Authors

Ekaterina Pravilova¹;  ¹ Princeton University, United States

Discussion

This paper offers an analysis of Russia's first mass atrocity trial held in the aftermath of the anti-Jewish pogrom in Kishinev in 1903. The trial, or, more precisely, a series of trials, involved more than three hundred defendants and was based on the testimonies of almost two thousand witnesses and victims. It ended with multiple acquittals and light sentences and the dismissal of many testimonies of the pogrom's victims. The paper asks: what, in addition to the banal antisemitism, caused this outcome? How did the coverage of the pogrom in the press, the evidentiary principles of assessing testimonies, and the sociological theories of crowd behavior affect the trials and society's attitudes to their results?