The expulsions were preceded by a year of ominous rumors of a program of new restrictions beside which the May Laws would pale into insignificance. An offer of ten million dollars for the cause of Jewish education made by Baron de Hirsch to the Russian government was refused. His scheme, however, for the organization of a mass-emigration of Jews to Argentine was sanctioned. All these facts lent strength to the feeling of the Jews that they had nothing to hope for under the existing regime. Thus closed the reign of Alexander III and a memorable chapter in Russian Jewish history. The early years of Nicholas II were marked by a relaxation in the strict administration and interpretation of the existing restrictive laws. Hopes for the amelioration of the Jewish situation began to be entertained. These hopes were destined shortly to be shattered. The first decade of the twentieth century opened with threatening unrest. Economic depression began and was accompanied by revolutionary attacks. For the Jews, the most alarming symptom was the rise and uninterrupted progress of a group of antisemitic agitators and Russian loyalists, who sought to counteract the revolutionary movement by denouncing the Jews as the leaders of the revolution and the enemies of the autocracy and the Orthodox religion. Thus was sown the seed of the Kishineff massacre of April, 1903, which lasted three days. Before the echoes of Kishineff had died away, the massacre at Gomel followed. But Kishineff proved to be merely a bloody prelude. The air was surcharged with explosives. The outbreak of the Russo-Japanese war and of the first organized revolution created a dangerous combination of events for the Jews. To the discontent of the peasants, forced to go to the front in a war for which they had no enthusiasm, and sore with the reverses of the Russian army, was added the increased activity of the agitators who declared that the war with Japan had been forced upon Russia by the Jews, eager to profit through its ruin, and who called upon their followers and the peasants through propaganda and proclamations to revenge themselves upon the Jews. The government at bay, on the verge of breakdown under the revolutionary attacks, and anxious to excuse its incompetency and failure in the conduct of the war, sought a means of diverting the peasants from the uprisings against the landed proprietors spreading over the land, and, above all, of stifling the revolution, which had met with such opportune and unlooked-for success among all classes. This was a situation alive with danger for the Jews, whose proletarians in the cities had taken an active part in the revolution. The organization of Jewish massacres by responsible agents of the government became the central feature of its program of counter-revolution.[38] A veritable holocaust ensued in nearly every province of the Empire for two years, only the climaxes of which became known to the world in Zhitomir, Odessa, Bialystok, and Siedlec.