With the approaching Passover season, pogroms were openly organized. The papers were flooded with telegrams from many cities stating that riots were imminent. In some places the governors adopted measures to check the excesses of the savage crowd, but in many localities the pogroms were deliberately permitted or even directly engineered by the police. In the manufacturing city of Bialystok, the center of the Jewish labor movement, the Cossacks assaulted Jewish passers-by on the streets, invaded the synagogues and Jewish homes, cruelly maltreating their inmates and frequently searching them and taking away their money (April 9-10). During the Passover holidays, peasants made an attack upon the Jews in the town of Dusyaty, in the government of Kovno, looting their property and beating those that dared to oppose them. In the city of Melitopol, in the government of Tavrida, an intoxicated mob demolished and set fire to Jewish stores, and thereupon started to attack the houses of Christians, but the self-defence consisting of Jewish and Christian young men checked the pogrom (April 18-19). In Simferopol, in the same government, the Black Hundred spread a rumor that a Jewish boy, the son of a pharmacist, had desecrated a Christian ikon. A pogrom was set in motion which met with the resistance of the armed Jewish youth and was afterwards checked by the troops (April 22). The most terrible outbreak took place in Zhitomir. In this quiet center of Volhynia the progressive elements of both the Jewish and the Russian population revelled in the joy of their political honeymoon. As had been the case in other large cities, here, too, the "bloody Sunday" of January called forth political strikes on the part of the workingmen, demonstrations on the part of the college youth, and the circulation of revolutionary appeals. The fact that the movement was headed by the Jewish youth was enough to inspire the Black Hundred to embark upon their criminal task. All kinds of rumors were set afloat, such as that the Jews had been firing at the Tzar's portrait on the field behind the city, that they were preparing to slaughter the Christians, and other absurd stories. At the approach of Passover, the pogrom organizers summoned to their aid a group of "Katzaps," Great-Russian laborers, from Moscow. The Jews, anticipating the danger, began to arm themselves in self-defence, and made their preparations openly. A clash between the "Black" and the "Red" was inevitable. It came in the form of a sanguinary battle which was fought on April 23-26, matching by its cruelty the pogrom at Homel, though exceeding it vastly by its dimensions.