attention both of the Russian and the
foreign press. It was universally felt that these farcical performances
of uncouth administrators were only the manifestations of a bottomless
hatred, of a morbid desire to insult and to humble the Jews, and that
these administrators were capable at any moment to proceed from
moralizing to more tangible forms of ill-treatment. This danger
intensified the state of alarm.

While making preparations for storming the citadel of Russian Jewry, the
Government took good care to keep it meanwhile in its normal state of
siege. The resourcefulness of the administration brought the _technique_
of repression to perfection. The officials were no longer content with
inventing cunning devices for expelling old Jewish residents from the
villages. [1] They now made endeavors to reduce even the area of the
_urban_ Pale in which the Jews were huddled together, panting for
breath. In 1890, the provincial authorities, acting evidently on a
signal from above, began to change numerous little townlets into
villages, which, as rural settlements, would be closed to the Jews. As a
result, all the Jews who had settled in these localities after the
issuance of the "Temporary Rules" of May 3, 1882, were now expelled, and
even the older residents who were exempt from the operation of the May
laws shared the same fate unless they were able (which in very many
cases they were not) to produce documentary evidence that they had lived
there prior to 1882. Simultaneously a new attempt was made to drive the
Jews from the forbidden fifty verst zone along the Western border of the
Empire, particularly in Bessarabia. These expulsions had the effect of
filling the already over-crowded cities of the Pale with many more
thousands of ruined people.

[Footnote 1: There are cases on record when Jewish soldiers who returned
home after the completion of their term of service were refused
admission to their villages, on the ground that they were "new
settlers."]

At the same time the life of the outlawed Jews was made unbearable in
the cities outside the Pale, particularly in the large centers, such as
Kiev, Moscow, and St. Petersburg. The governor-general of Kiev
prohibited the wives of Jewish artisans who were legally entitled to
residence in that city to sell eatables in the market, on the technical
ground that under the law artisans could only trade in the articles of
their own manufacture, thus robbing the poor Jewish workm