KRUSHEVAN, PAVOLAKI°

KRUSHEVAN, PAVOLAKI ° (1860–1909), Russian journalist who became notorious in connection with the *Kishinev pogroms of April 1903. Krushevan began to publish the newspaper Bessarabets in 1897 in Kishinev, the capital of the province of Bessarabia. Though at first liberal, the newspaper soon became the mouthpiece of the province's reactionary circles, the Russian landowners and merchants, and received support from the government. The publication of all other newspapers was prohibited in Bessarabia. The newspaper conducted a violent campaign against the Jews, accusing them of exploiting the Christian masses and encouraging revolution. After the bankruptcy of the Bessarabets, Krushevan, assisted by friends, published a new paper Drug, which had a similar policy. In February 1903 he headed a group of agitators trying to whip up a *blood libel around the death of a Christian child of *Dubossary who in fact was murdered by a gentile. The bloody pogroms in Kishinev on Passover 1903 broke out as a direct consequence of his inflammatory articles. Continuing his agitation with even greater vehemence, he rapidly became a central figure in antisemitic circles and began to publish the newspaper Znamya in St. Petersburg. His series of articles on "The Program for the Conquest of the World by the Jews" formed the nucleus of the Protocols of the Learned *Elders of Zion. In June 1903 Krushevan was stabbed by the Zionist student Pinḥas *Dashewski but was only slightly wounded. Elected to the Second Duma in 1907 as a delegate of the *Union of the Russian People, he had an undistinguished parliamentary career.

[Yehuda Slutsky]