On October 18, 1905, upon receiving news of the Manifesto on October 17 in Tomsk, a rally was held near the Commercial School on Salt Square. Students, high school students and simply liberal-minded townspeople joyfully celebrated the long-awaited event. This peaceful event was dispersed by the Cossacks and the police, and the participants were beaten.
The City Duma, in which the positions of the liberals were strong, reacted.
On the same evening, an emergency meeting of the City Duma was held under the chairmanship of Alexei Ivanovich Makushin (doctor and educator, brother of the famous educator Pyotr Makushin). The public councils demanded that the governor immediately remove the city police chief from his post and bring him to trial, as well as remove the Cossacks from Tomsk. If this demand was not met, the members of the Duma threatened to send a telegram to St. Petersburg asking for the dismissal of the governor himself. The Duma decided to stop the allocation of city funds for the maintenance of the police and began to create a police force to guard and protect the population of the city.
Governor V. N. Azancheev-Azanchevsky, having a telegraphic order from the Minister of Internal Affairs to suppress any protests, gave orders in his own way. A Black Hundred pogrom was organized in Tomsk. On October 20, a crowd gathered near the city police building. With portraits of the king and queen, national flags, as well as sticks and clubs, the crowd moved to the city council. Having broken the windows in the building, a crowd of pogromists flowed to Cathedral Square. On the square, they began to beat everyone who was in student uniform or looked like a student. The city militia tried to put things in order, the first bloody clash took place, "every now and then the wounded were carried from the square."
To defend "Faith, Tsar and Fatherland", the patriots (who had already secured the blessing of Bishop Macarius of Barnaul and Tomsk) decided to crack down on the railway employees. On that day, the building of the Siberian Railway Administration was especially crowded - they were giving out salaries. All leaving the Department were brutally beaten by the brutal crowd. Some of the employees were barricaded inside the Office. Then the besiegers set fire to the building. The crowd did not let the firefighters who had arrived to extinguish the flames, cutting off the fire hoses. The theater of EI Korolev, located nearby, was also on fire. "Two huge buildings were ablaze, and a huge sea of fire flooded a large area."
The Tomsk pogrom is the modern name for the tragic events of the period of the First Russian Revolution that took place in Tomsk on October 20-22, 1905. The number of those killed is comparable to the well-known pogroms of 1903-1906. in European Russia, and surpasses in cruelty and destructiveness. According to eyewitnesses, these days in October 1905 in Tomsk “in order to be killed, it was enough to have a decent suit and an intelligent face. A student's cap or just a hat similar to it and a Jewish type of face were the surest death sentences”.
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The pogrom continued over the next two days. Now it was not murder that prevailed, but robbery. Among others, the house of A. I. Makushin was destroyed. The family of the mayor, warned in time, managed to escape. Makushin himself resigned, and was soon elected a deputy of the State Duma, unsuccessfully trying to punish the former governor using the parliamentary tribune.
According to the Russian historian M. V. Shilovsky, at least 66 people were beaten to death or burned to death, at least 129 were wounded. However, the exact number of people who burned to the ground along with the Office of the Siberian Railway and the Korolev Theater remained unknown forever.
Historian Mikhail Shilovsky believes that the Tomsk pogrom “was not organized by the authorities, but was the result of a confrontation between liberal-radical and conservative elements, dissatisfied with the aggressive, offensive tactics of the“revolutionaries”, a sharp deterioration in their financial situation as a result of a general strike. It is no accident that the striking force of the Black Hundreds was cabs, small traders, butchers, blacksmiths engaged in the provision of services, since the massive curtailment of economic activity in the city left them without earnings."
A demonstration of the Black Hundreds, covered by the police, which had already managed to crush the city council, kill and maim several people, tried to break into the theater where the revolutionary meeting was starting. Members of the city guard created by the zemstvo fired revolvers at the rioters. The crowd retreated at first. Then she attacked her opponents, driving some of the vigilantes into the building of the Siberian Railway Administration, where engineers and employees were also besieged.
Those wishing to sincerely demonstrate their patriotic loyalty to the Empire and the Emperor and punish the "Japanese agents" were seized by the basest passions. The three-story mansion was set on fire, people were not allowed out of it. The railway employees who ran out of the building were killed or brutally beaten right on the square as enemies of the throne and the fatherland, "foreign agents". Those who lost consciousness were robbed. They fired back from the roof of the burning building. The crowd did not allow firefighters to extinguish the building.
One of the witnesses of the pogrom was the artist Vladimir Dmitrievich Vuchichevich-Sibirskiy, who reflected these events in his painting "The Black Hundred Pogrom of 1905 in Tomsk" (1906).
And now let's see how they reacted to the Manifesto of October 17, 1905 in other cities of Siberia to search for analogies and explanations. The degree of politicization of local communities and, accordingly, the level of confrontation between liberal-radical and conservative groups, in my opinion, depended on the size of the population and the complexity of the structure of urban societies. Here is how they reacted to the granted freedoms in the uncrowded (6.5 thousand people) Tyukalinsk on October 26: “The people were hurrying to the cathedral, where the manifesto would be read. Then a thanksgiving prayer followed. After the prayer service, the students with a large crowd of people, carrying in front the portraits of the royal persons, walked around the whole city and sang in front of the school buildings: "God save the king." In the evening the city was illuminated."
In Mariinsk (15.6 thousand people) on October 20, a crowded meeting of residents took place in the People's House, at which the text of the manifesto was read. Then the head of the house, I. P. Petrov, read two lectures at once on the problems of democracy, the development of human rights in Europe and the French revolution of 1789. Then a procession took place with national and red flags, some of them bore the inscriptions "freedom", "In memory of the fallen for freedom". As the assistant to the police chief noted in the telegram, “The Manifesto of October 17 was greeted with full delight by the people gathered in the public club. Nothing was expressed, except for the expression of loyal feelings to the emperor."
In the more populous (29.7 thousand people) Tyumen, the public reaction was no longer so unambiguous. In the afternoon of October 19, “two parties of demonstrators formed; the first consisted of an intelligent class and a youth of about 300, carried a flag with the inscription: "Long live freedom", sang "National anthem" and "Forward", shouted "Hurray!", "hello to the desired freedom; the second, in the number of 100, consisted mainly of half-drunk, very suspicious personalities shouting: "Let politics die," "Long live the autocracy," "Down with the revolution," "beat the schoolgirls," "beat the realists." Only a lucky coincidence of late times saved the students from the hands of wild "patriots". There was a little fight in the collision. " By the way, the Russian provinces reacted in about the same way to the Manifesto. So, in Pskov on October 18, 1905. First, a demonstration of revolutionary liberal elements with a red flag, which bore the inscription "Down with autocracy!", took place in the streets. Then, according to the chief of police, “the Pskovites, without the assistance of the troops or the police, took away the red flag from the demonstrators, beating them decently … By evening, the demonstration was replaced by a manifestation from the residents of the mountains. Pskov, who carried the portrait of the Emperor through the streets, and the banner presented to the fire-fighting society, with the singing of the national anthem.granted to the fire-fighting society, with the singing of the national anthem.granted to the fire-fighting society, with the singing of the national anthem.
Pogrom events, in addition to Tomsk, took place in such large cities of Siberia as Irkutsk (October 7, 1905), Omsk (October 21-23), Krasnoyarsk (October 21) and Barnaul (October 23-24). Earlier, I stated about the pogrom in Mariinsk (November 25). But it seems that A. N. Ermolaev convincingly showed that the event in question was a riot of militia soldiers awaiting demobilization, accompanied by the robbery of goods from Jewish shops at the local bazaar. Their scale and consequences are incomparable with those in Tomsk. In Omsk and Barnaul, there were no victims, except for those who were beaten. In Krasnoyarsk, during the siege of the People's House (without setting it on fire), the Black Hundreds beat and killed those trying to get out of the blockade (11 people were killed and 40 wounded). In Irkutsk on October 17, clashes broke out between the participants of the revolutionary meeting and the "rightists", the victims of which were 20 people. Taking advantage of the situation, criminal elements tried to rob shops in the central part of the city that belonged to Jews. They were scattered by a self-defense detachment, two thugs were killed. An attempt to organize a pogrom failed.
Only in Omsk, officials took decisive and effective actions to prevent and suppress pogrom actions. As for the direction of the actions of the Black Hundreds, the speeches in Irkutsk and Tomsk were anti-Semitic (in Barnaul, Jews were simply forbidden to settle), clearly anti-intellectual - in Omsk, Barnaul, Tomsk, Krasnoyarsk; railway workers were pursued in Omsk and Tomsk. On the example of Barnaul and Tomsk, two stages can be clearly distinguished in the pogrom actions: at the first, massive counter-revolutionary demonstrations took place, at the second, deviant elements joined the "patriots" and robbery began. In Irkutsk, the indicated stages coincided in time.