cts perpetrated against the
Jews--particularly if the Tzar himself had made a large donation for
that purpose, as he was wont to do in other cases of this kind. As it
was, the authorities not only neglected to take such a step, but they
even went so far as to forbid the Jews of St. Petersburg to start a
public collection for the relief of the pogrom victims. Nay, the
governor-general of Odessa refused to accept a large sum of money
offered to him by well-to-do Jews for the benefit of the sufferers.

Nor was this the worst. The local authorities did everything in their
power to manifest their solidarity with the enemies of Judaism. The
street pogroms were followed by administrative pogroms _sui generis_.
Already in the month of May, the police of Kiev began to track all the
Jews residing "illegally" in that city [1] and to expel these "criminals"
by the thousands. Similar wholesale expulsions took place in Moscow,
Oryol, and other places outside the Pale of Settlement. These
persecutions constituted evidently an object-lesson in religious
toleration, and the Russian masses which had but recently shown to what
extent they respected the inviolability of Jewish life and property took
the lesson to heart.

[Footnote 1: It will be remembered that the right of residence in Kiev
was restricted in the case of the Jews to a few categories: first-guild
merchants, graduates from institutions of higher learning, and
artisans.]

One hope was still left to the Jews. The law courts, at least, being the
organs of the public conscience of Russia, were bound to condemn
severely the sinister pogrom heroes. But this hope, too, proved
illusory. In the majority of cases the judges treated act of open
pillage and of violence committed against life and limb as petty street
brawls, as "disturbances of the public peace," and imposed upon their
perpetrators ridiculously slight penalties, such as three months'
imprisonment--penalties, moreover, which were simultaneously inflicted
upon the Jews who, as in the case of Odessa, had resorted to
self-defence. When the terrible Kiev pogrom was tried in the local
Military Circuit Court, the public prosecutor Strelnikov, a well-known
reactionary who subsequently met his fate at the hands of the
revolutionaries, delivered himself on May 18 of a speech which was
rather an indictment against the Jews than against the rioters. He
argued that these disorders had been called forth entirely by the
"exploitatio