Russia is on the verge of a new upheaval, which it is predicted will be marked by unprecedented pogroms against the Jews, says the London Daily Mail today in an article by Sir Percival Phillips, the first of a series on the situation in Russia, obtained from an Englishman who has just returned to London after many years residence in Russia. Peasants throughout the country, says the Daily Mail, are whispering the battle-cry which they believe to be a legacy from Lenin; “God save Russia and kill the Jews”, a phrase which the dead Premier is reported to have repeated as a liturgy, “crawling on all fours like a beast around the room in his carefully guarded retreat at Gorky”. Everywhere there is the cry: “Kill the Jews!”, sending a shudder through Jews everywhere.
From the Ukraine, where minor pogroms have already been reported. Jews are moving northward with all possible rapidity. Hundreds of Jews are pouring into Moscow, which has become known as the New Jerusalem. The British Agency in Moscow is being besieged by Jews, eager to go to Palestine. The emigration depots in the Baltic states are filled with Jews, anxious to sail for America. Zinovieff and Kameneff are Jews and Stalin, who is an Armenian, follows them in all that they do, but Tchitcherin, Rykoff, Sapron off and others high in Soviet government circles are avowedly anti-Semitic.
The peasants are against the Jews; the army is against the Jews, and Russians generally believe that their misfortune is due to Jews. A new word is spreading in Russia. It is VEP, the first initials of the words, Wseobstochi Evreiski Pogrom.
“The shadow of the coming pogrom”, says the Daily Mail, “has blighted the Bolshevik dream of world domination, and, although a few fanatics at the top of the flimsy structure left by Lenihe will cherish that fantasy, all the practical Jews are concentrating their energy, time and money on saving their lives and avoiding the deluge of blood which is clearly before them. Tratsky, head of the army, although himself a Jew, is regarded, curiously enough, as being anti-Jew in sentiment and politics, and it is even said that he would not find a pogrom distasteful”.
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
