CHAPTER VII

I. ORIGIN AND AGENCY

Kishineff is the capital of Bessarabia, the seat of its government, and the chief centre of its trading industry. It has a present population of 130,000, of a mixed ethnological community. The Russians number about 8000; the Moldavians, 50,000; the Jews, 50,000, with Bulgarians, Serbs, Greeks, Macedonians, and Germans accounting for the balance.

In the time of the Romans, Bessarabia formed part of the Imperial colony known as Dacia, and the Moldavian peasantry, who form the greater part of its present population, are said to be descendants of Roman “undesirables” who were forcibly exiled to the Balkan regions. From thence they emigrated, in time, to the rich lands lying west of the Dniester. The succession of conquering and colonising peoples who fought for the possession of this most fruitful region is historically bewildering. Cymri and Scythians, Greeks and Getæ, Romans and Goths, Huns and Avars, Bulgars and Slavonians; until, in the seventh century, the Bessi arrived, and gave the country its name of “Bessarabia.” Then came, in due course, Ugrians, Kumans, Polovtzians, and Mongolians. In the Middle Ages the Republic of Genoa founded colonies along the Dniester, which in turn gave way to an invasion of Turks. During the eighteenth century Russian power asserted itself in the land, and portions of the southern provinces which belonged to Turkey were, in our own time, ceded to the great Empire, thus completing Russian possession of the most fought-for country embraced within the wide dominions of the Tsars.

Thirty years ago Kishineff was on a level with an average Turkish town. According to its present Mayor, M. Karl Schmidt, the city owes its rapid rise and prosperity, and its present flourishing trade, solely to the Jews. They built up its commerce, organised its banks, developed its general business, and made it the handsome, thriving city it is to-day.

The country around the city is a great wine-growing region, and the Moldavian peasants are the chief producers of this most marketable commodity. They are not an intelligent race, and are even more superstitious, if possible, than the average Russian Mujik. They do not migrate from their villages in search of labour, like Russian workers in the central provinces. Their spare time is spent in eating sunflower seeds, and in drinking vodka during the winter months.

The economic relations between these Moldavian wine-growers and the Jews of Kishineff are most intimate. They have no business capacity whatever, and they dispose of their produce to the Jew brokers and dealers, who make, at least, a ten per cent. profit on such transactions.

These intimate trading connections have not led, as recently alleged, to any marked ill-feeling against the intermediaries; though it is only natural to assume that the profits of the skilled exploiter are not always a source of satisfaction to the mind of the peasant producer. What I was assured of, in this connection, from all sources of information sought by me in Kishineff, was that the origin of the outbreak at Easter was not, in any sense, traceable to these dealings between the Jew merchants and brokers of the city and the surrounding Moldavian farmers.

The genesis of the recent massacres is to be found in the special legislation which gives the Jew the mockery of civil rights within a pale of legal domicile. There are, at least, a hundred laws, ordinances, and special regulations having for object the coercing of him in all his religious, social, and industrial rights; even within this Pale of Settlement.[2] He is crowded into urban centres and denied, under penalties, access to where conditions of work and location might relieve him of his poverty and wretched home. Fines are levied upon him for infringements of these coercive regulations, and this fact induces him to circumvent such restrictive measures, while it appeals also to the police to help him to do so--for a consideration.

The first serious trouble experienced by the Jews of Bessarabia began about eight years ago. A _sous-prefect_ of police, named Von Oglio, appointed in the Beltzy district by the present Vice-Governor, Ostrogoff, harassed the Jews by exactions and blackmail until they “struck” against being further bled in this manner. He retaliated as follows:

On the Hebrew festival of Yom Kippur, one of the most solemn ceremonies of the year, Von Oglio entered the local synagogue, seized the Torah, or sacred writing, flung it on the floor, ordered a policeman to pick it up, to seal it, and then had it conveyed to--the local prison! He next expelled the small congregation, and placed his seal upon the lock of the place of worship.

He then applied the “May Laws” in all their rigour, and forced all who had not special permits to leave the town, even men who had lived there in peace for thirty years; taking proceedings against them under circumstances which led to the death or injury of their cattle and the ruin of their crops. This conduct on the part of the local head of the police excited a corresponding feeling of hostility among the local peasants. They saw the guardians of the law ill-treating those whom they were supposed to protect, and they followed the example thus set them.

Suits for reparation and damages were brought by some of the wealthier victims of this police tyranny, but no redress was obtained. Von Oglio was removed, without degradation or punishment, to another district, and no further steps were taken by the authorities.

The chief instigator of the recent massacres now appeared on the scene. Up to 1894 the only paper in the province of Bessarabia was the _Bessarabsky Viestnik_, a journal of a moribund existence. In this year one Pavolachi Kroushevan, of Moldavian origin, acquired the dying sheet, and amalgamated it with a new daily paper, the _Bessarabetz_. The Vice-Governor, Ostrogoff, was press censor, in virtue of his higher post, and he extended his patronage to Kishinev’s only daily organ in the most marked manner.

Kroushevan commenced at once a vicious anti-Semitic campaign. He singled out for special attack municipal offices in which Jews were employed as clerks and in other capacities, and demanded that the hated Hebrews should be driven out to make room for Christians. This was done. Popular feeling was worked up in this manner to such a heat that the paper became the dominating force in the public life of the city. It was the only paper read in Kishineff. Its circulation reached 20,000, and its articles against the Jews were directly addressed to the police, soldiers, workingmen, Seminarists (Kishineff possesses half-a-dozen Royal and Ecclesiastical Colleges, Gymnasiums, and High Schools), and to all the lower employés of the Governor’s, Post Office, Telegraph, and other public departments.

From fiery denunciation the Editor progressed to deliberate incitations to violence. Articles headed “Death to the Jews!”--“Crusade against the Hated Race!”--“Down with the Disseminators of Socialism!” followed each other, while Kroushevan organised a society under the patronage of his paper, in which the most rabid of his pupils in the anti-Semitic war were enrolled.

All this was ostentatiously tolerated by the present Vice-Governor, Ostrogoff.

Kroushevan got into financial difficulties a few months ago, and removed to St. Petersburg, leaving the paper in charge of the deputy-editor, but continuing himself as directing head of the staff. Its ferocious anti-Jewish spirit and propaganda were in no way abated by this arrangement.

This brings us down, in the matter of time, to a few weeks before the recent massacres.

There next happened two events that gave the _Bessarabetz_ a match with which to explode the mine of popular fury it had been building in the popular mind for four years. One was a murder of a boy at a village south of Kishineff, called Doubossar; and the other the suicide of a girl within the city itself. These were at once seized upon by the Kroushevan organ as “proofs” that they were instances of Semitic ritual murder! They were deliberately declared to be cases of the sacrifice of Christian blood in the performance of Hebrew rites at Passover! Steps were taken at once to put the true facts before the people, in public inquests and declarations; but the match had already ignited the end of the _Bessarabetz_ fuse, and those who were resolved to strike terror into the “Socialist Jews” of Bessarabia and Southwestern Russia paid no heed to the documents and evidence which told the truth about the Doubossar boy’s death and the girl who took poison and who passed away in the Jewish Hospital in Kishineff. The plot was ripe for execution, and the Paschal time, associated by the atrocious legend with the kidnapping and killing of Christian children, was fixed upon for action.