day showed incontrovertibly that if the authorities had only been so minded the excesses might have been suppressed on the first day and the crime nipped in the bud.  The indifference of the authorities was responsible for the demolition of about a thousand Jewish houses and business places, involving a monetary loss of several millions of rubles, not to speak of the scores of killed and wounded Jews and a goodly number of violated women.  In the official reports these orgies of destruction were politely designated as “disorders,” and The Imperial Messenger limited its account of the horrors perpetrated at Kiev to the following truth-perverting dispatch: 

On April 26, disorders broke out in Kiev which were directed against the Jews.  Several Jews received blows, and their stores and warehouses were plundered.  On the morning of the following day the disorders were checked with the help of the troops, and five hundred men from among the rioters were arrested.

The later laconic reports are nearer to the facts.  They set the figure of arrested rioters at no less than fourteen hundred, and make mention of a number of persons who had been wounded during the suppression of the excesses, including one gymnazium and one university student.  Yet even these later dispatches contain no reference to Jewish victims.

4.  FURTHER OUTBREAKS IN SOUTH RUSSIA

The barbarism displayed in the metropolis of the south-west communicated itself with the force of an infectious disease to the whole region.  During the following days, from April to May, some fifty villages and a number of townlets in the government of Kiev and the adjacent governments of Volhynia and Podolia were swept by the pogrom epidemic.  The Jewish population of the town of Smyela [1] and the surrounding villages, amounting to some ten thousand souls, experienced, on a smaller scale, all the horrors perpetrated at Kiev.  It was not until the second day, May 4, that the troops proceeded to put an end to the violence and pillage which had been going on in the town and which resulted in a number of killed and wounded.  In a near-by village a Jewish woman of thirty was attacked and tortured to death, while the seven year old son of another woman, who had saved herself by flight, was killed in beastly fashion for his refusal to make the sign of the cross.

[Footnote 1:  In the government of Kiev.]

In many cases the pogroms had been instigated by the newly arrived Great-Russian “bare-footed brigade” who having accomplished their “work,” vanished without a trace.