I felt I could never go back there again.
Near Smielo there was a village which was almost entirely inhabited by Jews.
It was from this village, one day, that two Jews came to Countess Bobrinsky and asked if they might store their furniture and their books in her stables … they would not take up much room. When Countess Bobrinsky asked them why, they said a pogrom had been arranged for the next day. Countess Bobrinsky was bewildered, and asked them what they meant, and who was going to make this pogrom. The two Jews said: They were coming from Kiev by train, and from another town. The pogrom would take place in the morning and they would go back in the evening.
When she asked: “Who are they?” she could get no answer, except that some said it was the Tsar’s orders, some that it was the Governor’s orders, but they had been sent to make a pogrom.
Countess Bobrinsky told them to go to the police, but the Jews said it could not be prevented, and that all had been arranged for the morrow. Both Count and Countess Bobrinsky then made inquiries, but all the answer that they could get was that a pogrom had been arranged for the next day. It was not the people of the place who would make it; these lived in peace with the Jews. They would come by the night train from two neighbouring towns; they would arrive in the morning; there would be a pogrom, and then they would go away, and all the next morning carts would arrive from the neighbouring villages, just as when there was a fair, to take away what was left after the pogrom. When they asked who was sending the pogrom-makers they could get no answer. Count Bobrinsky interviewed the local police sergeant, but all he did was to shrug his shoulders and wring his hands, and ask what could two policemen do against a multitude? if there was to be a pogrom, there would be a pogrom. He could do nothing; nothing could be done; nobody could do anything.
The next morning the peasant cook, a woman, came into Countess Bobrinsky’s room, and said: “There will be no pogrom after all. It has been put off.”
I stayed in Russia all that autumn and winter, and I saw the opening of the third Duma, and arrived in London in the middle of December. I was no longer correspondent in St. Petersburg, but I worked in London at journalism, and in the summer of 1908, together with Hilary Belloc, I edited and printed a newspaper, which had only one number, called The North Street Gazette. The newspaper was printed at a press which we had bought and established in my house, No. 6 North Street—a picturesque house behind the other houses in North Street, which possessed a courtyard, a fig-tree, and an underground passage leading to Westminster Abbey.
The newspaper was written entirely by Belloc, myself, and Raymond Asquith, who wrote the correspondence.
It was to be supported by subscribers. We received quite a number of subscriptions, but we never brought out a second number, and we returned the cheques to the subscribers.
The North Street Gazette had the following epigraph: “Out, out, brief scandal!” and opened with the following statement of aims and policy: