After asserting that General von Raaben, the Governor of Bessarabia, did nothing to avert or stop the rioting, while M. Ostragoff, the Vice-Governor, was actually at the same time a contributor to the _Bessarabets_, and also the censor, the writer proceeds: “M. Plehve desires to divert Christians from their own grievances, so he conducts a campaign of Jew-baiting. The Czar was indignant when he heard of the massacre. He wished to send an aide-de-camp to report on the matter, but M. Plehve managed to dissuade his Majesty, and sent instead M. Kopuchin, one of his creatures, who drew up a mild report, which M. Plehve further doctored before submitting to the Czar.” Summing up, the writer says; “The Kishineff massacre has nothing to do with revolutionary tendencies. It is simply the result of systematic Jew-baiting, organised by M. Plehve, whose position is still unshaken, and who holds the Czar under his thumb by working upon his feelings and persuading him that the country is honeycombed with revolution and anarchy. No change is possible until M. Plehve has ceased to have the ear of the Czar. Further anti-Semitic disturbances are probable.”[181] An American diplomatist endorses the statement that M. De Plehve was really responsible for the massacre,[182] while a Russian Prince affirms that the instigators of the massacre, such as the Moldavian Kruschevan, editor of the _Bessarabets_, “were under the personal protection of the Minister.”[183] Despite the efforts of the Russian Government to represent the brutal outrage as due solely to a spontaneous explosion of popular fury arising from “national, religious, and economic hatred,”[184] certain facts which came to light during the mock trial, held towards the end of that year in the very scene of the massacre, seem to prove that, though such hatred did exist, the spark which set the mine on fire was not of popular origin. The passions of the people had been carefully inflamed by a pamphlet entitled _Who is to blame?_--the work of an anti-Semitic agitator of the name of Pronin, who was in relations with the proprietor of the _Novoe Vremya_, the eloquent exponent of Panslavism. But that was not all. Though special envoys of the Ministry of Justice and the Ministry of the Interior kept a watchful eye on the course of the proceedings; though the Court exerted itself to prevent the production of undesirable evidence; and though, in true mediaeval fashion, an attempt was made to lay the blame for the crime on the shoulders of the victims--by stories of a Jew’s assault on a Christian woman, of the desecration of churches and the murder of priests--yet the evidence given, even under such conditions, without absolving the populace, tends to establish the deliberate connivance, not to say the complicity, of the Government.