The pogrom of Balta found but a feeble echo in the immediate neighborhood—­in a few localities of the governments of Podolia and Kherson.  It seemed as if the energy of destruction and savagery had spent itself in the exploits at Balta.  On the whole, the pogrom campaign conducted in the spring of 1882 covered but an insignificant territory when compared with the pogrom enterprise of 1881, though surpassing it considerably in point of quality.  The horrors of Balta were a substantial earnest of the Kishinev atrocities of 1903 and the October pogroms of 1905.

4.  THE CONFERENCE OF JEWISH NOTABLES AT ST. PETERSBURG

The horrors of Balta cast their shadow upon the conference of Jewish delegates which met in St. Petersburg on April 8-11, 1882.  The conference, which had been called by Baron Horace Guenzburg, with the permission of Ignatyev, was made up of some twenty-five delegates from the provinces—­among them Dr. Mandelstamm of Kiev, Rabbi Isaac Elhanan Specter of Kovno—­and fifteen notables from the capital, including Baron Guenzburg himself, the railroad magnate Polakov, and Professor Bakst.  The question of Jewish emigration was the central issue of the conference, although, in connection with it, the general situation of Russian Jewry came up for discussion.  There was a mixed element of tragedy and timidity in the deliberations of this miniature congress, at which neither the voice of the masses nor that of the intelligentzia were given a full hearing.  On the one hand, the conference listened to heartrending speeches, picturing the intolerable position of the Jews; and one of the delegates, Shmerling from Moghilev, who had just delivered such a speech, was so overcome that he fainted and died in a few hours.  On the other hand, the most influential delegates, particularly those from the capital, were looking about timorously, fearing lest the Government suspect them of a lack of patriotism.  Others again looked upon emigration as an illicit form of protest, as “sedition,” and they clung to this conviction, even when the conference had been told in the name of the Minister of the Interior that it was expected to consider the question of “thinning out the Jewish population in the Pale of Settlement, in view of the fact that the Jews will not be admitted into the interior governments of Russia.”

At the second meeting of the conference, the rabbi of St. Petersburg, Dr. Drabkin, reported to the delegates about his last conversation with Ignatyev.  In reply to the rabbi who had stated that the Jews were waiting for an imperial word ordering the suppression of the pogroms, and were anticipating the removal of their legal disabilities, the Minister had characterized these assertions as “commonplaces,” and had added in an irritated tone:  “The Jews themselves are responsible for the pogroms.  By joining the Nihilists they thereby deprive the Government of the possibility of sheltering them against violence.”  The sophistry of the Minister was refuted on the spot by his own confession that the Balta pogrom was due to “a false rumor charging the Jews with having undermined the local Greek-Orthodox church,” in other words, that the cause of the Balta pogrom was not to be traced to any tendencies within Jewry but rather to the agitation of evil-minded Jew-baiters.