> weren't all controlled by the state. Personally I
> doubt that the Okhranka was involved, since I don't
> see what they would have to gain from a pogrom
> (property damage was immense, and they hurt the
> Empire's image abroad badly. The Okhranka were not morons.).\
Venting of popular frustrations, which were very intense. My grandma who remembered pre-revolutionary times told me that peasant violence was directed at about everyone they could put their hands on. She told me a story about someone of an upper class origin who was separated from a hunting party and run into an angry peasant mob - the police later could not even recognize his body. Isaak Bashevis Singer - a keen observer of social life - writes about horrible peasant mob violence such as boiling people alive (_The Magician of Lublin_), and description of peasant mob violence are abound in literature (see for example _Painted bird_ by Jerzy Kosinski, who btw was accused of plagiarizing these descriptions from the novel _Peasants_ by the 1924 Nobel laureate Wladyslaw Reymont.)
Wojtek