He then applied the “May Laws” in all their rigour, and forced all who had not special permits to leave the town, even men who had lived there in peace for thirty years; taking proceedings against them under circumstances which led to the death or injury of their cattle and the ruin of their crops. This conduct on the part of the local head of the police excited a corresponding feeling of hostility among the local peasants. They saw the guardians of the law ill-treating those whom they were supposed to protect, and they followed the example thus set them.
Suits for reparation and damages were brought by some of the wealthier victims of this police tyranny, but no redress was obtained. Von Oglio was removed, without degradation or punishment, to another district, and no further steps were taken by the authorities.
The chief instigator of the recent massacres now appeared on the scene. Up to 1894 the only paper in the province of Bessarabia was the Bessarabsky Viestnik, a journal of a moribund existence. In this year one Pavolachi Kroushevan, of Moldavian origin, acquired the dying sheet, and amalgamated it with a new daily paper, the Bessarabetz. The Vice-Governor, Ostrogoff, was press censor, in virtue of his higher post, and he extended his patronage to Kishinev’s only daily organ in the most marked manner.
Kroushevan commenced at once a vicious anti-Semitic campaign. He singled out for special attack municipal offices in which Jews were employed as clerks and in other capacities, and demanded that the hated Hebrews should be driven out to make room for Christians. This was done. Popular feeling was worked up in this manner to such a heat that the paper became the dominating force in the public life of the city. It was the only paper read in Kishineff. Its circulation reached 20,000, and its articles against the Jews were directly addressed to the police, soldiers, workingmen, Seminarists (Kishineff possesses half-a-dozen Royal and Ecclesiastical Colleges, Gymnasiums, and High Schools), and to all the lower employés of the Governor’s, Post Office, Telegraph, and other public departments.
From fiery denunciation the Editor progressed to deliberate incitations to violence. Articles headed “Death to the Jews!”—“Crusade against the Hated Race!”—“Down with the Disseminators of Socialism!” followed each other, while Kroushevan organised a society under the patronage of his paper, in which the most rabid of his pupils in the anti-Semitic war were enrolled.
All this was ostentatiously tolerated by the present Vice-Governor, Ostrogoff.
Kroushevan got into financial difficulties a few months ago, and removed to St. Petersburg, leaving the paper in charge of the deputy-editor, but continuing himself as directing head of the staff. Its ferocious anti-Jewish spirit and propaganda were in no way abated by this arrangement.
This brings us down, in the matter of time, to a few weeks before the recent massacres.
There next happened two events that gave the Bessarabetz a match with which to explode the mine of popular fury it had been building in the popular mind for four years. One was a murder of a boy at a village south of Kishineff, called Doubossar; and the other the suicide of a girl within the city itself. These were at once seized upon by the Kroushevan organ as “proofs” that they were instances of Semitic ritual murder! They were deliberately declared to be cases of the sacrifice of Christian blood in the performance of Hebrew rites at Passover! Steps were taken at once to put the true facts before the people, in public inquests and declarations; but the match had already ignited the end of the Bessarabetz fuse, and those who were resolved to strike terror into the “Socialist Jews” of Bessarabia and Southwestern Russia paid no heed to the documents and evidence which told the truth about the Doubossar boy’s death and the girl who took poison and who passed away in the Jewish Hospital in Kishineff. The plot was ripe for execution, and the Paschal time, associated by the atrocious legend with the kidnapping and killing of Christian children, was fixed upon for action.