ch as Yelisavetgrad (Elizabethgrad), Kiev, and Odessa, and entered
into secret negotiations with the highest police officials concerning a
possible "outburst of popular indignation against the Jews" which they
expected to take place as part of the economic conflict, intimating the
undesirability of obstructing the will of the Russian populace by police
force. Figures of Great-Russian tradesmen and laborers, or _Katzaps,_ as
the Great Russians are designated in the Little-Russian South, began to
make their appearance in the railroad cars and at the railroad stations,
and spoke to the common people of the summary punishment soon to be
inflicted upon the Jews or read to them anti-Semitic newspaper articles.
They further assured them that an imperial ukase had been issued,
calling upon the Christians to attack the Jews during the days of the
approaching Greek-Orthodox Easter.

Although many years have passed since these events, it has not yet been
possible to determine the particular agency which carried on this pogrom
agitation among the Russian masses. Nor has it been possible to find out
to what extent the secret society of high officials, which had been
formed in March, 1881, under the name of "The Sacred League," with the
object of defending the person of the Tzar and engaging in a terroristic
struggle with the "enemies of the public order," [1] was implicated in
the movement. But the fact itself that, the pogroms were carefully
prepared and engineered is beyond doubt: it may be inferred from the
circumstance that they broke out almost simultaneously in many places of
the Russian South, and that everywhere they followed the same routine,
characterized by the well-organized "activity" of the mob and the
deliberate inactivity of the authorities.

[Footnote 1: The League existed until the autumn of 1882. Among its
members were Pobyedonostzev and the anti-Jewish Minister Ignatyev.]

The first outbreak of the storm took place in Yelisavetgrad
(Elizabethgrad), a large city in New Russia, [1] with a Jewish
population of fifteen thousand souls. On the eve of the Greek-Orthodox
Easter, the local Christians, meeting on the streets and in the stores,
spoke to one another of the fact that "the Zhyds are about to be
beaten." The Jews became alarmed. The police, prepared to maintain
public order during the first days of the Passover, called out a small
detachment of soldiers. In consequence, the first days of the festival
passed q