HARVARD UKRAINIAN STUDIES - See also - Harvard University

208 м. MiSHKiNSKYas well as on later inquiries. 56 Just after the leaflet had been printed, onthe night of April 27, the police, informed by an agent-provocateur,confiscated 124 copies. 57 They feared that its circulation would widenthe scope of the disorders 58 and change their character. Moreover, norevolutionary publication touching on the pogroms had such repercussionsin the Jewish press — Russian and Hebrew — as did the union'sleaflet. 59The proclamation of the Southern-Russian Workers' Union, addressedto "Brother workers," spoke directly to the perpetrators of thepogrom. 60 The appeal was made in the midst of the excesses with theintent of influencing actual events, and it was obviously agitational innature. Nevertheless, one can infer some of the principles whichguided its author. Bakunin and some other populists of the 1870sthought that the Jews constituted an exploitative group. Serhii Podolyns'kyi,author of the Ukrainian socialist brochures, regarded "Zhidophobia"as a socialist and revolutionary commandment. 61 This attitudehad been evident in the leaflet the union issued to copyholders on30 January 1881.The union's appeal during the pogrom in Kiev was quite different. Itmade a clear distinction between different social groups within the56See Kutaisov's report (cited in fns. 50, 60); and Koval'skaia, 1924, p. 249. Thepolice reports exaggerated the story somewhat to demonstrate their own vigilanceand efficiency, which certainly prompted the authorities to take greater measuresto stop the outrages.57As stated in the bill of indictment; Maksakov and Nevskii, Iuzhnorusskierabochie soiuzy, p. 325.58Koval'skaia's story that Ivaniv and other union members threw a bunch ofleaflets out of the window to the workers and that that led the police to detect theprinting press seems very far-fetched; Balabanov, К istorii, p. 109. She did notknow about the second agent, Marian Ratke, who rented the apartment where thepress was kept and who had alerted the security police about the forthcomingpublication.59See, for example, Russkii evrei (St. Petersburg), no. 19 (May 5,1881), p. 751.Items in the Hebrew press are noted in my article, "Iggud ha-poalim ha-drom-russiveha-pogrom be-Kuev be-shnat 1881," published in Shvuth (Tel-Aviv), 1(1973) : 65, fns. 15 and 16. Facts about the leaflet and the liquidation of the unionwere often distorted and the commentaries biased, for reasons that cannot be dealtwith here.60That is not to say that only workers took part in the pogrom. The evidenceshows that in Kiev, as in other cities, people from the so-called obshchestvo(educated society) were among the rioters and were even instigators; see Kutaisov'sreport in Krasnyi-Admoni, Materiały, pp. 412-17.61In a letter to B. N. Smirnov; see B. Sapir, ed., Vpered, 1873-1877, vol. 2(Dordrecht, 1970), p. 66.