Since the dissolution of the "League," these four groups have, as a rule, united in various coalitions. They are all represented on the permanent council at St. Petersburg which, together with the deputies of the Imperial Duma, discusses Jewish political questions as they arise from time to time. Thus, there emerged in Jewish public life a form of representation reflecting the national and political ideas which had assumed concrete shape during the years of the Russian revolution and counter-revolution. The only organization standing outside these federated groups and their common platform of national Jewish politics is the Jewish Social-Democratic party, known as the "Bund," which is tied down by its class program and is barred by it from co-operating with the bourgeoisie, or a non-class organization, even within the domain of national Jewish interests.
2. The Triumph of the "Black Hundred"
All these strivings and slogans were severely hit by the coup d'état of June 3, 1907, when a large part of what the revolution had achieved was rendered null and void. Owing to the amendment of the suffrage law by this clumsy act of autocratic despotism, the constitution became the handmaid of Tzardom. The ruling power slipped into the hands of the Black Hundred, the extreme monarchistic groups, which were organized in the "League of the Russian People" and openly advocated the restoration of autocracy. The head of the League, Dubrovin, congratulated the emperor upon his act of violence of June 3, and was assured in reply that henceforth the "League of the Russian People" would be the "trusted bulwark" of the Throne. Nicholas might have said with greater justification that the Throne was the bulwark of the League of the Black Hundred, the hirelings of the reaction, who were supplied with millions of rubles from the imperial counter-revolutionary fund, the so-called "black money." Street heroes and pogrom perpetrators became the masters of Russian politics. The sinister forces began the liquidation of the emancipation movement. Day after day the newspaper columns were crammed with reports concerning the arrests of politically "undependable" persons and the executions of revolutionaries. The gallows and the jails became, as it were, the emblems of governmental authority. The spectacle of daily executions which continued for two years (1907-1909) forced from the breast of the grand old man, Leo Tolstoi, the desperate cry: "I cannot keep silent."
Yet Nicholas II. continued his rôle of hangman. While young men and women, among them a great number of Jews, met their fate on the scaffold, the rioters and murderers from among the Black Hundred, who during the days of October, 1905, alone had ruined hundreds of Jewish communities, remained unpunished. The majority of them were not even put on trial, for the local authorities who were charged with that duty were afraid lest the judicial inquiry might establish their own complicity in the pogroms. But even those who were prosecuted and convicted on the charge of murder and plunder were released from punishment by orders from St. Petersburg. As a rule, the local branch of the League of the Russian People would appeal to the Tzar to pardon the participants in the "patriotic demonstrations"—the official euphemism for anti-Jewish riots—and the invariable response was an immediate pardon which was ostentatiously published in the newspapers. The petitions to the Tzar applying for the pardon of convicted perpetrators of violence went regularly through the Minister of Justice, the ferocious reactionary and anti-Semite Shcheglovitov. No one doubted that this amnesty was granted by virtue of an agreement concluded in 1905 between the Government and the pogrom ringleaders, guaranteeing immunity to the anti-Jewish rioters.
A different treatment was meted out to the Jewish self-defence contingents, which had the courage to oppose the murderers. They were dealt with ruthlessly. In Odessa, a court-martial sentenced six young Jews, members of a self-defence group which was active during the October pogroms, to long terms of hard labor, characterizing the "crime" of these Jews in the following words: "For having participated in a conspiracy having for its object the overthrow of the existing order by means of arming the Jewish proletariat for an attack upon the police and troops." This characterization was not far from the mark. The men engaged in defending the lives of their brothers and sisters against the murderous hordes were indeed guilty of a criminal offence against the "existing order," since the latter sought its support in these hordes, of whom "the police and troops," as was shown by the judicial inquiries, had formed a part. The appeal taken from this judgment to the highest military court was dismissed and the sentence sustained (August, 1907). The Jews who had done nothing beyond defending life and property could expect neither pardon nor mitigation. This lurid contrast between the release of the pogrom perpetrators and the conviction of the pogrom victims was interpreted as a direct challenge to the Jewish population on the part of Nicholas II. and his frenzied accomplices.
The Black Hundred had a right to feel that it was their day. They knew that the League of the Russian People formed, to use the phrase then frequently applied to it in the press, a "Second Government," which wielded greater power than the official quasi-constitutional Government of Stolypin. The dregs of the Russian populace gave full vent to their base instincts. In Odessa, hordes of League members made it a regular practice to assault the Jews upon the streets with rubber sticks, and, in case of resistance, to fire at them with pistols. Grigoryev, the city-governor, one of the few honest administrators, who made an attempt to restrain this black terrorism, was dismissed in August, 1907,[55] with the result that the assaults upon the Jews in the streets assumed an even more sanguinary character. All complaints of the Jews were dismissed by the authorities with the remark: "All this is taking place because the Jews were most prominent in the revolution."
The Government represented by Stolypin, which was anxious to save at least the appearance of a constitutional régime, was often forced to give way before the secret Government of the Black League, which commanded the full sympathy of the Tzar. By orders of the League, Stolypin decreed that one hundred Jewish students who had passed the competitive examination at the Kiev Polytechnicum should be excluded from that institution and that a like number of Russian students who had failed to pass should be admitted instead. The director and dean of the institution protested against this clumsy violation of academic freedom, but their protest was left unheeded, whereupon they tendered their resignation (September, 1907). Following upon this, the Ministry of Public Instruction, yielding to the pressure of the "Second Government," restored the shameful percentage norm, restricting the admission of Jews to institutions of higher learning, which, during the preceding years, had been disregarded by the autonomous professorial councils.
About the same time the Senate handed down a decision declaring the Zionist organization, which had been active in Russia for many years, to be illegal, and giving full scope to the police authorities to proceed with repressive measures against the members of the movement.