Tzar. For only a few months later the official attitude towards the Jewish question took a turn for the worse. The Government decided to abandon its former view on the Jewish pogroms and to adopt, instead, the theory of Jewish "exploitation," using it as a means of justifying not only the pogroms which had already been perpetrated upon the Jews but also the repressive measures which were being contemplated against them. Under these circumstances, Ignatyev did not see his way clear to allow the memorandum in defence of Jewry to receive the attention of the Tzar.
It is not impossible that the pacifying portion of the imperial reply which had been given at the audience of May 11 was also prompted by the desire to appease the public opinion of Western Europe, for at that time European opinion still carried some weight with the bureaucratic circles of Russia. Several days before the audience at Gatchina, [1] the English Parliament discussed the question of Jewish persecutions in Russia. In the House of Commons the Jewish members, Baron Henry de Worms and Sir H.D. Wolff, calling attention to the case of an English Jew who had been expelled from St. Petersburg, interpellated the Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, Sir Charles Dilke, "whether Her Majesty's Government have made any representations to the Government at St. Petersburg, with regard to the atrocious outrages committed on the Jewish population in Southern Russia," Dilke replied that the English Government was not sure whether such a protest "would be likely to be efficacious." [2]
[Footnote 1: On May 16 and 19=May 4 and 7, according to the Russian
Calendar.]
[Footnote 2: The Russian original has been amended in a few places in accordance with the report of the parliamentary proceedings published in the Jewish Chronicle of May 20, 1881.]
A similar reply was given by the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, Lord Granville, to a joint deputation of the Anglo-Jewish Association and the Board of Deputies, two leading Anglo-Jewish bodies, which waited upon him on May 13, [1] two days after the Gatchina audience. After expressing his warm sympathy with the objects of the deputation, the Secretary pointed out the inexpediency of any interference on the part of England at a moment when the Russian Government itself was adopting measures against the pogroms, referring to "the cordial reception lately given by the emperor to a deputation of Jews"
[Footnote 1: May 25, according to the European Calendar. From the issue of the Jewish Chronicle of May 27, 1881, p. 12b, it would appear that the deputation was received on Tuesday, May 24.]
Subsequent events soon made it clear that the Government, represented by Ignatyev, was far from harboring any sympathy for the victims of the pogroms. The public did not fail to notice the fact that the Russian Government, which was in the habit of rendering financial help to the population in the case of elemental catastrophes, such as conflagrations or inundations, had refrained from granting the slightest monetary assistance to the Jewish sufferers from the pogroms. Apart from its material usefulness, such assistance would have had an enormous moral effect, inasmuch as it would have stood forth in the public eye as an official condemnation of the violent acts perpetrated against the Jews—particularly if the Tzar himself had made a large donation for that purpose, as he was wont to do in other cases of this kind. As it was, the authorities not only neglected to take such a step, but they even went so far as to forbid the Jews of St. Petersburg to start a public collection for the relief of the pogrom victims. Nay, the governor-general of Odessa refused to accept a large sum of money offered to him by well-to-do Jews for the benefit of the sufferers.
Nor was this the worst. The local authorities did everything in their power to manifest their solidarity with the enemies of Judaism. The street pogroms were followed by administrative pogroms sui generis. Already in the month of May, the police of Kiev began to track all the Jews residing "illegally" in that city [1] and to expel these "criminals" by the thousands. Similar wholesale expulsions took place in Moscow, Oryol, and other places outside the Pale of Settlement. These persecutions constituted evidently an object-lesson in religious toleration, and the Russian masses which had but recently shown to what extent they respected the inviolability of Jewish life and property took the lesson to heart.
[Footnote 1: It will be remembered that the right of residence in Kiev was restricted in the case of the Jews to a few categories: first-guild merchants, graduates from institutions of higher learning, and artisans.]
One hope was still left to the Jews. The law courts, at least, being the organs of the public conscience of Russia, were bound to condemn severely the sinister pogrom heroes. But this hope, too, proved illusory. In the majority of cases the judges treated act of open pillage and of violence committed against life and limb as petty street brawls, as "disturbances of the public peace," and imposed upon their perpetrators ridiculously slight penalties, such as three months' imprisonment—penalties, moreover, which were simultaneously inflicted upon the Jews who, as in the case of Odessa, had resorted to self-defence. When the terrible Kiev pogrom was tried in the local Military Circuit Court, the public prosecutor Strelnikov, a well-known reactionary who subsequently met his fate at the hands of the revolutionaries, delivered himself on May 18 of a speech which was rather an indictment against the Jews than against the rioters. He argued that these disorders had been called forth entirely by the "exploitation of the Jews," who had seized the principal economic positions in the province, and he conducted his cross-examination of the Jewish witnesses in the same hostile spirit. When one of the witnesses retorted that the aggravation of the economic struggle was due to the artificial congestion of the Jews in the pent-up Pale of Settlement, the prosecutor shouted: "If the Eastern frontier is closed to the Jews, the Western frontier is open to them; why don't they take advantage of it?" This summons to leave the country, doubly revolting in the mouth of a guardian of the law, addressed to those who under the influence of the pogrom panic had already made up their minds to flee from the land of slavery, produced a staggering effect upon the Jewish public. The last ray of hope, the hope for legal justice, vanished. The courts of law had become a weapon in the hands of the anti-Jewish leaders.
2. THE POGROM PANIC AND THE BEGINNING OF THE EXODUS
The feeling of safety, which had been restored by the published portion of the imperial reply at the audience of May 11, was rapidly evaporating. The Jews were again filled with alarm, while the instigators of the pogroms took courage and decided that the time had arrived to finish their interrupted street performance. The early days of July marked the inauguration of the second series of riots, the so-called summer pogroms.
The new conflagration started in the city of Pereyaslav, in the government of Poltava, which had not yet discarded its anti-Jewish Cossack traditions. [1] Pereyaslav at that time harbored many fugitives from Kiev, who had escaped from the spring pogroms in that city. The increase in the Jewish population of Pereyaslav was evidently displeasing to the local Christian inhabitants. Four hundred and twenty Christian burghers of Pereyaslav, avowed believers in the Gospels which enjoin Christians to love those that suffer, passed a resolution calling for the expulsion of the Jews from their city, and, in anticipation of this legalized violence, they decided to teach the Jews a "lesson" on their own responsibility. On June 30 and July 1, Pereyaslav was the scene of a pogrom, marked by all the paraphernalia of the Russian ritual, though unaccompanied this time by human sacrifices. The epilogue to the pogrom was marked by an originality of its own. A committee consisting of representatives of the municipal administration, four Christians and three Jews, was appointed to inquire into the causes of the disorders. This committee was presented by the local Christian burghers with a set of demands, some of which were in substance as follows:
[Footnote 1: Comp. Vol. I, p. 145.]
That the Jewish aldermen of the Town Council, as well as the Jewish members of the other municipal bodies, shall voluntarily resign from these honorary posts, "as men deprived of civic honesty" [1]; that the Jewish women shall not dress themselves in silk, velvet, and gold; that the Jews shall refrain from keeping Christian domestics, who are "corrupted" in the Jewish homes religiously and morally; that all Jewish strangers, who have sought refuge in Pereyaslav, shall be immediately banished; that the Jews shall be forbidden to buy provisions in the surrounding villages for reselling them; also, to carry on business on Sundays and Russian festivals, to keep saloons, and so on.
[Footnote 1: This insolent demand of the unenlightened Russian burghers met with the following dignified rebuttal from the Jewish office-holders: "What bitter mockery! The Jews are accused of a lack of honesty by the representatives of those very people who, with clubs and hatchets in their hands, fell in murderous hordes upon their peaceful neighbors and plundered their property." The replies to the other demands of the burghers were coached in similar terms.]
Thus, in addition to being ruined, the Jews were presented with an ultimatum, implying the threat of further "military operations."
As in previous cases, the example of the city of Pereysslav was followed by the townlets and villages in the surrounding region. The unruliness of the crowd, which had been trained to destroy and plunder with impunity, knew no bounds. In the neighboring town of Borispol a crowd of rioters, stimulated by alcohol, threatened to pass from pillage to murder. When checked by the police and Cossacks, they threw themselves with fury upon these untoward defenders of the Jewish population, and began to maltreat them, until a few rifle shots put them to flight.
The same was the case in Nyezhin, [1] where a pogrom was enacted on July 20 and 22. After several vain attempts to stop the riots, the military was forced to shoot at the infuriated crowd, killing and wounding some of them. This was followed by the cry: "Christian blood is flowing—beat the Jews!"—and the pogrom was renewed with redoubled vigor. It was stopped only on the third day.
[Footnote 1: In the government of Chernigov.]
The energy of the July pogroms had evidently spent itself in these last ferocious attempts. The murderous hordes realized that the police and military were fully in earnest, and this was enough to sober them from their pogrom intoxication. Towards the end of July, the epidemic of vandalism came to a stop, though it was followed in many cities by a large number of conflagrations. The cowardly rioters, deprived of the opportunity of plundering the Jews with impunity, began to set fire to Jewish neighborhoods. This was particularly the case in the north-western provinces, in Lithuania and White Russia, where the authorities had from the very beginning set their faces firmly against all organized violence.
The series of pogroms perpetrated during the spring and summer of that year had inflicted its sufferings on more than one hundred localities populated by Jews, primarily in the South of Russia. Yet the misery engendered by the panic, by the horrible apprehension of unbridled violence, was far more extensive, for the entire Jewish population of Russia proved its victim. Just as in the bygone Middle Ages whenever Jewish suffering had reached a sad climax, so now too the persecuted nation found itself face to face with the problem of emigration. And as if history had been anxious to link up the end of the nineteenth century with that of the fifteenth, the Jewish afflictions in Russia found an echo in that very country, which in 1492 had herself banished the Jews from her borders: the Spanish Government announced its readiness to receive and shelter the fugitives from Russia. Ancient Catholic Spain held forth a welcoming hand to the victims of modern Greek-Orthodox Spain. However, the Spanish offer was immediately recognized as having but little practical value. In the forefront of Jewish interest stood the question as to the land toward which the emigration movement should be directed: toward the United States of America, which held out the prospect of bread and liberty, or toward Palestine, which offered a shelter to the wounded national soul.
While the Jewish writers were busy debating the question, life itself decided the direction of the emigration movement. Nearly all fugitives from the South of Russia had left for America by way of the Western European centers. The movement proceeded with elemental force, and entirely unorganized, with the result that in the autumn of that year some ten thousand destitute Jewish wanderers found themselves huddled together at the first halting-place, the city of Brody, which is situated on the Russo-Austrian frontier. They had been attracted hither by the rumor that the agents of the French Alliance Israélite Universette would supply them with the necessary means for continuing their journey across the Atlantic. The central committee of the Alliance, caught unprepared for such a huge emigration, was at its wit's end. It sent out appeals, warning the Jews against wholesale emigration to America by way of Brody, but it was powerless to stem the tide. When the representatives of the French Alliance, the well-known Charles Netter and others, arrived in Brody, they beheld a terrible spectacle. The streets of the city were filled with thousands of Jews and Jewesses, who were exhausted from material want, with hungry children in their arms. "From early morning until late at night, the French delegates were surrounded by a crowd clamoring for help. Their way was obstructed by mothers who threw their little ones under their feet, begging to rescue them from starvation."
The delegates did all they could, but the number of fugitives was constantly swelling, while the process of dispatching them to America went on at a snail's pace. The exodus of the Jews from Russia was due not only to the pogroms and the panic resulting from them, but also to the new blows which were falling upon them from all sides, dealt out by the liberal hand of Ignatyev.
3. THE GUBERNATORIAL COMMISSIONS
After wavering for some time, the anti-Semitic Government of Ignatyev finally made up its mind as to the attitude it was henceforth to adopt towards the Jewish problem. Taken aback at the beginning of the pogrom movement, the leading spheres of Russia were first inclined to ascribe it to the effects of the revolutionary propaganda, but they afterwards came to the conclusion that, in the interest of the reactionary policies pursued by them and as a means of justifying the disgraceful anti-Jewish excesses before the eyes of Europe, it was more convenient to throw the blame upon the Jews themselves. With this end in view, a new theory was put forward by the Russian Government, the quasi-economic doctrine of "the exploitation of the original population by the Jews." This doctrine consisted of two parts, which, properly speaking, were mutually exclusive:
First, the Jews, as a pre-eminently mercantile class, engage in
"unproductive" labor, and thereby "exploit" the productive classes
of the Christian population, the peasantry in particular.
Second, the Jews, having "captured" commerce and industry—here the large participation of the Jews in industrial life, represented by handicrafts and manufactures, is tacitly admitted—compete with the Christian urban estates, in other words, interfere with them in their own "exploitation" of the population.
The first part of this strange theory is based upon, primitive economic notions, such as are in vogue during periods of transition, when natural economic production gives way to capitalism, and when all complicated forms of mediation are regarded as unproductive and harmful. The thought expressed in the second part of the thesis is implied in the make-up of a police state, which looks upon the occupation of certain economic positions by a given national group as an illegitimate "capture" and regards it as its function to check this competition for the sole purpose of insuring the success of the dominant nationality.
The Russian Government was disturbed neither by the primitive character of this theory nor by the resort to brutal police force implied in it—the idea of supporting the "exploitation" practised by the Russians at the expense of that carried on by the Jews; nor was it abashed by its inner logical contradictions. What the Government needed was some means whereby it could throw off the responsibility for the pogroms and prove to the world that they were a "popular judgment," the vengeance wreaked upon the Jews either by the peasants, the victims of exploitation, or by the Russian burghers, the unsuccessful candidates for the rôle of exploiters. This point of view was reflected in the report of Count Kutaysov, who had been sent by the Tzar to South Russia to inquire into the causes of the "disorders." [1]
[Footnote 1: It may be added that Kutaysov recognized that the Russian masses were equally the victims of the commercial exploitation of the Russian "bosses," but was at a loss to find a reason for the pogroms perpetrated in the Jewish agricultural colonies, i.e., against those who, according to this theory, were themselves the victims of exploitation.]
Ignatyev seized upon this flimsy theory, and embodied it in a more elaborate form in his report to the Tzar of August 22. In this report he endeavored to prove the futility of the policy hitherto pursued by the Russian Government which "for the last twenty years [during the reign of Alexander II.] had made efforts to bring about the fusion of the Jews with the remaining population and had nearly equalized the rights of the Jews with those of the original inhabitants." In the opinion of the Minister, the recent pogroms had shown that "the injurious influence" of the Jews could not be suppressed by such liberal measures.
The principal source of this movement [the pogroms], which is so incompatible with the temper of the Russian people, lies—according to Ignatyev—in circumstances which are of an exclusively economic nature. For the last twenty years the Jews have gradually managed to capture not only commerce and industry but they have also succeeded in acquiring, by means of purchase and lease, a large amount of landed property. Owing to their clannishness and solidarity, they have, with few exceptions, directed their efforts not towards the increase of the productive forces [of the country] but towards the exploitation of the original inhabitants, primarily of the poorest classes of the population, with the result that they have called forth a protest from this population, manifesting itself in deplorable forms—In violence…. Having taken energetic means to suppress the previous disorders and mob rule and to shield the Jews against violence, the Government recognizes that it is justified in adopting, without delay, no less energetic measures to remove the present abnormal relations that exist between the original inhabitants and the Jews, and to shield the Russian population against this harmful Jewish activity, which, according to local information, was responsible for the disturbances.
Alexander III. hastened to express his agreement with these views of his Minister, who assured him that the Government had taken "energetic measures" to suppress the pogroms—which was only true in two or three recent cases. At the same time he authorized Ignatyev to adopt "energetic measures" of genuine Russian manufacture against those who had but recently been ruined by these pogroms.
The imperial ukase published on August 22, 1831, dwells on "the abnormal relations subsisting between the original population of several governments and the Jews." To meet this situation it provides that in those governments which harbor a considerable Jewish population special commissions should be appointed consisting of representatives of the local estates and communes, to be presided over by the governors. These commissions were charged with the task of finding out "which aspects of the economic activity of the Jews in general have exerted an injurious influence upon the life of the original population, and what measures, both legislative and administrative, should be adopted" for the purpose of weakening that influence. In this way, the ukase, in calling for the appointment of the commissions, indicated at once the goal towards which their activity was to be directed: to determine the "injurious influence" of the Jews upon Russian economic life.
The same thought was expressed even more directly by Ignatyev, who in his circular to the governors-general, dated August 25, reproduced his report to the Tzar, and firmly established the dogma of "the harmful consequences of the economic activity of the Jews for the Christian population, their racial separatism, and religious fanaticism."
We are thus made the witnesses of a singular spectacle: the ruined and plundered Jewish population, which had a right to impeach the Government for having failed, to protect it from violence, was itself put on trial. The judges in this legal action were none other than the agents of the ruling powers—the governors, some of whom had been guilty of connivance at the pogroms—on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the representatives of the Christian estates, urban and rural, who were mostly the appointees of these governors. In addition, every commission was allotted two Jewish representatives, who were to act in the capacity of experts but without voting power; they were placed in the position of defendants, and were made to listen to continuous accusations against the Jews, which the; were constantly forced to deny. Altogether there were sixteen such commissions: one in each of the fifteen governments of the Pale of Settlement—exclusive of the Kingdom of Poland—and one in the government of Kharkov. The commissions were granted a term of two months within which to complete their labors and present the results to the Minister.
The sessions of all these "gubernatorial commissions" [1] took place simultaneously during the months of September and October.
[Footnote 1: In Russian, Gubernskiya Kommissit, literally, "Government
Commissions," using "Government" in the sense of "Province."]
The prisoner at the bar was the Jewish people which was tried on the charges contained in the official bill of indictment—the imperial ukase as supplemented and interpreted in the ministerial circular. A well-informed contemporary gives the following description of these sessions in an official memorandum:
The first session of each commission began with the reading of the ministerial circular of August 25. The reading invariably produced a strong effect in two different directions: on the members from among the peasantry and on those from among the Jews. The former became convinced of the hostile attitude of the Government towards the Jewish population and of their leniency towards the instigators of the disorders, which, according to an assertion made in Ignatyev's circular, were due exclusively to the Jewish exploitation of the original inhabitants. Needless to say, the peasants did not fail to communicate this conviction, which was strengthened at the subsequent sessions by the failure to put any restraint upon the wholesale attacks on the Jews on the part of the anti-Semitic members, to their rural communes.
As for the Jewish members (of the commissions), the effect of the ministerial circular upon them was staggering. In their own persons they beheld the three millions of Russian Jewry placed at the prisoner's bar: one section of the population put on trial before another. And who were the judges? Not the representatives of the people, duly elected by all the estates of the population, such as the rural assemblies, but the agents of the administration, bureaucratic office-holders, who were more or less subordinate to the Government. The court proceedings themselves were carried on in secret, without a sufficient number of counsel for the defendants who in reality were convicted beforehand. The attitude adopted by the presiding governors, the speeches delivered by the anti-Semitic members, who were In an overwhelming majority, and characterized by attacks, derisive remarks, and subtle affronts, subjected the Jewish members to moral torture and made them lose all hope that they could be of any assistance in attempting a dispassionate, impartial, and comprehensive consideration of the question. In the majority of the commissions, their voice was suppressed and silenced. In these circumstances the Jewish members were forced, as a last resort, to defend the interests of their coreligionists in writing, by submitting memoranda and separate opinions. However, the instances were rare in which these memoranda and protests were dignified by being read during the sessions.
This being the case, it is not to be wondered at that the commissions brought in their "verdicts" in the spirit of the indictment framed by the authorities. The anti-Semitic officials exhibited their "learning" in ignorant criticisms of the "spirit of Judaism," of the Talmud and the national separatism of the Jews, and they proposed to extirpate all these influences by means of cultural repression, such as the destruction of the autonomy of the Jewish communities, the closing up of all special Jewish schools, and the placing of all phases of the inner life of the Jews under Government control. The representatives of the Russian burghers and peasants, many of whom had but recently co-operated or, at least, sympathized with the perpetrators of the pogroms, endeavored to prove the economic "injuriousness" of the Jews, and demanded that they should be restricted in their urban and rural pursuits, as well as in their right of residence outside the cities. Notwithstanding the prevailing spirit, five commissions voiced the opinion, which, from the point of view of the Russian Government, seemed rank heresy, that it was necessary to grant the Jews the right of domicile all over the empire so as to relieve the excessive congestion of the Jewish population in the Pale of Settlement.
4. THE SPREAD OF ANTI-SEMITISM
While the gubernatorial commissions—gubernatorial in the literal sense of the word, because entirely dominated by the governors—were holding their sessions, the satraps-in-chief of the Pale of Settlement, the governors-general, were busy sending their expressions of opinion to St. Petersburg. The governor-general of Kiev, Drenteln, who himself was liable to prosecution for allowing a two days' pogrom in his own residential city, condemned the entire Jewish people in emphatic terms, and demanded the adoption of measures calculated "to shield the Christian population against so arrogant a tribe as the Jews, who refuse on religions grounds to have close contact with the Christians." It was necessary, in his opinion, to resort to legal repression in order to counteract "the intellectual superiority of the Jews," which enables them to emerge victorious in the straggle for existence.
Similar condemnations of Judaism came from the governors-general of Odessa, Vilna, and Kharkov, although they disagreed as to the dimensions which this repression should assume. Totleben, the master of the Vilna province, who had refused to countenance the perpetration of pogroms in Lithuania, nevertheless agreed that the Jews should henceforth be forbidden to settle in the villages, though he was generous enough to add that he found it somewhat inconvenient "to rob the whole Jewish nation of the possibility of earning a livelihood by its labor." The impression prevailed that militant Judaeophobia was determined to deprive the Jews even of the right of securing a piece of bread.
The Government was well aware beforehand that the labors of the gubernatorial commissions would yield results satisfactory to it. It, therefore, found it unnecessary to wait for their reports and resolutions, and proceeded to establish in St. Petersburg, on October 19, "a Central Committee for the Revision of the Jewish Question." The committee was attached to the Ministry of the Interior, and consisted of several officials, under the chairmanship of Assistant-Minister Gotovtzev. The officials were soon busy framing "temporary measures" in the spirit of their patron Ignatyev, and, as the resolutions of the gubernatorial commissions were coming in, they were endeavoring to strengthen the foundations for the projected enactment. In January, 1882, the machinery for the manufacture of Jewish disabilities was in full swing.
This organized campaign of the enemies of Judaism, who were preparing administrative pogroms as a sequel to the street pogroms, met with no organized resistance on the part of Russian Jewry. The small conference of Jewish notables in St. Petersburg, which met in September in secret session, presented a sorry spectacle. The guests from the provinces, who had been invited by Baron Günzburg, engaged in discussions about the problem of emigration, the struggle with the anti-Semitic press, and similar questions. After being presented to Ignatyev, who assured them in diplomatic fashion of the "benevolent intentions of the Government," they returned to their homes, without having achieved anything.
The only social factor in Jewish life was the press, particularly the three periodicals published in Russian, the Razsvyet ("the Dawn"), the Russki Yevrey ("the Russian Jew"), and the Voskhod ("the Sunrise"), [1] but even they revealed the lack of a well-defined policy.
[Footnote 1: See on these papers, p. 219 et seq.]
The political movements in Russian Jewry were yet in an embryonic stage, and their rise and development were reserved for a later period. True, the Russian-Jewish press applied itself assiduously to the task of defending the rights of the Jews, but its voice remained unheard in those circles of Russia in which the poisonous waters of Judaeophobia gushed forth in a broad current from the columns of the semi-official Novoye Vremya, the pan-Slavic Russ, and many of their anti-Semitic contemporaries.
While the summer pogroms were in full swing, the Novoye Vremya, reflecting the views of the official spheres, seriously formulated the Jewish question in the paraphrase of Hamlet: "to beat or not to beat." Its conclusion was that it was necessary to "beat" the Jews, but, in view of the fact that Russia was a monarchical state with conservative tendencies, this function ought not to be discharged by the people but by the Government, which by its method of legal repression could beat the Jews much more effectively than the crowds on the streets.
The editor of the Moscow newspaper Russ, Ivan Aksakov, [1] attacked the Russian liberal press for expressing its sympathy with the Jewish pogrom victims, contending that the Russian people demolished the Jewish houses under the effect of a "righteous indignation," though he failed to explain why that indignation also took the form of plundering and stealing Jewish property, or violating Jewish women. Throwing into one heap the arguments of the medieval Church and those of modern German anti-Semitism, Aksakov maintained that Judaism was opposed to "Christian civilization," and that the Jewish people were striving for "world domination" which they hoped to attain through their financial power.
[Footnote 1: Compare above, p. 208.]
The bacillus of German anti-Semitism had penetrated even into the circles of the Russian radical intelligenzia. Among the "Populists," [1] who were wont to idealize the Russian peasantry, it became the fashion to look upon the Jew as an economic exploiter, with this distinction, however, that they bracketed him with the host of Russian exploiters from among the bourgeois class. This resulted in a most unfortunate misunderstanding. A faction of South Russian revolutionaries from among the party known as "The People's Freedom" [2] conceived the idea that the same peasants and laborers who had attacked the Jews as the representatives of the non-Russian bourgeoisie might easily be directed against the representatives of the ruling classes in general. During the spring and summer pogroms, several attempts were made by mysterious persons, through written appeals and oral propaganda, to turn the pogrom movement also against the Russian nobles and officials. [3] Towards the end of August, 1881, the Executive Committee of "The People's Freedom" issued an appeal in which it voiced the thought that the Tzar had enslaved the free Ukrainian people and had distributed the lands rightfully belonging to the peasants among the pans [4] and officials, who extended their protection to the Jews and shared the profits with them. Therefore, the people should march against the Jews, the landlords, and the Tzar. "Assist us, therefore," the appeal continues, "arise, laborers, avenge yourselves on the landlords, plunder the Jews, and slay the officials!"
[Footnote 1: See above, p. 222.]
[Footnote 2: In Russian, Narodnaya Vola. It was organized in 1879, and was responsible for the assassination of Alexander II.]
[Footnote 3: These endeavors were evidently the reason why the Russian Government was originally inclined to ascribe the anti-Jewish movement to revolutionary tactics.]
[Footnote 4: The Polish noble landowners. See Vol. I, p. 93, n. 2.]
True, the appeal was the work of only a part of the Revolutionary Executive Committee, which at that time had its headquarters in Moscow. It failed to obtain the approval of the other members of the Committee and of the party as a whole, and, being a document that might compromise the revolutionary movement, was withdrawn and destroyed after a number of copies had been circulated. Nevertheless, the champions of "The People's Freedom" continued for some time to justify theoretically the utilization of the anti-Jewish movement for the aims of the general social revolution. Only at a later stage did this section of the revolutionary party realize that these tactics were not only mistaken but also criminal. For events soon made it clear that the anti-Jewish movement served as an unfailing device in the hands of the black reactionaries to divert the popular wrath from the source of all evil—the rule of despotism—and direct it towards the most unfortunate victims of that despotism.
5. THE POGROM AT WARSAW
When the July pogroms were over, it seemed as if the pogrom epidemic had died out, and no one expected that it would soon break out afresh. The greater was the surprise when, in December, 1881, the news spread that a pogrom, lasting three days, had taken, place in the capital of the Kingdom of Poland, in Warsaw. Least of all was this pogrom expected in Warsaw itself, where the relations between the Poles and the Jews were not yet marked by the animosity they assumed subsequently. But the organizers of the pogrom who received their orders from above managed to adapt themselves to local conditions, and the unexpected came to pass. On the Catholic Christmas day, when the Church of the Holy Cross in the center of the town was crowded with worshippers, somebody suddenly shouted "Fire!" The people rushed to the doors, and in the terrible panic that ensued twenty-nine persons were crushed to death, and many others were maimed. The alarm proved a false one. There was no trace of a fire in the church, and nobody doubted but that the alarm had been given by pick-pockets—there were a goodly number of them in Warsaw—who had resorted to this well-known trick to rob the public during the panic. But right there, among the crowd which was assembled in front of the church, gazing in horror at the bodies of the victims, some unknown persons spread the rumor—which, it may be parenthetically remarked, proved subsequently unfounded—that two Jewish pickpockets had been caught in the church.
At that moment whistles were suddenly heard—nobody knew whence they came—which served as the signal for a pogrom. The street mob began to assault the Jews who happened to pass by, and then started, according to the established procedure, to attack the Jewish stores, saloons, and residences in the streets adjoining the church. The hordes were under the command of thieves, well known to the police, and of some unknown strangers who from time to time gave signals by whistling, and directed the mob into this or that street. As in all other cases in which the danger did not threaten the authorities directly, there were but few policemen and soldiers on hand—which circumstance stimulated the rioters in their further activity.
On the following day the rioters were "busy" on many other streets, both in the center of the town and in its outskirts, except for the streets which were densely populated by Jews, where they were afraid of meeting with serious resistance. [1]
[Footnote 1: In some places the Jews defended themselves energetically, and in the ensuing fight there were wounded on both sides.]
The police and the troops arrested many rioters, and carried them off to the police stations. But for some unknown reason they did not summon enough courage to disperse the crowd, so that the mob frequently engaged in its criminal work in the very presence of the guardians of public safety.
In accordance with the well-known pogrom routine, the authorities remembered only on the third day that it was time to suppress the riots, the "lesson" being over. On December 15, the governor-general of Warsaw, Albedinski, issued an order dividing the town into four districts and placing every district under the command of a regimental chief. Troops were stationed in the streets and ordered to check all crowds, with the result that on the same day the disorders were stopped.
This, however, came too late. For in the meantime some fifteen hundred Jewish residences, business places, and houses of prayer had been demolished and pillaged, and twenty-four Jews had been wounded, while the monetary loss amounted to several million rubles. Over three thousand rioters were arrested—among them a large number of under-aged youths. On the whole, the rioters were recruited from the dregs of the Polish population, but there were also found among them a number of unknown persons that spoke Russian. The Novoye Vremya, in commenting upon the pogrom, made special reference to the friendly attitude of the Polish hooligans to the Russians in general and to the officers and soldiers in particular—a rather suspicious attitude, considering the inveterate hatred of the Poles towards the Russians, especially towards the military and official class. Here and there the soldiers themselves got drunk in the demolished saloons, and took part in looting Jewish property.