Chapter XXVIII: Appendix: C

A RUSSIAN AUTHORITY ON THE POLICE PARTICIPATION OF _POGROMS_

M. LOPUCHIN’S LETTER TO M. STOLYPIN

Herewith we give the translation in full of the letter of M. Alexis Lopuchin, formerly Director of the Police Department of Russia. This is made from a German translation of the original Russian, and is vouched for, as to its correctness, by the author of the letter.

HONORED SIR:

I deemed it my duty to bring to your attention through my letter of
the 26th of May the fact that I gave to the editor of the journal
“Retsch” the copy of the report of the chief of the special
division of the police department to the minister of the interior,
concerning the organization of the pogrom against the Jews in
Alexandrovsk (government of Yekaterinoslaff), and touching the
participation therein of the authorities of the police department.
I did this in the firm conviction that it was only through the
imperial Duma, when well informed by the public press, we could
hope, once for all, to destroy the great danger menacing the State
because of the systematic preparation by government officials of
Jewish and other pogroms. I informed you of my action lest some
subordinate of Your Excellency might be held responsible for having
furnished that journal with the report.

I deemed it unnecessary in my communication to impart to you the
facts detailed in the report of Markaroff, and with which I was
familiar; I refrained from doing so because it was furthest from my
thoughts that it could be possible that Your Excellency would
conceal the truth that was revealed by the investigation called
forth at the request of the Duma, in connection with the report of
Markaroff.

But yet must I be convinced from the newspaper reports of the Duma
session of June 21st, that in your answer to the inquiry of the
Duma, the material that was put into your hands for the proper
preparation thereof, the real facts in the case, were substantially
set aside. I, therefore, conceived it to be my bounden duty to
impart to you, in this communication, facts that are well known to
me.

In January of this year several persons informed me that there were
indications of the preparation in different sections of Russia of a
Jewish pogrom, and they appealed for my help to prevent such
misfortune. Investigations that were made established the truth of
their statements, and satisfied me of the participation by public
officials in the preparations for a pogrom. They brought me on the
trail of a printing-office in the police department.

On January 20, Count Witte, the president of the Council of
Ministers, invited me to his office and asked me to give him my
views on the Jewish question, and as to the reason for the
participation of the Jewish proletariat in the revolutionary
movement. After I had clearly presented to him my main point of
view on the question, I told him that, aside from the judicial
aspect of the question, there was another of great importance,
namely, anti-Semitism, that not only existed because of the
long-continued period in which the Jews were without rights, but
because, as well, of the direct provocations against them on the
part of persons in public authority. As a special indication of
such provocation, I pointed to the incident of the printing-office
in the police department, of whose output, however, I had no
sufficient evidence in my hands, and Count Witte assigned to me, as
an officer of the Minister of the Interior, the duty of making a
close investigation into the matter.

I proved the following conclusively:

After the manifesto of the 17th October, 1905, thanks to the
disturbances that broke out in many places after this act of the
government, evidence of a reaction appeared in circumscribed
sections of society. Ratschkowski, chief of the political division
of the police department, an officer assigned to special duty by
the Minister of the Interior, undertook to maintain and strengthen
this reaction by the issuing of effective proclamations. They were
printed by an officer of the gendarmerie, in the building of the
gendarmerie in St. Petersburg, upon a printing-press that was taken
from revolutionaries when a house search was made. I had in my hand
one of these proclamations; it was addressed to the working people,
bore the signature “Group of Russian Factory Workers of St.
Petersburg,” and sought to destroy the faith of working-men in
their radical leaders by maintaining that these leaders had
misappropriated funds that had been collected for the political
campaign. This proclamation was not the only one that was printed
in the headquarters of the gendarmerie; but at the time of
investigation I could not get others because they had all been
distributed.

As the printing-press that served the purpose of the
revolutionaries failed to satisfy the present needs, a complete one
was purchased at the expense of the police department that was
capable of printing one thousand per hour. This was set up in the
secret service section of the police department.

Captain Comisaroff was given its supervision, and two compositors
were employed upon the work. On this machine there were printed in
December, 1905, and in January, 1906, not one but a vast number of
proclamations, all composed variously, but all of the same general
tenor.

In all these proclamations, alongside of a condemnation of the
revolutionary movement, the information was offered that
non-believers, mainly the Jews, were responsible therefor, and
their purpose was to provoke an uprising against these people.

I had in my hands three proclamations that were printed in the
printing-office of the police department. As I positively proved,
they were not the only ones; the fourth one was just set up at that
moment (February 3). It contained the most ridiculous complaints
against the Jews, and urged that they be boycotted in the Duma
elections. But of the printed proclamations that I had in my hand
one appears especially as law violating; the author, addressing
himself to the soldiers, calls upon the army for a campaign against
“the Poles, Armenians, and Jews.” Thousands of copies were printed,
of every proclamation. Of the proclamation addressed to the
soldiers, 5,000 copies were sent to Vilna by the officers on
special duty to Mr. Schkott, the governor-general, for distribution
in that city. Schkott distributed a portion of them himself in the
evening in the streets of the city, and gave the rest of them to
the chief of police of Vilna, who, on January 28, telegraphed to
the police department that in view of the great success that
attended the distribution of the proclamation addressed to the
soldiers, to send him a new lot. Several thousand copies more were
printed and sent on to the Vilna chief of police. The same
proclamation was sent in thousands of copies to Kursk, being taken
by Surgeon Michailoff, assigned there to duty, who, at the request
of M. Ratschkowski, was appointed secret agent of the police
department. Michailoff also telegraphed (February 1 or 2) for a new
lot of these proclamations in view of their great success among the
soldiers. Aside from these, the appeals printed by the police
department were distributed in St. Petersburg through M. Dubrovin,
and the League of the Russian People, over which he presided; in
Moscow through the publisher of the “Viedomosti,” Gringmut, who was
given a large number of these appeals in December, 1905, by
Ratschkowski personally.

The provocative appeals of the police department were also
distributed in other states, by the police and gendarmerie.

All that is narrated above I imparted in January of this year to
Count Witte, president of the committee of ministers, and I gave
him specimens of all the proclamations above referred to (for that
reason I have none at hand for present use). Count Witte at once
called before him Captain Comisaroff, who acknowledged the truth of
all this information. To me, also, he confirmed all these
statements without exception. At the same time he declared that he
acted under orders of Herr Ratschkowski; that he then presented the
text of the proclamation to Wuitsch, the director of the police
department, and did not at any time put them in type until the
director stated in writing that he had read the proclamation.

Express orders were issued by Secretary of State Witte that the
printing-office of the police department should be wiped out of
existence. However Captain Comisaroff merely took apart the
printing-press as a precaution against the printing of further
proclamations, by order of Ratschkowski, in spite of Witte’s
orders; and to make that altogether impossible the press was taken
from the police department to the residence of Captain Comisaroff.

Aside from this and altogether without regard thereto, Your
Excellency was confidentially informed that the proclamations which
called for the extermination of the Jews in the city of
Alexandrovsk (Yekaterinoslaff government) were circulated even
after all the uprisings ceased, even after December 27, 1905; I
consider it my duty to attach herewith a specimen of a proclamation
that was distributed in the city of Alexandrovsk February 7 and 8,
and that called for the extermination of the Jews on the 9th of
February, the anniversary of the breaking out of the war with
Japan.

Your Excellency was confidentially informed that the officer for
special duty, Ratschkowski, remained at the head of the political
division of the police department until the end of April; that
although this office was wiped out by the highest authority, he
remained at the head of the entire secret and protective police;
that the right was given him to supervise, so far as he deemed it
necessary, the course of all political occurrences and trials that
affected the police department, and he was further authorized to
utilize the social organizations in the interest of the government.

* * * * *

Permit me, sir, to regard it as my moral duty, aside from imparting
to you this information, to convey to you, as a former director of
the police department, the reasons, incomprehensible at a first
glance, why it is not only impossible for the central government to
suppress the pogrom politics of the local authorities when the
organization of a pogrom originates with them, but not even to be
well informed as to the organization of the pogrom itself. One of
these reasons _is the freedom from punishment of the officers of
the government who are responsible for the pogroms--no proof need
be given of this_. But there are other reasons of a general
character; at the time I was director of the police department a
pogrom occurred; that of Kishineff. The foreign and our own illegal
press that then had the privilege to speak out on our internal
conditions as well as several circles of society, put upon the
police department the responsibility for the organization of this
pogrom. There was no responsibility that could be attached to the
police department; yet the charge was not groundless in so far as
they started out with the supposition that the police department
and the ministry of the interior were possessed of all possible
power. In spite of the closest investigation as to the
participation of officers of the government in the organization of
the Kishineff pogrom, it was impossible for me; as director of the
police department, to absolutely prove the fact, and yet there
could be no doubt whatever of their participation. And what is
especially characteristic, the secret working of the pogrom
organization became clear to me only after I ceased to hold an
official position in the ministry of the interior.

And in such a position does every official of the central
government find himself if he yields no sympathy to pogrom
politics. That is to be accounted for by the fact that the minister
of the interior and the central political organization are
altogether powerless--the police and the gendarmerie are not in his
hands, but precisely the reverse: he is in the hands of the
superiors of these officials. The fact is that, through the
organization of the secret political police, because of the
exceptional law providing for extraordinary military protection,
and I the long continuance of that condition in the country, the
whole power has been transferred from above to below.

Aside from the continued causes that have been uncovered, the
weakness of the governmental authority, there are existing at
present other causes.

I met no one among the political or general police officials who
was not absolutely and thoroughly convinced that in reality there
were two governments in existence, each of which drove its own
politics to the other, one embodied in the person of Secretary of
State Witte, the other in the person of Trepoff, who, according to
general conviction, brought to the Czar reports of the condition of
affairs in the empire, different than those that Count Witte
brought to him, and in this wise developed a different political
position. This point of view finds its foundation in the fact that
General Trepoff, after his appointment as commander of the palace,
succeeded in having special funds put at his command for the
engagement of a separate force of secret agents, and he, therefore,
became possessed of tools in hand that should only be in control of
the minister of the interior.

This point of view finds further foundation in the fact that
General Trepoff, even after he gave up the post he held in the
ministry of the interior, in October, 1905, succeeded without the
knowledge of the minister of the interior, in getting out of the
police department all the documents, except those of no moment, for
the purpose of looking through them; not only current documents,
but those of no present use--even though all these had nothing
whatever to do with the commander of the palace.

As to what purpose General Trepoff had in mind with reference to
the secret funds, and the documents of the police department, in
what direction he was inclined to utilize his position in regard to
these, there exists, Your Excellency, in the mind of the
undersigned, a firm conviction--rightly or wrongly--that General
Trepoff sought to influence the politics of the government.

This conviction, indeed, is as firm as the conviction that General
Trepoff sympathized with the pogroms politics. And whatever power
the ministry may set to work in opposition to pogroms, they will be
valueless so long as the local police are convinced of the lack of
power of the ministry and the possession of power of other
authorities.