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 Leo Tolstoi voiced his sentiments in a letter which could not be published on account of the censorship.[37] The humanitarian writer Korolenko portrayed the horrors of Kishinev in a heart-rending story under the title "House No. 13,"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.