CHAPTER XXXIV

CONTINUED POGROMS AND THE RUSSO-JAPANESE WAR

1. THE POGROM AT HOMEL AND THE JEWISH SELF-DEFENCE

No sooner had the Zionist Congress, at which the heated discussions concerning the salvation of Judaism were intermingled with sobs bemoaning the martyrs of Kishinev, concluded its sessions than a new catastrophe broke out in the dominions of the Tzar--the pogrom at Homel, in the Government of Moghilev. In this lively White-Russian town, in which the twenty thousand Jews formed fully one-half of the population, public Jewish life was marked by great vigor. There existed in the city important societies of Zionists and Socialists. Both of these parties had organized several self-defence contingents, and it was to be expected that the disgrace of Kishinev would not be repeated at Homel, and that, in the case of an attack, the Jews would give a good account of themselves.

On August 29, 1903, a fight broke out on the market-place between a crowd of Jews and Christians. The cause of the quarrel was a trivial incident, one peasant trying to carry off from a Jewish store a barrel of herrings at a lower price than the one demanded by the storekeeper. The rowdyish purchaser was pushed out of the store, but the peasants on the market-place took sides with him, and in the ensuing fight between them and the Jew, one peasant was accidently killed. The peasants were scared and took to their heels, while the police began to make arrests among the Jews. The Jews might have been satisfied with the fact that their energetic attitude had succeeded in preventing a pogrom, did they not anticipate the revenge which was sure to be wreaked upon them.

Two days passed in a state of tense agitation. On the third day, on September 1, a crowd of Russian workingmen, numbering about two hundred, issued forth from the railroad shops, and began to demolish Jewish residences and houses of worship. The rioters were joined by a mob of stone-cutters, day-laborers, and ragamuffins. Here and there the crowd was incited by a few "intellectuals": a merchant, a student, and a teacher. On the Konnaya Square, the mob was checked by a large detachment of the Jewish self-defence, consisting of several hundred men. The rioters were on the point of giving way before the gallant attack of the self-defence; but at that moment the troops appeared on the scene, and fired a volley in the direction of the Jews, resulting in three killed and several wounded. The assistance rendered by the troops filled the rioters with fresh courage, and they continued their work of destruction with renewed vigor. All over the town a chain of soldiers shielded the attacking hordes against the Jewish self-defence contingents which tried in vain to break through the chain. The defenders were driven off with rifle butts and bayonets, while the rioters were allowed to destroy and murder without let or hindrance. In the evening, the pogrom was stopped; the results were twelve killed or dangerously wounded Jews, eight killed or dangerously wounded Christians, a large number of maltreated and slightly wounded Jews and over two hundred and fifty devastated Jewish residences and stores. Among those arrested by the police was a considerably larger number of self-defending Jews than of attacking Christians.

Two days later, the governor of Moghilev came to Homel, and, having summoned the Jews to the Town Council, treated them to the following harangue:

I am sorry for the unhappy victims, but how could such bitterness have arisen? Religious toleration in Russia is complete. The causes of the latest events lie deeper. The Jews have now become the leaders and instigators in all movements directed against the Government. This entire "Bund" and the Social-Democrats--they are all Jews. You are yourselves to blame for all that has happened. You do not educate your children properly. You have no influence over them. But at least you can surrender them, pointing them out to the Government, whereas you conceal them. You propagate disobedience and opposition to the Government among an uncivilized population. But the Russian populace does not care for it and turns against you.

It would seem as if Plehve himself had spoken through the mouth of the governor. The Russian functionary expressed with naïve and clumsy frankness the hidden thought of the Chief of the Political Inquisition--the idea of punishing the fathers for the revolutionary leanings of their children, who were to be surrendered to the police, and of discrediting the entire Russian liberty movement as a "Jewish cause." In a Government communication which appeared after the pogrom the events at Homel were reported in such a way as to suggest that they were brought about by an attack of the Jews upon Christian residents and upon the troops, in consequence of which the latter had been forced to fire in "self-defence." The final deduction was formulated thus: "The cause of the disorders lies in the extremely hostile and defiant attitude of the local Jews toward the Christians." Thus were the actual facts distorted in an official document, and the tortured were put forward as the torturers.

The Homel pogrom did not attain to the dimensions of the Kishinev massacre, nor was it as painful to the moral consciousness of the Jews. For in Homel the Jews did not allow themselves to be beaten and slaughtered like sheep, but put up a valiant defence. Had the troops not turned against the self-defence, the pogrom would not have taken place, and the cowardly rabble would have taken to flight before the gallant defenders of their national honor. Already in the spring, Plehve had foreseen that the Jews would attempt to organize a self-defence of their own, and he had in his previously mentioned circular declared in advance that this most fundamental right of human beings to defend their lives was "inadmissible." Accordingly, several Jewish heroes paid with their lives for having violated this ministerial circular. Their death was the foreboding of a new Jewish martyrdom. All this had the natural effect of enormously intensifying the revolutionary sentiments of the Jewish youth and of inspiring them with hatred towards a régime which permitted some of its citizens to commit murder and prohibited others to defend their lives.

2. THE KISHINEV MASSACRE AT THE BAR OF RUSSIAN JUSTICE

In the fall of 1903 the judicial investigation in connection with the spring pogrom in Kishinev was nearing its end. The investigation was conducted with a view to obliterating the traces of the deliberate organization of the pogrom. The representatives of Government authority and of the better classes whose complicity in the Kishinev massacre had been clearly established were carefully eliminated from the trial, and only the hired assassins and plunderers from among the lower classes, numbering about four hundred men, were brought to justice. Prompted by fear lest the terrible truth might leak out in the court, the Ministry of Justice ordered the case to be tried behind closed doors. By this act, the blood-stained Russian Government refused in advance to rehabilitate itself before the civilized world, which looked upon it as the instigator of the catastrophe.

In the court proceedings, the echo of which penetrated beyond the walls of the closed court-room, the counsel for the defence from among the best representatives of the Russian bar (Karabchevski, Sokolov, and others, who were Christians, and the Jews Gruzenberg, Kalmanovich, and others) succeeded in proving that the prisoners at the bar were only blind tools in the commission of the crime, whereas the organizers of the butchery and the ringleaders of the mob were escaping justice.[40] They demanded that the case be probed to the bottom. The court refused their demand, whereupon the lawyers, having stated their reasons, withdrew from the court-room one after the other.[41] The only advocates left were the anti-Semite Shmakov and other whole-hearted defenders of the Kishinev massacre, who regarded the latter as a manifestation of the honor and conscience of the Russian people. In the end, the court sentenced a score of murderers and rioters of the first group to hard labor or penal service, dismissing at the same time the civil actions for damages presented by the Jews.

Six months later the Kishinev case came up before the Senate, the Jews appearing as complainants against Governor von Raaben (who had been dismissed after the pogrom), Deputy-Governor Ustrugov, and the Kishinev Chief of Police, upon whom they fastened the responsibility. The bureaucratic defendants cynically declared "that the losses suffered by the Jews have been covered many times over by contributions from Russia, Western Europe, and America." All the eloquence of the well-known lawyer Vinaver and of his associates failed to convince the judges of the Senate, and the petition for damages was dismissed. The Government did not wish to create a precedent for compensating pogrom victims out of public funds, for "this might place the representatives of the administration in an impossible position," as was stated with naïve frankness by von Raaben, since it might become necessary to increase the imperial budget by several million rubles a year.

In the midst of these ghastly proceedings Plehve conceived the plan of "regulating the legislation concerning the Jews." In August, 1903, he sent out a circular to the governors, calling upon them, in view of the extraordinarily complex and tangled condition of the Russian laws affecting the Jews, to point out ways and means "of bringing these legal enactments into proper order and into as harmonious a system as possible." In reply to this circular, the governor of Vilna, Pahlen, submitted an extensive memorial, in which he pointed out that all the restrictive laws within the boundaries of the Pale of Settlement ought to be repealed on account of their pernicious political influence, since they were driving the Jews into the ranks of the paupers or revolutionaries. At the same time he suggested to retain the repressive measures "against the manifestation of the injurious characteristics of Judaism on the part of certain individuals" and also to exclude the Jewish youth from the Christian schools and establish for them special elementary and intermediate schools under the supervision of Christian teachers. A few other governors, among them the new governor of Bessarabia, Urussov, also expressed themselves in favor of mitigating the repressive policy against the Jews.

In January, 1904, a committee of governors and of several high officials representing the Ministry of the Interior met to consider the Jewish question. From the very beginning the conferees were given to understand that in "the highest spheres" every thought of the slightest mitigation of the condition of Jewry was taboo. The only liberal member of the committee, Governor Urussov, subsequently stated that after the Kishinev pogrom and the agitation raised by it "one could feel quite tangibly the unfriendly attitude of the highest spheres toward the Jews"--in other words, that the hatred toward the Jews was shared personally by the Tzar and by his _camarilla_. The committee therefore applied itself to the task, not of reforming Jewish legislation, but rather of systematizing the anti-Jewish code of laws. Its labors were interrupted by the outbreak of the Russo-Japanese War, on January 27, 1904.

3. THE JEWS IN THE RUSSO-JAPANESE WAR

On the day following the declaration of war, the organ of Russian Jewry, the _Voskhod_, wrote as follows:

This is not the time to irritate the old wounds. Let us endeavor, as far as it is in our power, to forget also the recent expulsion from Port Arthur,[42] the pogroms of Kishinev and Homel, and many, many other things.... Let the Jewish parents not think of the bitter fate of their children who had been thrown overboard [by being barred from the educational establishments]. The Jews will go forth into battle as plain soldiers, without any hope of attaining an officer's rank, or shoulder-straps, or distinctions--the blood of our sons will flow as freely as that of the Russians.

The Jews marched to the Far East to assist Russia in making the province of Manchuria part of Siberia in which they were forbidden to reside. The number of Jews at the front was disproportionately large--it amounted to some thirty thousand, owing to the fact that, in accordance with the usual military regulations, the Jewish recruits from the Western governments were generally despatched to Siberia, so that, at the very outset, they were near the theatre of military operations. Disproportionately large was also the number of Jewish physicians in the reserves. They were mobilized at once, evidently for the reason that they lived on their private practice and were not allowed to occupy any state or public office, whereas the Russian physicians were not drawn upon to the same extent, so as not to divert them from their administrative, municipal, or Zemstvo services.[43] Hundreds of Jewish physicians had to work and to encounter the murderous fire of the Japanese because of the fact that an unjust law deprived them of the right of civil service in time of peace.

While scores of thousands of disfranchised Jews were fighting for the prestige of Russia in the Far East, the whip of rightlessness did not cease to lash their brethren at home. In a number of places the authorities began to expel the families of the soldiers and physicians who had been sent to the war, on the ground that with the departure of the head of the family the wife and children had forfeited the right of residence, the latter being conditioned by the profession of the husband or father. This policy, however, was too monstrous even for St. Petersburg, and Plehve was soon forced to decree that the families of the mobilized Jews should be left in their places of residence, "pending the termination of the war."

Though the Government was compelled to relax for a while its oppression of the Jews, social Judæophobia, fanned by the chauvinism incident to war time, broke out with greater violence than ever. Irritated by the rapid failures of the Russian arms and by the unexpected military superiority of the Japanese, the reactionary press, headed by the _Novoye Vremya_, began to circulate preposterous rumors to the effect that the Jews were secretly helping the Japanese, their "kinsmen by race," in order to wreak their vengeance upon Russia for having perpetrated the Kishinev massacres. The story of the Jewish-Japanese alliance issued from the public press of the capital to make its rounds through the provinces, and each day gave birth to a rumor more absurd than the other: the Jews are exporting gold abroad, they are purchasing horses for Japan, they are collecting money to build cruisers for the Mikado, they are provoking England and America against Russia, and similar preposterous stories. It was clear that these rumors were the work of a gang of unscrupulous agitators _à la_ Krushevan, who were eager to instigate anti-Jewish pogroms on a modern basis--the accusation of "treachery." This assumption is confirmed by the additional fact that these incendiary rumors were particularly circulated in February and March, before the Easter festival, the old-time pogrom season, just as in the preceding year the ritual murder libel of Dubossary had been kept afloat during the same months. "The incendiaries have already set out upon their work"--with these words the Jewish organ _Voskhod_ warned its readers in its issue of March 11. A week later, the same paper had occasion to publish accounts of the panic which had spread among the Jewish population, particularly in the South. In Kishinev, a second pogrom was feared, calling forth an intensified emigration to America. In Odessa, the Jews were agitated by sinister rumors, and began to prepare themselves for self-defence. This state of alarm was reflected in the foreign press. It was rumored that the American ambassador at St. Petersburg had received instructions to make representations to the Russian Government--which rumor was subsequently officially denied.

Fortunately the Government itself came to the conclusion that the time of war was not a fit opportunity for arranging pogroms. The governors received orders to adopt energetic measures for the prevention of Passover excesses. Governor Urussov of Bessarabia and the city-governor of Odessa addressed serious warnings to the Russian population. These steps had the desired effect. As soon as the police and population realized that the pogroms were not desired from above, the agitation collapsed; and in April the papers were able to tell their readers that "Passover has passed quietly everywhere." In his _Memoirs_ Urussov tells us that, during the restless day preceding the Easter festival in Kishinev, he had been engaged, together with the Chief of Police, in working out a plan looking to the maintenance of public order in the city; during this conference he noticed that the Chief of Police was rather hesitant and puzzled. This hesitation continued until the governor received from Plehve a telegram in cipher, calling upon him to prevent pogroms. No sooner had Urussov shown the Chief of Police the deciphered telegram than the latter exclaimed: "Don't trouble yourself--now there will be no disorders in Kishinev." Such was the spirit in which the provincial administrators had been trained. Without a special order from St. Petersburg, they did not have the courage to suppress the pogroms.

4. THE "POLITICAL SPRING"

On the morning of July 15, 1904, the square before the Warsaw depôt in St. Petersburg presented a terrible sight. Upon the pavement lay the blood-stained body of Plehve, who had been smitten by the bomb of the Russian terrorist Sazonov while on his way to Peterhof where he was to report to the Tzar. This meant that the revolution had again raised its head. After two years of frenzied police terrorism, and in spite of all attempts to divert the attention of the public from the necessity of reforms, first by pogroms and then by the war against Japan--Plehve had insisted upon the declaration of war, hoping to drown the "seditious" movement in chauvinism--the revolutionary spectre was once more haunting the country. The martyrs of the autocratic inquisition perceived the "finger of God" in the calamities caused by the war and in the miserable end of Plehve. In February, 1904, the Russian censor confiscated an issue of the _Voskhod_ in which a young Jewish sibyl, in a poem entitled "To Haman," referring to the biblical _Mene, Mene, Tekel u-Farsin_, predicted a shameful death for the new Haman who was easily identified as the hero of Kishinev. One could feel in the air the coming of a cleansing tempest. Even the reactionary Government was taken aback by the approaching storm. It did not dare to answer the terrorism of the revolution with police terrorism. On the contrary, it made an attempt to moderate the régime of serfdom.

On August 11, on the occasion of the birth of the heir-apparent Alexis, an imperial manifesto was issued, granting "favors" and "privileges" to the population, the most important of which consisted in the abrogation of corporal punishment for peasants and soldiers. On the same day, a ukase was promulgated in which the Tzar "thought it _just_ to introduce, pending the general revision of the legislation affecting the Jews, several amendments in the enactments concerning their rights of residence at present in force." The amendments were trifling: the Jews with a higher education were permitted to live in the villages and acquire real property there, as well as to carry on business everywhere. Those who had participated in the Japanese war, and had distinguished themselves or had conducted themselves irreproachably were to be accorded the right of universal domicile. The wives and under-aged children of the Jews with a higher education were granted the right of residence even after the death of their husbands and fathers. These rights were the only ones which the Government thought it "just" to confer upon the Jews, who had sent thirty thousand people into the active army to fight on the fields of Manchuria. The Jewish public received this niggardly gift with chilly indifference, and turned its gaze to wider horizons which were then opening up before Russia. The country was on the eve of a "political spring."

On August 26 the post of Minister of the Interior was entrusted to Svyatopolk-Mirski, who in his previous capacity of governor-general of Vilna had displayed comparative administrative leniency. The new leader of internal Russian politics promised that he would strive for the restoration of "confidence" between the Government and the people by adjusting his actions to the demands of "true progress." The Jewish deputation which waited upon him at Vilna and the representatives of the foreign press were told that as far as the Jewish question was concerned, he would be guided by justice and "kindness." Unfortunately, at the very beginning he showed himself powerless to stem the new tide of pogroms. At the end of August, the Russian South was the scene of several "regular" pogroms, beginning with a quarrel in a Jewish store and ending with the demolition of Jewish stores and houses--as was the case in the town of Smyela, in the government of Kiev, on August 22, or in the city of Rovno, in Volhynia, where a similar attempt was made on the same day. Soon these "regular" riots gave way to a new variety of pogroms, which were distinguished by a peculiar coloring and might be termed "mobilization pogroms." The mobilized Russian reserve troops, wrought up over their impending departure to the fields of death in Manchuria where the Russian army suffered defeat after defeat, directed their protest along the line of least resistance--against the Jews. The soldiers, fortifying themselves with goodly doses of alcohol, began their "gallant exploits," and, accompanied by the street mobs, engaged in the task of devastating Jewish homes, maltreating their inmates, and looting their property. A sanguinary pogrom took place in Alexandria, in the government of Kherson, on September 6 and 7. On the sacred day of Yom Kippur a horde of intoxicated assassins invaded the synagogue which was crowded with worshippers, and butchered there twenty people in a most barbarous fashion. Among the severely wounded, who soon afterwards died from the wounds, were several gymnazium and university students. The police made no attempt to stop the killing and looting, and only on the second day, when the excesses were renewed, the Cossacks were summoned from an adjacent town, and succeeded in restoring order.

A month later, the mobilized Russian reservists began to perpetrate a series of pogroms in the North, in the region of White Russia. In the city of Moghilev the lawlessness of the soldiers and the local hooligans assumed appalling dimensions (October 10). The poorest quarters of the town suffered most. Among the victims of the riots were also the families of Jewish reservists who had gone to war. From the capital of the government the pogrom epidemic spread all over the region. Everywhere the intoxicated "crusaders," prior to their departure for Manchuria, engaged in destruction, looting, and incendiarism. In some places, as was the case in the government of Vitebsk, the rioters acted with perfect religious toleration, and even attacked the police, although the center of the "stage" was still occupied by the Jews.

The Government was manifestly unwilling to adopt energetic measures against the "defenders of the Fatherland" for fear of irritating them still further and spoiling the progress of mobilization. It was not until the end of October that the mobilization pogroms died out.

5. THE HOMEL POGROM BEFORE THE RUSSIAN COURTS

In the same month of October, 1904, the case of the Homel pogrom of the previous year came up before the Court of Appeals of the Government of Kiev, which held its sessions at Homel. The department of justice had taken a whole year to prepare the evidence, prompted by the desire not so much to investigate the case as to entangle it and present it in a perverted political interpretation. The investigation which had started in the lifetime of Plehve and proceeded under the pressure of the anti-Semitic reactionary, Minister of Justice Muravyov, resulted in a bill of indictment which was a flagrant example of deliberate misrepresentation. The whole affair was pictured as an anti-Russian pogrom which had been perpetrated by the Jews. According to this version, the Jews of Homel, wishing to avenge the Kishinev massacre, had taken up arms and attacked the Christian population on August 29, thereby calling forth a counter-pogrom on the part of the Russian workingmen on September 1, when again the armed Jewish self-defence had taken an aggressive attitude and thereby forced the soldiers to shoot at them. Sixty people were indicted on this charge, among them thirty-six Jews, representing the part of the population which had been the victims of the pogrom. The Jews who had dared to defend themselves stood at the prisoners' bar side by side with their assailants. Yielding to the pressure of public opinion, the Government decided to have the Homel case tried in open court, but the president of the tribunal was instructed to eliminate from the judicial proceedings all political revelations which might embarrass the Government. The élite of the legal profession, both among Jews and non-Jews (Vinaver, Sliosberg, Kalmanovich, Ratner, Sokolov, Kupernik, Zarudny, and others), assembled at Homel to plead the cause of the indicted Jews and to defend the action for damages brought by the Jewish pogrom victims. The trial was drawn out for nearly three months, reducing itself to a duel between the counsel who endeavored to bring out the facts, and the bench which was anxious to suppress them. The depositions of the witnesses and the cross-examinations of the Jewish lawyers succeeded in demolishing the entire structure of the indictment, but when the case reached the stage which was bound to lead to the detection of the real authors of the pogrom and lay bare the conduct of the authorities, the president stopped the counsel despotically, denying them the floor. The gross partiality manifested by the president of the court had the effect that the counsel for the defence lost their patience, and on December 21, after a violent scene, refused to participate in the trial and demonstratively left the court-room.

This action aroused public opinion throughout Russia to an extraordinary degree; it caused a storm of indignation against this official miscarriage of justice, and the fearless defenders received innumerable expressions of sympathy. The indicted Jews, too, joined in the noble demonstration of their lawyers, which was in itself an eloquent plea for a righteous cause. The trial terminated in January, 1905, and ended in the acquittal of half of the accused Jews and Christians and a verdict of guilty against the other half from among both groups. The guilty were sentenced to comparatively light penalties--to imprisonment for brief terms--and, in addition, the court decided to petition the Tzar for a mitigation even of these penalties.

This verdict displayed the Jesuitic character of Russian politics. The reprobate murderers and plunderers from among the Russian group were either acquitted altogether, or were sentenced to trifling penalties and placed on the same level of culpability with the members of the Jewish self-defence whose only crime was that they had stood up for their life, honor, and property. The Russian law journal _Pravo_ ("The Law"), the organ of the progressive Russian _intelligenzia_, published on this occasion a strong article which concluded with the following words:

The truth stands out in bold relief even in this verdict, and it does so against the wish of its authors. If, as is implied in this verdict, both the Jews and Christians are guilty of murder, violence, and plunder to a minimum degree only--for how could otherwise the extraordinary leniency of the verdict be justified?--then everybody is bound to ask himself the question: Who then is the real author of all the horrors that were perpetrated at Homel? Those who have followed the course of the judicial investigation with some degree of attention can only have one answer: Besides the Christians and the Jews, there is still a third culprit, the politically rotten officialdom. This culprit did not stand at the prisoners' bar, but the verdict is against him.... The best elements of the Russian public, and the Jews in particular, have been thirsting for justice and for the disclosure of the truth, but it was just that third accomplice who was afraid of justice and has managed to cover it up by a general amnesty.

Such was the end of the two ill-fated years of Russian-Jewish history (1903-1904)--years, marked by the internal war against the Jews and by the external war against Japan, filled with the victories of the reaction at Kishinev and Homel and the defeats of the Russian arms at Port Arthur, Liao-Yang, and Mukden. This ghastly interval of reactionary terrorism, which began to subside only towards the end of 1904, drove from Russia to America more than 125,000 Jewish emigrants who fled for their very lives from the dominions of the Tzar.

However, at the end of the long nightmare, the political horizon began to clear up. The tide of the liberty movement surged forward again and it looked as if the Russian people, and with it tormented Russian Jewry, would soon behold the new dawn. Yet the six million Jews of Russia were destined to pass through two more stormy years, standing between the firing lines of autocratic despotism and the revolutionary movement, and suffering the excruciating agonies of suspense, while hovering between degradation and emancipation.

FOOTNOTES:

[40] One of the instigators, Pisarevski, a notary public, had blown out his brains before the beginning of the trial. Other instigators from among the Kishinev _intelligenzia_ appeared merely as witnesses.

[41] The speech of Karabchevski justifying his withdrawal was particularly powerful. He openly declared that the pogrom was only "the fulfilment of a criminal order given from above." "The whole of Kishinev," he said, "was converted during the excesses into an immense circus of antiquity, where, before the eyes of curious spectators from among the administration and the army, before a festively attired crowd, a terrible drama was enacted in the depth of the arena. From the one side defenceless victims were driven upon the arena, and from the other maddened beasts were set at them, until the signal to stop was given, and the frightful spectacle was ended at once."

[42] About two months before the war, the Russian viceroy of the Far East had prohibited the Jews from residing in Port Arthur and upon the Kuantung Peninsula, whence the Russians were expelled by the Japanese a year later.

[43] Out of the thirty physicians who were mobilized in Kiev twenty-six were Jews. In Odessa, the Jews furnished twenty-one physicians out of thirty.