Why Were We Beaten?”: Atrocity, Law, and Truth
On Easter Day, April 6, 1903, a violent mob attacked the Jewish population of Kishinev, killing forty-nine people and wounding hundreds. During two days of bloody massacre, about a third of the city was destroyed, leaving hundreds of Jewish families destitute, their meager belongings smashed, broken, torn, or stolen. Hospitals were overwhelmed with injured men, women, and children. Fluff and feathers from torn pillows covered the streets of Kishinev as if snow had fallen in the middle of a sunny spring. It clung to puddles of blood and dirt, settling on the trees and the rubble scattered across the streets. The Kishinev pogrom would be followed by several others, some even surpassing it in brutality, but it would remain etched in the memory of generations as a turning point in Jewish history and the history of the Russian Empire and Eastern Europe.
The Hamas attack on October 7, 2023 again evoked the memory of Kishinev, supporting the historians’ claim about the pogrom’s lasting significance. The two events differ in their context and their scale: the carefully orchestrated terrorist operation carried out by the Gazan invaders equipped with advanced weaponry stands in stark contrast to the violence perpetrated by a mob of men and teenagers who brutally killed their neighbors and acquaintances using stones, clubs, metal pipes, and axes. Still, it is not unusual for a shocking event to trigger memories of past shocks and traumas despite all the differences. The common threads in this comparison are a deep understanding of the tragedy’s historical importance and an intensely felt need to uncover the truth about its causes. In the wake of the Hamas attack on October 7 and the conduct of the Israeli operation in Gaza, the avalanche of facts, coupled with a striking deficit in crucial details, created a sense of pervasive uncertainty. Everything seemed open to challenge. The most rudimentary and incontrovertible facts were thrown into doubt. There were even claims that the atrocity never took place. Particularly unsettling were the efforts to cast doubt on the suffering of civilians — Palestinians and Israelis — caught in the crossfire of the conflict, as though the trauma inflicted by war was not self-evident and required proof.
One does not have to be a trained historian to imagine that the crisis of credibility, the collapse of trust, that we experience today is not new, and that any tragedy creates room for contestation. Once upon a time it seemed that the catastrophes of the twentieth century had taught people to suspend their doubts in the face of the testimonies of victims and survivors, yet the ongoing wars in Ukraine, and in Israel and Gaza, show that this skill is easy to unlearn. The search for the solution to the political crisis in the Middle East often stumbles upon arguments about facts, throwing us back to the moment in 1903, when palpable anxiety about empirical truth pervaded the post-pogrom city of Kishinev.
Weeks after the pogrom, rain washed away the dirty fluff and feathers from the pavements. Shops remained closed, and people were paralyzed by fear of another attack, but the city was animated with a sudden influx of visitors. Amid the fear-stricken ruins, outsiders — journalists, writers, lawyers, and investigators — were busy collecting evidence and attempting to construct the stories of the event. Michael Davitt, an Irish journalist writing for American newspapers, spent several days in Kishinev interviewing government officials, visiting the sites of violence, and trying to obtain from “the living witnesses of the outrages an account of what they saw and experienced.” In the fall of 1903, Davitt’s dispatches from Odesa and Kishinev were collected in a volume called Within the Pale — an eye-opening account of the life of Jews in the tsarist Empire, explaining the sources and the outcomes of the Kishinev catastrophe. A short while later, in June 1903, the young Hebrew poet Hayim Nachman Bialik came on a mission from the Jewish Historical Commission in Odesa to collect evidence for a documentary book on the Kishinev pogrom. The testimonies of the pogrom’s survivors that he recorded remained unpublished until 1991. Instead Bialik wrote The City of Slaughter, a grand, wrathful, and influential poem. Around the same time as Bialik’s visit, Vladimir Korolenko, a Ukrainian writer, boarded a train from Poltava to Kishinev. Korolenko was fortunate to secure a room in the Hotel Paris, as many of Kishinev’s hotels were sold out, and tourists were seeking apartments to rent. By June, Kishinev coachmen had already learned the new morbid topography of the city, taking their guests to the sites of the tragedy. Korolenko followed the same paths as many others: observing the ruins of houses, visiting victims in hospitals, and conversing with Jews, Ukrainians, Moldavians, and Russians. “Fourth day in Kishinev, and I feel like I’m in a nightmare,” he lamented in his diary, feeling overwhelmed by despair and a sense of helplessness in understanding, aiding, or changing anything.
What we know today about the Easter pogrom in Kishinev has been primarily shaped by literary texts and journalists’ accounts: Davitt’s book and articles, Bialik’s writings, Korolenko’s “House No. 13,” a short story about the tragedy that unfolded in one of the houses where seven Jewish families had lived before the pogrom. Contemporary historians have tried to dig deeper and explain the inner mechanisms of violence, reconstructing the events preceding the pogrom and documenting the public reaction to it. But what has often escaped our attention is the fact that although the massacre happened in front of everyone’s eyes, both its overarching story and its details were vehemently contested. The struggle to establish the master narrative of the massacre unfolded not only in books or newspapers that sold their readers sensational news, but also, most importantly, in lawyers’ offices and courtrooms, where hundreds of victims and witnesses testified about what they had seen, heard, and endured.
When the news of the massacre reached the public, the demand for justice was the most common reaction, and everyone started anxiously awaiting the results of the investigation and the trial. The trial of the pogrom’s participants, or rather, the series of twenty-two trials that took place in 1903 and 1904, was almost as troubling as the atrocity itself. It marked the first time that hundreds of defendants were indicted for participating in collective violence driven by racial and national hatred, thus setting a precedent for the legal proceedings against war crimes and crimes against humanity in our own day. It was also the first trial of this magnitude to be entirely based on survivors’ testimonies, which were meticulously scrutinized, often neglected, and overwhelmingly disbelieved. The raw and unedited testimonies of victims and witnesses, preserved in court documents and lawyers’ notes, in some instances paralleled Davitt and Korolenko’s accounts and exposed the horror of the days of slaughter. Yet the court systematically dismissed these testimonies, deeming them untruthful. As a result, the court, the government, and a significant part of Russian society agreed upon one version of the event. At the same time, another truth, described in Korolenko’s, Bialik’s, and Davitt’s writings and remembered by the survivors and the witnesses, existed in a parallel universe.
Reading the witnesses’ accounts, one may wonder how those heart-wrenching words could leave anyone unmoved or doubting. Why did the judges not believe the survivors? It might be tempting to attribute the imperial court’s attitude to the testimonies of the pogrom’s victims solely to the prevalent antisemitism within the Russian establishment. Yet antisemitism is not just its own endemic disease: it is also a symptom of other structural problems and malfunctions. The roots of doubt and disbelief could be far more intricate than mere nationalism, indicating a broader epistemic and moral crisis within society. Similarly, our own crisis of misunderstanding and distrust extends beyond mere national or political biases, sympathies, or aversions, reflecting deeper, more complex undercurrents. Our society has been stricken by a fear of gullibility, and of the embarrassment that it may cause, and in this way it becomes more and more gullible. The fear of this embarrassment has become a norm of everyday life. And when this psychological weakness overlaps with extraordinary events, the anxiety of uncertainty goes through the roof. Politicians weaponize the discourse of “fake news,” peddling doubts and exalting them; facts mingle cozily with fiction, and conspiracy theories proliferate.
One remedy to the pervasive doubt — to the culture of doubt and its political manipulation — is the memory of past crises and the history of the attempts to deal with them. And even though the historical analogy between the spring of 1903 and the fall of 2023 is imprecise, the story of the pogrom trial in Kishinev can be very instructive. It suggests that even when the criteria of right and wrong are clearly seen and uncontested, the markers of truth may still remain unclear and undefined, even among those who oppose evil.
The Kishinev pogrom trial of 1903 could set a world record for the number of defendants, witnesses, and plaintiffs involved. A total of three hundred and ninety-one individuals were indicted for murder, plunder, rape, and participation in collective violence rooted in “national discord.” Nearly two thousand witnesses and plaintiffs were expected to testify. The authorities opted to divide this colossal case into twenty-two smaller ones, with the number of defendants in each ranging from one to sixty-two. This decision was owed not merely to the logistical challenge of trying almost four hundred defendants simultaneously. By splitting the trial, the authorities effectively reduced the massacre of Jews to a series of violent incidents between “Christians” — as the defendants were referred to — and their Jewish neighbors. This trivialization of the Kishinev tragedy enabled the authorities to downplay the role of those who incited antisemitism and to hide the complicity of officials in criminal negligence.
Everyone in Kishinev was aware that the pogrom had been incited by a series of articles by the journalist Pavolakii Krushevan published in the blatantly antisemitic daily newspapers Znamia and Bessarabets. In the weeks leading up to the bloody Easter of 1903, Bessarabets propagated falsehoods about an alleged ritual murder of a Christian boy in the small town of Dubossary. When the investigation swiftly identified the boy’s murderers among his own relatives, Bessarabets was compelled to issue a retraction, yet it persisted in inciting retributory violence against Jews. At the same time antisemitic leaflets circulated urging Christians to “liberate” Russia from Jews. Within weeks or even days, Kishinev, a city where Jews, Russians, Moldavians, and Romani had coexisted peacefully, was polarized, with rumors of an imminent Easter pogrom becoming more and more believable. Thus, the massacre that erupted on the afternoon of April 6 did not appear as a sudden, unforeseen calamity. Another fact that made it look less like an unpredictable disaster was the authorities’ passivity — both the military command and the police observed the assault and the looting of Jewish neighborhoods with indifference and apathy until an order from above to dispatch the troops halted the violence.
As soon as the bloodshed ceased, the police summoned the survivors and interrogated them, often in the presence of an armed gendarme. In many cases, their words were not fully recorded, especially when the witnesses spoke about the criminal passivity of the authorities. Alongside the official police investigation, however, a separate inquiry was underway. In May 1903, a group of liberal lawyers from St. Petersburg known as the “Young Advocates” arrived in Kishinev and settled into the city’s hotels. The “Young Advocates,” famous for supporting the oppressed, traveled around the country as a flying squad, aiding workers, peasants, and prisoners charged with participating in strikes, uprisings, and other forms of civil disobedience. The Kishinev trial marked a departure from their usual role. Here they represented the pogrom victims in civil suits, assisting them in seeking compensation for financial losses.
The “Young Advocates” established a temporary office and began interviewing victims and documenting damages — broken chiffoniers, stolen jewelry, the lost income of relatives who perished in the pogrom — and filing on their behalf thousands of suits against the civil administration. The unofficial investigation centered on the actions, or more accurately, the lack thereof, of the civil officials — the Bessarabian Governor von Raaben (who spent the critical days of the pogrom secluded in his mansion, failing to take any action to halt the violence), his deputies, the head of the police department, officers, gendarmes, and other officials. With none of these officials facing indictment, pursuing civil suits against the wealthy bureaucrats for financial reparations emerged as the sole means to hold the authorities accountable.
The competition between two investigative groups — the official police and the unofficial team led by the “Young Advocates” — tapping into the same sources but seeking evidence for different facts fostered an impression that the truth was buried under layers of falsehoods and misinterpretations. Journalists, philanthropists, and lawyers interviewed witnesses and survivors about what they had seen and heard from their neighbors. Accounts and rumors swirled together. When a few Russian newspapers published stories about the Kishinev atrocities, featuring shocking although sometimes inaccurate details, the government curtailed this uncontrolled publicity, allowing only a select few conservative outlets to report on the atrocity and its consequences. Another measure that the government took to maintain control was to hold the trials in secrecy, barring the public and journalists from attending. But this attempt to suppress information only heightened interest in the court case. A member of the advocate team meticulously recorded the proceedings and covertly passed these notes to the Western press. Inside the courtroom, with its doors firmly shut, all participants behaved as though the entire world was watching.
Indicted in the first trial was a group of thirty-seven men accused of participating in “a violent public gathering and the attack of one part of the population against another” and charged with the attack on the Jewish residents of 33 Gostinnaia Street, which ended with the murder of the sixteen-year-old Benjamin Baranovich and his neighbors Benzion Galanter, Duvid Drachman, Ios Kantor, and Reiza Katsap. Even before the beginning of the trial, it became apparent that the Jewish victims and the survivors, as well as their murderers, were of little interest to the court. As the Russian-language emigré journal Osvobozhdenie summarized the position of the liberal public, it did not care whether “these naïve savages” who were the blind weapons in the hand of “educated” organizers” would be adequately punished. “The main interest of the trial is in revealing the role of the administration in the Kishinev massacre, the local administration as well as the central one.”
This was the position of the sixteen Young Advocates representing the victims: their main goal was not to defend the victims but to accuse those who were not yet indicted and to prove that the pogrom had been orchestrated according to a premeditated plan from behind the scenes. The role of the prosecution and the judges was to prove the innocence of the administration and to show that the massacre resulted from “national discord,” which was the subject of Article 269 of the Penal Code. This statute, introduced after the pogroms of the early 1880s, allowed the court to punish dozens of pogromists who joined the crowd, but it presupposed that the “discord” was mutual and tacitly blamed Jews for provoking the assault. The collective guilt of the crowd also dissipated the guilt of individual murderers, making the killings appear almost accidental.
The trial began with the testimonies of well-known figures: the former city mayor Karl Schmidt, the commander of the local regiment General Beckman, doctors from the local hospital who admitted and treated victims during the pogrom, police officers, orthodox priests, and journalists. The Young Advocates aggressively interrogated witnesses whom they held responsible for the disaster, trying to convince the court to re-investigate the case and indict antisemites who had instigated the violence and the officials who allowed it to happen.
It was not until November 17, the eighth day of the court proceedings, that survivors and witnesses of the violence at 33 Gostinnaia Street were finally called to testify. Ruvim Katsap, who had hidden in the attic while the pogromists invaded the house, recounted to the court the brutal murder of his sixty-year-old grandmother, Reizel Katsap. Following Ruvim’s testimony, Shimon Baranovich took the stand, sobbing and barely able to speak. A skilled house painter, renowned as “the best in Bessarabia,” Shimon had been a resident of Kishinev for twenty-two years. Among those who had attacked his house were Russians and Moldavians who had previously worked under him as apprentices. He testified that on April 7, the second day of the pogrom (I am translating from the records of the court proceedings in the Serguei Zarudnyi collection in the Russian State Historical Archive),
the crowd … started breaking glass and forcing open the iron gates. … Soon the vandals made their way through the windows into the courtyard and the apartment. We all rushed to escape, some onto the roof, some into the attic, some into the outhouse. I was in the far corner…. Suddenly, a heart-wrenching cry reached me, “Daddy, Daddy, they’re killing me.” I rushed into the yard and begged them, promising to give them everything I had. I pleaded with Kolesnichenko to take everything from the house and leave me my son. He replied, “Shut up, you Jew, we’ll finish with you now, and we’ll take all your belongings without [asking] you.” I ran out into the street, [the gendarme] Solovkin was standing there; I fell at his feet, kissing his coat and boots, begging him to protect us. He remained calm, lit a cigarette, and said, “Everything is over in your yard; you have nothing to fear now.” “Here comes the patrol, for God’s sake, save us,” I asked him and cried in front of him. But the patrol passed by, and he did not call them. I noticed Officer Trofimov and began to plead with him. “What can I do for you?” he answered and walked away. Meanwhile, they [the pogromists] continued to destroy property in the apartments. I took my son to the water tap and tried to pour water on him. I heard only a groan from him.“For God’s sake, send a doctor,” I begged the officer again, but he walked around the yard, paying no attention to my words.
Baranovich’s court testimony, along with those of other survivors, not only provided the details of the killings but also exposed efforts by the police and the authorities to hide the truth about their criminal negligence. Survivors’ petitions vanished from the prosecutor’s office, and the presiding judge frequently censored and interrupted witness testimonies during their court appearances, dismissing their accounts as “irrelevant” to the case. The plaintiffs’ legal representatives protested and called for a re-investigation, citing new evidence of a conspiracy and the authorities’ complicity that had emerged during the trial. These demands were summarily dismissed by the court. When the Young Advocates’ efforts to redirect the focus from the collective guilt of the mob and the individual actions of the pogromists to the suspected orchestrators of the pogrom reached an impasse, they decided to withdraw from the trial and left the courtroom.
The “quitting” maneuver employed by the group of Young Advocates had been used in previous trials as a public gesture to signal the illegality of the proceedings and to suggest that the court was not genuinely interested in uncovering the truth. By exposing the culpability of the antisemitic journalists and the authorities, the advocates felt they had fulfilled their role. Before exiting the courtroom, the lawyers declared that the true crime remained unpunished and that the wrong individuals had been placed on the defendant’s bench. Nikolay Karabchevsky, the star lawyer from St. Petersburg, nailed down the image of the pogrom that the lawyers had in mind, comparing Kishinev to the Roman coliseum.
On the basis of verified evidence [that emerged during] the court hearings, I claim that for several hours Kishinev instantly turned into one giant arena of a Roman circus, surrounded by troops and the festive applauding crowd, while in its depth a bloody spectacle, unheard of in our days, was taking place: from one side, the defenseless victims were pushed out, from another, the infuriated beasts were set on them. And when they were told: “Enough, end of the show,” it ended, as all shows usually end. I insist that even the external features of the event contain all the evidence of its internal organization.
Karabchevsky’s speech, which was published by Western newspapers, achieved rhetorical success. In reality, however, the lawyers lacked sufficient evidence to prove conclusively that the pogrom had been systematically organized or that there was a strategic plan directing the movements of the pogromist groups. There were rumors that a list of Jewish residences was compiled, and one witness claimed to have overheard that groups of pogromists were numbered like military units. The lawyers also tried to prove that it was implausible that an unorganized, leaderless mob could cause such extensive destruction. Yet despite their efforts, no definitive evidence was uncovered — neither the documents proving a conspiracy nor any indication of a pre-existing plot involving government authorities. The lawyers’ frustration with the court’s refusal to investigate the crimes committed by what they termed “educated people” — referring to officials, antisemitic politicians, and journalists — was justifiable. They viewed the pogromists as mere pawns, people without a will of their own, manipulated evildoers executing someone else’s order.
The decision to withdraw from the first of the twenty-two trials had an unintended consequence: both public and foreign press interest in the victims’ and defendants’ fates rapidly waned, as if a spotlight of attention had been abruptly switched off. This decline in interest was particularly notable as it occurred shortly after the court had begun to hear the accounts of the pogrom’s victims. Consequently, aside from the moving account of Baranovich regarding his son’s death — an account also captured in the interviews that Hayim Nachman Bialik conducted for the Jewish Historical Commission in Odesa, which provided the raw material for his great poem — and a handful of brief testimonies from Baranovich’s neighbors, the stories of many other survivors went unheard. The tragic irony of the pogrom trial lay in that, despite being heavily reliant on the testimonies of nearly six hundred witnesses, the court seemed disinclined to consider these accounts from the outset.
Let us pause for a second and consider whether the rebuke for failing to listen and appreciate the survivors’ testimonies is fair. Can we blame judges and advocates for not knowing how to listen? Even in the modern historiography of pogroms, as the historian Gur Alroey admits, “the victim has been marginalized,” and the attention usually centers on perpetrators and instigators. Indeed, the scholarly methodology for analyzing the testimonies of witnesses to mass atrocities emerged only in the aftermath of the Second World War, alongside the emergence of what is known as the jurisprudence of atrocities, but even in legal practice, the voices of witnesses and victims did not always play a key role.
The Nuremberg trial in 1945–1946 was based entirely on Nazi documents, and the Eichmann trial in 1961 was the first instance of adjudication that overwhelmingly relied on the testimonies of survivors. Historians also had to learn how to suspend doubt when dealing with testimonies — sources that may be imperfect in relating facts yet nevertheless be truthful. Jan Gross, writing in the early 2000s about wartime anti-Semitic atrocities in the Polish town of Jedwabne, argued for the change in the attitude to testimonies from “a priori critical to in principle affirmative,” and proposed “to accept as true Jewish testimonies about atrocities committed by the local population until they are proven false.” Gross’s message did not find unanimous approval in Poland, and the story of the killing of fifteen hundred Jews in 1941 by their Polish neighbors remains a subject of bitter contention.
Still, even if the ethics of reading survivors’ testimonies is fairly recent, evaluating evidence, including eyewitness accounts, has been an essential element of judicial and everyday reasoning practiced by courts for centuries. In the early nineteenth century, Jeremy Bentham, in his attempt to define the principles of the critique of evidence, called on judges to suspend doubt and “hear everyone.” Bentham believed in people’s natural propensity to tell the truth and advocated for the presumption of truthfulness as a default setting. (He thought that lying is a laborious task that most humans tend to avoid.) One may dispute his optimistic view of human nature, but in the 1860s Russia introduced new courts with an improved organization and procedure that followed Bentham’s principles and allowed for an almost unrestricted freedom of evidence, including the use and interpretation of witnesses’ testimonies. Vladimir Spasovich, picking up Bentham’s thesis, added that each society, in each stage of its historical development, has its own principles for assessing proofs. The level of trust in testimonies fluctuates, Spasovich maintained; it is influenced by various factors, including the political climate, scientific advances, religious beliefs, and cultural trends. In the 1860s and 1870s, the era of liberal thaw, courts and the people whom they represented were open to listening and believing. In the 1890s and early 1900s, by contrast, Russian society was at its most skeptical and even cynical, at its lowest capacity for believing.
There were multiple reasons for this incredulity. One of them was the persistent policy of the autocratic government to conceal the truth about crucial events and their causes — such as, for instance, a mass stampede in Moscow in 1896 that took the lives of around two thousand people. The regime of secrecy and censorship exacerbated popular anxiety, as did the proliferation of media and the industry of rumors and sensations. There were other factors as well. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Russian forensic psychologists and lawyers delved deeply into research on the psychology of memory and attention. Psychological experiments that tested people’s ability to remember and to reproduce facts led scientists to conclude that even honest and unbiased testimonies can be inaccurate and misleading. This was particularly true in extraordinary situations such as natural catastrophes or mass violence, in which individuals might struggle to fully comprehend and accurately recall the details of events, including the identities of perpetrators. This emerging understanding of the fallibility of memory played a significant role in shaping the judicial approach to witness testimonies during this era. Lying was exonerated and normalized, yet everyone appeared as a liar. “Doubts [in the trustworthiness of testimonies] grew into the merciless rejection of testimonies,” admitted Anatoly Koni, a famous judge who tried to restore trust in the human ability to remember and tell the truth.
The “scientization” of truth in legal proceedings resulted in a peculiar situation when the two notions of truth emerged parallel to each other: one based on facts, calculatable and verifiable, the other based on moral judgment. Russian philosophers loved pondering the specificity of the Russian language, which has two words to designate truth, “pravda” and “istina,” aligning themselves with the first or the second. Speculations about notions of truth could be entertaining, but when it came to deciding the fate of victims or the defendants, this splintering, this epistemological crisis, resulted in misjudgments. Leo Tolstoy attributed the persistence of doubt and uncertainty to the celebration of scientific knowledge: “Doctors, lawyers, theologians, all those who scientifically study fantastic matters that cannot be conceived, employ methods with which they can achieve only the superficial, mechanical semblance to authenticity … But the methods they use in principle cannot achieve the state of true knowledge.”
Tolstoy, to be sure, was an almost mystical upholder of the moral truth and a believer in the human propensity to honesty, while remaining skeptical when it came to scientific “proofs” and “facts.” Yet the distrust in testimonies was not fueled merely by “scientific” skepticism. Testimonies were viewed through the lens of class, nationality, and religion. Although legal reform in the 1860s eliminated many institutionalized biases, in the 1880s and 1890s nationalists revived the most obnoxious myths about the propensity to lie among Tatars, Chuvash, Daghestanians, and, of course, Jews. Nationalists often used modern sociological and psychological theories to support centuries-old lies and biases, doubling the effect of the fin-de-siècle epistemological crisis. Thus, inadvertently, forensic psychologists, philosophers, and lawyers gave antisemites the language and the right to reject testimonies, normalizing prejudices as a form of doubt.
Even before the beginning of the pogrom trial in Kishinev, nationalists started agitating against Jewish witnesses and victims. The nationalist newspaper Novoe Vremia published an article that insisted, with sarcasm, on a thorough interrogation of the “trustworthy” Jewish eyewitnesses, warning about the “unanimity of Jews” when they face Christians in court. The article manifested a tendency that would become even more apparent when Alexei Shmakov, a nationalist lawyer who represented the pogromists, evoked the Oath More Judaico, the medieval anti-Semitic institution that required a special oath of Jews to guarantee the credibility of their testimony about Christians in a Christian court, and demanded that the Jewish eyewitnesses take the oath in a synagogue. Judges rejected the demand as incompatible with law and the court’s ethos. But this rejection exposed only their own annoyance with the attempt of the nationalist press and antisemitic lawyers to instruct them how to interpret testimonies. Their own approach, sadly, was not significantly different.
The judges and the administrators shrouded their antisemitism under the mask of objectivity and a healthy, rational skepticism. Prince Serguei Urusov, the new and progressive governor of Bessarabia who deemed himself a “philo-Semite,” did not conceal his disappointment that after the “interesting” beginning of the trial that featured the interrogation of “half-witnesses, half-defendants” by the Young Advocates, “the testimony of the Jews began:”
Witnesses who sat in their basement during the massacre had seen what was going on two squares ahead of them. Witnesses identified different persons among the accused as the perpetrators of the murders they saw…. In short, a Bacchanalian orgy of witnesses arose, confounding the unhappy judges and interesting the lawyers for the plaintiffs but little.
Urusov, who was not sympathetic to the pogromists-defendants, blamed the authorities for their inactivity and even held the central government “morally responsible” for the massacre. But his lack of empathy and his overt distrust of the testimonies from Jewish survivors mirrored the prevailing attitude of even progressive administrators and the liberal public, who harbored doubts about the credibility of testimonies.
Following the liberal lawyers’ collective withdrawal from the first trial, the court’s regard for testimonies diminished even further, while the voices of the survivors failed to reach an audience outside the courtroom. Some “young lawyers” returned to the courtroom for the subsequent trials, supporting their clients and recording testimonies. From the notes of Alexander Zarudnyi, one of the Young Advocates, we can gain insights into what transpired in the courtroom and can access the survivors’ accounts. Throughout the trials, which lasted until the end of 1904, Zarudnyi persistently pressured the court to reinvestigate cases, and sent appeals to the Senate, and urged the court to heed the words of the survivors. Zarudnyi was fighting what seemed to be a losing battle; his records, now kept in an archive, preserve the details of his legal ordeal.
I ran away from home with my husband and the boys… We slipped into the alley next to the [brothers] Papanuks’ house… we were pressed against the fence. Papanuk started shouting, “Jews need to be killed!” We pleaded with them to let us go. Georgy Papanuk pulled me forward. And all of them started beating me, and I fell. I couldn’t see what was happening on the street. My eyes and my entire face were swollen from the beatings. I heard the voices of these two [pointing at the accused in the courtroom]. My husband stayed behind me, and I didn’t see who killed him. My son, who saw better than me, told me that Ivan Papanuk rushed out with a piece of iron in his hands and hit my husband. I recognize the accused. In the raging crowd, I didn’t see them, but when I regained consciousness, I heard their voices in the mob.”
As Perla Kogan testified in court, she, her husband Avrum, and their sons, pursued by the mob, fled towards the railway station but were captured and brutally beaten. Avrum died on the spot. Although several witnesses identified the perpetrators, the court was reluctant to convict them. The judges’ hesitation stemmed from uncertainty over which blow to Avrum Kogan’s head was fatal — whether it was the one delivered by Anton Kuiban or by Georgy Papanuk. (The debate focused on whether Kogan remained standing after the blow.)
In her testimony, Perla asserted that the two neighbors, Georgy Papanuk and Konstantin Rotar, raped her after the beating.
I lay on the ground from 8:00 PM until morning. Georgy Papanuk came to me twice around 12:00 and raped me twice. Then [Konstantin] Rotar approached and also raped me, then he left, cursing and pulling my shirt up. I recognized both of them by their voices, as I’ve known them for a long time. I couldn’t see their faces; I was all beaten up. When dawn broke, I covered myself with a shirt. By morning, a city guard and some Jew took me to the hospital.
During the investigation, Perla mentioned the fact of the rape, but the officer in charge did not even record it. She reported it verbally to the prosecutor, and her lawyer, Zarudnyi, filed a written complaint on her behalf. Despite these efforts, the rape allegation was not included in the indictment.
The court also doubted that Perla could recognize her attackers without seeing them, although forensic experts invited to the proceeding stated that a person who loses vision could still hear clearly and thus recognize people by their voices. Finally, Perla’s testimony was called into question when Eduard Woldenmeier, a resident of the same street where the tragedy unfolded, claimed to have seen a woman fall in the middle of the road, lying there until morning without anyone approaching her. Despite the apparent cynicism in Woldenmeier’s testimony — he watched Perla, severely beaten, lying on the ground for twelve hours and did nothing — the court favored his account over hers. Zarudnyi, representing Perla in court, pushed for the case to be reopened to investigate the assault and the rape that she endured, but his efforts were in vain. Ultimately the court acquitted the defendants accused of beating and raping Perla Kogan and murdering her husband.
Perhaps most shocking was the court’s decision to acquit Yakov Bezdrigin and Nikita (Mitia) Kreuter, the rapists identified by several witnesses and victims, including the sixteen-year-old Sima Zaichik, who testified:
Gentiles, among whom I noticed Kreuter, cut through the attic roof with an axe…and through this hole they came down to the attic where we were hiding. Five of them grabbed me by my arms and legs, threw me down, and Bezdrigin started having intercourse with me against my will; I recognized him on April 14 when I came to the police department to identify things stolen from us. In addition to Bezdrigin, other people had intercourse with me, but I don’t know who because I fainted.
Many residents of the house on Nikolskaia Street witnessed Sima’s ordeal. As Rivka Schiffer, another victim of the rapists, confirmed, about thirty people, most of them women, were hiding in the attic when the thugs broke in. Rivka recognized two of them — Nikita (Mitia) Kreuter, whom she had known for twelve years, and Yakov Bezdrigin. Rivka begged Mitia not to touch her, to no avail. Kreuter raped Rivka first, then Bezdrigin and others, eight or nine men in total, followed. She did not resist, fearing that they would kill her.
Rukhlia Krupnik, a witness, saw how Kreuter ripped Rivka’s skirts, shut her mouth, bent her arms behind her back, and assaulted her. After Kreuter, someone else took his turn with her while Kreuter raped Sima. Sima was screaming, but they paid no attention. Bezdrigin stood on his knees next to Sima, waiting. After that, Kreuter came to Rukhlia with an axe; she gave him everything she had — money, a tin box with her golden watch and jewelry. Rivka’s husband, Shepsel Schiffer, also saw how Kreuter raped his wife, and how Bezdrigin assaulted Sima. The pogromists threatened him; he gave them his watch and ran away.
The story of the two women raped in the attic of the house on Nikolskaia Street was known beyond the courtroom. Social norms of that time made women, and not their rapists, look disgraced, but Sima and Rivka, unlike many other victims who quietly carried the burden of pain and dishonor, chose to speak up. Michael Davitt met Sima, among other victims at the rabbi’s house: “One was a girl of sixteen, named Simme Zeytchik, very pretty, and childish-looking for her years.” She spoke to him. Bialik recorded Rivka’s long and detailed testimony. In court and in interviews, both women repeated their statements almost word for word.
They were not sure about the exact number of the men who assaulted them, but who could blame them for not counting? The court, however, harped on the fact that, according to Sima, Bezdrigin was first to assault her and Kreuter was second, while Rukhlia Krupnik claimed that Kreuter started and Bezdrigin was next. Sima and Rivka had gone through the forensic medical examination by male doctors eleven days after the assault. Sima’s legs were bruised, and the exam showed traces of coitus. Two experts — Kogan and Frenkel — asserted (this is from Zarudnyi’s courtroom notes) that these were the signs of rape; but an expert named Vasilevich sowed doubt by suggesting that the hymen was ruptured “with either penis or finger,” and the fourth expert, a man named Rava, doubted the very fact of the defilement. The results of Rivka’s examination were also inconclusive, and the court ruled that the inconsistencies in testimonies about the order in which the women were assaulted and the lack of unanimity among the experts not only undermined the accusation of Bezdrigin and Kreuter “but even raised doubt regarding the fact of rape itself.”
The list of crimes that the court refused to recognize because it did not consider the testimonies authentic is staggering. Judges acted as automatons, formally evaluating and calculating evidence, dismissing testimonies that came from victims or relatives or doubting that witnesses had been able to see things that they later reported seeing. Two pogromists, Yakim Sofronii and Ulyan Chebotarenko, knocked out Meir Weisman’s eye, and Weisman, who was already blind in one eye, lost his vision completely; but the court, the unconscionable cruelty of this crime notwithstanding, refused to consider Weisman’s petition because it was based only on his own statement. Judges acquitted the murderers of Kopel Kainarskii because the key witnesses to his murder were his widow and his children. Petr Kaverin, Ivan Pirozhok, and Stepan Foksh, who had killed Kelman Voliovich, were also exonerated because the testimonies against them came from Voliovich’s family members. Although seven witnesses observed the pogromists chasing and beating Srul Ulman, the crucial testimony came from his sons, and the court suggested that in their state of emotional distress they “could unintentionally make a mistake regarding the identity” of the assailants. Therefore, the court decided to clear the accused of murder charges. The case involving the killings on Muncheshtskaia Road, where Sura Fonarzhi, her husband Zis, and their neighbor Yankel Tunik were the victims, was particularly harrowing. Witnesses asserted that Sura’s body was found mutilated, with nails driven into her nostrils. However, the doctor who performed the autopsy later refuted this detail. This inconsistency in witness accounts regarding the mutilations provided the court with a pretext to dismiss their testimonies entirely, resulting in the acquittal of the accused on murder charges.
When survivors sought some solace by suing the pogromists for the destruction of their property, the judges questioned the plaintiffs’ ability to identify who plundered their homes because, during the attack, the plaintiffs were hiding from the attackers and, consequently, could not see anything. Even when the perpetrators were clearly identified, the court dismissed requests for compensation because the testimonies regarding the value of broken utensils, stolen goods, and clothing came from the plaintiffs’ neighbors, who were themselves victims of the attack. In the face of this injustice, Zarudnyi tried to appeal the court decision in the Senate, pointing out that “all these witnesses were themselves victims of the pogrom because, with few exceptions, all the Jews of Kishinev suffered from the pogrom. There were no other witnesses available to establish the value of the destroyed household property except for Jewish neighbors. The victims of the pogrom, who belonged to the poorest segment of the city’s population for the most part, were the ones who could testify to it.” This, like all other Zarudnyi’s appeals, was futile. Russian courts treated all Jews as if they constituted a single collective entity with uniform interests and consciousness. Simultaneously, it sought to individualize the guilt of each defendant, opting for acquittal when this guilt was not immediately apparent.
The main cause of the judges’ attitude to the survivors’ testimonies requires no explanation. Antisemitism — deep, sometimes even unconscious, prejudice turned them against the survivors’ stories. According to many accounts, the presiding judge from Odesa, Vladimir Davydov, was a decent person, a loyal and conservative man, and very representative of the legal estate that was permeated by latent antisemitism. Other factors, however, also played a role. As I have pointed out, the court followed the formal rules of evidence, dismissing testimonies as legally unacceptable. It is quite possible that the judges understood that the survivors were telling the truth, but they prioritized the formal rules, dismissing contradictory testimonies altogether and rejecting the testimonies of close relatives. Doubt and skepticism, often with a scientific gloss, concealed and justified their biases and the lack of empathy.
The result was an absurd coexistence of the two truths. The city was abuzz with tales of atrocities, with burned houses and streets littered with fragments of shattered furniture serving as silent testaments to the catastrophe; everyone was aware of the truth regarding the rapes and the killings. Yet the judges constructed an alternate version of the truth that deviated from common knowledge. The judges’ prior doubt mirrored the prior willingness of the pogromists to accept lies and conspiracy theories, such as the story of ritual murder or of the Tsar’s alleged order to massacre the Jewish residents of Kishinev. The pogromists’ readiness to believe these rumors was not driven by the allure of falsehoods but rather by a desire to believe in their veracity, a credulity based on the platitudes of the world they inhabited, while the court’s doubt in the authenticity of testimonies also reflected a tacit convention.
The liberal lawyers who withdrew from the trial because the court refused to investigate antisemitic conspiracy also inadvertently played a role in sealing the irrelevance of the victims’ testimonies and contributed to the murderers’ acquittal. The Jewish lawyer Samuel Kalmanovich, a member of the Young Advocate defense team, spoke on the victims’ behalf when he declared that they did not care about the prosecution of the pogromists: “We are not seeking the punishment of these poor souls… We, Jews, need the reasons… Tell us, why were we beaten?” But while this question certainly resonated with the words of the survivors, it seems that Kalmanovich and the victims were speaking about different things. Kalmanovich asked about the role of the authorities and the instigators, assuming the existence of a plot, while the victims wondered how and why people who had lived side-by-side with them for ages had turned into their enemies. The liberal lawyers’ position denying agency to the mob and to its individual participants somewhat foreshadowed Hannah Arendt’s stance about the role of individual perpetrators in the giant machine of Nazi violence. Like Arendt reporting in 1963 on the Eichmann trial, the young lawyers, undoubtedly sympathetic to the victims, failed in 1903 to hear their voices clearly.
The court, predictably, could not and did not want to address the question of the pogrom’s causes, all the more so because most defendants stayed silent throughout the trial, simply denying their guilt. The study of the origins of the violence requires deep research into the social, cultural, and economic history of Kishinev, and some of this work has been done recently by several prominent historians who showed that the pogrom was neither an organized and pre-planned assault, as the liberal lawyers tried to prove, nor the eruption of a national and economic conflict that had been building up for ages, as the prosecution suggested. What happened in Kishinev was a spontaneous ethnic riot provoked by antisemitic propaganda. In its causes, but not in its context or its scale, it was similar to the massacre in Jedwabne in 1941, when, as Jan Gross asserts, “ordinary Poles slaughtered the Jews” without the Gestapo’s command and instruction, “of their own free will.”
While the memory of the massacre at Jedwabne lay dormant until Gross’s intervention, Kishinev’s story was neither unknown nor forgotten. But what remains to be explained is the seductiveness of the lies and the conspiracy theories, and the failure of both the court and the liberal lawyers, with the exception of a few, to hear the voices of the survivors. Was the society, including its liberal part, ready and willing to accept testimonies, and if not, what could have caused the crisis of disbelief? This question resonates, alas, with our own debates about alternative truths, elusive facts, prior ideological disqualifications, and trust that has become predicated on a testifier’s group or nationality or citizenship.
Striking a balance between credulity and skepticism regarding the narratives of victims is difficult. What matters is not their identity or their position — on the defendant’s bench, among the plaintiffs, or among the witnesses; even the categories of “victim” and “survivor” can be contested. A judge, a journalist, or a historian should approach testimonies with an assumption of truthfulness — but trust is not the same as blind belief, which turns quickly into distrust and injustice towards others. Truth has a history, and a society’s progress toward a better way of understanding and critically evaluating evidence is not straightforward. It is from the failures and the retreats in the history of truth that we can learn the most.