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The local authorities of Balta were forewarned in time of the approaching pogroms. Beginning with the middle of March the people in Balta and the surrounding country were discussing them openly. When the Jews of that town made their apprehensions known to the local police commissioner, they received from him an evasive reply.
This terrible insult gnaws at my vitals. It may be that I am mistaken, but I do honestly believe that even if I succeeded in moving to a happier country where all men are equal, where there are no pogroms by day and "Jewish commissions" by night, I would yet remain sick at heart to the very end of my life to such an extent do I feel worn out by this accursed year, this universal mental eclipse which has visited our dear fatherland.
The first and worst pogroms were perpetrated in those places where the Jews were like their Russian neighbors in every respect, except in the eyes of the law, and with the approval of some who were devotees of the Narodnaya Volya. The Jewish consciousness reasserted itself.
If a Jew and a Gentile kept store side by side, the Gentile could content himself with smaller profits. He did not have to buy permission to travel in the interests of his business. He did not have to pay three hundred rubles fine if his son evaded military service. He was saved the expense of hushing inciters of pogroms. Police favor was retailed at a lower price to him than to the Jew.
In 1882, Leo Pinsker, a Jewish physician of Odessa, disturbed by the pogroms of 1881, made a keen analysis of the position of the Jews, declared that anti-Semitism was a psychosis and incurable, that the cause of it was the abnormal condition of Jewish life, and that the only remedy for it was the removal of the cause through self-help and self-liberation.
In the French-occupied coastal zone riots broke out against the French; in Palestine there were "pogroms" against the Jews, whom the Arabs, both Moslem and Christian, hated for their "Zionist" plans; while in Mesopotamia there were sporadic uprisings of tribesmen. Faced by this ominous situation, the "mandatories" took military counter-measures. The French took especially vigorous action.
The announcement clearly implied that the Government knew beforehand of the imminence of new pogroms. Even the conservative Moscow News commented on the injudicious statement of the official organ in emphatic and sarcastic terms: The Imperial Messenger is comforting the public by the announcement that it would in due time and at due length report all cases of excesses perpetrated upon the Jews.
This is an additional proof for the contention that systematic pogroms in Russia are impossible as long as the central Government and the local authorities are honestly and firmly set against them. The stringent measures adopted by Tolstoi were soon reflected in the legal trials arising out of the pogroms.
Pogroms and other manifestations of anti-Semitism have been so common in Bolshevist Russia as to make the "Jewish question" one of extreme difficulty and importance. In numerous Soviets, notably Yaroslavl, Vitebsk, and Smolensk, Jewish members were openly insulted by the Bolsheviki; such epithets as "szhid!"
The Pogrom Victims' Relief Committee of the Russian Red Cross Society published a report of its investigations of the Jewish pogroms in southern Russia during the period when General Denikin's forces were fighting the Bolsheviki.
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