Free The Family Romanov: Murder, Rebellion, and the Fall of Imperial Russia by Candace Fleming Page B

anti-Jewish, antiworker newspaper. He even secretly provided guns to its members. Meanwhile, policemen—acting under orders from Nicholas’s minister of the interior—encouraged the Black Hundred to take to the streets, turning a blind eye as the mob attacked anyone who looked anti-tsar.
    But the group’s most vicious attacks were perpetrated against the Jews. In the two weeks after the signing of the October Manifesto, there were 694 separate pogroms across the country. Pogroms (derived from the Russian word meaning “to wreak havoc”) were organized attacks against Jews. And while Nicholas did not instigate these attacks, he did little to discourage them. With staggering brutality, Russian subjects, provoked by the Black Hundred, rose up against their Jewish neighbors, burning homes, looting shops and synagogues, and murdering innocent men, women, and children. For the most part, police and government officials looked the other way. They took no action to stop the violence or arrest the attackers. Instead, they shared Nicholas’s view that “the Yids,” as he derisively called his Jewish subjects, “must be kept in their place.”
    Pogroms were hardly new to Russia. Attacks on Jews had been happening for centuries. One of the worst had occurred just two years earlier in the town of Kishinev. Incited by a leaflet (printed under the supervision of Nicholas’s minister of the interior and paid for with the tsar’s money) that read in part: “Brothers, in the name of our Savior, who gave his blood for us, in the name of our verypious Little Father, the Tsar … let us join on Easter Day in the cry, ‘Down with the Jews!’ Let us massacre these … monsters,” Christians rioted for three days. When peace was finally restored, fifty-seven Jews (including two babies and a twelve-year-old boy) lay dead, and five hundred more were wounded. Homes and businesses—fourteen hundred in all—had been pillaged and destroyed, leaving almost two thousand Jewish families with little more than rubble. When Nicholas heard what had happened, he was pleased.“Good,” he said. “The Jews needed to be taught a lesson.”
    Considered undesirable subjects, Jews had not only been the victims of dozens of pogroms, they’d been subjected to endless imperial decrees meant to discriminate against them. By the time Nicholas took the throne, his predecessors had already created more than fourteen hundred laws meant to limit the way Jews lived. Among them was a law forcing almost all Russian Jews (some 5.2 million, or nearly half of all Jews in the world) to live within fifteen western provinces known collectively as the Pale of Settlement. Additionally, Jews were forbidden from owning land, serving as army officers, holding a bureaucratic job, or practicing law. They were subject to special and steep taxes on their businesses, on kosher meat, and on synagogues. There were even strict quotas limiting Jewish admittance to high schools and universities. Nicholas himself decreed that those same quotas be applied to grammar schools. Because of his action, one-third of all Jewish children aged twelve and under were forbidden from going to school. Nicholas—who believed the world’s Jews were conspiring against him—thoroughly approved of these restrictions.
    By 1906, he also believed the uprising that had led to the October Manifesto had been entirely their fault.“They [have] been putting on airs and leading the revolutionary movement,” he claimed. (While many Jews
did
join the ranks of revolutionaries, most were moderates who wanted to make changes through the Duma.)Wrote Nicholas to his mother in November 1905: “In the first days after the Manifesto the subversive elements raised their head … and because nine-tenths of the trouble-makers are Jews, the people’s anger turned against them. That’s how the pogrom happened. It is amazing how they took place simultaneously in all the towns of Russia and Siberia.… [It] shows