On June 2, the Imperial Duma received the heart-rending news of the Bialystok massacre, and right there, after the passionate speeches of Dr. Levin, Rodichev, and other deputies, passed a resolution to bring in an interpellation to be answered by the Government within a fixed date, and to appoint a parliamentary commission which was to investigate the events on the spot. Three Duma deputies left at once for Bialystok, and on their return submitted to the Duma an unvarnished account which incontrovertibly established the fact that the Bialystok crime had been carefully prepared as a counter-revolutionary act, and that the peaceful Jewish population had been pitilessly shot down by the police and soldiery.
On June 5, three days after the appearance of the bloody spectre of Bialystok in the Duma hall, a bill dealing with civil equality for the Jews came up for discussion. The burning problem involving the disfranchisement of six million human beings was discussed side by side with the question of a few petty class discriminations and with the entirely separate question of women's rights. The entire treatment of the subject by the deputies showed a distinct lack of warm-hearted sympathy. Only the speech of the Jewish deputy Levin reverberated with indignation, when he reminded the Russian Assembly that he himself, being a Jew, would in ordinary times be denied the right of residence in the capital, and that, as soon as the Duma would be dissolved, he, a representative of the people and a former legislator, would be evicted from St. Petersburg by the police. The bill was referred to a committee to receive its final shape.
After an interval of three days, on June 8, the Duma had again occasion to discuss the subject of pogroms. Premier Stolypin replied to the interpellation of May 8 concerning the complicity of the Government in the pogrom of 1905. His lame attempt to exonerate the authorities called forth a strong rebuttal from a former member of the Government, the erstwhile Assistant-Minister of the Interior, Deputy Urussov, who bravely disclosed the full truth. Fortified by documentary evidence, he proved the existence of a secret printing-press in the Police Department which was issuing "patriotic" proclamations calling upon the populace to exterminate the Jews. He quoted the words of the gendarmerie officer who was in charge of that particular activity: "A pogrom may be arranged on whatever scale you please, whether it be against ten people or against ten thousand," and he concluded his speech with these words: "The danger will not disappear, so long as the affairs of the state and the destinies of the land will be subject to the influence of people who, by their training, are corporals and policemen, and by their convictions pogrom makers." These words were accompanied by a storm of applause, and the Government bench was showered with cries, "Resign, you pogrom fiends!" The Duma finally adopted a resolution echoing these cries of indignation.
A more passionate tone characterized the discussions of the Duma during the days of June 23-26, in connection with the report of the parliamentary commission which had been appointed to investigate the Bialystok massacre. The Duma was scandalized by the lying official communication, in which the Jews were put forward as the authors of the pogrom, and by the shameful military order of the day, in which the troops of the Bialystok garrison were thanked "for their splendid services during the time of the pogrom." The speeches delivered by the Jewish deputies, by Jacobson, who had visited Bialystok as one of the members of the parliamentary commission, and by Vinaver and Levin, gave vent to their burning national wrath. The Russian Mirabeau, Rodichev, pilloried the highly placed instigators of the Bialystok butchery. On July 7, the Duma concluded the debate by adopting a resolution denouncing in violent terms the policy of the Government, a policy of oppression, frightfulness and extermination, which had created "a situation unprecedented in the history of civilized countries," and demanding, moreover, the immediate resignation of the reactionary Ministry.
5. The Spread of Anarchy and the Second Duma
Two days later, when the deputies appeared before the Duma, they found the building closed, and on the doors was displayed an imperial manifesto dissolving the Duma which "has encroached upon a domain outside its jurisdiction, and has engaged in investigating the acts of the authorities appointed by us." The sudden dissolution of the Duma was answered by the "Vyborg Manifesto" which was signed by the entire parliamentary Opposition, calling upon the people to refuse to pay taxes to furnish soldiers to a Government which had driven asunder their representatives. The manifesto was also signed by all the Jewish deputies who subsequently had to pay for it with imprisonment and the loss of their electoral rights.
The revolutionary terrorism which had subsided during the sessions of the Duma broke out with redoubled violence after its dissolution. Attempts upon the lives of high officials—the most terrible being the explosion of a bomb in the summer residence of Stolypin, who had been appointed Prime Minister at the dissolution of the Duma—"expropriations," i. e., the plunder of state funds and private moneys for revolutionary purposes, anarchistic labor strikes, were the order of the day. The Government retorted with monstrous measures of oppression. A political court-martial was instituted which, in the course of five months (September, 1906-January, 1907) sentenced over one thousand people to death, among them many who were innocent or under age. Needless to say, a considerable portion of these victims were Jews.
Yet as far as the revolutionary attitude of the Jewish population was concerned, the Government was not satisfied to cope with it by "legal" executions, and therefore resorted, in addition, to the well-tried contrivance of wholesale executions, in other words, of pogroms. The chief of the political police in the city of Syedletz, Tikhanovich, engineered on August 27-28 a bloody military pogrom in that city, netting thirty dead and more than one hundred and fifty wounded Jews. The signal for the pogrom were shots fired at a sentry by an agent provocateur, whereupon the troops started an aimless musketry fire on the streets and even bombarded Jewish houses with grenades. Many soldiers, in a state of intoxication, committed incredible barbarities and looted Jewish property. Notwithstanding the official report of another agent of the local political police, Captain Pyetukhov, in which he asserted that the Jews had not given the slightest reason for the butchery and that the latter had been entirely engineered by the military and political authorities, the perpetrator of the pogrom, Tikhanovich, was not only allowed to go unpunished, but received from the governor-general of Warsaw an expression of thanks for his "energy and executive skill."
This being the attitude of the ruling spheres of Russia, it was out of the question to expect any initiative from that quarter in regard to the solution of the Jewish question. The Government of Stolypin, in a circular issued on August 24, 1906, had promised "to find out without delay which restrictions, being a source of irritation and manifestly obsolete, could be immediately repealed, and which others, affecting basically the relationship of the Jewish nationality to the native population, seem to be a matter of popular conscience, and should therefore be referred to the legislative institutions." The Council of Ministers laid before the Tzar a draft of moderate reforms in favor of the Jews, pointing to the necessity of appeasing the Jews who, as a result of their grievous restrictions, "had been forced to carry on a desperate struggle against the existing order." But these representations had no effect. Nicholas II. is reported to have said on that occasion: "So long as I am Tzar, the Zhyds of Russia shall not have equal rights." During that time, the power of the so-called "Second Government," the horrible camarilla around the Tzar, was in the ascendancy, and their mainstay were the Black Hundred now organized in the reactionary "League of the Russian People." These reactionary terrorists knew only of one way to solve the Jewish question—by exterminating the Jews.