Two days later, the governor of Moghilev came to Homel, and, having summoned the Jews to the Town Council, treated them to the following harangue:
I am sorry for the unhappy victims, but how could such bitterness have arisen? Religious toleration in Russia is complete. The causes of the latest events lie deeper. The Jews have now become the leaders and instigators in all movements directed against the Government. This entire "Bund" and the Social-Democrats—they are all Jews. You are yourselves to blame for all that has happened. You do not educate your children properly. You have no influence over them. But at least you can surrender them, pointing them out to the Government, whereas you conceal them. You propagate disobedience and opposition to the Government among an uncivilized population. But the Russian populace does not care for it and turns against you.
It would seem as if Plehve himself had spoken through the mouth of the governor. The Russian functionary expressed with naïve and clumsy frankness the hidden thought of the Chief of the Political Inquisition—the idea of punishing the fathers for the revolutionary leanings of their children, who were to be surrendered to the police, and of discrediting the entire Russian liberty movement as a "Jewish cause." In a Government communication which appeared after the pogrom the events at Homel were reported in such a way as to suggest that they were brought about by an attack of the Jews upon Christian residents and upon the troops, in consequence of which the latter had been forced to fire in "self-defence." The final deduction was formulated thus: "The cause of the disorders lies in the extremely hostile and defiant attitude of the local Jews toward the Christians." Thus were the actual facts distorted in an official document, and the tortured were put forward as the torturers.
The Homel pogrom did not attain to the dimensions of the Kishinev massacre, nor was it as painful to the moral consciousness of the Jews. For in Homel the Jews did not allow themselves to be beaten and slaughtered like sheep, but put up a valiant defence. Had the troops not turned against the self-defence, the pogrom would not have taken place, and the cowardly rabble would have taken to flight before the gallant defenders of their national honor. Already in the spring, Plehve had foreseen that the Jews would attempt to organize a self-defence of their own, and he had in his previously mentioned circular declared in advance that this most fundamental right of human beings to defend their lives was "inadmissible." Accordingly, several Jewish heroes paid with their lives for having violated this ministerial circular. Their death was the foreboding of a new Jewish martyrdom. All this had the natural effect of enormously intensifying the revolutionary sentiments of the Jewish youth and of inspiring them with hatred towards a régime which permitted some of its citizens to commit murder and prohibited others to defend their lives.
2. The Kishinev Massacre at the Bar of Russian Justice
In the fall of 1903 the judicial investigation in connection with the spring pogrom in Kishinev was nearing its end. The investigation was conducted with a view to obliterating the traces of the deliberate organization of the pogrom. The representatives of Government authority and of the better classes whose complicity in the Kishinev massacre had been clearly established were carefully eliminated from the trial, and only the hired assassins and plunderers from among the lower classes, numbering about four hundred men, were brought to justice. Prompted by fear lest the terrible truth might leak out in the court, the Ministry of Justice ordered the case to be tried behind closed doors. By this act, the blood-stained Russian Government refused in advance to rehabilitate itself before the civilized world, which looked upon it as the instigator of the catastrophe.
In the court proceedings, the echo of which penetrated beyond the walls of the closed court-room, the counsel for the defence from among the best representatives of the Russian bar (Karabchevski, Sokolov, and others, who were Christians, and the Jews Gruzenberg, Kalmanovich, and others) succeeded in proving that the prisoners at the bar were only blind tools in the commission of the crime, whereas the organizers of the butchery and the ringleaders of the mob were escaping justice.[40] They demanded that the case be probed to the bottom. The court refused their demand, whereupon the lawyers, having stated their reasons, withdrew from the court-room one after the other.[41] The only advocates left were the anti-Semite Shmakov and other whole-hearted defenders of the Kishinev massacre, who regarded the latter as a manifestation of the honor and conscience of the Russian people. In the end, the court sentenced a score of murderers and rioters of the first group to hard labor or penal service, dismissing at the same time the civil actions for damages presented by the Jews.
Six months later the Kishinev case came up before the Senate, the Jews appearing as complainants against Governor von Raaben (who had been dismissed after the pogrom), Deputy-Governor Ustrugov, and the Kishinev Chief of Police, upon whom they fastened the responsibility. The bureaucratic defendants cynically declared "that the losses suffered by the Jews have been covered many times over by contributions from Russia, Western Europe, and America." All the eloquence of the well-known lawyer Vinaver and of his associates failed to convince the judges of the Senate, and the petition for damages was dismissed. The Government did not wish to create a precedent for compensating pogrom victims out of public funds, for "this might place the representatives of the administration in an impossible position," as was stated with naïve frankness by von Raaben, since it might become necessary to increase the imperial budget by several million rubles a year.
In the midst of these ghastly proceedings Plehve conceived the plan of "regulating the legislation concerning the Jews." In August, 1903, he sent out a circular to the governors, calling upon them, in view of the extraordinarily complex and tangled condition of the Russian laws affecting the Jews, to point out ways and means "of bringing these legal enactments into proper order and into as harmonious a system as possible." In reply to this circular, the governor of Vilna, Pahlen, submitted an extensive memorial, in which he pointed out that all the restrictive laws within the boundaries of the Pale of Settlement ought to be repealed on account of their pernicious political influence, since they were driving the Jews into the ranks of the paupers or revolutionaries. At the same time he suggested to retain the repressive measures "against the manifestation of the injurious characteristics of Judaism on the part of certain individuals" and also to exclude the Jewish youth from the Christian schools and establish for them special elementary and intermediate schools under the supervision of Christian teachers. A few other governors, among them the new governor of Bessarabia, Urussov, also expressed themselves in favor of mitigating the repressive policy against the Jews.