In Russia no official of the government can be prosecuted at law without the approval of his official superiors. The prosecution of an official is popularly supposed to threaten the prestige of the Emperor, consequently any prosecution is very rare. The right of the Emperor to promulgate “exceptional laws,” which take precedence over all other laws in the empire, reduces to an absurdity every form of law-making in Russia. The right of the Emperor to place a certain official in supreme command of a given locality, removing him for the time without the pale of all civil and military authority, makes possible the greatest abuses which culminate from time to time in organized massacres. These massacres are sometimes arranged by the police and the gendarmes, as at Bielostok; sometimes by a single official, sometimes by the organization of the Black Hundred, as at Odessa. There are famous instances when massacres have been secretly planned by local authorities with the knowledge and consent of St. Petersburg. General Trepoff’s attitude of tacit consent and approval is well known. The complicity of the Russian government in massacres and other barbarities that are periodically visited upon the Russian people is familiar to most people in Europe, but America seems very reluctant to accept the facts. We are loath to believe that a government, having dealings with civilized nations, does condone the monstrous crimes which incontrovertibly do belong to Russia. A volume of evidence on this issue could easily be prepared. My present task is to tell of the things I saw with my own eyes, and the things I learned from unimpeachable sources. Recognizing, however, the seriousness of these charges, I feel justified in appending enough citations to official and authoritative reports to adequately support my most condemnatory statements.[13] Senator Turau, an official investigator for the government, in reporting upon one of the Kieff _pogroms_ stated that for purposes of defense the troops stationed in the city had been assigned to the four quarters of the town. “Yet the _pogrom_ lasted for three days,” he goes on to state, “and stopped only when all Jewish shops and many Jewish houses had been ransacked. The police were almost entirely absent. The troops walked slowly down the middle of the street while robbery was proceeding on both sides of them. When private persons or officials asked for help from the troops, the answer was always: ‘We have no orders.’ Even the vice-governor, Raffalsky, though in uniform, had this answer from a squad of Cossacks. Generally a shop already ransacked was guarded by a sentinel, who thought it his duty to stand there, paying no attention to the pillage which was going on all around him.”