rubles, not to speak of the scores of killed
and wounded Jews and a goodly number of violated women. In the official
reports these orgies of destruction were politely designated as
"disorders," and _The Imperial Messenger_ limited its account of the
horrors perpetrated at Kiev to the following truth-perverting dispatch:

On April 26, disorders broke out in Kiev which were directed against
the Jews. Several Jews received blows, and their stores and
warehouses were plundered. On the morning of the following day the
disorders were checked with the help of the troops, and five hundred
men from among the rioters were arrested.

The later laconic reports are nearer to the facts. They set the figure
of arrested rioters at no less than fourteen hundred, and make mention
of a number of persons who had been wounded during the suppression of
the excesses, including one gymnazium and one university student. Yet
even these later dispatches contain no reference to Jewish victims.

4. FURTHER OUTBREAKS IN SOUTH RUSSIA

The barbarism displayed in the metropolis of the south-west communicated
itself with the force of an infectious disease to the whole region.
During the following days, from April to May, some fifty villages and a
number of townlets in the government of Kiev and the adjacent
governments of Volhynia and Podolia were swept by the pogrom epidemic.
The Jewish population of the town of Smyela [1] and the surrounding
villages, amounting to some ten thousand souls, experienced, on a
smaller scale, all the horrors perpetrated at Kiev. It was not until the
second day, May 4, that the troops proceeded to put an end to the
violence and pillage which had been going on in the town and which
resulted in a number of killed and wounded. In a near-by village a
Jewish woman of thirty was attacked and tortured to death, while the
seven year old son of another woman, who had saved herself by flight,
was killed in beastly fashion for his refusal to make the sign of the
cross.

[Footnote 1: In the government of Kiev.]

In many cases the pogroms had been instigated by the newly arrived
Great-Russian "bare-footed brigade" who having accomplished their
"work," vanished without a trace.

A similar horde of tramps arrived at the railway station of Berdychev.
But in this populous Jewish center they were met at the station by a
large Jewish guard who, armed with clubs, did not allow the visiting
"performers" to leave the railway