Early-nineteenth-century map of Kishinev.
From the outset, religious influences held sway in Kishinev; the church viewed the town as something of a parsonage. Soon after Russia’s conquest in 1812, the patriarch of Jerusalem agreed to transfer ownership of the town and its surrounding villages from the control of local monasteries to the Russian emperor. The region’s Russian metropolitan established his offices here, with a network of schools under his control that remained until late in the century the area’s major source of primary school education. Already by the late eighteenth century, Kishinev boasted a seminary, and in 1818 the church established the city’s first printing press, producing mostly educational materials for the area’s Moldavian-language religious schools. Kishinev’s religious seminary would continue to exert an overwhelming influence into the next century, with an impact well beyond the strictly religious sphere.19
Photograph of Lower Kishinev in the 1880s.
For decades, Kishinev remained a small town: built on a cluster of low hills, its growth would be sporadic, with much of its housing little more than patched-together huts that expanded over the years no less randomly. By 1812, according to varying accounts, between 7,000 and 12,000 people lived here, with some 2,100 houses and 448 stores. Already it had a glimmer, perhaps not much more, of urban amenities. Pushkin settled at first in a handsome if spare two-room cottage at the southern tip of Old Town; there he found decent if unexceptional restaurants, a society of convivial officers, moneyed civilians, and attractive mistresses.20
Built no more than a mile from the river Byk, Kishinev’s city center would be dominated from the beginning by a neighborhood known as Alexandrov, itself dominated by Alexandrovskaia Street to the south of Lower Kishinev. Just beyond it, indeed around the corner, was a labyrinth of narrow, winding paths rising and sloping along a hillside. There numerous small, multifamily houses were built around courtyards, often with stores or workshops and sometimes also synagogues tucked into the same buildings. It was an area muddy in the spring and dusty in the summer, with few trees or open spaces and none of the grand parks that dominated the center just a few blocks away. This “old town,” with its “narrow, crooked streets, dirty bazaars, low shops, and small houses with tiled roofs . . . with many gardens planted with Lombardy poplars and white acacias,” as Pushkin described it, looked colorful only to those from elsewhere. It was already an eyesore in the first years of the nineteenth century.21
House dating to the early nineteenth century in Lower Kishinev. Photograph taken by author, September 2016.
Many of the city’s poorest Jews lived, side by side with others, in this area, some in buildings dating back to the late eighteenth century, much of it still a gully of Ottoman-era ruins. Sewerage, street paving, and electricity were limited to the city’s better areas, introduced even there only in the early twentieth century. Entering Old Town, or Lower Kishinev, required descending for blocks in the direction of the river Byk, which was little more than a marshy extension of the Dniester and a noisome stream for much of the year. Into the early twentieth century Kishinev (particularly in this neighborhood), with its large concentration of seasonal workers, most of them peasants seeking winter employment, retained the feel of a border town. The city’s extremes of wealth and poverty were stark even by tsarist standards—hovels patched together so poorly that the mildest storm seemed capable of blowing them away existed around the corner from the grandest boulevards. And yet its enterprising mayor, Karl Schmidt, who in 1903 had been in office for twenty-five years, insisted that, if the city continued on its commercially vigorous course, it could soon overtake in importance its rival—and perpetual source of inspiration—Odessa.22
Photograph of a Kishinev street in the 1880s.
Its economic growth, despite the city’s demographic surge in the second half of the nineteenth century, was agonizingly slow. Although its population would be larger than Kiev’s—nearly 110,000 at the start of the twentieth century, the empire’s fifth-largest city—Kishinev’s infrastructure lagged far behind. Electric trams, introduced in Kiev in 1892, came to Kishinev only in 1913. A decision to launch a Kishinev electric utility was made in 1889, but it took until 1907 to start construction and two more years to put it into operation; Bessarabia’s stultifying blend of lethargy and graft continued to flourish amid its quickening economy. The water supply remained inadequate though the Dniester was barely twenty-five miles to the east. Medical conditions, especially outside Kishinev, were among the worst in Russia: Only six doctors and twenty-five medical assistants serviced the entire Kishinev district in 1914, and nearly two-thirds of infants born at the time in Bessarabia died at birth.23
Alexandrovskaia Street, 1889.
Alongside all this gross inefficiency and civic indifference were the city’s fine schools, a splendid ethnographic museum, opened in 1874, beautiful public parks, and lovely areas just south of Alexandrovskaia Street boasting rows of stunning homes. Bands regularly played in its largest park on Sundays, and reports from the 1903 pogrom noted that on the riot’s first day, a Sunday, the sound of music could be heard wafting from the park as nearby shops were ransacked. “Rather pretty place,” observed Michael Davitt, clearly surprised at this, in notes he took after his arrival in the city. “One or two very handsome boulevards planted with trees and many fine buildings built of a bright yellow stone. Streets wide & at right angles—like an American city. Pavement rough. Three or four small parks newly planted. A very handsomely built gymnasium for boys & one adjacent for girls.”24
Despite its new trolley-car system, Kishinev was a place where nearly everyone walked, for it took about half an hour, less if one walked briskly, from the wide streets so admired by Davitt to the town’s wretched northern rim on the banks of the Byk. Nearly the whole city was unpaved and pitch-dark at night; electricity serviced only its wealthier neighborhoods, which were by and large unscathed in the pogrom. Rioters had to trudge through mostly darkened streets on the massacre’s first night—by its second the riot was almost completely quashed—in their quest for liquor, plunder, and women and girls.
Little known by even knowledgeable Russians, Kishinev did have a reputation—when it was noticed at all—of moral laxity, of a casualness with which strictures that inhibited elsewhere were blithely overlooked. Civility’s constraints weighed less heavily here even in comparison with freewheeling Odessa. Governor General R. S. von Raaben, the city’s chief administrator at the time of the pogrom, openly entertained guests side by side with a mistress registered as a prostitute. Smuggling was known to be more commonplace there than elsewhere, with bribery all but normalized. For this reason Kishinev was selected for the printing of the Social Democratic Iskra (Spark) the empire’s most politically radical mouthpiece—the only place in European Russia where it was ever printed—for about a year, with the knowledge that there it could be safely printed and distributed.
Civility’s constraints—like those of the wider world—weighed less heavily in this backwater. Set fees were allotted, essentially, to the various categories of graft: For example, the cost of operating as a prostitute without interference was one ruble per week.25
Why did the pogrom erupt here? According to a memo forwarded by Kishinev’s Jewish communal leaders to Raaben soon after the attack, the reasons had nothing to do with long-standing enmity. The region’s gentiles were “quiet and peaceful,” the local economy healthy, and never in the past had an economic slump precipitated anti-Jewish disturbances. The document asserts that “the rich and fertile land of Bessarabia furnishes a certain existence to all kinds of labor,” and highlights that there was little evidence beforehand of ferocious local Jewish hatred. (It notes how the city had barely been touched in the pogrom wave of 1881–82, following the assassination of Tsar Alexander II, despite eruptions barely more than a few dozen miles away.)
At the same time Mayor Schmidt spoke with what appeared to be true warmth of the role of Jews in the city’s economic life, insisting
that without them Kishinev and indeed Bessarabia’s countryside would be economically bereft. The only new, toxic ingredient in this otherwise benign mix was, as the Jewish report argued, Pavel Krushevan’s newspaper, Bessarabets. Purchasing it cheap—Krushevan spent much of his life desperately short of cash—he quickly turned it into one of the empire’s most outspokenly anti-Jewish periodicals.26
Seen from Krushevan’s vantage point, Kishinev had become a powder keg, a city fed up with Jewish exploitation and ready to explode. The same new economic trends that Schmidt so extolled terrified those like Krushevan, who deplored how the region was being destroyed, overtaken by the cacophonous savagery of Jews. He made a powerful case for protecting Bessarabia from the disruptions of the contemporary marketplace in 1903 in a lavishly illustrated oversize book—the first of its kind—celebrated in a letter of praise from Tsar Nicholas II himself, signed by the imperial clerk. The volume was a romantic evocation of Bessarabia’s fecund fields, flowing hills, and attractive peasants; city life was portrayed as something of an afterthought, a presence to be noted but quickly passed over. Its portrait of Kishinev highlighted the handsome city center while also describing its marketplaces as being threatened by raven-like images—dark, alien, eerily thin—of Jews, their faces obscure, their designs on unsuspecting locals anything but clear.27
Market Jews photograph in Krushevan’s 1903 Bessarabia guide.
Bessarabia, not surprisingly, had the reputation of a place where it was easy to make money, where Moldavian peasants were more readily manipulated, more innocent, and known for their geniality and a tendency to accommodate. These qualities impressed even visitors to Kishinev’s prisons, who found inmates—including those jailed for vile crimes during the pogrom—eager to share confidences and not infrequently oblivious, or so they claimed, as to why they were being held. This interplay between the reputed innocence of the local Moldavians and the cleverness of Jews may have exacerbated feelings here—but in ways that remain indeterminable.
The claim that day-to-day relations were amicable is likely on target; the insistence that peasants felt they were being exploited may well have been accurate too. Jewish exploitation of locals was often decried, and even those sympathetic to Jews acknowledged that there were some who engaged in particularly aggressive economic practices, leaving peasants with smaller profits than they might otherwise have earned. A steep fall in agricultural prices in the spring of 1903 also meant that there was less money to go around. Yet there is no evidence that Jews exploited the innocence or laziness of Bessarabia’s peasants more than others did, and without the propaganda disseminated by Krushevan and those close to him in his newspaper in the months before the pogrom’s outbreak, it is unlikely that Jews would have been the target for local frustration. Nonetheless local ideologues—including some of the most formidable and relentless antisemites in the empire—managed to pin such frustration onto something of a historical canvas, insisting that Jewish mistreatment of the region’s gentiles had long existed and that Jewish ritual practice was not merely arcane or absurd but so irretrievably perverse that it included the killing of Christian children.
The great visibility of Jews in Kishinev was not just a figment of their enemies’ imagination. Indeed, Jewish stores lined its streets, their stalls filled its marketplaces, and they were spread throughout the entire city in neighborhoods both poor and rich. Urussov recalls in his memoirs that—on the day of his arrival in June 1903 as Raaben’s successor as governor general—the most animated by far in the crowds welcoming him were the Jews. Of course, they were in search of an authority that might protect them amid rumors of still more murderous attacks soon to come. Urussov made a point, after his tour of Alexandrovskaia Street, of going immediately to the area in Lower Kishinev most devastated by the pogrom:
We passed through the more interesting parts of the city [and] descended to its lower portion, adjoining the bed of the Byk, where the poverty-stricken Jewish inhabitants had established themselves. On the Asia and adjoining streets I saw striking pictures of Jewish life. In the diminutive houses one could see the entire furnishings of the rooms through the open windows. There were sleeping children, adults preparing for sleep, a belated supper, the reading aloud of a book by an old Jew to the family around him, etc. Many of them slept on the verandas around the houses.28
The neighborhood’s Jewish residents were mostly the working poor, employed in the local garment trade or as minor clerks, teamsters, coachmen, artisans, grape pressers, or harvesters. Because of the outsize ferocity of the attacks in this neighborhood, the information amassed about it—the occupations of its residents, the dimensions of its courtyards, the stock on the shelves of their looted stores, and their sparse domestic possessions—is more comprehensive and intimate in its concrete details about Jews than is available for anywhere else at the time in the Russian empire.29
Jewish water carrier in Kishinev.
Prior to 1903 the typical Jewish-owned shop in market squares or elsewhere was sparsely stocked. This was true throughout Bessarabia. (Urussov noted, “There are scores of watch-makers in small towns where the townsfolk, as a rule, own no watches.”) And the burgeoning of the Jewish population was accompanied by an increased poverty: The number subsisting on charity doubled between 1895 and 1900. Most Jews engaged in buying and selling grains were poor, living from deal to deal. Boosters like Kishinev’s Mayor Schmidt saw these agents as a positive force in local trade and commerce; others countered that the Jews, including the Jewish poor, were exploitative and an obstacle, that they blocked roads to town cajoling peasants hauling grain or hay to the city’s markets to sell their goods on the spot at lower prices than they would yield if brought to market. Such critics loathed no less the region’s itinerant salesmen—nearly all were Jews—who moved from village to village as peddlers, frequently doubling as moneylenders.30
Beginning in the 1880s, laws restricting Jewish residence in rural districts meant that an increasing number of Jews poured into Bessarabia’s cities, especially Kishinev; by 1897, of the Kishinev district’s 280,000 residents—encompassing a larger swath than just the city itself—54,910 were Jews. Rural residence for Jews was not impossible—the restrictions could be circumvented with the use of bribery or special arrangements with noblemen or others—but they were fraught with contradictions, and with ordinances permitting the temporary residence of Jews without, however, specifying what “temporary” meant. Thus, long after Jews had been expelled from villages, it was commonplace for them still to live there while leasing estates and then subleasing them to peasants. Such arrangements were all the more readily available in Bessarabia because of the prevalence of bribery and the eagerness of Jews, many of them recent arrivals, not to lose their newfound footing.31
With few buildings higher than four or five stories, many of Kishinev’s Jews lived on village-like streets in apartments clustered around tiny courtyards surrounded by fruit trees; others resided in ornamented, handsome, one-story, Galician-inspired houses, many of which were near the New Market. Wealthier Jews lived in commodious homes and hired leading architects to design their businesses—pharmacies, print-shops, and the like—that were among the finest in the city. For example, the Kogen pharmacy was a city landmark, lavishly ornamented and filled with natural light because of its expansive windows; its wedding-cake-like structure was located prominently on one of the city’s best streets.
Despite considerable economic growth at the turn of the century, Kishinev retained the feel of a smallish town, with its largest, shaded park adjacent to the city’s Holy Gates and the Cathedral of Christ’s Nativity, a spot where non-Jews and Jews sauntered side by side on Sundays and during festivals. A few blocks away, its first—and still its grandest—museum, dating back to the 1870s, the Museum of Ethnography and National History, which had been built in Moorish style and founded by one of the city’s more distinguished figures (rumored to have been of Jewish descent), remained a favored destination. Pleasures were, on the
whole, modest, and the local rich were rarely known to flaunt their wealth—in contrast, as it was often said in Kishinev, to those in Odessa.
Kogen pharmacy.
Like elsewhere in Russia by the early twentieth century, in Kishinev too there was a small but visible cluster of Jewish professionals—doctors, pharmacists, lawyers, and notaries, few of them wealthy but several occupying prominent roles in Jewish communal life. Davitt was convinced, as he jotted in his notes, that nearly all the city’s Jewish leaders were physicians. Kishinev’s Jewish rich owned most of its factories, though nearly all of these were little more than workshops. By the turn of the century, of the thirty-nine workplaces in Kishinev listed as factories, all but ten were owned by Jews, and these included nearly all the largest ones. Five of them refined tobacco, four were print houses, and others were the city’s largest grain mills, owned by a newcomer to Kishinev named Schartzberg, who had arrived within the previous ten years. (With few exceptions, all the city’s most successful Jewish businessmen were newcomers.)32
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