On the morning of July 15, 1904, the square before the Warsaw depôt in St. Petersburg presented a terrible sight. Upon the pavement lay the blood-stained body of Plehve, who had been smitten by the bomb of the Russian terrorist Sazonov while on his way to Peterhof where he was to report to the Tzar. This meant that the revolution had again raised its head. After two years of frenzied police terrorism, and in spite of all attempts to divert the attention of the public from the necessity of reforms, first by pogroms and then by the war against Japan—Plehve had insisted upon the declaration of war, hoping to drown the "seditious" movement in chauvinism—the revolutionary spectre was once more haunting the country. The martyrs of the autocratic inquisition perceived the "finger of God" in the calamities caused by the war and in the miserable end of Plehve. In February, 1904, the Russian censor confiscated an issue of the Voskhod in which a young Jewish sibyl, in a poem entitled "To Haman," referring to the biblical Mene, Mene, Tekel u-Farsin, predicted a shameful death for the new Haman who was easily identified as the hero of Kishinev. One could feel in the air the coming of a cleansing tempest. Even the reactionary Government was taken aback by the approaching storm. It did not dare to answer the terrorism of the revolution with police terrorism. On the contrary, it made an attempt to moderate the régime of serfdom.
On August 11, on the occasion of the birth of the heir-apparent Alexis, an imperial manifesto was issued, granting "favors" and "privileges" to the population, the most important of which consisted in the abrogation of corporal punishment for peasants and soldiers. On the same day, a ukase was promulgated in which the Tzar "thought it just to introduce, pending the general revision of the legislation affecting the Jews, several amendments in the enactments concerning their rights of residence at present in force." The amendments were trifling: the Jews with a higher education were permitted to live in the villages and acquire real property there, as well as to carry on business everywhere. Those who had participated in the Japanese war, and had distinguished themselves or had conducted themselves irreproachably were to be accorded the right of universal domicile. The wives and under-aged children of the Jews with a higher education were granted the right of residence even after the death of their husbands and fathers. These rights were the only ones which the Government thought it "just" to confer upon the Jews, who had sent thirty thousand people into the active army to fight on the fields of Manchuria. The Jewish public received this niggardly gift with chilly indifference, and turned its gaze to wider horizons which were then opening up before Russia. The country was on the eve of a "political spring."
On August 26 the post of Minister of the Interior was entrusted to Svyatopolk-Mirski, who in his previous capacity of governor-general of Vilna had displayed comparative administrative leniency. The new leader of internal Russian politics promised that he would strive for the restoration of "confidence" between the Government and the people by adjusting his actions to the demands of "true progress." The Jewish deputation which waited upon him at Vilna and the representatives of the foreign press were told that as far as the Jewish question was concerned, he would be guided by justice and "kindness." Unfortunately, at the very beginning he showed himself powerless to stem the new tide of pogroms. At the end of August, the Russian South was the scene of several "regular" pogroms, beginning with a quarrel in a Jewish store and ending with the demolition of Jewish stores and houses—as was the case in the town of Smyela, in the government of Kiev, on August 22, or in the city of Rovno, in Volhynia, where a similar attempt was made on the same day. Soon these "regular" riots gave way to a new variety of pogroms, which were distinguished by a peculiar coloring and might be termed "mobilization pogroms." The mobilized Russian reserve troops, wrought up over their impending departure to the fields of death in Manchuria where the Russian army suffered defeat after defeat, directed their protest along the line of least resistance—against the Jews. The soldiers, fortifying themselves with goodly doses of alcohol, began their "gallant exploits," and, accompanied by the street mobs, engaged in the task of devastating Jewish homes, maltreating their inmates, and looting their property. A sanguinary pogrom took place in Alexandria, in the government of Kherson, on September 6 and 7. On the sacred day of Yom Kippur a horde of intoxicated assassins invaded the synagogue which was crowded with worshippers, and butchered there twenty people in a most barbarous fashion. Among the severely wounded, who soon afterwards died from the wounds, were several gymnazium and university students. The police made no attempt to stop the killing and looting, and only on the second day, when the excesses were renewed, the Cossacks were summoned from an adjacent town, and succeeded in restoring order.
A month later, the mobilized Russian reservists began to perpetrate a series of pogroms in the North, in the region of White Russia. In the city of Moghilev the lawlessness of the soldiers and the local hooligans assumed appalling dimensions (October 10). The poorest quarters of the town suffered most. Among the victims of the riots were also the families of Jewish reservists who had gone to war. From the capital of the government the pogrom epidemic spread all over the region. Everywhere the intoxicated "crusaders," prior to their departure for Manchuria, engaged in destruction, looting, and incendiarism. In some places, as was the case in the government of Vitebsk, the rioters acted with perfect religious toleration, and even attacked the police, although the center of the "stage" was still occupied by the Jews.
The Government was manifestly unwilling to adopt energetic measures against the "defenders of the Fatherland" for fear of irritating them still further and spoiling the progress of mobilization. It was not until the end of October that the mobilization pogroms died out.
5. The Homel Pogrom Before the Russian Courts
In the same month of October, 1904, the case of the Homel pogrom of the previous year came up before the Court of Appeals of the Government of Kiev, which held its sessions at Homel. The department of justice had taken a whole year to prepare the evidence, prompted by the desire not so much to investigate the case as to entangle it and present it in a perverted political interpretation. The investigation which had started in the lifetime of Plehve and proceeded under the pressure of the anti-Semitic reactionary, Minister of Justice Muravyov, resulted in a bill of indictment which was a flagrant example of deliberate misrepresentation. The whole affair was pictured as an anti-Russian pogrom which had been perpetrated by the Jews. According to this version, the Jews of Homel, wishing to avenge the Kishinev massacre, had taken up arms and attacked the Christian population on August 29, thereby calling forth a counter-pogrom on the part of the Russian workingmen on September 1, when again the armed Jewish self-defence had taken an aggressive attitude and thereby forced the soldiers to shoot at them. Sixty people were indicted on this charge, among them thirty-six Jews, representing the part of the population which had been the victims of the pogrom. The Jews who had dared to defend themselves stood at the prisoners' bar side by side with their assailants. Yielding to the pressure of public opinion, the Government decided to have the Homel case tried in open court, but the president of the tribunal was instructed to eliminate from the judicial proceedings all political revelations which might embarrass the Government. The élite of the legal profession, both among Jews and non-Jews (Vinaver, Sliosberg, Kalmanovich, Ratner, Sokolov, Kupernik, Zarudny, and others), assembled at Homel to plead the cause of the indicted Jews and to defend the action for damages brought by the Jewish pogrom victims. The trial was drawn out for nearly three months, reducing itself to a duel between the counsel who endeavored to bring out the facts, and the bench which was anxious to suppress them. The depositions of the witnesses and the cross-examinations of the Jewish lawyers succeeded in demolishing the entire structure of the indictment, but when the case reached the stage which was bound to lead to the detection of the real authors of the pogrom and lay bare the conduct of the authorities, the president stopped the counsel despotically, denying them the floor. The gross partiality manifested by the president of the court had the effect that the counsel for the defence lost their patience, and on December 21, after a violent scene, refused to participate in the trial and demonstratively left the court-room.
This action aroused public opinion throughout Russia to an extraordinary degree; it caused a storm of indignation against this official miscarriage of justice, and the fearless defenders received innumerable expressions of sympathy. The indicted Jews, too, joined in the noble demonstration of their lawyers, which was in itself an eloquent plea for a righteous cause. The trial terminated in January, 1905, and ended in the acquittal of half of the accused Jews and Christians and a verdict of guilty against the other half from among both groups. The guilty were sentenced to comparatively light penalties—to imprisonment for brief terms—and, in addition, the court decided to petition the Tzar for a mitigation even of these penalties.
This verdict displayed the Jesuitic character of Russian politics. The reprobate murderers and plunderers from among the Russian group were either acquitted altogether, or were sentenced to trifling penalties and placed on the same level of culpability with the members of the Jewish self-defence whose only crime was that they had stood up for their life, honor, and property. The Russian law journal Pravo ("The Law"), the organ of the progressive Russian intelligenzia, published on this occasion a strong article which concluded with the following words: