We have already had occasion to point out that the Government had originally planned to reduce the Jewish element also in the city of St. Petersburg, whose head, the brutal Gresser, had manifested his attitude toward the Jews in a series of police circulars.  Following upon the first raid of the Moscow police on the Jews, Gresser ordered his gendarmes to search at the St. Petersburg railroad stations for all Jewish fugitives from that city who might have ventured to flee to St. Petersburg, and to deport them immediately.  In April there were persistent rumors afloat that the Government had decided to remove by degrees all Jews from St. Petersburg and thus make both Russian capitals judenrein.  The financial blow from Paris cooled somewhat the ardor of the Jew-baiters on the shores of the Neva.  The wholesale expulsions from St. Petersburg were postponed, and the Russian anti-Semites were forced to satisfy their cannibal appetite with the consumption of Moscow Jewry, whose annihilation was carried out systematically under the cover of bureaucratic secrecy.

4.  POGROM INTERLUDES

Under the effect of the officially perpetrated “legal” pogroms little attention was paid to the street pogrom which occurred on September 29, 1891, in the city of Starodub, in the government of Chernigov, recalling the horrors of the eighties.  Though caused by economic factors, the pogrom of Starodub assumed a religious coloring.  The Russian merchants of that city had long been gnashing their teeth at their Jewish competitors.  Led by a Russian fanatic, by the name of Gladkov, they forced a regulation through the local town-council barring all business on Sundays and Christian holidays.  The regulation was directed against the Jews who refused to do business on the Sabbath and the Jewish holidays, and who would have been ruined had they also refrained from trading on Sundays and the numerous Greek-Orthodox holidays, thus remaining idle on twice as many days as the Christians.  The Jews appealed to the governor of Chernigov to revoke or at least to mitigate the new regulation.  The governor’s decision fell in favor of the Jews who were allowed to keep their stores open on Christian holidays from noon-time until six o’clock in the evening.  The reply of the local Jew-baiters took the form of a pogrom.

On Sunday, the day before Yom Kippur, when the Jews opened their stores for a few hours, a hired crowd of ruffians from among the local street mob fell upon the Jewish stores and began to destroy and loot whatever goods it could lay its hands on.  The stores having been rapidly closed, the rioters invaded the residences of the Jews, destroying the property contained there and filling the streets with fragments of broken furniture and leathers from torn bedding.  The plunderers were assisted by the peasants who had arrived from the adjacent villages.  In the evening, a drunken mob, which had assembled on the market-place, laid fire to a number of Jewish stores and houses, inflicting on their owners a loss of many millions.