During the same time a regularly organized pogrom occurred in the southern outskirts of Russia, in the city of Kerch, in the Crimea. On July 27, a peaceful political demonstration of the kind then generally in vogue took place in that city; among the participants were also the Jewish youth. By way of protest, the city-governor and gendarmerie chief organized a "patriotic" counter-demonstration, which was held a few days later, on July 31. Carrying a banner with the portrait of the Tzar and singing the Russian national hymn, the "patriotic" hordes, with the notorious local thieves and hooligans as the predominating element, sacked Jewish houses and stores, and, in the name of patriotism, looted Jewish property—even the so-called respectable public participating in the latter act. When the armed Jewish self-defence began to oppose the rioters, they were scattered by a volley from the soldiers, ten of them being killed on the spot. The subsequent inquiry established the fact that the pogrom had been fully prepared by the police and gendarmerie authorities, which had been in telegraphic communication in regard to it with the Police Department in St. Petersburg. It was a rehearsal of the monstrous October pogroms which were to take place a few months later.
4. The Jewish Franchise
In the midst of the noise caused by the revolution on the one hand and by the pogroms on the other, the question of popular representation, promised in the ukase of February 18, 1905, was discussed in the highest Government spheres of Russia. A committee, which met under the chairmanship of M. Bulyghin, was drafting a scheme of a consultative popular assembly; as far as the Jews were concerned, it was proposed to exclude them from the franchise, on the ground that the latter would not be compatible with their civil disfranchisement. This proposition, which was in entire accord with the general reactionary trend of Russian politics, called forth a storm of indignation in all circles of Russian Jewry. During the month of June protest resolutions against the contemplated measure were adopted by the Jewish communities of St. Petersburg, Riga, Kishinev, Bobruisk, Zhitomir, Nicholayev, Minsk, Vitebsk, Vilna, and other cities. Many resolutions were couched in violent terms betraying the outraged sentiments of Russian Jewry. As an illustration, the following extract from the Vilna resolution may be quoted:
In the proposed scheme of popular representation, we Jews, a cultured nation of six millions, are placed below the semi-savage aliens of Eastern Russia. The policy of pacification applied to other suppressed nationalities has given way to a policy of terrorization when the Jews are concerned. The mad system, consisting in the endeavor to irritate and infuriate the Jews by mediæval persecutions and thereupon wreak vengeance on them for the manifestation of that irritation, has now reached its climax.... We appeal to the Russian people, which is now called upon to renovate the antiquated political structure of the country.... We are of the hope that the malign vindictiveness toward the Jews on the part of the retiring bureaucracy, which is eager to carry over the ferments of corruption into the healthy atmosphere of the future popular representation, will not be realized.
Professor Trubetzkoy, who waited upon the Tzar on June 6, at the head of a combined deputation of Zemstvos and municipalities, pointed out in his famous speech that no one should be excluded from popular representation: "It is important that there should not be any disfranchised and disinherited." The Government was shaken in its resolution, and the Council of Ministers eliminated from the Bulyghin project the clause barring the Jews from voting, justifying this step by the undesirability "to irritate the Jews still further."
The Jewish question was also touched upon in the conferences at Peterhof, which were held during the month of July under the chairmanship of the Tzar, to formulate plans for an Imperial Duma. Naryshkin, a reactionary dignitary, demanded that "the dangerous Jewish nation" be barred from the Duma. But a number of other dignitaries—the Minister of Finance, Kokovtzev, the Assistant-Minister of the Interior, Trepov, and Obolenski and Chikhachev, members of the Council of State—advocated their admission, and the discussions were terminated by the brief remark of the Tzar: "The project [with the insertion of the Council of Ministers in favor of the Jews] shall be left unaltered."
By this action, the Government made itself guilty of a flagrant inconsistency. It conferred upon the Jews the highest political privilege—the right of voting for popular representatives—but left them at the same time in a state of complete civil disfranchisement, even with regard to such elementary liberties as the right of domicile, the right of transit, and so on. Only one month previously, on June 8, the Tzar had approved the "Opinion" of the Committee of Ministers—in pursuance of the ukase of December 12, 1904, the Committee had been busy discussing the Jewish problem—to the effect that the consideration of the question of ameliorating the condition of the Jews should be deferred until the convocation of the new Parliament. Evidently, the anti-Jewish conscience of the Tzar made it impossible for him to grant even the slightest relief to the Jews who from pariahs had been turned into revolutionaries.