Accordingly, the imperial manifesto [1] promulgated on April 29, 1881, proclaimed to the people that "the Voice of God hath commanded us to take up vigorously the reins of government, inspiring us with the belief in the strength and truth of autocratic power, which we are called upon to establish and safeguard." The manifesto "calls upon all faithful subjects to eradicate the hideous sedition and to establish faith and morality." The methods whereby faith and morality were to be established were soon made known, in the "Police Constitution" which was bestowed upon Russia in August, 1881, under the name of "The Statute concerning Enforced Public Safety."
[Footnote 1: A manifesto is a pronouncement issued by the Tzar on solemn occasions, such as accession to the throne, events in the imperial family, declaration of war, conclusion of peace, etc., accompanied, as a rule, by acts of grace, such as conferring privileges, granting pardons, and so on. Compare also above, p. 115.]
This statute confers upon the Russian satraps of the capitals (St. Petersburg and Moscow) and of many provincial centers—the governors-general and the governors—the power of issuing special enactments and thereby setting aside the normal laws as well as of placing under arrest and deporting to Siberia, without the due process of law, all citizens suspected of "political unsafety." This travesty of a habeas corpus Act, insuring the inviolability of police and gendarmerie, and practically involving the suspension of the current legislation in a large part of the monarchy, has ever since been annually renewed by special imperial enactments, and has remained in force until our own days. The genuine "Police Constitution" of 1881 has survived the civil sham Constitution of 1905, figuring as a symbol of legalized lawlessness.
2. THE INITIATION OF THE POGROM POLICY
The catastrophe of March 1 had the natural effect of pushing not only the Government but also a large part of the Russian people, who had been scared by the spectre of anarchy, in the direction of reactionary politics. This retrograde tendency was bound to affect the Jewish question. The bacillus of Judaeophobia [1] became astir in the politically immature minds which had been unhinged by the acts of terrorism. The influential press organs, which maintained more or less close relations with the leading Government spheres, adopted more and more a hostile attitude towards the Jews. The metropolitan newspaper Novoye Vremya ("The New Time") [2] which at that time embarked upon its infamous career as the semi-official organ of the Russian reaction, and a number of provincial newspapers subsidized by the Government suddenly began to speak of the Jews in a tone which suggested that they were in the possession of some terrible secret.
[Footnote 1: The term used in Russia for anti-Semitism.]
[Footnote 2: See above, p. 205.]
Almost on the day following the attempt on the life of the Tzar, the papers of this ilk began to insinuate that the Jews had a hand in it, and shortly thereafter the South-Russian press published alarming rumors about proposed organized attacks upon the Jews of that region. These rumors were based on facts. A sinister agitation was rife among the lowest elements of the Russian population, while invisible hands from above seemed to push it on toward the commission of a gigantic crime. In the same month of March, mysterious emissaries from St. Petersburg made their appearance in the large cities of South Russia, such as Yelisavetgrad (Elizabethgrad), Kiev, and Odessa, and entered into secret negotiations with the highest police officials concerning a possible "outburst of popular indignation against the Jews" which they expected to take place as part of the economic conflict, intimating the undesirability of obstructing the will of the Russian populace by police force. Figures of Great-Russian tradesmen and laborers, or Katzaps, as the Great Russians are designated in the Little-Russian South, began to make their appearance in the railroad cars and at the railroad stations, and spoke to the common people of the summary punishment soon to be inflicted upon the Jews or read to them anti-Semitic newspaper articles. They further assured them that an imperial ukase had been issued, calling upon the Christians to attack the Jews during the days of the approaching Greek-Orthodox Easter.
Although many years have passed since these events, it has not yet been possible to determine the particular agency which carried on this pogrom agitation among the Russian masses. Nor has it been possible to find out to what extent the secret society of high officials, which had been formed in March, 1881, under the name of "The Sacred League," with the object of defending the person of the Tzar and engaging in a terroristic struggle with the "enemies of the public order," [1] was implicated in the movement. But the fact itself that, the pogroms were carefully prepared and engineered is beyond doubt: it may be inferred from the circumstance that they broke out almost simultaneously in many places of the Russian South, and that everywhere they followed the same routine, characterized by the well-organized "activity" of the mob and the deliberate inactivity of the authorities.
[Footnote 1: The League existed until the autumn of 1882. Among its members were Pobyedonostzev and the anti-Jewish Minister Ignatyev.]