[29] [He died, after the completion of the present volume by the author, on December 15, 1917.] [30] [The Yiddish equivalent for "Grandfather."] [31] A collection of his sketches, translated into English by Helena Frank, was issued by the Jewish Publication Society of America in 1906. [32] Died in New York on May 13, 1916. [33] See vol II, p. 228 _et seq._ [34] See vol. II, p. 330, n. 1. [35] "If thou wishe to know the fountain--whence thy martyred brethren drew their inspiration." CHAPTER XXXIII THE KISHINEV MASSACRE 1. POGROMS AS A COUNTER-REVOLUTIONARY MEASURE The frenzy of political reaction, which raged for two decades, was grist to the mill of the Revolution. Stunned by the blow it had received at the beginning of the eighties, the Russian revolutionary movement came back to consciousness at the beginning of the twentieth century, when the hopes for a change of policy on the part of Nicholas II. had been completely blasted. The agitation among the students and the workingmen, the "disorders" at the universities, the strikes at the factories, the revolutionary propaganda carried on in the underground press at home and in the public press abroad--all these endeavors were gradually co-ordinated within the frame of the two revolutionary organizations, the Social-Democratic and the Social-Revolutionary parties, both of which assumed definite shape between 1898 and 1900. The Social-Revolutionary party favored terrorism as a weapon in its struggle with the Russian Government, which had made use of all the appliances of police terrorism to suppress the faintest stirring for liberty. This official terrorism raged with unrestricted violence. Nocturnal raids, arrests, prisons, and places of deportation or of penal servitude, filled to overflowing with "political criminals," mostly young men and women--such were the agencies by means of which the Government hoped to stamp out the "revolutionary hydra," even when manifesting itself in the form of moderate constitutional demands. The revolutionaries fought terrorism with terrorism, and one of their victims was the reactionary Minister of the Interior, Sipyaghin, who was assassinated in April, 1902. The exasperated Tzar retorted by appointing to the same office von Plehve, one of the most experienced henchmen of the Russian political inquisition, who had long before, in his capacity of Chief of the Political Police, brought its mechanism to the top notch of efficiency.[36] He was destined to play an ill-fated rôle in the martyrology of Russian Jewry.