d to keep their stores open on Christian holidays from
noon-time until six o'clock in the evening. The reply of the local
Jew-baiters took the form of a pogrom.

On Sunday, the day before Yom Kippur, when the Jews opened their stores
for a few hours, a hired crowd of ruffians from among the local street
mob fell upon the Jewish stores and began to destroy and loot whatever
goods it could lay its hands on. The stores having been rapidly closed,
the rioters invaded the residences of the Jews, destroying the property
contained there and filling the streets with fragments of broken
furniture and leathers from torn bedding. The plunderers were assisted
by the peasants who had arrived from the adjacent villages. In the
evening, a drunken mob, which had assembled on the market-place, laid
fire to a number of Jewish stores and houses, inflicting on their owners
a loss of many millions.

All this took place during the holy Yom Kippur eve. The Jews, who did
not dare to worship in their synagogues or even to remain in their
homes, hid themselves with their wives and children in the garrets and
orchards or in the houses of strangers. Many Jews spent the night in a
field outside the city, where, shivering from cold, they could watch the
glare of the ghastly flames which destroyed all their belongings. The
police, small in numbers, proved "powerless" against the huge hordes of
plunderers and incendiaries. On the second day, the pogrom was over, the
work of destruction having been duly accomplished. The subsequent
judicial inquiry brought out the fact clearly that the pogrom had been
engineered by Gladkov and his associates, a fact of which the local
authorities could not have been ignorant. Gladkov fled from the city but
returned subsequently, paying but a slight penalty for his monstrous
crime.

It should be added, however, that the Government was greatly displeased
with the reappearance of the terrible spectre of 1881, as it only tended
to throw into bolder relief the policy of legal pogroms by which Western
Europe was alarmed. As a matter of fact, already in October, the
semi-official _Grazhdanin_ had occasion to print the following news
item:

Yesterday [October 15] the financial market [abroad] was marked by
depression; our securities have fallen, owing to new rumors
concerning alleged contemplated measures against the Jews.

Commenting upon this, the paper declared that these rumors were entirely
unfounded, for the