In the afterword Krushevan continues recycling much the same medley of unprompted apologies. He says that he feels awful about making so many cuts to the document, but he insists again that, despite the text’s imperfections, it offers “a fairly accurate idea of the program of world conquest by Jews.” This is the terrible, fervent dream shared by all Jews. How is it possible for anyone but a Jew to describe the workings of such a mind, its contempt for all the Christian countries of the world? This is sufficient proof that the document is neither apocryphal nor, as Krushevan puts it, the workings of a diseased mind. Only a “cruel Jewish mind” would be able to sum up the catastrophic contours of a world in which Jews enslave everyone else. There is little time to stop the clock. Resistance to the disastrous scenario now nearing its culmination can succeed only if action is taken immediately.52 What he says here is startling: First he insists on the document’s authenticity though no one had questioned it, and his answers are curiously thin. He appears to acknowledge this inadequacy: The most conclusive proof he is able to muster in this regard is that the incomparable coldness of the Jewish mind is something no non-Jew could ever replicate. Moreover, he admits that the document was rushed into press—why, he does not explain—with all sorts of errors strewn throughout. He is willing to acknowledge such errors—indeed, even the text’s possible fraudulence—while trumpeting how revealingly it airs the terrible intentions of the Jewish people.
Chapter 10 of the document opens, for example, with a proclamation of the Jewish obligation to wipe all other faiths off the face of the earth. This devastation admittedly might result in the rise of several generations of atheists, but it is certain that they will eventually be won over to the religion of Moses. The key to Jewry’s strength, according to the text, is in its unalloyed confidence, its certainty of its own indomitable power that will ultimately result in the subjugation of all under the weight of its kingdom: “We will not tolerate any kind of religion espousing one God except our own . . . since we are the chosen people, and we have been fated to rule.”53
The document sees the slow, steady march to Jewish power that began in antiquity and is now nearly successful. And, though Jewry’s stated goal is the restoration of the Davidic kingdom, it is obvious that a more pressing issue is the capitulation of Christianity—which is, arguably, a euphemism for the annihilation of Judaism’s foes.
Why were these heinous “admissions” made in the form of a word-for-word transcript? Who transcribed it, and why? None of this would be explained. However, the reason why the present moment was so dire is made clear: The sudden rise of Zionism was proof that Jewry’s goals were nearing success. Zionism had openly acknowledged that it was ready to take control of Christianity’s most sacred sites in the Holy Land and that this was merely the opening sortie in Jewry’s march toward universal mastery.
Krushevan—and others close to him on Russia’s far Right—had long seen Zionism as among the most destructive of all Jewish efforts at world dominion. The right-wing journalist Menshikov summed up these fears in the wake of the Fifth Zionist Congress in December 1901. The movement, he argued, constituted the starkest shift in Jewish history since the destruction of the Second Temple. Since then Jews had been absent from history—“historically defunct” is how he put it—plotting their return, no doubt, but constrained by the heavy yoke of “the Talmud and the Kahal.”* This meant that Jews had been no more than a “desolate and gray” presence on the world stage, a condition that was now over because of Zionism’s alarming capacity to revitalize Jewish political life. Clearly this perilous situation had to be carefully monitored, though mere monitoring could not go nearly far enough.54
Krushevan, according to his nephew, had never hated Jews, only Zionists. Krushevan’s own words contradict the claim, of course, but the nephew could have remembered accurately that Theodor Herzl’s movement filled him with special terror.55
Why this preoccupation with Zionists? Jewish radicals were justly obsessed, now more than ever, but why was fear focused on Zionists, who had their sights set on a faraway land and had a comparatively mild, even conservative constituency drawn largely from the ranks of shopkeepers and synagogue attendees? Their leader, Herzl, sported formal wear at its congresses and reassured every world leader willing to meet with him—including Plehve, in meetings held in St. Petersburg soon after the Kishinev pogrom—of his disdain for revolutionaries. The most compelling of all Russian Zionism’s ideological mentors, Ahad Ha’am, was an intense, reclusive former businessman who was now an editor and essayist. Far from being a firebrand, his two-hour oration delivered in a monotone at the movement’s first officially authorized conference in Russia in September 1902 had thoroughly bored most in the Minsk hall. Judged by any realistic standard, this was not a movement intent on taking Russia by storm.56
Nonetheless the Zionist movement was by the turn of the twentieth century, more so than ever before, the object of the greatest scrutiny in Russia’s right-wing circles. This interest was prompted by Zionism’s stated intention to purchase the Holy Land. “Most legends spring from facts,” as the historian A. J. P. Taylor once observed, and there was sufficient evidence available to make the case for a Jewish plot—as outlined in the Zionist movement’s own protocols—whose goal was world domination. Of course, Krushevan’s belief in the mysterious power exerted by the movement was grossly exaggerated, but there was testimony, indeed right there in Kishinev, on which he could draw to substantiate his fears.57
Fears of Zionism’s dangerously ambitious aspirations found their echo in official circles too. On the one hand, officials sought to use the Zionist movement as a wedge against radicalism, as a way to deflect the Jewish hope for reform in the empire to distant Palestine; hence the permission given to Russia’s Zionists to convene the 1902 conference. On the other hand, Herzl’s grandiosity, his frequent (if also unfounded) intimations of his movement’s wealth, and particularly the launching of a Jewish colonial bank in 1901—accompanied by efforts to establish a branch in Russia—quickly soured officials on the prospect of cooperation. Indeed, such suspicions would only deepen in the wake of the Minsk conference (a condition of its legality was that police attend and take notes), where talk of cultural revival and nationalist education dominated the agenda rather than calls for emigration. The items highlighted at the conference struck officials as uneasily familiar, tinged as they were with subversion and the prospect of political activism.58
Thus not only did Russia’s Zionists sound eerily similar to radicals, but Herzl himself, with his claims of great wealth and the prospect of support from English, Ottoman, or German authorities, seemed on the verge of an epochal diplomatic victory. It seemed certain—as attested by numerous articles appearing in Russia’s right-wing periodicals—that Zionism was on the cusp of acquiring for itself vast chunks of the Holy Land. All such claims were either untrue or greatly overstated, but they were taken deadly seriously by the Russian Right, whose apprehensions grew to fever pitch once Zionism petitioned for authorization to establish a branch of the colonial bank in Russia so as to garner investors. This transformed Zionism from a project with the benign goal of emigration to an effort intent on acquiring Christianity’s most sacred places and then, no doubt, far more.59
The looming prospect of an English-sponsored Jewish settlement in East Africa and Herzl’s Russia trip soon after the Kishinev pogrom, when he had audiences with both Plehve and Sergei Witte, heightened fear of the Zionists. This would only be accentuated after news spread of the wildly enthusiastic reception he received when, on visiting Vilna, the “Jerusalem of Lithuania,” thousands greeted his train in the middle of the night. Circles close to Krushevan as well as the Russian government registered all this with mounting concern. The government made this clear in a book-length report on the Zionists that was produced soon after the Minsk conference by the police director Aleksei Lopukhin, a particularly well-informed bureaucrat. As portrayed by Lopukhin, this was an organization no less preoccupied with
Russian domestic reform than were the regime’s liberal and radical opponents; Zionism’s calls for emigration were sidelined by a mounting interest in the thoroughgoing reform of Jewish life in Russia. Its message was, arguably, even more threatening than that of the radicals, if only because its potential impact was greater, with the resources at its disposal making it better equipped to conceal its subversive goals.60
Mentioned frequently in the Lopukhin report is the prominence of Kishinev’s Bernstein-Kogan, with nearly as many references to him as to Herzl. Bernstein-Kogan was described as occupying a role unmatched in the Zionist hierarchy, the virtual “president” of the movement in Russia.61
This was a curious depiction, since Bernstein-Kogan was never more than a midlevel activist, a financially strapped cholera specialist whose communal activities outpaced his devotion to his practice. (Unable to make a living in Palestine, where he moved before World War I, he would return to Romania later, spending the last years of his life ministering to the medical needs of the Jewish agricultural colonies in Soviet Crimea.) The government as well as the Russian Right took special interest in him because of the populism of his youth and the eventual jailing of his Socialist Revolutionary brother. In reality there was little to worry about. His relations with Herzl were not close, indeed often contentious. He wielded little influence in the movement and had left his radicalism behind long ago.62
Still, though he was far from the darkly influential figure imagined by St. Petersburg officials or Kishinev’s far Right, Bernstein-Kogan’s role in catapulting the city’s pogrom into a world-famous event was pivotal. His ability to spread word of the pogrom—and with breathtaking speed—to newspapers, organizations, and influential figures throughout Europe, the United States, and elsewhere would consolidate the belief that he was at the epicenter of Jewry’s worldwide machinations. Here was that rare moment when fantasy, or at least the previously unprovable, seemed to mesh seamlessly with reality, when long-held suspicions of Jewish sedition would now be pegged onto humdrum Kishinev as the headquarters of a meticulously coordinated effort to do harm to the Russian empire.
Bernstein-Kogan would be identified as the endeavor’s mastermind. And at his disposal was the Zionist movement’s Kishinev-based correspondence bureau, one of four offices performing different institutional tasks set up a few years earlier. The others were by now largely nonfunctional; Bernstein-Kogan, no longer at the helm of Kishinev’s office, had set in motion a well-run (albeit one-man) operation, ensuring not only contact with the movement’s branches but also ready dissemination of information about Jewish concerns inside and beyond the empire.63
Bernstein-Kogan’s superb work as head of Kishinev’s correspondence bureau, as well as the city’s proximity to the notoriously porous Romanian border at Jassy, one hundred miles to the west, was the backdrop to his stumble into history. The reasons for this were, of course, far more mundane than imagined by the right-wing circle close to Krushevan. Nonetheless there was good reason for them to connect the dots as they did with Bernstein-Kogan’s activities: Since he had already been identified as suspicious by the government, this was concrete proof of what they already believed was the terrible truth.
In the anxious weeks before the pogrom’s eruption, Bernstein-Kogan’s apartment was designated as a depot for guns that could be used for self-defense. It is unclear whether these weapons were really intended to be used. On the second night of the pogrom, when most of the city’s streets were finally quiet, Bernstein-Kogan went door-to-door to the city’s wealthy Jewish families, collecting money for relief and for the cost of telegrams he intended to send to newspapers and other outlets, telling them news of the massacre.64
By the night’s end he had collected 48,000 rubles in cash and 18,000 rubles in checks. (He says in his memoirs that, when he encountered resistance, he simply stood his ground and refused to leave until the donation was given.) His familiarity with smugglers, who had long serviced his correspondence bureau, and his knowledge of the movement’s international contacts, whom he had cultivated for years, proved to be invaluable. He spent some 1,500 rubles, a large sum, on telegrams transmitted from Jassy.65
The messages yielded, as Bernstein-Kogan later recorded in his memoirs, 1.25 million rubles in immediate relief, the bulk of this money coming to Kishinev from as far away as rural Australia. The Hilfsverein der deutschen Juden in Berlin, German Jewry’s central community relief organization, alone contributed 192,443 rubles, and nearly all Jewish communities in the world quickly responded with impressive sums. In the midst of this, the already-porous lines between philanthropy and journalism collapsed. The Hearst chain sent to Kishinev 100,000 rubles that Davitt personally handed over to Bernstein-Kogan. With some of the money Bernstein-Kogan oversaw the launching of a trade school to provide marketable skills to girls whose parents had been killed. A few days after transmitting news of the pogrom via Jassy, he was summoned to St. Petersburg, where he met with Russian Jewry’s leading figures and saw government officials as well as sympathetic members of Russia’s literary community and intelligentsia, including Maksim Gorky. There he was introduced, especially in meetings with officials, as “Herzl’s right-hand man.” Plehve would astonish Herzl at their meeting in August (Herzl said, “I was secretly amazed at [his] knowledge of [Zionist] personalities”) when he noted the following: “But take Kogan-Bernstein! . . . [We] know that he conducts a press campaign against us abroad.”66
It was a telegram from Bernstein-Kogan that had alerted the London representative of the Hearst press to the pogrom, and it was his name that topped Davitt’s list of Kishinev contacts.Davitt also had letters of recommendation to Bernstein-Kogan from the American Jewish leader Cyrus Adler and London’s Sephardic chief rabbi, Moses Gaster. As soon as Bernstein-Kogan arrived in Odessa, he was summoned by the U.S. consul to meet with Davitt, and as described earlier, he then spent seven hours with the latter—and Meir Dizengoff as translator—relating the pogrom’s details. Bernstein-Kogan describes in his memoirs how he and Davitt nearly managed to purchase the original copy of the Plehve letter with a large sum provided by Hearst, though it then slipped between their fingers. (This could never have happened, of course, because the letter never existed.)67
Jacob Bernstein-Kogan.
By now rumors were circulating—fanned by Georgi Pronin and others—that Jews had gathered just before the riot’s outbreak in a Kishinev synagogue to plot revolution. In the cosmology of the far Right, Kishinev was transmuted from an agricultural depot at the empire’s edge into a place of dark designs, what they believed to be the command post of a Jewish conspiracy with Bernstein-Kogan as its general.
Bernstein-Kogan’s celebrity among Jews would pass quickly. With deep roots in Kishinev—where his father had been a well-known Jewish community figure—he never quite found another home after he abandoned it following rumors that his life was endangered once his role in publicizing the massacre became known. But the imprint he would leave in the annals of antisemitism would be profound and lasting—far more so than anything else he achieved in his life either as an activist or as a doctor. A warmhearted man armed with little more than the addresses of foreign newspapers and the stamina to stay awake all night collecting money to pay for a pile of telegrams, Bernstein-Kogan provided the authors of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion with as close a glimpse of a real Jewish elder as they would ever get. So it was that an overweight, underpaid, midlevel political activist—someone known to Krushevan since boyhood, when both were clothed in the same gymnasium uniform—became the unlikely inspiration for the most terrifying Jew on the planet.68
Kishinev offered Krushevan a front-row seat to Jewry’s international machinations. And there was just enough solid evidence to bolster his already ample suspicions: Bernstein-Kogan’s role in transmitting news of the pogrom, its outsize notoriety in the world’s press, the Plehve forgery.
In Krushevan’s view, nothing rioters could ever do to Jews could match the terrible, secret horrors
Jews had in store, with Kishinev the testing ground for such designs. In Bernstein-Kogan’s memoirs, written decades after the pogrom, he described Kishinev as a place where chickens wandered onto its larger boulevards from nearby, rural-like lanes. Krushevan’s Kishinev was, in contrast, a place packed with fiends poised to bring Christendom to its knees. What connection there was for Krushevan between the demons haunting his adolescence and those he later sought to vanquish as he fought the Jewish people remains unknowable. Haunted, however, he undoubtedly was. The Protocols likely provides, as he saw it, a glimpse as to why.
Bessarabets front page, May 12, 1903.
* “Kahal” means both the Jewish community as a whole and the administrative body of a Jewish community.
6
Remains of the Day
The Kishinev pogroms in 1905 marked another period of crisis when the community locally, and the Jews nationally, organized themselves into various bodies to protest the outrages.
—LOUIS WIRTH, The Ghetto
The American sociologist Louis Wirth first wrote those words in his University of Chicago doctoral dissertation, which, when published in 1928, was justly hailed as a landmark study of urban life. He was knowledgeable in Jewish history, with a large swath of The Ghetto providing a reliable summary of Jewry’s past, and when he described Russia’s pogrom wave of 1905–6, it was Kishinev that, for him, was the natural marker, the most transparent way to capture early-twentieth-century Russian violence against Jews. Kishinev was—as for many others—so synonymous with pogroms that simple fact-checking likely felt unnecessary.
America’s obligation to free Russia from barbarism had preoccupied liberal and left-wing opinion in the United States and Britain for decades before the Kishinev pogrom. As early as 1891, George Kennan, a war correspondent and explorer (a distant cousin of the renowned diplomat George F. Kennan), wrote Siberia and the Exile System, which contrasted a senselessly vindictive, dark penal system with the decency of those caught up in its web, and with Russia’s nihilists embodying the best of its qualities. In response to Kennan’s revelations, for example, the Philadelphia Ledger insisted that “civilized nations should refuse to have anything to do with Russia until she abandons barbarous practices.”1
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