It is needless to point out that had this readiness of the police and military to attend to their duty been displayed in Kishinev at the inception of the pogrom, not a single Jew would have been murdered nor a single house destroyed. As it was, the murderers and rioters were given a free hand for two days, and the result was that forty-five Jews were slain, eighty-six severely wounded or crippled, five hundred slightly wounded, apart from cases of rape, the number of which could not be determined. Fifteen hundred houses and stores were demolished and looted. The victims were mostly among the lower classes of the Jewish population, since many well-to-do Jewish families were able, by bribing the police heavily, to secure the protection of the latter and to have the rioters turned away from their houses. As against the enormous number of Jewish victims, there were only two fatalities among the intoxicated rioters. The Kishinev Jews seemed unable to resist the murderers and sell their lives dearly.
3. Echoes of the Kishinev Tragedy
A cry of horror rang throughout Russia and the more or less civilized countries of the world when the news of the Kishinev butchery became known. The entire liberal Russian press voiced its indignation against the Kishinev atrocities. The most prominent Russian writers expressed their sympathy with the victims in letters and telegrams. Leo Tolstoi voiced his sentiments in a letter which could not be published on account of the censorship.[37] The humanitarian writer Korolenko portrayed the horrors of Kishinev in a heart-rending story under the title "House No. 13," in which, on the basis of personal observation, he pictured how the Jewish residents of one house were tortured to death by the rioters. The story was circulated in an illegal edition, its publication having been strictly forbidden by the censor. But in Russia itself, the cry was stifled by the heavy hand of Plehve's censorship, and wherever a fraction of the terrible truth managed to slip through the barriers of the censor, Plehve sent out warnings to the papers threatening to discontinue their publication for the "pursuit of an injurious policy." Such a fate actually overtook the Russian-Jewish Voskhod, in St. Petersburg, the legal journal Pravo ("The Law"), and others. The entire Russian press was forced by the Government to publish the falsified version embodied in its official reports, in which the organized massacre was toned down to a casual brawl, and the inactivity of the troops was explained either by the inadequacy of their numbers—despite the fact that several battalions were stationed in the city—or by the incapacity of the police, while the dead and wounded were referred to in a vague manner so as to suggest that the victims of the "brawl" were to be found on both sides.
But the revelations in the foreign press were of a nature to stagger all Europe and America. The correspondent of the London Times published the text of a secret letter addressed by Plehve to the governor of Bessarabia, in which, two weeks before the pogrom, the latter official was told that, in the case of anti-Jewish "disorders," "no recourse shall be taken to armed interference with the urban population, so as not to arouse hostility to the Government in a population which has not yet been affected by the revolutionary propaganda." The authenticity of this letter is not entirely beyond suspicion. But there can be no doubt that instructions to that effect, rather by word of mouth than in writing, probably through the secret agent Levendahl, had been actually transmitted to the authorities in Kishinev.
From the fact that on the second day of the pogrom the governor was still waiting for instructions from St. Petersburg permitting him to discontinue the massacre it is evident that he must have received previous orders to allow it to proceed up to a certain point. The horrors of the Armenian massacres in Turkey, against which even Russian diplomacy had protested more than once, faded into insignificance before the wholesale butchery at Kishinev. Europe and America were deeply agitated. The Jews outside of Russia collected large funds for their unhappy Russian brethren, but their efforts exhausted themselves in sympathy and philanthropy.
The effect of the catastrophe upon Russian Jewry was more lasting. A mixed feeling of wrath and shame seized the Jewish public—wrath against the organizers and abetters of the terrible crime, and shame for the tortured and degraded brethren who, not having a chance to save their lives, had failed to save their honor by offering stout resistance to these beasts in human shape, who were sure of immunity. The poet Frug poured forth his sentiments in a Yiddish poem, voicing his sorrow at the physical helplessness of his nation and confining himself to an appeal to the kind Jewish heart:
Too keen and grievous is our pain, too weak our hand the blow to parry.
Come on, then, tender Jewish heart, and love and comfort to us carry!
Brothers, sisters, pray, have pity; dire and dreadful is our need:
Shrouds we want the dead to bury, and bread that the living we may feed.[38]