An additional reason for the pogrom was the reputed wealth of a goodly number of the Jewish families of Nizhni-Novgorod.  The judicial investigation brought out the fact that before attacking the offices of Daitzelman, a big Moscow merchant, the mob was directed by shouts:  “Let us go to Daitzelman; there is a lot to be gotten there.”  The murder of Daitzelman, who was beloved by his Russian laborers, and that of other Jews, was not prompted by revenge, but by mere purposeless savagery.  It is impossible to assume that the mob was moved to action by the rumor which had been spread by the ringleaders of the rioting hordes concerning the kidnapping of a Christian child by the Jews—­the more so since at the very beginning of the excesses the police produced the supposedly kidnapped child whole and intact, and showed it to the crowd.  The pogrom was due primarily to the savagery of brutal and unenlightened mobs, who found an opportunity to vent their beastly instincts, fortified by the conviction of complete immunity, which is referred to in the report of the governor.

Even the central Government in St. Petersburg was alarmed by the St. Bartholemew night which had been enacted at Nizhni-Novgorod.  At the recommendation of Governor Baranov, the murderers were tried by court-martial and suffered heavy punishment.  Nevertheless, the same governor thought it his duty to appease the Russian popular conscience by ordering the expulsion of those Jews whom the police had found to live outside the Pale “without a legal basis.”  In this wise, the Russian administration once more managed to follow up a street pogrom by a legal one, not realizing the fact that the atrocities perpetrated upon the Jews by the mob were merely a crude copy of the atrocities perpetrated upon them by the Government, and that the outlawed condition of the Jews bred the lawlessness and violence of the mob, which was fully aware of the anti-Semitic sentiments of the official world.  The bloody saturnalia of Nizhni-Novgorod had, however, the beneficent effect that the Government, fearing the spread of the conflagration outside the Pale and even outside Jewry, took energetic steps to prevent all further excesses.  As a matter of fact, the Nizhni-Novgorod pogrom was the last in the annals of the eighties—­with the exception of a few unimportant occurrences in various localities.  For six years “the land was quiet,” and the monopoly of “silent pogroms,” in the shape of the systematic denial of Jewish rights, remained firmly in the hands of the Government.

2.  THE CONCLUSIONS OF THE PAHLEN COMMISSION