Two days later they buried freedom, and whilst I was there the Government was still busy stamping down the bloody earth to lay her ghost. There was no longer any talk of manifesto or concession. Every promise had been falsified, and every hope deceived. No meetings were allowed, except to legal Hooligans. No papers could appear, except the Government organ of violence. Even the paper of the Constitutional Democrats had been suddenly suppressed. The friends of liberty choked the prisons, and as I went down the streets I saw their white faces peering between the bars. All was still, except when the stagnation of tyranny was broken by the murder of some police-officer conspicuous for brutality, or by a bomb such as had just fallen into the Café Liebmann on the central square by the cathedral. No schools had been open since October, and there seemed no prospect of the University ever opening again.
Trepoff began it when he sent an order from St. Petersburg urging the Governor-General Neidhart to allow a demonstration of the loyalist Black Hundred on November 1st. Infuriated by religious conviction and the lust for stolen goods, the Black Hundred exhibited an enthusiastic loyalty, unchecked by the police, who directed their movements, or by the troops, who were confined to barracks. For three days the city lay at the mercy of law and order, and in the cemetery may be seen the oblong of loose earth where 350 bodies were heaped into a common grave. The Government’s victory was complete and so far-reaching that memorials of it might still be seen on every side. Even in the middle of the town, shops that had been the richest had the shutters up in January, their windows were broken to pieces, their stores all gone. And in the northern and north-west districts, where the Jews and some work-people live, whole rows of houses stood desolate. The marks of bullets were thick upon the walls. The empty sockets of the windows were roughly boarded over. The roofs had been broken in or sometimes burnt away, and even on the main streets people pointed out the windows, three storeys high, from which babies, girls, and women had been pitched sheer upon the stony pavement below.
THE JEWS’ GRAVE AT ODESSA.
AFTER THE MASSACRE.
It was in the miserable lanes of this north-west district that the plunder and slaughtering began—a district so wretched that my top-boots kept sticking in the deep slough of the streets, and the worst Jewish slum off Commercial Road would have seemed in comparison a County Council paradise. But passing beyond this quarter, I crossed a deep watercourse, and came out upon the kind of land which serves for country at the backdoor of Odessa. It is part of the wild and almost uninhabited steppe which stretches for mile on mile round the basin of the Dniester and far away into Bessarabia—an uninterrupted, water-worn plain, like the Orange River veldt, but streaked at that time with melting snow. On the edge of this steppe stands a semi-detached town or large village, called Slobodka Romanovka, conspicuous for its madhouse and its hospital. Providence itself must have ordained the site of these buildings, for nowhere else upon earth’s surface could they have been more wanted. And, indeed, it was the Chosen People of Providence who wanted them most, for none of the rabid Christians who there hunted them down were afterwards confined in the asylum for mania.
The village numbered about 26,000 souls, and there was hardly a house which did not still show the marks of wrecking and murder. Clubs were the weapons chiefly used by the champions of Christ and the Tsar—such clubs as the Turks used in Constantinople when they brained the Armenians in the name of the Prophet and the Sultan. But long butcher knives were found even more convenient for killing children, and when there was the least show of resistance, nothing could be more serviceable than a revolver at five yards’ range. In that three days’ massacre nearly all who suffered were Jews, and out of a population of about 600,000 in Odessa, the Jews are estimated at a little under or a little over 300,000, so that the game for the Christian sportsmen lay thick upon the ground.
The Jews of Odessa are said by their Christian neighbours—even by such as restrained themselves from putting them to death—to represent a particularly unpleasant type. They are accused of peculiar selfishness, greediness, and indifference to suffering, even to their own. I cannot say for certain whether that is so. I only know that they have a particularly unpleasant time, and, whether indifferent to their own sufferings or not, they are an amazing people. Their Christian neighbours, as in Kieff and all centres of Jewish persecution, chalk a conspicuous cross on their shutters in dangerous times, or stick a sixpenny saint’s portrait over the door. Most people also, as I noticed in Moscow, wear big crosses hidden round their necks, so that, when the supporters of the Government are out cutting throats, they may have some chance of salvation. No Jew would do any such thing—not for dear life itself would he do it. Christians say he could not conceal himself, even if he wished—his look, his dwelling, his passport, the police, all would betray him. And no doubt that is true, though, if I were a Jew, I would cover my house with crosses from ground to roof in the hope of saving any one I cared for from being flung out of my top window. But, even if such hope were vain, that is no reason why a Jew should cover his outside shutters and the lintel of his door with Hebrew inscriptions or Hebrew information about his Kosher goods and the Shomer who is in attendance. Yet on ruin after ruin I saw these inscriptions written; and, what is more remarkable, I saw the surviving owners repainting these inscriptions as they patched up the wreckage of their homes.
They are not, perhaps, exactly the race I should call chosen, but certainly they are a peculiar people. I saw, for instance, one aged type of wretched Israel who had been counted a prosperous man, but in the massacre had lost wife, family, ducats, and all. When his seed was buried and the days of the mourning passed, he borrowed a few cigarettes, and sat down on the pavement outside the wilderness of his habitation. Next day he had more cigarettes to sell. Next week he had a stall, and when I saw him he was hoping to open a tobacconist shop where before he sold secondhand clothes and saw his family murdered. It seems impossible that all the Christians in Russia, backed as they are by the open support of the army, police, and Church, can ever succeed in exterminating such a race.