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.