An election campaign was set in motion and carried on under the most difficult circumstances. The police authorities took advantage of the state of war which had been proclaimed in many places to interfere with a comprehensive pre-election propaganda, and at the same time the Black Hundred tried to intimidate the Jews by holding out the menace of pogroms during the approaching Passover season. In Poland, the anti-Semitic chauvinists threatened the Jews with all possible reprisals for their "audacious intention" to nominate their own candidates for the Duma, alongside of the candidates of the Christian Poles. Simultaneously, the Jewish group of the Left, the "Bund" and others, followed the policy of boycotting the Duma and did their best to interfere with the elections. However, all these apprehensions proved groundless. The Passover and election pogroms did not take place, and Russian Jewry displayed a vigorous activity in the elections, with the result that twelve Jewish deputies were sent to the first Duma. The most active among these deputies were M. Vinaver, one of the leaders of the general Russian Constitutional-Democratic party and president of the "League for the Attainment of Equal Rights"; Dr. Shmaryahu Levin, the well-known Zionist; L. Bramson, actively identified with Jewish educational activities, who was affiliated with the Russian Democratic group, known as the Trudoviki, or "Laborites." All the Jewish deputies were united on the nationalistic platform formulated by the "League for the Attainment of Equal Rights." By a resolution passed at the fourth Convention of the League, held on May 9-13, 1906, they pledged themselves to co-ordinate their actions in all questions pertaining to Jewish emancipation and to abide by a common discipline, without, however, forming a separate parliamentary fraction.
4. The Jewish Question Before the First Duma
The first Duma was convened on April 27, 1906, and barely three months later, on July 8, it was dissolved, or rather dispersed by the Tzar, for having displayed a spirit of excessive opposition. The prevailing element in the first Duma was the Constitutional-Democratic majority to which, by their political sympathies, the bulk of Russian Jewry and ten of its twelve representatives in the Duma—the other two stood a little more to the Left—belonged. It was natural for the Jews to expect that a Parliament of this complexion would have no difficulty in solving the question of equal rights for the Jews as one of the most fundamental prerequisites of civil liberty. Unfortunately, this expectation was not justified. The entire brief session of the Duma was spent in an uninterrupted struggle of the Opposition with the unscrupulous Government which was then headed by Goremykin, a hide-bound reactionary. True, in its reply to the speech from the throne, the Duma declared that "neither liberty nor order can be firmly established without the equality of all citizens before the law." But in the pronouncement of the Government of May 13 no word was said about this equality of citizenship. The Jewish deputy Vinaver delivered a powerful speech, in which, among other things, he spoke as follows:
From this platform, from which so much has been said about political liberties, we Jews, the representatives of one of the most tortured nationalities in the land, have not uttered a single word about ourselves, because we did not consider it seemly to speak here of civil inequality.... Now, however, it is becoming clear to us that the Government has made up its mind to continue on the same road on which it has gone until now, and we are, therefore, bound to declare that, so long as you will connive at civil slavery, there will be no peace in the land.
The mistake made by the Jewish deputies consisted just in the fact that they had not "uttered a single word" about themselves on a former occasion, in reply to the speech from the Throne which had equally failed to make the slightest mention of civil equality—practically affecting only the Jews—and that they did not utter that word with that feeling of righteous indignation to which the representatives of "the most tortured nationality" in Russia were morally entitled.
Later on, the debates in the Duma concerning the Jewish question were, by the force of events, concentrated upon the pogrom policy of the Government. On May 8 an interpellation was introduced regarding the complicity of the Imperial Police Department in instigating the pogroms of 1905. Stolypin, the Minister of the Interior, promised to reply to the interpellation, which was substantiated by documentary evidence, a month later. But before that term had elapsed a new sanguinary pogrom broke out in Bialystok.
In this center of the Jewish revolutionary and labor movement, where, in 1905, the police and troops had already twice staged a Jewish massacre, a new conspiracy was being hatched by the police and military against "the authors of the liberty movement." An accidental act of terrorism, the assassination of the Chief of Police by an unknown culprit, gave the police conspirators a proper occasion to execute their terrible design. On June 1, during a church procession, a pistol was discharged by an agent provocateur from among the Black Hundred, and at once a rumor spread like wildfire among the crowd that "the Jewish anarchists are firing at the Christians." The pogrom flared up on the spot. In the course of two days the mob was busy demolishing Jewish houses and stores and attacking the Jews, while at the same time the police and military were systematically firing at the Jews not only on the streets but also in the houses, in which the unfortunate tried to hide. The bestialities of Kishinev were enacted again. Entire families were slaughtered, human beings were tortured, and hacked to pieces; limbs were cut off from the body, nails driven into the heads.... Eighty dead and hundreds of wounded Jews were the result of this new exploit of the counter-revolutionaries.