The shock and grief of the pogrom were intermingled with continued, though now much dulled, excitement about the ongoing revolution, the ramifications of Nicholas's October Manifesto, and the upcoming elections for the new Duma. While Jewish traders and artisans, many of them now impoverished by the pogrom, attempted to reconstruct their lives, Kiev's Jewish liberal activists were particularly engaged in mobilizing the city's Jews for the elections, and there was hope in the air that Jewish disabilities might soon be eased, if not even removed altogether (see chapter 7 for an in-depth discussion of the revolution and the elections). The new premier P. A. Stolypin gave added heft to these aspirations when he ordered governors of the interior provinces of Russia to cease expulsions of Jews who had settled there before august 1906; this circular seemed to apply to Kiev as well, over which fact the city's Jewish residents were jubilant.152
But the threat of violence still hung in the air. March 1906 brought rumors of an impending pogrom, and trains bound for austria-Hungary were reported to be full of Jews fleeing the city.153 In april, despite promises from the authorities to put a stop to antisemitic propaganda, a leaflet aimed at soldiers and distributed in large numbers claimed that Jews were dressing up as troops in order to sabotage the army from within and achieve their ultimate goal of destroying Russia. "Let us stand up against the Jews, the sedi-tionists," called the leaflet, according to Yiddish newspaper Dos lebn}54 The fact that laborers at one of Kiev's shipbuilding yards passed a resolution in May voicing their opposition to the possibility of another pogrom and calling on all workers to defend citizens from attacks on their freedom, life, and property was not necessarily reassuring to Jews; the incident seemed to reveal that the menace of pogrom still hung in the air.155 A month later, there were reports that a leaflet was being distributed around the city, calling on Russians to beat their enemies, in the name of the Central Russian Patriotic Committee.156 New rumors of an imminent pogrom sprung up every day, and a "depression has fallen on the local Jews," wrote the Yiddish newspaper Der telegraf}5'7
Life was affected in more ordinary ways as well. The records of the library of the Kiev Literacy Society record a precipitous drop in Jewish attendance in the year after the pogrom, from 55 percent to 32 percent; this, after the proportion of Jewish readers had climbed from one-fifth in 1897, to one-third in 1899, to 55 percent just before the violence broke out. Clearly, the pogrom severely damaged Jewish willingness to mingle with their Christian neighbors, even in such a benign environment as a lending library. Several years later, after a terrible flood of the Dnepr River, only seven of the thousands of Jewish families in the low-lying neighborhood of Podol took refuge at the district's solidly built Contract House; an observer claimed that most Jewish flood victims, remembering their experience of the pogrom, were too afraid to come to the Contract House and chose instead to take shelter in damp garrets where, presumably, they would not have to mingle closely with Christians or be an easy target for anti-Jewish violence.158 Their fears do not seem out of place when we read that in that same year, bands of soiuzniki (members of the right-wing Union of Russian People) wandered the streets of Kiev, asking, "Jew or Russian?" and beating up those Jews foolhardy enough to tell the truth.159 The increasing violence was accompanied by round-ups more vicious than those experienced before 1905—including humiliating daytime razzias and mass expulsions, not surprising given the threat that all Jews were now said to pose to the very existence of the Russian Empire it-self.160 Kiev's illegal Jews were said to live "like hunted animals," especially now that Stolypin's circular of 1906 about Jews living outside the Pale had been "clarified" to cover only Jews who had not had residence permits for those areas; those who had carried such permits but had then allowed them to lapse after the issuing of the circular were now living illegally in places such as Kiev—and thus were candidates for expulsion.161 In 1910, more than one thousand Jewish families were expelled.162 A report from 1911 describes policemen going into Jewish stores and businesses, tearing people away from their work, gathering them in a courtyard, and marching them off to the police station where their papers would be examined.163
World History
