 Section 10 of History of the Jews in Russia and Poland, Volume 3, from the accession of Nicholas II until the present day, by Shimon Dubnov, translated by Israel Friedlander. This Livrivox recording is in the public domain, recording by SS Kim, Manicked Baisho, Chapter 35, The Revolution of 1905 and the Fight for Immensipation. Part 1. 1. The Jews in the Revolutionary Movement The political spring, manifesting itself in the attempt of the government, headed by Sibyato Polk-Mirsky to establish friendly relations with the liberal elements of Russia, gave the first impetus to an open movement for political emancipation. The liberal conspirators, who had neither to be secretly dreaming of a constitution, gave public utterance to this tabooed aspiration. In November 1904, the Conference of Zems to Workers, assembled in St. Petersburg, adopted the resolution, pointing out the anomaly of the political order of Russia, which is founded on autocracy and proclaiming the necessity of associating the representatives of the people in the work of legislation. About the same time, a large mass meeting, which took the form of a public banquet attended by lawyers and literators, adopted a similar resolution, calling for the repeal of all national and denominational restrictions. Taking advantage of the temporary relaxation of police despotism, the press spoke of more boldly, while the better elements of the population began to organize themselves in all kinds of public bodies. The government was slow in making concessions and harshly condemned the boisterous assemblages, which called for changes in the unshakable foundations of our political order. Nevertheless, an imperial new case, published on December 12, 1904, promised a number of partial reforms, improvement of the legal status of the peasantry, enlargement of the activities of the Zems to Workers, the establishment of state insurance for working men, relaxation of the severities of police and censorship, and likewise, a revision of the laws, restricting the rights of aliens with the retention of those provisions, only which are called forth by the genuine interest of the state and the manifest needs of the Russian people. It is almost needless to add that the latter clause held forth no promises to the Jews. For their disfranchisement could always be justified by the genuine interest of the state, a state built upon the foundations not of law, but of police force. The carrying into effect of the promised assembly reforms were entrusted to a bureaucratic body, the Committee of Ministers. The services of the popular representatives were repudiated. The new movement for liberty forced further concessions from Russian officialdom, but these concessions could only be rested from it in small doses and were granted only after desperate resistance. The bloody Sunday of January 9, 1905 marked the beginning of the open revolution in which social, economic and political demands were interwoven with one another. The demonstration of the striking workingmen of St. Petersburg, who marched in immense numbers to enter the palace to present the petition to the Tsar for economic and political reforms ended in a tragedy. The petitioners who marched with clothes in their hands under the leadership of the priest and demagogue Gapon were received with a shower of bullets, resulting in a large number of victims from among the participants in the demonstration, as well as from among the public. There were also several Jews among them, first aid nurse or dentist or pharmacy student and journalist. This scandalous conduct of the Tsar, who replied with bullets to a peaceful appeal for reforms, led to a series of demonstrations, labor strikes and terrorist acts in the provinces. In the western government and in the Kingdom of Poland, the Jews played a conspicuous role in the revolutionary movement, counting as they did a large number of organized workingmen. In Odessa, a Jewish workingman by the name of Stilman fired at the chief of police and wounded him, January 19. In Mogilev, a Jewish youth made a vain attempt upon the life of the local chief of police who was accused of having instigated the pogrom, which had taken place there in the fall of 1904. These incidents served in the hands of the reactionary government. Sviato Polk Mirski had been dismissed for his excessive leaning toward liberalism as an excuse for continuing its oppression of the Jews as the ring leaders of the revolution. The President of the Committee of Ministers, Viktor, was the only one who advocated a different point of view. At the meeting of the committee held on September 11, he contended that the hostile attitude towards the government, now noticeable among the Jews, is due to the sad material conditions in which the bulk of Russian jewelry lives, being weighed down by the pressure of restrictive laws. Viktor prophesied that the police authorities would be bound to fight with redoubled zeal against the anti-government activity of the Jews until the amelioration of the condition of the aliens promised in the UK of December 12 would be carried into effect. 2. The struggle for equal rights Notwithstanding these pleas, the government was slow in realizing even the moderate reforms which had been outlined in the Imperial UK's. In the meantime, the representatives of Russian jewelry had decided to place before it their own more comprehensive demands. In February 1905, several mass petitions demanding equal rights for Jews were addressed to Viktor. A petition signed by 32 Jewish communities, St. Petersburg, Vilkna, Kovno, Hommel, Belichap and others began with these words. The measures adopted for the last 25 years towards the Russian Jews were designed with the deliberate ending view to convert them into a mess of beggars, deprived of all means of sustenance and of the right of education and human dignity. Consistency and comprehensiveness marked the system of oppression and violence which was skillfully planned and carefully executed. The entire machinery of the state was directed to one end, that of making the life of the Jews in Russia impossible. The petition repeats the idea voiced in the UK's of December 12, 1904, of gradual amelioration of the position of the Jews and of few mitigations. For the insulted dignity of men cannot be reconciled to half measures. It demands the complete removal of rightlessness. All the Jews of Russia are permeated at present moment by one thought that the cruel system of endless restrictions and disabilities undermines the very basis of their existence that it is impossible to continue such a life. Worn out by all they have had to go through and filled with grave anxiety about their future destinies, the Jews are waiting at last for their entire enfranchisement. They are waiting for a radical repeal of all restrictive laws so that enjoying freedom and equality with all others, they may shoulder to shoulder with other citizens of this great country work for its welfare and prosperity. A memorandum couched in more resolute terms was sent by 26 Jewish communities, Moscow, Odessa and others, and by the radical groups of the communities which had signed the first petition. We declare the memorandum states that we look upon the attempt to satisfy and appease the Jewish population by any partial measures of improvement as doomed to failure. We expect equal rights as human beings in whom the feeling of human dignity is alive as conscious citizens in a modern body politic. The memorandum of the Vilna community made the following addition to the last clause. As a cultured nation, we demand the same rights of national cultural self-determination which ought to be granted to all the nationalities that go to make up the Russian body politics. Memorials and telegrams addressed to the President of the Committee of Ministers with the demand for equal rights were also sent by many individual Jewish communities. In the meantime, the general revolutionary movement in Russia proceeded apace. Professional organizations were springing into existence such as the leaks of railroad workers, engineers and lawyers. Here and there, huge railroad strikes were called. The college youth were in a state of formant and often went on strike. The agitation was answered by rifle shots and Korsak dips which were used to disperse the demonstrators. The extreme wing of the Socialist Party resulted to terroristic acts. A tremendous sensation was caused by the assassination of Grand Duke Sergius, the Governor General of Moscow, February 4th, one of the most detestable members of the House of Romanov. The Grand Duke, whose name was bound with the expulsion of tens of thousands of Jews from Moscow in 1891 and with the cruel oppression of the Jewish colonies still left there, was the victim of a bomb thrown by a known Jew, the social revolutionist Kalayev. The surging tide of the revolution intimidated Nicholas II and rested from him still another concession. On February 18, 1905, three enactments were published, an imperial manifesto condemning the revolutionary unrest at a time when the Sanctuary War in the Far East was going on and calling upon all well-intentioned persons to wage war against the internalization. A rescript addressed to Boligin, Minister of the Interior, announced the decision of the Tsar to invite the worldiest men invested with the confidence of the nation and chosen by the population to participate in the consideration of legislative project. In other words, a popular representation with merely consultative rights. Finally, a new case addressed to the Senate granted permission to private persons and institutions to lay before the government their views and suggestions relating to the perfection of the well-being of the state. The progressive elements of Russia were not in a mood to be reconciled to the duplicity of these enactments, any threats and concessions followed upon one another or to the patiness of the concessions in themselves. They took, however, full advantage of the permission to lay their views before the government and indulged in an avalanche of resolution and declarations, demanding the substitution of parliamentary system of government for the existing system of autocracy. The Jewish institutions joined in this general campaign. The oldest Jewish organization, the Society for the Diffusion of Enlightenment Among the Jews in St. Petersburg at a meeting held on February 27th, adopted the following resolution. The proper organization of Jewish education, such as would be in keeping with the social and cultural peculiarities of the Jewish people will only be possible when the Jews will be placed on a footing of complete equality of rights with the rest of the Russian population. As a firm guarantee of the untrammeled cultural development and the complete equality of all nationalities, it is necessary that the legislative power and the administrative control of the country shall have the cooperation of popular representatives to be elected upon the basis of the universal direct and secret vote of all citizens of the country without any distinction of nationality denomination or calling. The need of a non-partisan political organization to direct its struggle for Jewish emancipation, which was to be waged by all classes of Jewry outside the small fraction which had already been united in the labor organization of the Bund was universally felt. Such an organization was formed at the Conference of Public Spirit Jews which took place in Vilna at the end of March 1905. It assumed the name of the League for the Attainment of Equal Rights for the Jewish people in Russia and proclaimed as its object the realization to their full extent of the civil political and national rights of the Jewish people in Russia. The complete civil emancipation of the Jews, the assurance of their proportionate participation in the Russian popular representation, the freedom of national cultural self-determination in all its manifestations, in the shape of a comprehensive system of communal self-government, the freedom of language and school education, such was the three-fold program of the League. It was the first attempt of a Jewish organization in modern history to inscribe upon its banner not only the demand for the civil and political but also for the national emancipation of the Jewish people, the first attempt to obtain liberty for Jewry as a nationality and not as a neo-denominational group forming part of the dominant nation as had been the case in Western Europe during the 19th century. The central bureau of the League was located in St. Petersburg composed of 22 elected members, half of whom lived in the capital and in our G. Siliusburg, L. Bramson, and others, and the other half in the provinces, Dr. Shemaria Ulevin, S. M. Dubunov, M. Ratno, and others. The first resolution adopted by the League was in substance as follows, to demand universal suffrage at the elections to the future parliament with a guarantee of proper representation for the national minorities, to influence the Russian public to the end that the general resolutions demanding equality for all citizens should contain an explicit reference to the emancipation of the Jews, to call upon all the Jewish older men in the municipal dumas to resign their post in view of the fact that under the law of 1892, which had deprived the Jews of their franchise at the municipal elections, these older men had not been elected by the Jewish population but had been appointed by the administration on act which implied an insert to the civic and national dignity of the Jewish people. The last mentioned clause of this resolution adopted at the first conference of the League proved effective. In the majority of cities, the Jewish members of the municipal dumas began to tender their resignations by various protests against the disfranchisement of the Jews in the municipal self-government. At first, the authorities were somewhat embarrassed and made an attempt to appoint other Jews in lieu of those that had resigned by seeing that the Jewish boycott continued. They became reconciled to the entire absence of Jewish representatives in municipal self-government. The protest of the Jewish older men was drowned in the general noise of protests and demonstrations which filled the air during the revolutionary year. End of section 10, section 11 of history of the Jews in Russia and Poland, volume 3, from the accession of Nicholas II until the present day by Shimon Duvnov, translated by Israel Fritlander. This Livrivov's recording is in the public domain recording by SS Kim, Manik Vyshev, Portugal. Chapter 35, the revolution of 1905 and the fight for emancipation. Part 2, 3, the black hundred and patriotic programs. In this wise, did the Jewish people, though chafing on the trodum and well-nigh crushed by it, strive for the life of liberty. But the forces of reaction were preparing to wreak terrible vengeance upon the prisoner for his endeavor to draw off his bonds. As the revolutionary tide, which had engulfed the best elements of the Russian people was rolling on, it clashed with the filthy wave of the black hundred, which the underlings of Tzardom had called to the surface from the lowest depths of the Russian underworld. Acheronta Povevo, this threat was now carried out systematically by the government of Nicholas II in its struggle with the emancipatory movement. By letting loose the Russian network against the liberal intelligentsia and the Tziz, the reactionaries hoped to achieve three objects at once. To intimidate the liberals and revolutionaries. To demonstrate the unwillingness of the people to abolish autocracy in favor of constitutional government. And finally, to discredit the entire revolutionary movement as the work of Jewish hands. The latter end could, in the opinion of the reactionaries, be obtained best by convincing the Russian masses that the enemies of Christ are the only enemies of the Tzar. An open anti-Jewish agitation was set in motion. Proclamations of the black hundred with the appeals slayed the students and the Zs. Remember Kisnev and Hommel was scattered broadcast. The proclamation of the nationalist society of Kiev, Odessa, Kisnev and other cities contained the following sentences. The shouts downed autocracy are the shouts of those bloodsuckers who call themselves Zs, Armenians and Poles. Be on your guard against the Zs. All the misfortunes in our lives are due to the Zs. Soon, very soon, the great time will come when there will be no Zs in Russia. Down with the traitors. Down with the constitutions. With the approaching Passover season, programs were openly organized. The papers were flooded with telegrams from many cities stating that riots were imminent. In some places, the governors adopted measures to check the excesses of the savage crowd, but in many localities, the programs were deliberately permitted or even directly engineered by the police. In the manufacturing city of Bialystok, the center of the Jewish labor movement, the Cossacks assaulted the Jewish passers-by on the street, invaded the synagogues and Jewish homes, cruelly maltreating their inmates and frequently searching them and taking away their money, April 9 to 10. During the Passover holidays, peasants made a motif upon the Jews in the town of Tsiati, in the government of Kovno, looting their property and beating those that dared to oppose them. In the city of Melitopol, in the government of Tabrida, an intoxicated mob demolished and set fire to Jewish stores, and their opponents started to attack the houses of Christians, but the self-defense consisting of Jewish and Christian young men checked the program, April 18 to 19. In a simple poll, in the same government, the black-hundred-spread rumor that the Jewish boy, the son of our pharmacist, had desecrated the Christian icon. A program was set in motion which met with the resistance of the armed Jewish youth and was, afterwards, checked by the troops, April 22. The most terrible outbreak took place in Zitomir. In this quiet corner of Bolivia, the progressive elements of both the Jewish and the Russian population prevailed in the joy of their political honeymoon. As had been the case in other larger cities, here too, the bloody Sunday of January called forth political strikes on the path of the workingmen, demonstrations on the path of the college youth, and the circulation of evolutionary appeals. The fact that the movement was headed by the Jewish youth was enough to inspire the black-hundred to embark upon the criminal task. All kinds of rumors were set off load, such as that the Jews had been firing at the tsar's portrait on the field behind the city, that they were preparing to slaughter the Christians, and other absurd stories. At the approach of Passover, the program organized someone to their aid, a group of katsaps, great Russian laborers from Moscow. The Jews, anticipating the danger, began to arm themselves in self-defense and made their preparation openly. A clash between the black and the red was inevitable. It came in the form of a singular battle, which was fought on April 23rd to 26th, matching by its cruelty the program at home, though exceeding it vastly by its dimensions. In the course of three days, the city was in the hands of the black-hounds who plundered, murdered and mutilated the Jews. They were fortified not only by quantities of alcohol, but also by the conviction that they were fighting for the tsar against the Sicilists, who clamored for freedom and republic. The Jewish self-defense performed prejudices of valor, wherever they were not interfered with by the police and military, and died gallantly, where the authorities actively assisted the savage work of the intruded rioters. During the three program days, 15 Jews were killed and nearly 100 wounded, many of them severely. The casualties were mostly among young working men and handicraftsmen, but there were also some students among the victims, one of them a Christian named Blinov, who stood up nobly for the assaulted Jews. The inhuman fiends fell upon Blinov shouting, though you are a Russian, you are a Sicilist, and worse than the Z's, now that you have come to defend them. The young hero was beaten to death, and the murderers were actively assisted by the soldiers and policemen. On one of those days, on April 25th, a hard-ranging tragedy took place in the town of Trojanov in the government of Volinia, not far from Zhitomir. Having learned of the massacre that was going on in Zhitomir, 14 brave Jewish young men from the neighboring town of Zhitomir armed themselves with cheap pistols and proceeded to bring aid to their endangered fellow Jews. On the way, while passing through Trojanov, they were met by a crowd of peasants and working men who had been allowed by a rumor that Jewish slaughterers were marching in order to exterminate the Russians. The insulated mob fell upon the youth, and in the presence of the local Jews, savagely killed 10 of them while the others were cruelly beaten. The following account of this ghastly occurrence was given by one of the survivors. There were 14 of us. We were on the way from Zhitomir to Zhitomir. In Trojanov, we were surrounded by katsaps. They began to search us, taking away everything we had, and then started to beat us with hatchets and clubs. I saw my comrades fell down dead one after the other. Before the constabulary appeared, only four had remained alive, I and three other men. The constabulary ordered us to be carried to the hospital at Zhitomir, but on the way, we were arrested by the katsaps from the rural police and were tortured again. I was robbed and dragged to the priest. He begged that I should be left alone. The katsaps made fun of him, dragged me out again and started to beat me. The policemen began to tell them that they would answer for me, since the constabulary had ordered them to get me to Zhitomir. Well, said the katsaps, if that be the case, we will let him go, but before we do this, that hound of Jew must have a look at his fellow Zeeds. I was then dragged in an unconscious state to my calmness. I found myself in a pool of water. I had been drenched in sores to make me regain consciousness. Then, I beheld the dead bodies of my ten calmness. No matter how long I may live, I shall never forget their sight. One of them lay with his head chopped off. Another with a ripped stomach, cut off hands. I fell into a swan and found myself here in this bed. In the cemetery of Trojanov, one may still behold the ten graves of the youth per martyrs, who unselfishly went to the rescue of their brethren against the beast in human home, and were under way torn to pieces by this beast, ten graves which ought to become sacred to the entire Jewish people. The government reacted upon the Zhitomir massacre by an official communication. Initial effects were deliberately governed in order to prove that the Jews had called forth the program by their conduct. It was alleged in this communication that during their shooting exercises in the woods, the Jews had discharged their pistols at the portrait of the Tsar, had held insulting remarks at the police escort, which was conveying a band of political prisoners, had issued a proclamation in the name of the criminal party of the social revolutionaries, in which the authorities of Zhitomir were accused of preparing the program and similar charges. The concrete object of the official communication is betrayed in its concluding part, in which the governors are enjoined to explain to the sober mind section of the Jewish population that in the interest of the safety of the Jewish masses, it is in duty bound to inspire the core religionists who have been drawn into the political struggle with the consciousness of the absolute necessity of refraining from arousing by their behavior the hatred of the Christian population against them. Translated into plain terms, the government order meant, if you do not wish to have pogroms and massacres, then keep your hands off the liberty movement. But if you will persist in playing a part in it, then the Christian population will make short work of you dealing with you as with enemies of the fatherland. Caught in the general revolutionary conflagration, which flared up with particular violence in the summer of 1905, after the destruction of the Russian fleet by the Japanese near Tsushima, the Jews reacted upon the pogroms by intensifying their revolutionary activity and thrilling the number of self-defense organizations. Russian Jewry played an active part in the two wings of the emancipation army, the constitutional democratic as well as the social democratic party, and was represented even in the extreme wing occupied by the social revolutionaries. The majority of these Jewish revolutionaries were actuated by general Russian aspiration and were often entirely oblivious of the national interest of Judaism. This, however, did not prevent the henchmen of the Tsar from visiting the scene of the revolution upon Jewish masses. A vicious circle was the result of this policy. As victims of the old despotism, the Jews naturally threw in their lot with the revolution, which promised to do away with it. Thereupon, uncivilized Russia vented its fury upon them by instituting pogroms, which in turn pushed them more and more into the ranks of the revolution. During the summer months of 1905, a new succession of pogroms took place, this time of the military variety. Wrote up over the defeats of the Russian army in Manchuria and roused by the vile proclamations of the Black Hundred, which pictured the Jews as the inner enemy. Soldiers and Cossacks began to wreck their vengeance upon this inner enemy, assaulting and killing or wounding Jews on the streets of Minsk, May 26, Brest-Rithfosk, May 29 to 31, Zalets and Utsi, June 9. In the first three cities, the soldiers plundered and murdered only the Jews. In Utsi, they fired at a mixed-police Jewish demonstration of the workingmen. A regular battery was engineered by the soldier in Bialystok, June 30. During the entire day, the city resounded with rifle shots of maddened soldiers who were firing into peaceful Jewish crowds. Fifty dead and a still larger number of wounded were the result of these military exploits. During the same time, a regular organized pogrom occurred in the southern outskirts of Russia in the city of Kerch in the Crimea. On July 27, a peaceful political demonstration of the kind then generally involved took place in the city, among the participants were also the Jewish youth. By way of protest, the city governor and gendarmerie chief organized the patriotic counter demonstration, which was held a few days later on July 31. Carrying a banner with the portrait of the Tsar and singing the Russian national hymn, the patriotic hordes with notorious local thieves and hooligans as the predominating element sect Jewish houses and stores and in the name of patriotism looted the Jewish property, even the so-called respectable public participating in the latter act. When the armed Jewish self-defense began to oppose the rioters, they were scattered by a volley from the soldiers, 10 of them being killed on the spot. The subsequent inquiry established the fact that the pogrom had been fully prepared by the police and gendarmerie authorities, which had been in telegraphic communication in regard to it with the police department in St. Petersburg. It was a rehearsal of the monster's October pogroms, which were to take place a few months later. Four, the Jewish franchise. In the midst of the noise caused by the revolution on the one hand and by the pogroms on the other, the question of popular representation promised in the UK's of February 18, 1905 was discussed in the highest government spheres of Russia. A committee which met under the chairmanship of M. Boligin was drafting a scheme of consultative popular assembly. As far as the Jews were concerned, it was proposed to exclude them from the franchise on the ground that the latter would not be compatible with their civil disfranchisement. This proposition, which was in entire accord with the general reactionary trend of Russian politics, called forth a storm of indignation in all circles of Russian Jewry. During the month of June, protest resolutions against the contemplated measure were adopted by the Jewish communities of St. Petersburg, Riga, Kishnev, Bobrysk, Tzitomir, Nikolayev, Minsk, Vitebsk, Vilna and other cities. Many resolutions were couched in violent terms betraying the outraged sentiments of Russian Jewry. As an illustration, the following extract from the Vilna resolution may be quoted. In the proposed scheme of popular representation with Jews, a cultured nation of 6 million are placed below the semi-savage aliens of East Russia. The policy of pacification applied to other suppressed nationalities has given way to a policy of terrorization when the Jews are concerned. The mad system consisting in the endeavor to irritate and insulate the Jews by medieval persecutions and their upon red vengeance on them for the manifestation of that irritation has now reached its climax. We appeal to the Russian people, which is now called upon to renovate the antiquated political structure of the country. We are of the hope that the malign addictiveness towards the Jews on the path of the retiring bureaucracy, which is eager to carry over the ferments of corruption into the healthy atmosphere of the future popular representation, will not be realized. Professor Trubetskoy, who waited upon the Tsar on June 6th at the head of combined deputation of Zemstwoz and municipalities, pointed out in his famous speech that no one should be excluded from popular representation. It is important that there should not be any disfranchised and disinherited. The government was shaken in its resolution and the council of ministers eliminated from the Bolivian project the clause barring the Jews from voting justifying this step by the undesirability to irritate the Jews still further. The Jewish question was also touched upon in the conferences at Peterhof, which were held during the month of July under the chairmanship of the Tsar to formulate plans for an Imperial Duma. Narishkin, a reactionary dignitary, demanded that the dangerous Jewish nation be barred from the Duma, but number of other dignitaries, the Minister of Finance Kokovtsev, the Assistant Minister of the Interior Trepov and Oberlensky and Chikachev, members of the council of state, advocated their admission and the discussion was terminated by the brief remark of the Tsar. The project with the insertion of the council of ministers in favor of the Jews shall be left unaltered. By this action, the government made itself guilty of flagrant inconsistency. It controlled upon the Jews the highest political privilege, the right of voting for popular representatives, but left them at the same time in a state of complete civil disfranchisement, even with regard to such elementary liberties as the right of domicile, the right of transit, and so on. Only one month previously, on June 8, the Tsar had approved the opinion of the committee of ministers in pursuance of the UK's of December 12, 1904. The committee had been busy discussing the Jewish problem to the effect that the consideration of the question of ameliorating the condition of the Jews should be deferred until the convocation of the new parliament. Evidently, the anti-Jewish conscience of the Tsar made it impossible for him to grant even the slightest relief to the Jews, who from barriers had been turned into revolutionaries. End of section 11. Section 12 of History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Volume 3. From the obsession of Nicholas II until the present day. By Szymon Tufnów. Translated by Israel Friedlander. This level of recording is in the public domain. Recording by S.S. Kim. Manicked Baesho. Portugal. Chapter 36. The Counter-Revolution and the October Massacres. Part 1. 1. The Finnish Designs of the Black Hundred. Soon afterwards, on August 6, 1905, the so-called Bolivian Constitution was made public, providing for a truncated imperial tumor with a system of representation based on class qualifications and limited to advisory functions, but without any restrictions as far as the franchise of the Jews was concerned. Now, wrote the Voskot, the Jew has the right to be a popular representative, but he has no right to reside in the place in which the imperial tumor assembles in the capital. Russian Jewry, with the exception of its left wing, was on the point of starting an election campaign to send its representatives to this mutilated tumor in the hope of attaining through it to a more perfect form of representation when the stomicors of events brought to the fore new threatening questions. This counterfeit of a national parliament failed to satisfy the Russian democracy and the struggle with the government broke out on you with unprecedented energy. Stormy political meetings were held at the universities and at other institutions of higher learning, which by a new case of August 27 had been granted academic self-government. The autonomous professorial councils began to admit Jewish students to the schools without any restrictive percentage, and the wave of an agitated Jewish youth was drawn into the holding sea of the Russian student body. A new succession of strikes followed, arranged by the students, working men and railroad workers. A general Russian strike was being carefully prepared as a last result in the struggle for a democratic constitution. The Army of the Emancipation Movement was instituting a bloodless revolution, the temporary stoppage of all railroad movements and of all other activities in the country in the hope of forcing Zathom to an act of self-epnigation and the proclamation of civil liberties. The month of September and the beginning of October were spent in these feverish preparations, but at the same time the Black Army of absolutism was making its own arrangements for a sanitary counter-revolution for regular sane battle in the nights directed against the participant in the Emancipation Movement and particularly against the Jews. The plans of the Emancipation Army were universally known, but the terrible designs of the dark forces of reaction were effectively concealed. Only when the bloody undertaking was accomplished was it possible to uncover the threat of the criminal program organization, which led from the palaces of the Tsar and the highest dignitary of state by way of the police department to the slums of murderers and hooligans. In the disclosures made by Lobov in November 1905, in his memorandum to Viter, the president of the council of ministers, the officials in the immediate environment of Nikolas II who had organized the October programs were pointed out by name. They were the patriotic general Bogdanovich in St. Petersburg who acted with the blessing of Archbishop Vladimir and with the assistance of the Imperial Camarilla and of many governors general in the provinces. During the month of September, fighting contingents of the Black Hundred whose number as Bogdanovich posted in the highest government spheres amounted to 100,000 were organized all over Russia. In every city, the parts to be enacted by the administrators, the police and the program hirelings from among the local rip-rap were carefully prepared and assigned. The program proclamations were printed openly, the manufacturing center of this propaganda literature as was afterwards disclosed in the Imperial Duma by Deputy Ustrov, formally assistant minister of the interior, was located in the printing office of the police department. There can be no question that the Tsar was acquainted, if not with all the details of these preparations, at least with the general plan of arranging a counter-revolution by means of carefully engineered massacres of which the Jews were to become the chief victims. Billions of rubles for the organization of the programs were appropriated from a secret 10 million rubles fund, the disposition of which lay entirely in the hands of the Tsar, such were the conditions which ushered in the month of October 1905. The first days of the month saw the beginning of the railroad strike. By the middle of the month, it had already sieged the entire country, accompanied in the industrial centers by a general strike in all lines of productive endeavor. In many cities, collisions took place between the revolutionaries and the military. At first, the government made an attempt to resort to threats, and all over Russia rang the bloodthirsty cry of the chief of police Trepov. No cartridges shall be spared. But at the last moment, autocracy recalled from the revolutionary tempest and gateway. On October 17, an imperial manifesto was issued, solemnly promising to bestow all civil liberties upon the Russian people, inviolability of person, freedom of conscience, liberty of speech, assemblage and organization, and the legislative tumor in each of the representatives of all classes of population were to have a voice. The manifesto made no mention, however, of the equality of all citizens before the law of the pistol of equal rights under various nationalities, and even in the accompanying memorandum of Premier Vite, the author of the enactment of October 17, the subject was disposed of in a few nameless phrases. Nevertheless, even in this hazy form, the manifesto made a tremendous impression. Everybody believed that autocratic Tsardom had been vanquished by the army of liberty, and that Russia had been finally converted from a state founded on police force into a body politic based on law. But on the day following, all these hopes were cruelly shattered. On October 18, in hundreds of cities, the carefully concealed army of counter-revolutionaries evidently obeying a pre-oriented signal crawled out from beneath the ground to indulge in an orge of blood lasting a full week, October 18 to 25, which in its heart finds no parallel in the entire history of humanity. 2. The Russian Saint Bartholomew Knight The principal victims of this protracted Saint Bartholomew Knight were the new eunuchs of the Emancipation Movement, the Jews. They were to pay the penalty for having assisted in resting from the despotic government, the manifesto, with its promise of liberties. In the course of one week, nearly 50 anti-Jewish programs accompanied by bloodshed took place in various cities. Odessa, Kiev, Kishnev, Kalarash, Simferopol, Romney, Kremlin Tzuk, Cherenigov, Nikolayev, Yekaterinov-Slav, Kamenets Podolsk, Yelizavetgrad, Orsha, etc. in addition to several hundred bloodless programs marked in regular fashion by the destruction of property, plunder, and incendiarism. The programs directed against the Christian participant in the Emancipation Movement, such as intellectuals, students, etc., in Tuber, Tomsk, and other interior Russian cities, amounted in all to a score or two. This disproportion alone shows the direction in which the organized dark forces were active. The strict uniformity and consistency in the carrying out of the counter-revolutionary conspiracy was too palpable to be overlooked. The customary procedure was as follows. In connection with the manifesto of October 17, the progressive elements would arrange a street procession, frequently adorned by the red flags of the left parties, and accompanied by appropriate acclimations and speeches expressive of the new liberty. Simultaneously, the participant in the patriotic demonstration consisting mostly of the scum of society of detectives and police officers in plain clothes would emerge from their nooks and crannies, carrying the portrait of the Tsar under the shadow of the national flag, singing the national hymn and shouting, Kura, beat the Zids. The Zids are eager for liberty. They go against our Tsar to put the Zid in his place. These patriotic demonstrators would be accompanied by police and Cossack patrols or soldiers ostensibly to preserve order, but in reality to enable the hooligans to attack and maltreat the Jews and prevent the victims from defending themselves. As soon as the Jews assembled for self-defense, they would be driven off by the police and troops. Thereupon, the patriotic demonstrators and the accomplices joining them on the way would break up into small bands and disperse all over the city, invading Jewish houses and stores, ruin, plunder, beat and sometimes slaughter entire families. The most terrible program took place in Odessa. It lasted fully four days. The rioters were openly assisted by the police and troops and were encouraged by the active support of city governor Nighthawk and the criminal inactivity of the military governor Kaulbaz. The heroism displayed by the Jewish self-defense was strong enough to beat off the hooligans, but it was powerless to defeat the troops and police. Over 300 dead, thousands of wounded or crippled Jews, among them many who lost their minds from the horrors, 140 widows, 593 orphans and more than 40,000 Jews materially ruined, such was the result of the battle which was fought against the Jews of Odessa during October 18 to 21. Approximately along the same lines, the program campaign was conducted in scores of other cities, with a few lowered departures from the customary ritual, as for instance in Niezin, in the government of Chernigov, where the Jewish community headed by the rabbi was forced by the rioters under the pain of death to pronounce publicly the oath of allegiance to the Tsar. As a rule, the programs which occurred in hundreds of cities, towns and villages were limited to the destruction of property, although even in small localities, such as in Semyonovka, in the government of Chernigov, the riots were occasionally accompanied by massacres. It may be added that the outbreaks were not confined to the pale of settlement. In a number of cities outside the pale, such as in Saratov, Boronies and other places with the small Jewish population, the Jewish communities were ruthlessly attacked. Contemporary history is not yet in a position to depict all the horrors which were perpetrated upon the Jews in Russia in the latter half of October 1905, or to trace with any amount of accuracy their underlying causes. Let us draw a veil over this bloody spectacle. There will come a time when the world will shudder on learning the truth about the bloody happenings and about the real culprits of this prolonged Bartholomew night at the beginning of the 20th century. The sinister counter-revolution which broke out on October 17, the day on which the manifesto of the Tsar was promulgated, threatened to trap the revolution into the abyss of Anarchy. All were profoundly aroused by the perfidious Byzantine policy of Nicholas II, who with one hand waved the peace banner before the progressive section of the Russian people, and with the other plunged a knife into its heart, a knife which most of all was to slash jewelry. Not only the parties of the extreme left, but even the constitutionalists who were willing to accept the promises of the October manifesto had little faith in the ultimate realization. A reign of chaos ensued. The parties of the left demanded now a democratic, now even a social republic. The political and labor strikes among them, those arranged by the Jewish Bund, assumed the character of Anarchy. The peasant or agrarian movement burst forth, accompanied by the burning of manors and estates. Poland and the Baltic region were in the throes of terrorism. Moscow witnessed an armed uprising with bellicase and with all the paraphernalia of a popular revolution, December 1905. The government quelled the Moscow rebellion and resolutely adopted a policy of repression, arrest, executions, punitive military expeditions were the means by which the program of the Drunov cabinet was to be carried into effect. The reactionary Camarilla around the Tsar operated in full force, banning the hatred against the Jews. On December 23, the Tsar received the deputation of the ring leaders of the Black Hundred who had organized themselves in the League of the Russian People. One of the speeches appealing to the Tsar to preserve autocracy was devoted to the Jewish question. The deputation begged the Tsar not to give equal rights to the Jews. To this Nicholas replied, laconically, I shall think it over. End of section 12, section 13 of history of the Jews in Russia and Poland, volume three from the obsession of Nicholas II until the present day by Szymon Dunov, translated by Israel Fritlander. This Livrivov's recording is in the public domain, recording by SS Kim, Anik Baisho, Portugal. Chapter 36, the counter-revolution and October massacre. Part two. Three, the undaunted struggle for equal rights. The terrible October calamities were faced by Russian Jewry in a spirit of courage and fortitude. It stood alone in its sorrow. The progressive elements of Russian society, which were themselves in the throes of a great crisis, reactivably upon the sufferings of the Jewish people, which had become the scapegoat of the counter-revolution. The indifference of the outside world, however, was counteracted by the rise of the Jewish national sentiment among the better classes of Russian Jewry. One month after the program auction earlier, the League for the Attainment of Equal Rights for the Jewish People held its second convention in St. Petersburg. The convention, which lasted four days, November 22nd to 25th, gave public utterance to the feeling of profound national indignation. It voted down the motion to send the deputation to Count Fitte, asking for the immediate grant of equal rights to the Jews. In the resolution, repudiating this step, the policy of the government was characterized in these words. The fact have incontrovertibly approved that recent programs, appalling by their dimensions and by the number of their victims, have been staged with the open connivance and in many cases with the immediate assistance and sometimes even under the direction of the police and highest local administration. That the government that had all abashed by the monstrous crimes of its executive organs, the local representative of state authority, has not removed from office a single one of the suspected functionalists and has taken no measures to bring them to justice. In view of the fact that Count Fitte has repeatedly stated that the government does not see its way clear to proclaim at the present moment the emancipation of the Jews, supposedly in the interest of the Jews themselves, against whom the agitation of the popular masses might be intensified by such a measure. Whereas in reality, the programs result of that very rightlessness of the Jews, which is fully realized by the masses of the Russian people and by the so-called Black Hundred. The convention resolves that the sending of a deputation to Count Fitte and the entering into negotiations with him will achieve no purpose and that instead all efforts should be concentrated upon organizing Russian Jewry in the server for its equality of citizenship by joining the ranks of the general movement for liberty. In view with the spirit of martyrdom, the convention remembered the Martha Tashevsky, the Avenger of the Kishnip massacre and passed the resolution to convey to the youth for sufferer who was then languishing in a penal military company in its enthusiastic greetings. In an outburst of national enthusiasm, the convention adopted the following bold resolution. In the interest of realizing to their full extent the civil, political and national rights of the Jewish nationality in Russia, the convention resolves as follows. To proceed without delay to call on the basis of universal and equal suffrage without discrimination of sex and by a direct secret boat on all Russian Jewish National Assembly in order to establish in accordance with the will of the entire Jewish population the forms and principles of its national self-determination as well as the foundations of its internal organization. It was the project of a national senior union radically different in its conception from the Napoleonic senior union convened in 1807. The third convention of the League of Equal Rights was held on February 10th to 13th 1906 during the election campaign to the First Imperial Duma. The proposal of the left wing of the League to boycott the Duma on the ground that it will prove a bulwark of reaction prediction which was fully justified by events and to refrain from taking parts in the elections was voted down. On the contrary, resolution was passed calling upon the Jews to take most active parts in the elections to nominate everywhere their own Jewish candidates and wherever this was impossible to give their votes to the non-Jewish candidates on condition that they pledge themselves to support in the Duma the civil political and national rights of the Jewish people. The resolution moreover contained these clothes to insist that the Jewish question in the Duma shall be settled unconditionally in connection with the fundamental articles of the constitution and with the questions of elementary liberties to be granted to all citizens. An election campaign was set in motion and carried on under the most difficult circumstances. The police authorities took advantage of the state of war which had been proclaimed in many places to interfere with the comprehensive pre-election propaganda and at the same time the Black Hundred tried to intimidate the Jews by holding out the menace of pogroms during the approaching Passover season. In Poland, the anti-Semitic chauvinists threatened the Jews with all possible reprisals for their audacious intentions to nominate their own candidates for the Duma alongside of the candidates of the Christian Poles. Simultaneously, the Jewish group of the left, the Bund and others, followed the policy of boycotting the Duma and did their best to interfere with the elections. However, all these apprehensions proved groundless. The Passover and election programs did not take place and Russian Jewry displayed a vigorous activity in the elections with the result that 12 Jewish deputies were sent to the first Duma. The most active among these deputies were M. Binawa, one of the leaders of the General Russian Constitutional Democratic Party and the president of the League for the Attainment of Equal Rights. Dr. Shemaria O'Levin, the well-known Zionist, L. Branson, actively identified with Jewish educational activities who was affiliated with the Russian Democratic group known as the Trudoviki were labor rights. All the Jewish deputies were united on the nationalistic platform formulated by the League for the Attainment of Equal Rights. By a resolution passed at the Fourth Convention of the League, held on May 9th to 13th, 1906, they pledged themselves to coordinate their actions in all questions pertaining to Jewish emancipation and to abide by a common discipline without, however, forming a separate parliamentary fraction for the Jewish question before the first Duma. The first Duma was convened on April 27, 1906 and barely three months later on July 8, it was dissolved or rather dispersed by the Tsar for having displayed a spirit of excessive opposition. The prevailing element in the first Duma was the constitutional democratic majority to which by their political sympathies the bulk of Russian Jewry and 10 of its 12 representatives in the Duma, the other two stood a little more to the left, belonged. It was natural for the Jews to expect that a parliament of this complexion would have no difficulty in solving the question of equal rights for the Jews as one of the most fundamental prerequisites of civil liberty. Unfortunately, this expectation was not justified. The entire brief session of the Duma was spent in an uninterrupted struggle of the opposition with the unscrupulous government which was then headed by Khoramikin, a hide-bind reactionary. True, in its reply to the speech from the Duma, the Duma declared that neither liberty nor order can be formally established without the equality of all citizens before the law. But in the pronouncement of the government of May 13, no word was said about this equality of citizenship. The Jewish deputy, in other words, delivered a powerful speech in each among other things he spoke as follows. From this platform, from it, so much has been said about political liberties. We Jews, the representatives of one of the most tortured nationalities in the land, have not uttered a single word about ourselves because we did not consider it seemingly to speak here of civil inequality. Now, however, it is becoming clear to us that the government has made up its mind to continue on the same road on which it has gone until now, and we are therefore bound to declare that so long as you will connive at civil slavery, there will be no peace in the land. The mistake made by the Jewish deputies consisted just in the fact that they had not uttered a single word about themselves on a formal occasion in reply to the speech from the throne, which had equally failed to make the slightest mention of civil equality, practically affecting all the Jews, and that they did not utter that word with that feeling of righteous indignation to which the representatives of the most tortured nationality in Russia were morally entitled. Later on, the debates in the tumor concerning the Jewish question were by the force of events concentrated upon the program police of the government. On May 8th, an interpolation was introduced regarding the complicity of the Imperial Police Department and instigating the programs of 1905. Stolipin, the Minister of the Interior, promised to reply to the interpolation, which was substantiated by documentary evidence a month later. But before the term had elapsed, a new secondary program broke out in Bialystok. In the center of the Jewish revolutionary and labor movement, where in 1905 the police and troops had already twice staged a Jewish massacre, a new conspiracy was being hatched by the police and military against the orders of the liberty movement. On Accidental Act of Terrorism, the assassination of the chief of police by an unknown culprit gave the police conspirators a proper occasion to execute their terrible design. On June 1st, during a church procession, a pistol was discharged by an agent profiteur from among the black hundred and at once a rumor spread like wildfire among the crowd that the Jewish anarchists are fighting at the Christians. The pogrom flared up on the spot. In the course of two days, the mob was busy demolishing Jewish houses and stores and attacking the Jews, while at the same time the police and military were systematically fighting at the Jews, not only on the streets, but also in the houses in which the unfortunate tried to hide. The bestialities of Kishnev were enacted again. Entire families were slaughtered. Human beings were tortured and had two pieces. Limbs were cut off from the bodies, nails driven into the heads. Eighty dead and hundreds of wounded Jews were the result of this new exploit of counter-revolutionaries. On June 2nd, 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 the resolution to bring in an interpolation 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 shut down by the police and the soldiers. On June 5th, three days after the appearance of the bloody specter of Bialystok in the Duma hall, a bill dealing with civil equality for the Jews came up for discussion. The burning problem involving the disenfranchisement of six million human beings was discussed side by side with the question of a few petty class discriminations and with the entire separate question of women's right. The entire treatment of the subject by the deputies showed the 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 the 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 8th, the Duma had again occasioned to discuss the subject of pogroms. Premier Stolipin replied to the interpolation of May 8th concerning the complicity of the government in the pogroms 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 Uzrov, 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 10 people or against 10,000, and he concluded his speech with these words. The danger will 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, resigned new pogrom fiends. The tumor finally adopted a resolution echoing these cries of indignation. A more passionate tone characterized the discussions of the tumor during the days of June 23rd to 26th in connection with the report of the parliamentary commission, which had been appointed to investigate the Bialystok massacre. The tumor was scandalized by the lying official communication in which the Jews were put forward as the orders 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. Those speeches delivered by the Jewish deputies by Jakobson, who had visited Bialystok as one of the members of the parliamentary commission and by Vinava and Levin, gave end to their burning national wrath. The Russian Mirov, Odyshev, pilloried the highly-placed instigators of the Bialystok butchery. On July 7th, the tumor concluded the debate by adopting a resolution denouncing in violent terms the policy of the government or policy of operation, flightless 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 Anaki and the second tumor. Two days later, when the deputies appeared before the tumor, they found the building closed and on the doors was displayed an imperial manifesto dissolving the tumor, which has encroached upon the domain outside its jurisdiction and has engaged in investigating the acts of the authorities appointed by us. The sudden dissolution of the tumor was answered by the V-book 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 us under 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 tumor, 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 Stolipin, who had been appointed prime minister at the dissolution of the tumor, expropriations, i.e. the plunder of state funds and private money for the revolutionary purposes, anarchistic labor strikes were the order of the day. The government retorted with monstrous measures of oppression. A political court measure was instituted, which in the course of five months, September 1906 to January 1907, sentenced over 1,000 people to death, among them many who were innocent or underage. 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 programs. The chief of the political police in the city of Siedelitz, Tikanovich, engineered on August 27 to 28 a bloody military program in the city netting 30 deaths and more than 150 wounded Jews. The signal for the program was charge fired at the century by an agent provocateur, whereupon the troops started on aimless muscretary fire on the streets and even bombarded Jewish houses with grenades. Many soldiers, in a state of intoxication, committed incredible verbalities and looted Jewish property. Notwithstanding the official report of another agent of the local political police, Captain Pietukov, he asserted that the Jews had not given the slightest reason for the butchery and that the letter had been entirely engineered by the military and political authorities. The perpetrator of the program, Tikanovich, 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 the Tukata in regard to the solution of the Jewish question. The government of Stolipin, 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, seemed to be a matter of popular conscience and should, therefore, be referred to the legislative institutions. The council of ministers laid before the Tsar 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 desperate struggle against the existing order. But these representations had no effect. Nikolas II is reported to have said on that occasion, so long as I am Tsar, the disease of Russia shall not have equal rights. During the time, the power of the so-called Second Government, the horrible Kamarilla around the Tsar 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. There was only one way of hope left the Second Duma, which was to be converted in February 1907. The election campaign was carried on under government pressure and was hampered by the threat of reprisals and programs on the part of the Black. The elections resulted in a Duma with an anomalous complexion. The two extreme wings, the Socialists and Black Hundred, had gained in strength, whereas the constitutional democratic center had been weakened. The Jews had managed to elect only three deputies, apart from one Jewish social democrat, who ran on the ticket of his party. They were men of little renown, whereas of the deputies of the First Duma, who were persecuted for signing the V-Book manifesto, not one was elected. The entire energy of the new parliament spent itself in the struggle between its left and right wing. The Jewish question was entirely relegated to the committee on the freedom of conscience. The government had brought in a bill repealing all denominational restrictions, except those affecting the Jews, but the committee decided to eliminate this discriminating clause and in this manner carried through the emancipation of the Jews under the guise of the freedom of conscience. But this time too, the hope for Jewish emancipation proved an illusion. The Duma was soon dissolved under the pretext that a revolutionary conspiracy of the socialistic deputies had been uncovered. On June 3, 1907, another coup d'etat took place. The former electoral law which made it possible for the Russian democracy and the oppressed nationalities to send their representatives to the Duma was arbitrarily changed by the Tsar in order to ensure a conservative pro-government majority in the Russian parliament. They followed an era of dismal reaction. End of section 13, section 14 of History of the Jews in Russia and Poland, volume 3 from the obsession of Nicholas II until the present day by Szymon Duvnoff, translated by Israel Friedlander. This liverwax recording is in the public domain, recording by SS Schemes, Manik Devayesho, Portugal, chapter 37, External Operation and Internal Consolidation, Part 1. 1. The New Alignments within Russian Jewry. The terrible quadranium of 1903 to 1906 had an extraordinarily quickening effect upon the national and political thoughts of the classes as well as of the mass suppression jury. The era of Kishnip and Hommel when the right-less Jews were made defenseless. The era of the Russo-Japanese War when these right-less and defenseless patriots were called upon to fight for their fatherland against the enemy from without. The era of the revolution when after the sanctuary struggle for liberty, the Jews received a constitutional charter wrapped up in pogroms. Finally, the first year of the Duma when indignant utterances of the Jewish deputies from the platform of the Duma were accompanied by the mourns of the wounded Jews of Bialystok. These terrible upheavals might have proved fatal to Russian Israel, had it not during the preceding period worked out for itself a definite nationalistic attitude towards the non-Jewish world. There were several varieties of this national political formula. At the one pole stood Zionism with its theory of New Exodus. At the other pole was the Social Democratic Party with its premise that the blood of the Jew must serve as lubricating oil upon the wheels of the Russian revolution. But even these two poles came somewhat closer to one another at the moment of the great national danger converging in spite of all their differences in programs and tactics towards the central line above which floated the banner proclaiming the fight for civil, political, and national rights of the Jewish people. Disranchised, battered by pogroms, victimized by tyrannous Zardom, the Jews of Russia never thought of degrading themselves to the point of begging equal rights in instalments. They demanded their rights in full and demanded them not merely as the Jewish population but as the Jewish people as an autonomous nation among other nations with the culture of its own. The doctrine of national cultural optimism was crystallized in definite slogans. These slogans were proclaimed as we have seen by the League for the Attainment of Equal Rights for the Jewish people which united on its platform all political Jewish groups with the exception of the social democratic partisans. The ears of storm and stress also forced Zionism to recede from its original position of denying the possibility of a nationalist struggle in the diaspora. Meeting during the most exciting days of the Russian revolution, the seventh Zionist Congress at Basel held in July 1905 mourned the loss of its prematurely cut up leader Theodor Herzl and adopted a resolution voicing its strict allegiance to the Palestinian idea and rejecting the temptations of territorialism. This led to a formal split within the party, the territorialist headed by Tsangvil, seizing and forming an organization of their own. A year later, in November 1906, the Russian Zionists met at Helsing Falls and adopted the platform of a synthetic Zionism that is a combination of the Palestine idea with the fight for national and cultural autonomy in the diaspora. The guiding resolution of the Zionist Convention was couched in the following terms. The Zionist organization of Russia sanctions the affiliation of the Zionist with the movement for liberty among the territorial nationalities of Russia and advocates the necessity of uniting Russian Jewry upon the principle of the recognition of the Jewish nationality and its self-government in all the affairs affecting Jewish national life. This slogan of national rights was followed by the Zionists during the elections to the First Imperial Duma. It was acted upon to a lesser extent by the two socialistic factions affiliated with Zionism, the Pohale Zion and the Zionistic Socialists. Both groups confined themselves to the demands of a minimum of cultural autonomy in the diaspora, concentrating their entire energy upon emigration whether it be into Palestine as advocated by the Pohale Zion or into any other territory as preached by the Zionistic Socialists. During 1905 to 1906, a new socialistic party with strong nationalistic leanings came into existence. In distinction from the other two socialistic factions, it demanded the maximum of national autonomy in the diaspora, including even a Jewish diet as the central organ of Jewish self-government. The members of this party called themselves Siamist from Siam, diet, or went by the name of the Jewish Socialistic Labour Party. In the midst of all these parties and platforms stood the league for the attainment of equal rights for the Jewish people, this regarding all party and class affiliations. During the revolutionary period, this organization endeavoured to unite all public spirit Jews in the general Russian and national Jewish struggle for liberty, but with the decline of the revolutionary movement, the centrifugal forces within the league began to assert themselves. The diversions of views and tactics among the various groups composing the league proved stronger than their common interest in the nearest aim, which with the advent of the political reaction had become more remote. Thus, it came about that at the beginning of 1907, the league for the attainment of equal rights fell asunder into its component parts. The first to secede from it was the Zionist party, which preferred to carry on its own Gaggenwald's outright under a separate party flag, although properly considered a far-reaching activity on behalf of national Jewish rejuvenation in the lands of the diaspora was scarcely compatible with the fundamental principle of political Zionism, the negation of the colors. The Helsinki force program of synthetic Zionism, the child of the liberty movement, shrank more and more as the hopes for Jewish emancipation in Russia receded into the distance. Out of the league for equal rights came further the Jewish People's Group, a party which opposed the Zionist idea altogether and repudiated the attempt to find new Jewish centers outside of Russia. This group headed by the well-known political leader Mvunava placed in the center of its program, the fight for civil emancipation, in close contact with the progressive elements of the Russian people. Whereas, in the question of national Jewish interests, it confined itself to the principle of self-determination and to the freedom of Jewish culture in general outlines, without putting forward concrete demands of Jewish autonomy. The People's Group counted among its adherents many representatives of the Jewish intelligentsia who had more or less discarded the idea of assimilation and had come to recognize the necessity of a minimum of Jewish national rights. The Third Group, which also took its rise in the League for Equal Rights and received the name of Fox Party or Jewish National Party, stood firmly on the platform of national Jewish policies. The underlying principles of this organization were more correctly of this far-reaching social current, which has its origin in the historic development of the Jewish people was the same principle of national cultural autonomism which had long before the revolution pursued its own line of development parallel to Zionism. The simultaneous struggle for civil and national rights, the creation of a full-fledged national community instead of the cruelty scheme of Western Europe, an autonomous national school, and the rights of both languages, the Hebrew and the Yiddish, such was in general outlined the programs of the Fox Party. At the same time, this party taking the historic idea of transplantation of Jewish centers in the diaspora as its point of departure recognized the emigration to America and the colonization of Palestine as great national factors destined to create two new centers of Judaism, one quantitatively powerful center in North America and the smaller national center but qualitatively from the point of view of cultural purity more valuable in Palestine. Finally, the League for Equal Rights gave birth to a fourth party, the Jewish Democratic Group, which is distinguished from the People's Group by its stronger leaning towards the political parties of the left, the Russian radicals and socialists. 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, they emerged in Jewish public life or form of representation reflecting the national and political ideas which had assumed concrete shape during the years of the Russian Revolution and Counterrevolution. 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 cooperating 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'etat of June 3, 1997, 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 Tsartom. 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 was supplied with millions of rubles from the imperial counter-revolutionary fund do so-called black money. Street heroes and program 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 arrest 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 to 1909, forced from the breast of the grand old man, Leo Tolstoy, the desperate cry, I cannot keep silent. Yet Nicholas II continued his role 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 programs. 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 Tsar to pardon the participants in the patriotic demonstrations. The official ephemism for anti-Jewish riots and the invaluable response was an immediate pardon which was ostentatiously published in the newspapers. The petitions to the Tsar applying for the pardon of convicted perpetrators of violence went regularly through the Ministry of Justice, the ferocious reactionary and anti-Semite, Shegulovitov. No one doubted that this amnesty was granted by the verge of an agreement concluded in 1905 between the government and the program ring leaders guaranteeing immunity to the anti-Jewish rioters. A different treatment was meted out to the Jewish self-defense contingents which had the courage to oppose the murderers. They were dealt with ruthlessly. In Odessa, O'Koth Marshall sentenced the six young Jews, members of a self-defense group, which was active during the October programs, to long terms of hard labor, characterizing the crime of these Jews in the following wars. For having participate in a conspiracy, having for its object the overdraw of the existing order by means of arming the Jewish proletariat from 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 murderers' wars were indeed guilty of a criminal offense against the existing order. Since the latter sought its support in these wars, 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 lowered contrast between the release of the program perpetrators and the conviction of the program 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 the 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 or second government which yielded greater power than the official quasi-constitutional government of Stolipin. The directs of the Russian populace gave full vent to their base instincts. In Odessa, hosts of League members made the 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 with the result that the assaults upon the Jews in the streets assumed an even more sanitary 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 Stolipin, which was anxious to save at least the appearance of a constitutional regime, was often forced to give way before the secret government of the Black League, which commanded the full sympathy of the Tsar. By orders of the League, Stolipin decreed that 100 Jewish students who had passed the competitive examination at the Kiev Polytechnic should be excluded from that institution and the 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. End of section 14.