Among all civilized nations hospitals are respected, even in war times. But the gendarmes stood before the Bielostok hospital and deliberately poured volley after volley into it, with no other object, apparently, than to throw the patients into a panic. Some of them threw themselves under the beds, others climbed up the chimneys. One man remained three days in a chimney, and then dropped down through the exhaustion of hunger.
When the firing upon the hospital ceased, a gendarme entered the hospital and asked if one of the doctors would come into the street to attend to some wounded men. A feldsher (a doctor’s assistant) gathered some bandages and antiseptics together and hastened out of the hospital-yard. As he passed through the gateway a gendarme shot him. He lay dead where he fell until night.
A young boy of twelve whose face had been slashed with a sword told me how the police had carried him to the local gendarmerie, after he had been cut down with the saber stroke. He recovered consciousness shortly and not being seriously hurt was perfectly able to walk home. Instead of permitting this the gendarmes threw him into a cart and then piled a number of corpses above him, and sent him out to where the dead were being buried. The grave-diggers were compassionate and allowed him to escape.
The story of Bielostok is the story of nearly every massacre of recent years in Russia that has been inaugurated by local authorities, with or without the connivance of higher authorities in St. Petersburg.
From Bielostok I ran over to Vilna, the old Lithuanian capital, picturesquely situated on the river Vilia. Immediately after the Bielostok pogrom the Vilna police circulated the rumor that on Sunday there would be a massacre of the Jews in Vilna. On Sunday the rumor was corrected. The massacre was set for Tuesday. On Tuesday it was put off till Thursday and for two weeks and a half the Jews of Vilna lived in a state of perpetual panic. Those who could fled the city, but the most were imprisoned there through their poverty.
Governmental terrorism in one form or another is employed by Russia to terrify the people of a given locality into submitting to certain impositions, or to quiet seditious gossip, or to coerce the people into voting for a Duma deputy whom they disapprove of, but who is the representative of the government.
In Russia no official of the government can be prosecuted at law without the approval of his official superiors. The prosecution of an official is popularly supposed to threaten the prestige of the Emperor, consequently any prosecution is very rare. The right of the Emperor to promulgate “exceptional laws,” which take precedence over all other laws in the empire, reduces to an absurdity every form of law-making in Russia. The right of the Emperor to place a certain official in supreme command of a given locality, removing him for the time without the pale of all civil and military authority, makes possible the greatest abuses which culminate from time to time in organized massacres. These massacres are sometimes arranged by the police and the gendarmes, as at Bielostok; sometimes by a single official, sometimes by the organization of the Black Hundred, as at Odessa. There are famous instances when massacres have been secretly planned by local authorities with the knowledge and consent of St. Petersburg. General Trepoff’s attitude of tacit consent and approval is well known.
The complicity of the Russian government in massacres and other barbarities that are periodically visited upon the Russian people is familiar to most people in Europe, but America seems very reluctant to accept the facts. We are loath to believe that a government, having dealings with civilized nations, does condone the monstrous crimes which incontrovertibly do belong to Russia.
A volume of evidence on this issue could easily be prepared. My present task is to tell of the things I saw with my own eyes, and the things I learned from unimpeachable sources. Recognizing, however, the seriousness of these charges, I feel justified in appending enough citations to official and authoritative reports to adequately support my most condemnatory statements.[13]
Senator Turau, an official investigator for the government, in reporting upon one of the Kieff pogroms stated that for purposes of defense the troops stationed in the city had been assigned to the four quarters of the town.