II’s advisors, von Plehve was made minister of internal affairs in- As security chief, von Plehve supported draconian internal se-
curity practices and supported anti-Semitic organizations known as
“Black Hundreds.” He was despised by liberal and radical public
opinion for his sponsorship of the Kishinev pogromof April 1903
that claimed hundreds of Jewish lives. Von Plehve was an incompe-
tent security chief. He fired his most competent subordinate, Nikolai
Zubatov, and ignored intelligence about growing urban and peasant
radicalism. More importantly, he was seen by many Russians as the
single most evil figure in the tsar’s court. His death became a major
goal of the Socialist Revolutionary Party’s Battle Organization, and
after several failed attempts he was assassinated in 1904, an act that
prompted genuine popular rejoicing in Russia.
POGROMS. Organized anti-Semitic violence, known as pogroms, be-
came a fact of Russian political life beginning in the early 1880s.
Russia had in the last decades of the Romanov dynasty the largest
Jewish population in Europe. But Russian chauvinists saw the Jew-
ish people as ethnically and politically alien. One of Aleksandr III’s
chief advisors stated that Russia’s policy was to convert one-third of
the Jews, see another third killed, and force the last one-third to im-
migrate to America. The tsar and his reactionary bureaucrats believed
that violence against Jews would divert the revolutionary drive of the
Russian people.
The Ministry of Internal Affairs and the Okhranatook part in the
financing and planning of pogroms during the reigns of Aleksandr III
and Nicholas II. The Okhranaalso almost certainly commissioned
the virulently anti-Semitic Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which
claimed to be a master plan for a Jewish plot to control the world.
(The book survived the fall of the Romanov dynasty, was widely read
in Hitler’s Germany, and is still quoted by virulent anti-Semites.) In-
terior Minister Vyacheslav von Plehve, one of Nicholas II’s chief ad-
visors, encouraged his subordinates to incite racial violence, which
caused thousands of casualties. Over 1,000 people died in a pogrom
at Kishinev, which von Plehve had had a hand in designing. His as-
sassination in 1904 by the Battle Organizationof the Socialist Rev-
olutionary Party was partly a result of a demand for vengeance for
these pogroms by political radicals.198 •POGROMS06-313 G-P.qxd 7/27/06 7:56 AM Page 198