"Forgive me. What I have said is probably wild and incoherent. But I
am somewhat agitated. Forgive me. I continue. We thieves by profession
know better than any one else how these pogroms were organised. We
wander everywhere: into public houses, markets, tea-shops,
doss-houses, public places, the harbour. We can swear before God and
man and posterity that we have seen how the police organise the
massacres, without shame and almost without concealment. We know them
all by face, in uniform or disguise. They invited many of us to take
part; but there was none so vile among us as to give even the outward
consent that fear might have extorted.
"You know, of course, how the various strata of Russian society behave
towards the police? It is not even respected by those who avail
themselves of its dark services. But we despise and hate it three, ten
times more--not because many of us have been tortured in the detective
departments, which are just chambers of horror, beaten almost to
death, beaten with whips of ox-hide and of rubber in order to extort a
confession or to make us betray a comrade. Yes, we hate them for that
too.
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