The first decade of Alexander III's reign had opened with these pogroms. The second decade opened with the wholesale expulsions from Moscow. Within six months, more than ten thousand Jews were expelled from the city on the ground of illegal residence. So vast a number of Jewish families was affected and so summary was the manner of executing the decree of expulsion, that several governments, among them our own, protested to the Russian government. President Harrison, discussing this protest in his message to Congress, frankly stated that
the banishment, whether by direct decree or by not less certain indirect methods, of so large a number of men and women is not a local question. A decree to leave one country is in the nature of things an order to enter another—some other. This consideration, as well as the suggestion of humanity, furnishes ample ground for the remonstrances which we have presented to Russia.[37]
The expulsions were preceded by a year of ominous rumors of a program of new restrictions beside which the May Laws would pale into insignificance. An offer of ten million dollars for the cause of Jewish education made by Baron de Hirsch to the Russian government was refused. His scheme, however, for the organization of a mass-emigration of Jews to Argentine was sanctioned. All these facts lent strength to the feeling of the Jews that they had nothing to hope for under the existing régime. Thus closed the reign of Alexander III and a memorable chapter in Russian Jewish history.
The early years of Nicholas II were marked by a relaxation in the strict administration and interpretation of the existing restrictive laws. Hopes for the amelioration of the Jewish situation began to be entertained. These hopes were destined shortly to be shattered.
The first decade of the twentieth century opened with threatening unrest. Economic depression began and was accompanied by revolutionary attacks. For the Jews, the most alarming symptom was the rise and uninterrupted progress of a group of antisemitic agitators and Russian loyalists, who sought to counteract the revolutionary movement by denouncing the Jews as the leaders of the revolution and the enemies of the autocracy and the Orthodox religion. Thus was sown the seed of the Kishineff massacre of April, 1903, which lasted three days. Before the echoes of Kishineff had died away, the massacre at Gomel followed.
But Kishineff proved to be merely a bloody prelude. The air was surcharged with explosives. The outbreak of the Russo-Japanese war and of the first organized revolution created a dangerous combination of events for the Jews. To the discontent of the peasants, forced to go to the front in a war for which they had no enthusiasm, and sore with the reverses of the Russian army, was added the increased activity of the agitators who declared that the war with Japan had been forced upon Russia by the Jews, eager to profit through its ruin, and who called upon their followers and the peasants through propaganda and proclamations to revenge themselves upon the Jews. The government at bay, on the verge of breakdown under the revolutionary attacks, and anxious to excuse its incompetency and failure in the conduct of the war, sought a means of diverting the peasants from the uprisings against the landed proprietors spreading over the land, and, above all, of stifling the revolution, which had met with such opportune and unlooked-for success among all classes. This was a situation alive with danger for the Jews, whose proletarians in the cities had taken an active part in the revolution. The organization of Jewish massacres by responsible agents of the government became the central feature of its program of counter-revolution.[38] A veritable holocaust ensued in nearly every province of the Empire for two years, only the climaxes of which became known to the world in Zhitomir, Odessa, Bialystok, and Siedlec.
The rôle of the bureaucracy in the creation of the pogroms, especially in 1906, in which year there took place hundreds of pogroms, was made abundantly clear by the Russian press, by Prince Urussov's disclosures in the Duma, and by the report of the Duma Commission appointed to investigate the causes of the Bialystok pogrom of 1906. As announced in their official report, an investigation had shown that the relations between the Jews and the Christians of Bialystok previous to the bloodshed had been amicable, and that preparations for a pogrom had been deliberately and carefully made by agents of the bureaucracy and carried out with the aid of the local authorities.
Both periods of pogroms in these thirty years were periods of revolution. In both the government had felt the ground shaking under its feet from terroristic attacks and from peasant uprisings. In the first period Jews had taken only slight part. In the late revolution, however, the participation of the Jews of the Pale, through the Jewish labor organization, the Bund, was quite strong. The earlier pogroms gave a hint as to the policy of the new régime. The later ones occurred at the end of years of repression and persecution, and were a culminating point in the fury of the reactionary forces at their failure to stem the tide of liberalism in the struggle for parliamentary institutions and for the rights of citizens in a modern state.
The results of these thirty years of reaction remain to be considered. Though the effects of the pogroms upon the Russian Jews can hardly be overestimated, the less evident, because less spectacular, methods of restrictive law and administrative action have in the long run left a far more enduring impress.
The introduction of the May Laws at the very beginning of the eighties awakened the Jews to the realization that their future in Russia was threatened. The May Laws and the laws that were developed from them, the obstacles that were placed in the way of Jewish education and, in general, the administrative difficulties that were created, have affected every movement of their life.