The truth stands out in bold relief even in this verdict, and it does so against the wish of its authors. If, as is implied in this verdict, both the Jews and Christians are guilty of murder, violence, and plunder to a minimum degree only—for how could otherwise the extraordinary leniency of the verdict be justified?—then everybody is bound to ask himself the question: Who then is the real author of all the horrors that were perpetrated at Homel? Those who have followed the course of the judicial investigation with some degree of attention can only have one answer: Besides the Christians and the Jews, there is still a third culprit, the politically rotten officialdom. This culprit did not stand at the prisoners' bar, but the verdict is against him.... The best elements of the Russian public, and the Jews in particular, have been thirsting for justice and for the disclosure of the truth, but it was just that third accomplice who was afraid of justice and has managed to cover it up by a general amnesty.
Such was the end of the two ill-fated years of Russian-Jewish history (1903-1904)—years, marked by the internal war against the Jews and by the external war against Japan, filled with the victories of the reaction at Kishinev and Homel and the defeats of the Russian arms at Port Arthur, Liao-Yang, and Mukden. This ghastly interval of reactionary terrorism, which began to subside only towards the end of 1904, drove from Russia to America more than 125,000 Jewish emigrants who fled for their very lives from the dominions of the Tzar.
However, at the end of the long nightmare, the political horizon began to clear up. The tide of the liberty movement surged forward again and it looked as if the Russian people, and with it tormented Russian Jewry, would soon behold the new dawn. Yet the six million Jews of Russia were destined to pass through two more stormy years, standing between the firing lines of autocratic despotism and the revolutionary movement, and suffering the excruciating agonies of suspense, while hovering between degradation and emancipation.
FOOTNOTES:
[40] One of the instigators, Pisarevski, a notary public, had blown out his brains before the beginning of the trial. Other instigators from among the Kishinev intelligenzia appeared merely as witnesses.
[41] The speech of Karabchevski justifying his withdrawal was particularly powerful. He openly declared that the pogrom was only "the fulfilment of a criminal order given from above." "The whole of Kishinev," he said, "was converted during the excesses into an immense circus of antiquity, where, before the eyes of curious spectators from among the administration and the army, before a festively attired crowd, a terrible drama was enacted in the depth of the arena. From the one side defenceless victims were driven upon the arena, and from the other maddened beasts were set at them, until the signal to stop was given, and the frightful spectacle was ended at once."
[42] About two months before the war, the Russian viceroy of the Far East had prohibited the Jews from residing in Port Arthur and upon the Kuantung Peninsula, whence the Russians were expelled by the Japanese a year later.
[43] Out of the thirty physicians who were mobilized in Kiev twenty-six were Jews. In Odessa, the Jews furnished twenty-one physicians out of thirty.