He fought desperately, cursing the authorities and calling to the mob to turn upon the soldiers, but he was overpowered and carried away half dead. When his identity was discovered at Police Headquarters, it caused a panic among the officials of the place. He was reverently placed in a carriage and taken to the Palace.
The Defence Guard gave the rioters fight in two places, and a desperate encounter it was, but it was not to last long. Troops fell upon them, beat them with the butts of their rifles and hurled execrations at them for violating the police ordinance. Every Jew who was armed and every Jew who looked educated, Elkin among them, was arrested. The others were driven indoors. Vladimir was brought to police headquarters unconscious, with blood gushing from his head.
When the first stack of bedding was pitched out on the sidewalk at Nicholas Street, from a residence over a tobacco shop, a man with watery eyes and a beautiful Great-Russian beard, one of the leaders, selected a big, plump, tempting feather-bed, and opened his pocket-knife with dignified deliberation. A crowd of about one thousand stood about in breathless silence, as though attending a religious ceremony of great solemnity. In order to prolong the spell, the man with the golden beard played with the feather-bed awhile, kneading, patting, punching it, brandishing his knife over it, like a barbaric high priest performing some mystic rite over a captive about to be sacrificed. Then, grasping it with sudden ferocity, his teeth a-glitter amid his enormous whiskers, his watery eyes flashing murder, he cut a quick, long gash, rent the pillow-case apart and hurled its snow-white entrails to the breeze.
“Hurrah! Hurrah!” the mob yelled savagely, as the breeze seized the down and flung it in a thousand directions. “Hurrah! Hurrah!”
The other feather-beds and pillows were ripped up, disemboweled and emptied by some of the other rioters. The summer-baked street seemed to be in the grasp of a snow-storm.
It is one of the characteristics of the housewife of the Ghetto that she will put up with a poor meal rather than with an uncomfortable bed. The destruction of pillows and featherbeds is therefore the most typical scene of anti-Semitic riots in Russia. An Anglo-Saxon crowd viewing a prize-fight is not thrilled more deeply at sight of “first-blood” than were the rioters of Miroslav at sight of the first cloud of Jewish down. Now the outbreak was in full swing. Some of the men came out in fashionable clothes, their pockets bulging with plunder. The same work of devastation and pillage was going on in many places at once. About ten thousand raiders, most of them covered with down, were skirmishing about in groups of fifty to one hundred, preceded by one or two leaders and accompanied, in some cases, with a band of toy-drums and whistles. They went from street to street reconnoitering for houses or shops that had not yet been visited. Now it looked like a real anti-Jewish riot. Hurrah! Hurrah!
After the pillows came the furniture and other household goods, every bit of it either shivered to flinders or carried off. While some were busy smashing things or throwing them out of the windows, others were stripping off their own clothes and arraying themselves in the best coats, trousers, dresses, bonnets, the raided houses contained. A frowzy drunken scrub-woman emerged in a gorgeous ball dress, a costly fur cap on her head, with two gold watches dangling from her neck. One of these gangs was led by a man who wore a woman’s jacket of brown plush and a high hat. Another leader was decked out in a fashionable summer suit and a new straw hat, but his feet were bare and encrusted with dirt. A third gang was preceded by a flag consisting of the torn skirt of an outraged Jewish woman, the flag-bearer celebrating the exploit as he marched along.
Following the looters were dense crowds of spectators, many of them well dressed and with the stamp of education and refinement on their faces. These included some well known families, members of the aristocracy, who watched the scenes of the day from their fashionable equipages. Officials, merchants, people of the middle class were out in their best clothes. Miroslav made a great gala day of it. The aristocracy was in a complacent, race-track mood. Occupants of carriages were exchanging greetings and pleasantries. Cavaliers were interpreting to their ladies the bedlam of sound, odour and colour. The appearance of a drunken jade in a ball dress, strutting with her arms akimbo, in besotted imitation of a lady, brought forth bursts of facetious applause. The well-dressed spectators tried to steer clear of down and feathers, but that was almost impossible. Many streets were so thickly covered with it that it deadened the sound of traffic. But then to catch some of the Jewish down on one’s dress or bonnet or coat was part of the carnival. Where the street was strewn with jewelry, silverware or knicknacks, costly carpets, fabrics, many a noblewoman scanned the ground with the haze of temptation in her eye. “Isn’t that cameo perfectly lovely!” And in many, many instances the cameo, or the silver tray, or the piece of tapestry found its way into the lady’s carriage. This was during the early stage of the riot. Later on, when all restraint had been cast off, phaetons with crests on their sides were filled with plunder. The lame princess took home one carriage-load and hurried back for more. At every turn one saw a cavalier offering his lady some piece of finery as he might a rose or a carnation, and in most cases it was accepted, on the cogent ground that if left on the pavement it would be destroyed. On the other hand many of the rioters themselves disdained to appropriate anything that was not theirs. Very often when a Jew offered his assailants all the money he had about him as a ransom the paper money was torn to pieces and silver or coppers was flung out into the street, whereupon the crowd outside would fall over each other in a wild scramble for shreds of the paper or the metal. In one place a man offered the mob all he had in the world as a ransom for his daughter’s honour, but his money was destroyed, his daughter assaulted and he himself mortally wounded. When a peasant woman was seen carrying an armful of linen and ribbons out of a small shop, she was stopped by one of the rioters.
“Drop that, you old hag,” he shouted. “We are no robbers, are we?” He added a torrent of unprintable Russian and kicked the woman into a swamp of syrup, whisky and flour. A short distance from this spot other peasant women were stuffing their sacks lustily, whereupon some of them preferred loud linen to black silk and cheap spoons to silver ones. In several places large sums of money were plundered. As the bank and check system was (and still is) in its very infancy in Miroslav, this meant in most cases that people of means were literally reduced to beggary. One family was saved from personal violence as well as from the loss of its fortune by an iron safe which the looters spent the whole day in vainly trying to open. But then, while they were at work on the safe, the mother of the family went insane with fright.
Marching side by side with the leaders of the various bands were the competitors of Jewish tradesmen or mechanics who acted as guides, each pointing out the stores or workshops of his rivals. Thus Rasgadayeff, after instructing his wife and servants to see to it that no harm was done to his tenants, the Vigdoroffs, had gone to the scene of the outbreak, where he directed a crowd of rowdies to the store of his most formidable business opponent. The place was raided. A wealth of costly furs was cut to pieces and flung into the street, where cans of kerosene and pails of tar were emptied over the pile, while more than half as much again was carried off intact.