1. The Fiendish Designs of the "Black Hundred"
Soon afterwards, on August 6, 1905, the so-called "Bulyghin Constitution" was made public, providing for a truncated Imperial Duma with a system of representation based on class qualifications and limited to advisory functions but without any restrictions as far as the franchise of the Jews was concerned. "Now," wrote the Voskhod, "the Jew has the right to be a popular representative, but he has no right to reside in the place in which the Imperial Duma assembles—in the capital." Russian Jewry, with the exception of its Left wing, was on the point of starting an election campaign to send its representatives to this mutilated Duma, in the hope of attaining through it to a more perfect form of representation, when the stormy course of events brought to the fore new threatening questions. This counterfeit of a national parliament failed to satisfy the Russian democracy, and the struggle with the Government broke out anew with unprecedented energy. Stormy political meetings were held at the universities and at the other institutions of higher learning, which, by an ukase of August 27, had been granted academic self-government. The autonomous professorial councils began to admit Jewish students to the schools, without any restrictive percentage, and the wave of an agitated Jewish youth was drawn into the whirling sea of the Russian student body. A new succession of strikes followed, arranged by the students, workingmen and railroad workers. A general Russian strike was being carefully prepared as a last resort in the struggle for a democratic constitution. The army of the emancipation movement was instituting a bloodless revolution, the temporary stoppage of all railroad movements and of all other activities in the country, in the hope of forcing Tzardom to an act of self-abnegation and the proclamation of civil liberties.
The month of September and the beginning of October were spent in these feverish preparations, but at the same time, the black army of absolutism was making its own arrangements for a sanguinary counter-revolution, for regular St. Bartholomew nights, directed against the participants in the emancipation movement, and particularly against the Jews. The plans of the emancipation army were universally known, but the terrible designs of the dark forces of reaction were effectively concealed. Only when the bloody undertaking was accomplished, was it possible to uncover the threads of the criminal pogrom organization, which led from the palaces of the Tzar and the highest dignitaries of state, by way of the Police Department, to the slums of murderers and hooligans. In the disclosures made by Lvov, in November, 1905, in his memorandum to Witte, the president of the Council of Ministers, the officials in the immediate environment of Nicholas II. who had organized the October pogroms were pointed out by name. They were the "patriotic" General Bogdanovich in St. Petersburg, who acted with the blessing of Archbishop[48] Vladimir and with the assistance of the Imperial camarilla and of many governors and governors-general in the provinces. During the month of September "fighting contingents" of the Black Hundred, whose number, as Bogdanovich boasted in the highest government spheres, amounted to one hundred thousand, were organized all over Russia. In every city the parts to be enacted by the administrators, the police and the pogrom hirelings from among the local riff-raff were carefully prepared and assigned. The pogrom proclamations were printed openly; the "manufacturing" center of this propaganda literature, as was afterwards disclosed in the Imperial Duma by deputy Urussov (formerly Assistant-Minister of the Interior), was located in the printing office of the Police Department. There can be no question that the Tzar was acquainted, if not with all the details of these preparations, at least with the general plan of arranging a counter-revolution by means of carefully engineered massacres of which the Jews were to become the chief victims. Millions of rubles for the organization of the pogroms were appropriated from a secret ten-million ruble fund, the disposition of which lay entirely in the hands of the Tzar.
Such were the conditions which ushered in the month of October, 1905. The first days of the month saw the beginning of the railroad strike; by the middle of the month it had already seized the entire country, accompanied in the industrial centers by a general strike in all lines of productive endeavor. In many cities, collisions took place between the revolutionaries and the military. At first, the Government made an attempt to resort to threats, and all over Russia rang the blood-thirsty cry of the Chief of Police Trepov: "No cartridges shall be spared!" But at the last moment, autocracy recoiled before the revolutionary tempest and gave way. On October 17, an imperial manifesto was issued, solemnly promising to bestow all civil liberties upon the Russian people—inviolability of person, freedom of conscience, liberty of speech, assemblage and organization, and a legislative Duma in which the representatives of all classes of the population were to have a voice. The manifesto made no mention, however, of the equality of all citizens before the law or of the bestowal of equal rights on the various nationalities, and even in the accompanying memorandum of Premier Witte, the author of the enactment of October 17, the subject was disposed of in a few nebulous phrases.
Nevertheless, even in this hazy form, the manifesto made a tremendous impression. Everybody believed that autocratic Tzardom had been vanquished by the army of liberty and that Russia had been finally converted from a state founded on police force into a body politic based on law. But, on the day following, all these hopes were cruelly shattered. On October 18, in hundreds of cities the carefully concealed army of counter-revolutionaries, evidently obeying a prearranged signal, crawled out from beneath the ground, to indulge in an orgy of blood, lasting a full week (October 18-25), which in its horrors finds no parallel in the entire history of humanity.