Kitabı oku: «History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Volume 3 of 3. From the Accession of Nicholas II until the Present Day», sayfa 5

2. The Organized Kishinev Butchery

Needless to say, there was plenty of inflammable material for such an anti-Jewish conflagration. One of the criminal haunts of these incendiaries was situated at that time in Kishinev, the capital of semi-Moldavian Bessarabia. Until the end of the nineteenth century, the fifty thousand Jews of that city had lived in peace and harmony with their Christian neighbors who numbered some sixty thousand. At the beginning of the new century, these friendly relations were severed, owing to the untrammelled anti-Semitic agitation of a local yellow journalist, a petty official by the name of Krushevan. This official had been publishing in Kishinev since 1897 a local sheet under the name of Bessarabetz ("The Bessarabian"). Having originally embarked upon a moderately progressive policy, the paper soon sold itself to the local anti-Semitic reactionaries from among the nobility and bureaucracy, and was thenceforth subvention-ed by the Government. For a number of years Krushevan's paper carried on an unbridled agitation against the Jews. The Jews were accused of every possible crime, of economic "exploitation," of Socialism, of "hatred towards the Christians," of ritual murders, and of fathering the "Godless revolution." Favored by the powers that be, the Bessarabetz could do what it pleased. The censorship of the paper lay in the hands of the deputy-governor of Kishinev, Ustrugov, who during his administrative activity had proved himself a past master in the art of persecuting the Jews and curtailing the crumbs of rights that were still left to them. Under the auspices of such a censor, who was in reality a contributor to the paper, the latter was sure of immunity even when it proceeded to print appeals calling on the Christian population to make pogroms upon the Jews.

This agitation was particularly dangerous in view of the fact that the Bessarabetz was the only press organ in the province, the Government consistently refusing to license the publication of any other newspaper. As a matter of fact, Krushevan's activity in Bessarabia was so well thought of by Plehve that in 1902 the mercenary journalist received considerable sums from a special slush fund for the publication of a newspaper in St. Petersburg, under the name Znamya ("The Banner"), with a similarly reactionary anti-Semitic tendency. However, in the capital, the filthy sheet was unable to find readers. But as far as the Bessarabetz was concerned, its influence was clearly felt. Russian public opinion was affected by the poisonous doses administered to it daily. The sinister instincts of the mob became inflamed more and more, and there was the foreboding of a storm in the air.

In the beginning of 1903, Krushevan found an occasion to give a definite turn to his accustomed pogrom propaganda. In the town of Dubossary the mutilated body of a Russian peasant boy, Rybalenko, had been found, who, as was subsequently brought out by the judicial inquiry, had been slain by his uncle in the hope of appropriating his portion of a bequest. The Bessarabetz immediately launched a campaign against the Jews, accusing them of ritual murder. "Death to the Jews! Let all Zhyds be massacred!" – such appeals were almost daily repeated in the paper which was read in all the saloons and public-houses of Bessarabia. The unenlightened Russian mob itched for an occasion to lay its hands upon the Jews. An attempt at a pogrom was made at Dubossary, but it was frustrated by the local Jews who were of a sturdy physique.

On the eve of the Easter festival of 1903, mysterious rumors were set afloat in Kishinev itself telling of the murder of a Christian servant girl, whose death was ascribed to the Jews. In reality the girl had taken poison and died, despite the efforts of her Jewish master to save her life. The goings-on in Kishinev on the eve of that Easter bore the earmarks of an energetic activity on the part of some secret organization which was hatching an elaborate fiendish scheme. That criminal organization was centered in the local Russian club which was the rallying-point of the officials of the province. Shortly before the holiday, there suddenly appeared in the city an emissary of the political police, the gendarmerie officer Levendahl, who had been despatched from St. Petersburg; after Easter, when the sanguinary crime had already been committed, the same mysterious envoy vanished just as suddenly.

The triumvirate Krushevan-Ustrugov-Levendahl was evidently the soul of the terrible anti-Semitic conspiracy. Printed hand-bills were scattered about in the city, telling the people that an imperial ukase had been published, granting permission to inflict a "bloody punishment" upon the Jews in the course of the three days of the Christian Passover. The police made no attempt to suppress these circulars, for, as was subsequently brought out, they were in the conspiracy. Several police officials even hinted at the impending events in their talks with Jewish acquaintances. In the saloons and in the tea-houses, the approaching pogrom was the subject of public discussion. The Jews were fully aware of the coming storm, though they scarcely realized that it would take the form not merely of an ordinary pogrom, but of a regular butchery. On the eve of the festival of Passover, the representatives of the Jewish community waited upon the governor and the Chief of Police, praying for protection, and received the cool reply that the necessary instructions had already been given and that the proper measures for their safety had been adopted. The local Greek-Orthodox bishop asked the rabbi, who came to see him on the subject, whether it was true that there was a Jewish sect which used Christian blood for ritual purposes.

The conflagration which was openly prepared by the incendiaries broke out at the moment determined upon. On Sunday, April 6, the first day of the Christian Passover and the seventh day of the Jewish holiday, the church bells began to ring at noontime, and a large crowd of Russian burghers and artisans, acting undoubtedly upon a given signal, scattered all over the town, and fell upon the Jewish houses and stores. The bands were preceded by street urchins who were throwing stones at the windows. The rioters, whose number was swelled by these youthful "fighters," seeing that the police made no attempt to interfere, began to break into the houses and stores, and to throw the contents on the street where everything was destroyed or plundered by the festive crowd. But even then the police and soldier detachments who were stationed on the streets remained passive, and made no attempt to arrest the rioters. This attitude served in the eyes of the mob as a final proof that the rumors concerning the permission of the Tzar "to beat the Jews" were correct. An immense riff-raff, in a state of intoxication, crowded the streets, shouting "Death to the Zhyds! Beat the Zhyds!"

In the evening looting gave way to killing. The murderers, armed with clubs and knives, assailed the Jews in the cars, on the streets, and in the houses, wounding them severely, sometimes even fatally. Even then, the police and military remained inactive; only when in one place a group of Jews, armed with sticks, attempted to drive off the murderers, the police stepped in at once and disarmed the defenders.

At ten o'clock in the evening the looting and killing were suddenly stopped. Rumor had it that the general staff of the rioters were holding a meeting concerning the further plan of military operations, and were making arrangements for a systematic butchery. The "army" soon received the necessary orders, and in the course of the entire day of April 7, from daybreak until eight o'clock in the evening, Kishinev was the scene of bestialities such as find few parallels even in the history of the most barbarous ages. Finding themselves defenceless and exposed to the passions of a savage crowd, many Jewish families hid themselves in their cellars, or in their garrets, and sometimes sought safety in the houses of their Christian neighbors, but the murderers succeeded in hunting down their unfortunate victims. The Jews were slain in most barbarous fashion. Many of them were not killed at once, but were left writhing in pre-mortal agonies. Some had nails driven into their heads or had their eyes put out. Little children were thrown from garrets to the pavement, and their brains dashed out upon the stones. Women had their stomachs ripped open or their breasts cut off. Many of them became the victims of rape. One gymnazium pupil who saw his mother attacked by these fiends threw himself single-handed upon them, and saved at the cost of his life his mother's honor; he himself was slain, and his mother's eyes were put out. The drunken hordes broke into the synagogue, and, getting hold of the Torah scrolls, tore them to shreds, defiled them, and trampled upon them. In one synagogue, the old Shammes (beadle), arrayed in his prayer-shawl, and shielding with his body the Ark containing the sacred scrolls, was savagely murdered by the desecrators on the threshold of the sanctuary.

Throughout the entire day, wagons were seen moving in the streets, carrying wounded and slain Jews to the hospitals which had been converted into field-lazarettes.

But even this sight did not induce the police to step in. The Russian population, outside of a few isolated cases, made no attempt to defend the tormented Jews. The so-called "intelligent" public, the officials with their wives and children, the students, the lawyers, the physicians, walked leisurely upon the streets and looked on indifferently, and sometimes even sympathetically, while the terrible "work" was going on. The governor of Bessarabia, von Raaben, who, on the morning of the second day of the pogrom, was waited upon by a Jewish deputation begging for protection, replied that he could do nothing since he had received no instructions from St. Petersburg.

At last at five o'clock in the afternoon, a telegram was received from Plehve, and at six o'clock large detachments of troops, fully armed, appeared on the central streets. No sooner had the crowd noticed that the soldiers were ready to act than it took to its heels, without a single shot being fired. Only in the outskirts of the town, which had not yet been reached by the troops, the plunder and massacre continued until late in the evening.

It is needless to point out that had this readiness of the police and military to attend to their duty been displayed in Kishinev at the inception of the pogrom, not a single Jew would have been murdered nor a single house destroyed. As it was, the murderers and rioters were given a free hand for two days, and the result was that forty-five Jews were slain, eighty-six severely wounded or crippled, five hundred slightly wounded, apart from cases of rape, the number of which could not be determined. Fifteen hundred houses and stores were demolished and looted. The victims were mostly among the lower classes of the Jewish population, since many well-to-do Jewish families were able, by bribing the police heavily, to secure the protection of the latter and to have the rioters turned away from their houses. As against the enormous number of Jewish victims, there were only two fatalities among the intoxicated rioters. The Kishinev Jews seemed unable to resist the murderers and sell their lives dearly.

3. Echoes of the Kishinev Tragedy

A cry of horror rang throughout Russia and the more or less civilized countries of the world when the news of the Kishinev butchery became known. The entire liberal Russian press voiced its indignation against the Kishinev atrocities. The most prominent Russian writers expressed their sympathy with the victims in letters and telegrams. Leo Tolstoi voiced his sentiments in a letter which could not be published on account of the censorship.³⁷ The humanitarian writer Korolenko portrayed the horrors of Kishinev in a heart-rending story under the title "House No. 13," in which, on the basis of personal observation, he pictured how the Jewish residents of one house were tortured to death by the rioters. The story was circulated in an illegal edition, its publication having been strictly forbidden by the censor. But in Russia itself, the cry was stifled by the heavy hand of Plehve's censorship, and wherever a fraction of the terrible truth managed to slip through the barriers of the censor, Plehve sent out warnings to the papers threatening to discontinue their publication for the "pursuit of an injurious policy." Such a fate actually overtook the Russian-Jewish Voskhod, in St. Petersburg, the legal journal Pravo ("The Law"), and others. The entire Russian press was forced by the Government to publish the falsified version embodied in its official reports, in which the organized massacre was toned down to a casual brawl, and the inactivity of the troops was explained either by the inadequacy of their numbers – despite the fact that several battalions were stationed in the city – or by the incapacity of the police, while the dead and wounded were referred to in a vague manner so as to suggest that the victims of the "brawl" were to be found on both sides.

But the revelations in the foreign press were of a nature to stagger all Europe and America. The correspondent of the London Times published the text of a secret letter addressed by Plehve to the governor of Bessarabia, in which, two weeks before the pogrom, the latter official was told that, in the case of anti-Jewish "disorders," "no recourse shall be taken to armed interference with the urban population, so as not to arouse hostility to the Government in a population which has not yet been affected by the revolutionary propaganda." The authenticity of this letter is not entirely beyond suspicion. But there can be no doubt that instructions to that effect, rather by word of mouth than in writing, probably through the secret agent Levendahl, had been actually transmitted to the authorities in Kishinev.

From the fact that on the second day of the pogrom the governor was still waiting for instructions from St. Petersburg permitting him to discontinue the massacre it is evident that he must have received previous orders to allow it to proceed up to a certain point. The horrors of the Armenian massacres in Turkey, against which even Russian diplomacy had protested more than once, faded into insignificance before the wholesale butchery at Kishinev. Europe and America were deeply agitated. The Jews outside of Russia collected large funds for their unhappy Russian brethren, but their efforts exhausted themselves in sympathy and philanthropy.

The effect of the catastrophe upon Russian Jewry was more lasting. A mixed feeling of wrath and shame seized the Jewish public – wrath against the organizers and abetters of the terrible crime, and shame for the tortured and degraded brethren who, not having a chance to save their lives, had failed to save their honor by offering stout resistance to these beasts in human shape, who were sure of immunity. The poet Frug poured forth his sentiments in a Yiddish poem, voicing his sorrow at the physical helplessness of his nation and confining himself to an appeal to the kind Jewish heart:

 
Too keen and grievous is our pain, too weak our hand the blow to parry.
Come on, then, tender Jewish heart, and love and comfort to us carry!
Brothers, sisters, pray, have pity; dire and dreadful is our need:
Shrouds we want the dead to bury, and bread that the living we may feed.³⁸
 

A little later, the young poet Bialik gave powerful utterance to his feeling of wrath and shame in his "Burden of Nemirov."³⁹ He makes God address these words to the martyred nation:

 
Your dead have died in vain, and neither you nor I
Can say for what they gave their lives, and why…
No tears shall flow for you! – the Lord swears by His Name —
For though the pain be great, great also is the shame,
And which of them the greater, thou, son of man, decide…
 

In picturing the memorial services held in honor of the Kishinev victims at the synagogues, he angrily exclaims in the name of God:

 
Lift thine eyes and look how steeped they are in grief.
You hear them cry and sob and mournful prayers read.
You see them beat their breasts and for forgiveness plead…
What are they praying for?.. Tell them to protest!
To shake their fists at Me and justice to demand!
Justice for all they've suffered throughout the generations,
So that My Heaven and Throne shall quake to their foundations!
 

Neither the pogroms at the beginning of the eighties, nor the Moscow atrocities at the beginning of the nineties can compare, in their soul-stirring effect upon Russian Jewry, with the massacre of Kishinev. It awakened the burning feeling of martyrdom, but with it also the feeling of heroism. All were seized by one and the same impulse – the organization of self-defence, as if to say: "Since the Government fails to defend our life and honor, then we ourselves are bound to defend it." The pogrom panic which spread over the entire South following upon the terrible days of April 6-7 led to the organization of self-defence societies in a number of cities. Plehve knew of these preparations, and found himself in a difficult position. He realized that these endeavors might interfere with the engineering of the pogroms, since the latter would no longer be safe for the murderers and plunderers, and he was, moreover, full of apprehension that these self-defence societies might become hotbeds of a revolutionary propaganda and provide a training ground for political demonstrations. These apprehensions were voiced in a circular issued at the end of April, in which the Minister instructed the governors, first, that "no self-defence societies should be tolerated," and, second, that the authorities should adopt measures for the "prevention of violence" and the "suppression of lawlessness." Subsequent events showed that the latter order was never put into effect. The first instruction, however, was carried out with relentless cruelty, and, during the following pogroms, the troops made it their first business to shoot down the members of the self-defence.

Such being the frame of mind of Russian Jewry, the ukase of May 10, 1903, opening up to the Jews for "free domicile" one hundred and one localities in various governments of the Pale of Settlement, which had hitherto been barred to them under the "Temporary Rules" of 1882, was received with complete indifference. As a matter of fact, many of the rural settlements, included in that ukase, were in reality towns which had been converted into "villages," at the instigation of spiteful officials, for the sole purpose of rendering them inaccessible to the Jews. The stolen property was now returned with a slight surplus. The Danaid gift, which seemed to be offered to the Jews as a compensation for the Kishinev horrors, could not but fill them with disgust. Parenthetically it may be remarked that the Government itself nullified the moral effect of its "act of grace" by issuing on the same day a new repressive law prohibiting the privileged Jews who were entitled to the right of domicile outside the Pale of Settlement from acquiring real property in the villages and hamlets. The knot of rightlessness was loosened by a hair's breadth in one place, and tightened in another.

Grief and shame over "the Kishinev days" armed the hand of Pincus Dashevski, a high-minded Jewish youth, against the most culpable instigator of the massacre – Krushevan. Dashevski, the son of a military surgeon, travelled from Kiev, where he was a student at the Polytechnicum, to St. Petersburg to inflict punishment on the miserable hireling of Judæophobia, who had caused the Kishinev conflagration by his criminal newspaper agitation. On June 4, 1903, he assailed Krushevan in the heart of the capital, on the so-called Nevski Prospect, wounding him in the neck with a knife. The wound proved of no consequence, and the "victim" was able to go home, without accepting the first aid proffered to him in a Jewish drug store nearby. Dashevski was arrested and brought to trial. At the preliminary examination he frankly confessed that he had intended to avenge the Kishinev massacre by killing Krushevan. Krushevan, now more ferocious than ever, demanded in his newspaper Znamya that the Jewish avenger be court-martialled and executed, and his demand was echoed by the entire anti-Semitic press. The case was tried in a district court behind closed doors, the Government of Plehve evidently fearing the appearance of the sanguinary ghost of Kishinev in the court-room.

Krushevan was represented by the anti-Semitic lawyer Shmakov, who subsequently figured in the Beilis trial. The counsel for Dashevski (the lawyer Gruzenberg and others) pleaded that his client's act had been inspired by the intention not to kill, but merely to voice his protest against the unbridled criminal activity of Krushevan. Dashevski received the severe sentence of penal military service for five years (August 26). An appeal was taken to the Senate, but the judgment of the lower court was sustained. The youth who, in a fit of righteous indignation, had given vent to the outraged feelings of his martyred nation, was put in chains and sent into the midst of murderers and thieves, while the venal instigator, whose hands were stained with the blood of numerous victims, escaped unscathed, and assisted by public funds, continued his criminal activity of fanning the hatred of the populace against the Jews.