Ironically, then, those hostile to Jews would argue then and later that the pogrom’s outsize violence was the result of Jewish aggression, while far more typical for Jews was an insistence on Kishinev Jewry’s passivity—indeed, its outright cowardice. This would leave an indelible mark, especially since the latter charge would come to be at the explosive center of Bialik’s famous Kishinev poem. But the belief congealed rapidly even before that poem’s appearance in late November/December 1903. With the pogrom’s outrages now overshadowed by the deportment of its victims, just a few months later Jewish self-defense during the Gomel pogrom in September 1903 would be touted as little less than redemption for the wretched behavior of Kishinev’s Jews.
Soon a great deal of what had occurred—and had, at first at least, been reported in the weeks immediately after the massacre—all but disappeared amid the cascade of postpogrom journalism in the Jewish press and other media too. Rarely would Jewish self-defense be mentioned except by apologists for the government. The role played by seminary students would soon be downplayed as well. Krushevan would often be relegated to a surprisingly minor role as little more than a government-controlled puppet, a shadowy figure in an episode in which he played a bit part. With the government implicated as early as mid-May in having launched the miserable episode, nearly all the others held responsible before were relegated to the margins. And much of what had already been aired—but with its details all the more confounding because Kishinev’s urban layout remained so little known—was reduced to a few discrete hours of particularly intense and murderous violence that erupted just hours before the pogrom was put to an end.
By the time the violence had reached Munchehtskii Street, order was being restored elsewhere in the city. This occurred once Raaben gave Lt. Gen. V. A. Bekman, head of the garrison in Kishinev, full authority to use the army to control the mob. Orders were issued in midafternoon of the second day of the pogrom, just after 4:00 p.m. The clearing of Kishinev’s streets began in earnest about two hours later. Bekman divided the city into four sections and then rapidly removed the rioters. The majority of those arrested—about five hundred of the total nine hundred jailed—were brought in during this brief period. Before then Raaben had handled the troops on his own, dispatching them without clear orders and sending them to various locations with only the vaguest of ideas as to what tasks they should perform.54
Few countries, if any, at the time were widely believed to be as thoroughly regulated, as militarized as Russia. In Principles of Sociology in 1895, Herbert Spencer wrote: “Russia, as well as ancient Peru, Egypt, and Sparta, exemplify that owning of the individual by the state . . . for a social system adapted for war.”55 How, then, to explain the dreadful pandemonium on Kishinev’s streets? Who set it in motion? How could it have occurred without government complicity at least on the local level, if not higher?
In reality Russia was far less militarized than then believed. The guidelines for the use of the military in civil disturbances were hopelessly complicated and designed largely for rural disturbances, not urban ones. The military typically resented being used for such purposes, and, more often than not, befuddlement or obtuseness were the main reasons why Russian officials like those in Kishinev so mishandled urban riots—which were increasingly common at the turn of the century, mostly in the form of ever-more-violent industrial disputes.56
All this had a decisive imprint on the muddled reactions of Raaben and others in his command to Kishinev’s disaster. The governor general was an easygoing, bumbling man, not fervent in his dislike of Jews and probably sincere in his assurance that they would be protected. But he was lax about nearly everything—except his gambling and womanizing—and showed little interest in his administrative duties and no capacity to handle the crisis.57
It was not Raaben’s ineptitude but news of government complicity at the highest levels that would soon fixate so much of the world’s press on Kishinev. This would happen with the appearance in mid-May of the so-called Plehve letter. It was this letter that prompted the plethora of public meetings denouncing Kishinev’s outrages, and that inspired Leo Tolstoy to speak out in defense of Jews for the first time. It was thought to signal the most resonant of all lessons to be learned from the massacre: namely that the government at the highest levels was directly responsible for it all, and that the government was intent on wreaking havoc on (perhaps on little less than the annihilation of) its Jews. This would become the most unassailable, the most canonic of all assumptions shared by Jews regarding the late-imperial regime. And the Plehve letter constituted the main body of evidence utilized by Jews and others in the effort—in the end quite successful—to block restrictions on Jewish immigration to the United States. Such restrictions were comparable to those under very serious consideration at the time in Britain and made into law with the 1905 Alien Act.
Vyacheslav Konstantinovich Plehve was the ideal bogeyman: mordant; haughtier than Tolstoy’s Karenin. No photograph shows him with anything but a grimace. His loathing of Jews was deep, all the more so since, in contrast to most Russian antisemites, he had had sustained contact with them in the Warsaw courtyards of his youth. Rather obscure until the moment he became infamous, Plehve was barely known beyond St. Petersburg’s bureaucratic circles before the Kishinev pogrom; he had been appointed minister of the interior only in 1902. Yet, when Theodor Herzl sped to Russia in Kishinev’s wake, it was Plehve whom Herzl was most eager to see (once Nicholas II made it clear he would not meet with him), as Plehve was now widely viewed as the keeper of Russian Jewry’s fate.58
He was a made-to-order villain: Recollections of him by government colleagues show someone ceaselessly conniving, endlessly self-important, too vile to be accused of mere corruption, a human cipher. Jews, Plehve said shortly after hearing news of the Kishinev pogrom, were “conceited” and deserved “to be taught a lesson.” A year after the pogrom Plehve was assassinated by an agent of the Socialist Revolutionary Party—on orders to do so largely because of Plehve’s responsibility for that tragedy.59
Vyacheslav Konstantinovich Plehve.
The single most damning piece of evidence implicating Plehve was a letter with his signature as minister of the interior, dated two weeks before the pogrom, outlining its basic details—in short, just the proof that for so long had been exasperatingly difficult to locate. It first appeared in the London Times a month after the pogrom and was then reprinted widely. The Russian government’s immediate reaction was to expel the Times correspondent. It took eight days for the government to disavow the letter, and then it did so clumsily, with all sorts of reckless, insulting claims about Jews and their responsibility for the massacre. These disavowals only sharpened suspicions that the letter was authentic. By the time the regime decided to react, it was simply taken for granted—probably even by most of its allies—that Plehve had written it and that St. Petersburg’s demurral was but a perfunctory one. The letter read in part as follows:
It has come to my knowledge that in the region entrusted to you wide disturbances are being prepared against the Jews, who chiefly exploit the local population. In view of . . . the unquestionable undesirability of instilling, by too severe measures, anti-government feeling into the population . . . your Excellency will not fail to contribute to the immediate stopping of the disorders which may arise, by means of admonitions, without at all having recourse, however, to the use of arms.60
It was a shocking document, a green light to marauders whose only concern was that local authorities would not respond too severely and thus alienate the rioters. Not only did the letter offer no guide as to what ought to be done to stop the massacre, but it helped to explain why the government’s response turned out to be so ineffective.
There is no doubt that Plehve greatly disliked and distrusted Jews. He made these feelings amply known: He saw Jews as a disruptive force, economically untrustworthy, politically subversive, and alien to the natural rhythms of Russian life. He hated them because too many of them were r
adicals, and he suspected that most of them were insufficiently loyal to the regime. There is little doubt that he would not have minded if there were far fewer of them in the empire.
Nevertheless, claims that Plehve’s long career was an unrelentingly anti-Jewish one are exaggerated and mostly untrue. Aleksei Lopukhin, who served under Plehve as police director, published remarkably candid memoirs after the 1917 Revolution, in which he stated that Plehve had nothing at all to do with fomenting the Kishinev pogrom. When Plehve’s papers were opened to scholars after the fall of the Romanov regime, researchers scoured the materials for evidence of the infamous Kishinev letter and any other signs of Plehve’s responsibility for the pogrom, but nothing was found—despite the fact that they discovered a great deal of highly embarrassing data on a wide range of other sensitive matters.61
Later, in the regime’s final years on the eve of World War I, when it seemed to be teetering out of control, the government did include some officials—most prominently those who had engineered the cynical campaign to prosecute Mendel Beilis on the charge of using the blood of Christian children for Jewish ritual purposes—who were prepared to sacrifice the stability of Romanov Russia for a radical, right-wing agenda. It was antisemitic men of this sort, albeit not any in the employ of the central government in St. Petersburg, who, as we will soon see, likely set the Kishinev pogrom in motion. Plehve was not one of them, however. He could easily have lived without Jews; no doubt he would have much preferred to do so, but he would never have done anything—certainly not bring disorder to Russia’s streets—to do away with them.62
It is all but certain that the letter was a forgery; its origins remain obscure and perhaps always will. Still, there is good reason to believe that whoever wrote it believed it to be essentially accurate. This is because it was widely presumed at the time that an explosion like the Kishinev pogrom simply could not occur in autocratic Russia without governmental sanction, and that such permission could only have been issued by Plehve. And self-evident as this presumption was, it was, unfortunately, unlikely that it could ever be proved to be true. So, although those responsible for the letter knew that the exact words it attributed to Plehve were inaccurate, the sentiments the letter conveyed were as good a stab at reality as anyone was likely to muster.
The belief that the riot must have been coordinated, whether by St. Petersburg or by local authorities, carried weight if only because it appeared to be so well organized. The pinpointing of Jewish properties by the mob, the collaboration of the seminarians—many in school uniform—all seemed to confirm the workings of a plot. Of course the insistence—no doubt overstated—by Jews and others once smoke cleared that interethnic relationships had been uniformly peaceful until the massacre’s outbreak reinforced the belief that outsiders had to have set it in motion. Then again, it is difficult to sort out how much of what seemed to have been coordinated was instead the by-product of rumor amid the confusion and the terrors of the attack.
The question of whether the violence was coordinated was never taken up in the court proceedings against those charged with pogrom-related violence conducted in Odessa that fall and winter, and attempts to raise the issue were quashed. But sufficient evidence exists to point to a clutch of local activists—not the imperial government—closely linked to Bessarabets; it was they who, with the help of right-wing student radicals, likely managed to stir up the riot’s start amid the barrage of newspaper articles charging Jews with the Dubossary killing. In the lead-up to the massacre, those activists are credited with having distributed leaflets to bars and flophouses, accusing Jews of the ritual murder. Bessarabets had formed a benevolent society with meetings in the back room of a local bar. The builder Georgi Pronin admitted to circulating antisemitic literature before the pogrom later defending such activity in court as a weapon against Jewish plans—concocted in the city’s largest synagogue—to attack gentiles. The owner of a Kishinev tavern testified that he saw the circulars distributed at his bar. It was later claimed that, the night before the riot’s start, axes, iron bars, and clubs were distributed for use against Jews and that the first rioters were clothed in the festive red shirts of workingmen so as to persuade onlookers that the attack was a spontaneous uprising of laborers against Jewish exploiters.63
At the helm of the pogrom were almost certainly Krushevan’s closest associates: Pronin, a local activist named Popov, an examining magistrate named Dawidowitch, a semiliterate worker named Stepanov, and a few doctors. They seem to have been the backbone of this conspiracy. Pronin was seen as sufficiently dangerous that he was expelled by Urussov for a year’s time. There may well have been no more than six or seven members of this fraternity, with the key inspiration being the longtime Bessarabets editor, Krushevan. True, he was in St. Petersburg during the riot, and he had sold the newspaper before his move. But his correspondence with the new editor demonstrates that he managed to maintain control over the paper; the shadow he cast over the pogrom was, by all accounts, considerable. His name was cited repeatedly during the massacre, with rioters drinking to his health during their attacks, justifying their violence by citing him as an authority, and calling out his name as they attacked Jews. Davitt names him as the riot’s prime culprit on the authority of Kishinev’s stalwart, eminently trustworthy mayor, Karl Schmidt.64
Krushevan’s devotion to his native Bessarabia was profound and undoubtedly sincere. His travelogue of the region, published shortly before the riot, was the finest evocation to date of its underappreciated charms. He was a charismatic man who inspired intense devotion as well as loathing. He managed to put out several newspapers simultaneously, often writing much of their copy. He was a public figure who was keenly, even obsessively, secretive, in his younger years a liberal who turned for reasons never aired to far-right politics; he would become, soon after Kishinev’s pogrom, the publisher—and almost certainly among the authors—of the first version of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. None of the effects of the Kishinev massacre would prove nearly so consequential as this bizarre and spectacularly influential forgery.
Georgi Pronin’s home.
Devastated Kishinev market.
4
Burdens of Truth
again some writer
runs howling to his art.
—W. H. AUDEN, “Journey to Iceland”
The same streets in Lower Kishinev that Sergei Urussov would find so shocking at his first glimpse as Bessarabia’s new governor general had already been anticipated in a 1903 play performed before sellout crowds on three consecutive nights at New York’s Chinese Theater. Kishinev had struck a nerve with Chinese American leaders, perennial strangers in their new land, who immediately threw themselves into its relief effort. Located on Doyers Street, the theater was the only hall in Chinatown with a capacity (five hundred) large enough to seat the crowd wishing to attend. The New York Times reported that this was “almost certainly the first time in history that the Chinese people had come forward in the defense of Jews.”1
The event was spearheaded by the community activist Joseph Singleton, who was born Chew Mon Sing in China. His Kishinev-related efforts, however, did not end there. The debut was capped off with a banquet at Mon Lay Won, a Pell Street eatery that billed itself as the Chinese Delmonico: a reference to the famed New York steak house. The restaurant, packed with a mixed crowd of Jews, Chinese, and a host of city dignitaries, heard a veritable multitude of speeches, including a breathtakingly lengthy oration delivered by a local rabbi in Yiddish—a language familiar only to a sprinkling of the audience. Singleton himself spoke about how his people, much like the Jews, had been the victims of Russian tyranny. The actors donated their wages to Kishinev relief, and the enterprise yielded the handsome sum of $280, worth around $8,000 today.2
The Pell Street restaurant was on New York’s Lower East Side, where the U.S. government’s 1902 confirmation of restrictive immigration policy toward the Chinese made the prospect of linking their cause with that of their Jewish neig
hbors particularly compelling. The Kishinev tragedy continued to dominate newspaper headlines, with crowds gathering daily outside the offices of William Randolph Hearst’s New York American—which had, with Michael Davitt’s reporting, made itself into a central address for news of the pogrom—and other newspapers as well, seeking information about the fate of relatives: “The American people in this matter are not being led by the press; the press is being led by the people.”3
Pell Street restaurant, Chinese Delmonico.
By now, just weeks after the pogrom’s end, it was commonplace to liken Kishinev to the worst of Jewish history’s catastrophes, including the destruction of the temples of Jerusalem. Special liturgies highlighting the tragedy were introduced into American synagogues. (Elsewhere, in France and England, for instance, synagogue ritual was more centrally controlled.) The poem “Have Pity,” by Shimen Frug, which appeared soon after the pogrom, was immediately set to music and recited at Yom Kippur services that fall: “Brothers, sisters, please have mercy!/Great and awful is the need/Bread is needed for the living/Shrouds are needed for the dead.” The Yiddish writer Sholem Asch produced a yizkor, or memorial for the dead, that also would be widely integrated into religious ritual life. The ersatz Yiddish poet Yisroel ben Yehudah Fein, a Baltimore clothier, captured attention for a time with snippets of his unseasoned, ferocious work, much of it built around reverent evocations of Moshe Kigel; it was recited at communal gatherings throughout the United States.4
The impetus for nearly all of this was the Jews of New York City’s Lower East Side. As the historian Jonathan Frankel writes: “This was the time that the new immigrant community in the United States (more than half a million Jews had arrived from the Russian empire since 1881) found itself observing from afar a major crisis in the mother community, in der heym.”5 The socialist leadership of the Jewish Lower East Side—particularly Forverts—was able to stand at the forefront of a massive, community-wide campaign with its emphasis on relief, not politics. (Rumors that they had collected as much as five hundred thousand dollars even in the first few weeks may well be accurate.) They found themselves able to galvanize the initially quiescent established American Jewish leadership—hailing from the German Jewish immigration of the mid-nineteenth century—into action, and found a ready ally in the Hearst press. Within two or three weeks of the news reaching the United States, a previously reticent New York Times started reporting regularly on the pogrom as well. By May 16 the Times admitted that the Lower East Side was completely “wrought up” amid the steady stream of dreadful news still coming from Kishinev.6
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