By the beginning of the twentieth century, Bialystok, a county town in the Grodno province, was the center of an entire industrial region, the main role in which was played by textile and leather production - from small semi-handicraft workshops to large manufactories. The city was inhabited by many thousands of Polish and Jewish population, which was dominated by industrial workers and artisans employed in textile production. Naturally, at the turn of the XIX - XX centuries. here, as in other regions of the Russian Empire, revolutionary sentiments spread. In Bialystok, they found fertile soil, not only because of the industrial character of this city, but also because of its entry into the so-called. "Pale of Settlement". The Jewish population of Bialystok turned out to be the most susceptible to revolutionary agitation, which was explained by its low status in the system of national policy of the Russian Empire.
- a street in Bialystok.
The fact that the children of more or less wealthy Jews for the most part went to study abroad - primarily to Germany, Switzerland and France, where they faced the propaganda of European revolutionaries and perceived their ideological views - also played a role. On the other hand, temporary labor migration to European countries was developed among the poor part of the Jewish population. Migrant workers from the western corners of the Russian Empire, when faced with student propagandists in Europe, became even more convinced revolutionaries than the agitators from "decent families" themselves.
It was from Europe that anarchism came to Bialystok - the third most influential, after the social-democratic and social-revolutionary, leftist ideology in pre-revolutionary Russia. So, in 1903, a certain Shlomo Kaganovich appeared in Bialystok, who had previously spent six years in Great Britain, France and Switzerland working. In August 1903, together with Grigory Brumer, he created the first anarchist organization on the territory of the Russian Empire - the International Group of Communist Anarchists "Struggle", which included 10 activists.
For agitation activities, the available group of leaflets and brochures to meet the demand of the working masses for anarchist propaganda was clearly not enough. The literature sent in January 1904 from abroad was not enough either. The beginning Bialystok anarchists did not have their own authors, and even money for printing. There was no one to look for help from. By this time, in the Russian Empire, the anarchist circle, besides Bialystok, existed only in the small town of Nizhyn in the Chernigov province.
But the people of Belostok knew only about the group "Irreconcilable", which operated in Odessa and consisted of the Makhaevites who sympathized with anarchism - supporters of the original theory of the working conspiracy of the Polish revolutionary Jan Vaclav Machaysky. It was rumored that the Irreconcilables were doing relatively well with both literature and money. The hopes of the Bialystok residents for help from the Odessa Makhaevites were justified: the "Irreconcilable" handed the emissary of the Bialystok anarchists Yitzhokh Bleher literature and a certain amount of money, and he, with a sense of accomplishment, returned to Bialystok.
Wrestling group "Wrestling"
From the very beginning of their existence, the Bialystok anarchists did not hesitate to switch not only to propaganda activities, but also to more radical actions. At first, employees of administrative bodies and police became victims of assassination attempts and terrorist acts. So, after the police dispersed a rally in one of the outskirts of Bialystok in July 1903, the anarchists seriously wounded the policeman Lobanovsky, and a few days later they shot at the police chief Bialystok Metlenko.
The assassination attempts on the police contributed to the growth of the popularity of anarchists among a part of the radical youth, in whose eyes the policemen and bailiffs symbolized the existing political and social order. As their propaganda activities intensified, the anarchists attracted more and more Bialystok working and unemployed youth to their side.
In 1904, Bialystok and its suburbs were gripped by a deep economic crisis. Workshops and factories have reduced production or have been idle altogether. Thousands of people were left without a livelihood. Particularly difficult was the situation of nonresidents - immigrants from the Bialystok suburbs, who arrived in the city in search of work. In the first place, nonresidents have become victims of reductions in enterprises and total unemployment. Discontent grew among the hungry people. In the end, it turned into a mass riot in the Bialystok bazaar. Crowds of starving unemployed rushed to seize and destroy bakeries and butchers. Food, especially bread, was forcibly taken from shopkeepers. It was possible to suppress the demonstration of the unemployed with great difficulty. Hundreds of artisans were arrested, nonresidents were forcibly expelled from Bialystok to their place of birth.
At the end of the summer of 1904, in the midst of the economic crisis, a strike broke out at the weaving mill of the famous Bialystok businessman Avram Kogan. Kogan was a devout Jew and headed "Agudas Achim" - a kind of trade union of Bialystok manufacturers and entrepreneurs. He did not intend to satisfy the demands of the striking workers. Instead, with the help of the Bialystok police chief, Kogan organized the discharge of workers from Moscow, ready to replace the strikers at the bench. Kogan fired the strikers. This act infuriated even the relatively moderate in terms of radical actions of the Jewish Social Democrats from the Bund party. The Bundists sent 28 militants to the Kogan factory to remove the strikebreakers from their jobs. The militants cut the cloth on two machines, but the strikebreakers managed to repel the attack with the help of iron rollers and beat the militants. One Bundist was killed, the rest fled. The police arrived and began arresting the striking workers.
The Bialystok anarchists also decided to react, but in their own way. On August 29, 1904, during the Jewish holiday of Judgment Day, the anarchist Nisan Farber lay in wait for Abram Kogan at the entrance to the synagogue in the Bialystok suburb of Krynka and stabbed him twice with a dagger - in the chest and in the head. This was the first act of economic terror not only in Bialystok, but throughout the entire Russian Empire.
A little about the personality of the assassin, which is important, first of all, as a typical portrait of the Bialystok (and generally Western Russian) anarchist of those times. Nisan Farber was only eighteen years old. He was born in 1886 in the town of Porozov, Volkovysk district, Grodno province, into a very poor family. Nisan's mother soon died, and his father eked out the existence of a beggar at the local synagogue. The child was placed in the care of someone else's family. Since he showed a great desire to study, at the age of eight, the boy was sent to a Jewish charity school in Bialystok. Two years later, unable to continue his studies at school, Nisan entered a bakery as an apprentice. When the first anarchists appeared in Bialystok, Nisan was carried away by their ideas.
During the food riot in the Bialystok bazaar, Nisan led a crowd of unemployed people. As one of the ringleaders, he was arrested and, according to the escort, deported to his native Porozov. But soon he illegally returned to Bialystok and began to carry out the expropriation of products, transporting them to political and criminal prisoners. When Nisan was handing over food to the prison, he was arrested, severely beaten at the police station, and expelled from the city. But Nisan returned. Six times he was caught in the transfer of parcels and sent to Porozov, and six times he returned to Bialystok again.
However, after the assassination attempt on Kogan, Farber did not live long. On October 6, 1904, Farber, disguised as a visitor, entered the first police station in Bialystok. He expected to meet here the entire camarilla of the highest police ranks headed by the Chief of Police. But there were no senior officers, and delay could be costly. A movement of the hand - and there was a deafening explosion. When the smoke cleared, the mutilated bodies of the wounded and dead were strewn on the floor. A police overseer, two policemen, a police secretary were wounded by shrapnel "Macedonians", and two visitors who happened to be in the office of the police department were killed.
The assassination attempt on Kogan and the explosion in the police station opened up a long-term epic of bloody terrorist acts, the victims of which were not always people who were in any way involved in the real exploitation of workers or police repressions against revolutionary organizations. Very often, casual passers-by, junior police officers, and janitors who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time perished. The most radical part of the anarchists even developed the concept of "unmotivated terror", according to which any more or less wealthy person was a priori guilty of being richer than starving lumpen proletarians and therefore worthy of death.
On January 10, 1905, Benjamin Friedman threw a bomb into the Bialystok synagogue, where a meeting of the Agudas Ahim union of merchants and industrialists was taking place. In April 1905, Aaron Yelin (Gelinker), who had gone over to the anarchists from the social revolutionaries, killed a janitor, a well-known police informer.
In the same period, the ideas of the notorious Black Banner group began to spread in Bialystok. This faction in the pre-revolutionary anarchist movement took more radical positions than the followers of Pyotr Kropotkin, and called for immediate terror against the state and capitalists.
Despite the fact that the magazine "Black Flag", expressing the point of view of the direction, came out in only one issue, in December 1905 in Geneva, the ideas of direct action promoted by it turned out to be consonant with the sentiments of many anarchists, especially Belarusian, Lithuanian and Ukrainian. It is not surprising that the leading ideologist of the "Black Banner" was an active member of the Bialystok international group of anarchist communists "Struggle" Judas Grossman, who wrote under the pseudonym Roshchin.
Shortly after the events of January 9, 1905 in St. Petersburg, the Bialystok committee of the Social Democratic Party "Bund" declared a general political strike. A little later, the second general strike was announced by the committees of the Socialist Revolutionary Party and the Polish Socialist Party. Although the anarchists did not actively participate in strikes due to their rejection of the political activities of parties, they diligently agitated the workers in an effort to radicalize them.
In the end, the workers made economic demands. Businessmen in Bialystok went to their satisfaction - in factories and plants the working day was reduced from 10 to 9 hours, in workshops - to 8 hours, and wages were increased by 25-50%. But meeting the demands of the workers only made them believe in the success of radical actions. The situation was heating up. To pacify the workers, the bourgeoisie summoned the Cossacks. The latter, of course, were not always correct with the inhabitants of Bialystok and, ultimately, the city began to organize itself to resist the sent Cossack units. The first were cabmen, among whom anarchist ideas had long enjoyed popularity - they created an armed detachment. Following the cabs, an armed detachment appeared at the very group of anarchist-communists "Struggle".
The direct action tactics promoted by the anarchists became increasingly popular among the rank-and-file members of the Bund and the Party of Socialist-Revolutionaries. Hiding their actions from the party leadership, the Socialist-Revolutionaries and Bundists attacked the manufacturer Weinreich in the Bialystok synagogue, who was one of the initiators of the call of the Cossacks to the city. In May 1905, the entire so-called “Struggle” joined the Bialystok group of communist anarchists "Struggle". "Agitational gathering" of the local committee of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party.
By May 1905, the strength of the "Struggle" group, which until quite recently did not exceed twelve comrades, had grown to almost seventy people. To facilitate the work of the group and the coordination of the actions of its members, it was decided to divide the "Struggle" into five "federations", which were formed according to two fundamental principles - either according to working conditions, or on the basis of comradely sympathies and personal affections. The "Socialist Revolutionary Federation" brought together immigrants from the Party of Socialist-Revolutionaries who switched to anarchist positions. The "Polish Federation" was guided by propaganda among the Polish workers - the most isolated part of the Bialystok proletariat, among which, due to linguistic differences (Poles did not speak Yiddish, and Jews - Polish), the anarchists had practically no work before.
- Bialystok anarchists
Three "federations" were responsible for the activities of the entire group - technical, armed and literary. The technical "federation" was in charge of printing only. The armed one provided the Bialystok anarchists with weapons, primarily with bombs. The literary "federation", on the other hand, played the role of an intellectual center, supplying the group with literature brought from abroad and handing over manuscripts of appeals and leaflets to the printing house. The anarchists' positions in Bialystok were strengthened by the creation of their own illegal printing house "Anarchy", which printed brochures and leaflets. For the needs of the printing house, 200 rubles were collected at a general meeting of the anarchists. But the decisive importance for its creation was the expropriation in one of the private printing houses in Bialystok, during which the anarchists managed to seize more than 20 poods of typographic type. Boris Engelson was in charge of the Anarchia printing house.
In 1905, both in the city itself and on its outskirts, there were a number of strikes by workers in the textile and leather industries. One of these strikes took place in the town of Khorosch near Bialystok. Here, on the Moes estate, more than seven thousand people worked in a cloth factory and in agricultural work. When the strike began, both cloth makers and agricultural workers took part in it. First of all, the strikers seized the barns and cellars of the estate. Moes fled abroad. The workers waited for his return for several days, and then, seeing that Moes, fearing reprisals, would not return, decided to occupy the workshops. When Moes was informed of what was happening by telegraph, he hastened to immediately make concessions. In addition to this performance, in the spring and summer of 1905 there were several strikes of shoemakers, tailors, tanners, bakers, painters and carpenters. The demonstration of bristle workers in the town of Trostyan in June 1905 was quite large.
The activation of anarchists in Bialystok and its suburbs caused a negative reaction among competing socialist parties - Socialist-Revolutionaries, Bundists, Polish socialists. Back in 1904, the Bund organ Proletary, No. 28, noted: “The anarchists have become a threat to the local owners. It was enough to mention that the strike was led by a "group" - the owner either satisfied the demands or left the city. The prestige of the anarchist kulak also rose in the eyes of the working masses. It was said that in terms of conducting strikes, the palm belongs to the groupists, that thanks to the use of vigorous measures on the part of the latter, any strike ends in success."
In 1905, the Bund Social Democrats pulled together to fight the anarchists all their ideologically literate forces - according to some estimates, about 40 theoretically trained agitators. Surazhskaya Street, popularly referred to as the "stock exchange", has become a place of fierce discussions between anarchists and social democrats. They discussed in pairs, 200-300 listeners gathered around each pair of arguing. Gradually, the anarchists in Bialystok became the masters of the situation on the left political flank, pushing into the background all the local committees of the socialist parties. All workers' demonstrations in the city and surrounding townships were carried out with the assistance of the anarchists.
The Strigi Communards and the Bialystok Uprising
The shooting of the demonstration on January 9, 1905 in St. Petersburg, which sparked a revolutionary protest throughout the Russian Empire, was followed by the suppression of the uprising of workers in textile enterprises in the Polish city of Lodz. It was suppressed by units of the regular Russian army, which led to considerable casualties and caused the indignation of the revolutionary-minded part of the population of the western provinces of the Russian Empire.
Of course, Bialystok, located relatively close and also the center of the textile industry, took the Lodz uprising most sharply. Under his impression, a group of “communards” arose among the Bialystok Chernoznamens, whose informal leader and ideologist was Vladimir Striga (Lapidus). The idea of a "temporary commune" put forward by Striga was to raise an uprising in a particular city or village like the Paris Commune of 1871 or Lodz in 1905, destroy power, expropriate property and hold out under the blows of government troops at least some time before they it will be possible to suppress the uprising. The communards understood that such a revolution in one single city would certainly be doomed to defeat, but they believed that it would be an example to follow for workers in other cities and towns and ultimately lead to a general revolutionary strike.
Striga began to hatch plans for an armed uprising in Bialystok, intending to turn this city with the most powerful anarchist movement in the country into the "second Paris commune". For this, it was necessary to capture the city, arm the people, and push the government troops out of the city. Simultaneously with this, a continuous and expanding process of the seizure and expropriation of factories, factories, workshops and shops had to go on. The picture of Bialystok, freed, at least for a short time, from the tsarist power, seduced many members of the anarchist group. The Bialystok anarchists began to seriously prepare for an uprising. First of all, for the uprising it was necessary to acquire a significant amount of weapons. One of the "federations" of the group tried to carry out a major expropriation, but due to the fact that everything was done in a hurry, the operation failed.
Meanwhile, the workers, not waiting for someone to give a battle cry, stopped work themselves. More than 15-20 thousand people went to rallies, at which anarchist orators called for an armed uprising. After three days, the strike ended. The workers dispersed to factories and workshops, but failure did not break the willingness of the anarchists for further action. On Surazhskaya Street, the confrontation between the police and workers who gathered at the "stock exchange" continued. Every now and then, policemen appeared on the workers' stock exchange, trying to arrest someone. In such cases, the anarchists avoided open confrontation. Using dozens of walk-through yards that looked out into the intricate work lanes, the activist pursued by the police was hidden, and they themselves dispersed. The police were left alone in the street, and no one showed up for more than a quarter of an hour. And twenty-five or thirty minutes later the street was again flooded with people, hundreds of heaps formed, continuing the interrupted discussions.
In the end, the police authorities decided to resort to extreme methods. Several infantry companies were deployed in the lanes bordering Surazhskaya Street. When the majority of people gathered at the "stock exchange", soldiers suddenly appeared and opened fire on those gathered. Ten people were killed and several more were injured. This happened at about 10 pm, and the next morning a general strike had already begun in the city. That is, the plan of the chief of police not only did not contribute to the pacification of the city, but, on the contrary, caused massive unrest in it. At this time, the "stock exchange" on Surazhskaya Street was at its peak. Up to 5 thousand people gathered here every evening, anarchist propaganda literature was dispersed right in front of the police.
- market in Bialystok
On July 31, 1905, the police and soldiers appeared on Surazhskaya Street before ten o'clock in the morning. The workers gathered slowly and by one o'clock in the afternoon there were no more than a thousand people on the "stock exchange". The soldiers, on the orders of the officers, began to disperse the workers. They did not disperse. One of the soldiers approached Worker Shuster and ordered him to leave. "What will happen if I don't leave?" - asked Schuster. “If you don’t leave, I’ll shoot you,” the soldier replied. Schuster took the soldier's words for a joke and, smiling, said "Shoot." The soldier stepped back a few steps and shot Schuster down on the spot with a shot in the chest. Then a few more shots rang out. The wounded lay on the sidewalks. The street was empty, but within ten minutes crowds of indignant workers poured onto it. Sensing trouble, the anarchists walked down the street, begging the workers to disperse and not endanger themselves. Meanwhile, one of the anarchists went to get the bomb. He hoped that while he returned with her, the street would be empty and he could undermine the police. But the calculation turned out to be wrong.
"They are asking to leave the stock exchange, there must be a bomb" - the workers were talking and no one wanted to leave, wanting to look at the explosion. The returned anarchist saw that on both sidewalks there were dense crowds of workers, almost in close contact with the soldiers. But that did not stop him from throwing the bomb. There was an explosion. When the smoke cleared, an officer, four soldiers, and the bomber itself were writhing on the ground, wounded by shrapnel. The explosion killed a woman propagandist from the Bund who was standing in the crowd. The panic began. In half an hour, shooting was already going on throughout the city.
In the morning of the next day, all the workers in Bialystok and nearby townships gave up their work. A general strike began, which lasted until the end of the funeral. In the courtyard of the Jewish hospital, about 15 thousand people gathered for the rally. Two days after the funeral of the dead workers, the activities of the "stock exchange" on Surazhskaya Street resumed. The city gradually entered the usual rhythm of life, and the workers' anarchist movement was recovering from the blow. Already two weeks later, a new clash occurred.
This time, the reason was that the owner of the steel plant, Mr. Vechorek, demanded that his workers sign a promise that they would not hold any strikes for a year. Of the 800 workers at the plant, 180 refused to sign the statement. For this, the unreliable workers were fired, and the apartment and the factory Vechorek surrounded by soldiers. But safety measures did not save the breeder. On the evening of August 26, anarchists - Poles Anton Nyzborsky, nicknamed "Antek" and Jan Gainsky, nicknamed "Mitka", entered Vechorek's apartment and threw two bombs at its inhabitants. Martial law was declared in Bialystok. On September 20, 1905, the Anarchy publishing group was crushed, and its organizer Boris Engelson was arrested (however, despite this failure, the anarchists soon expropriated eighteen pounds of type in one of the private printing houses).
Economic terror
Under the prevailing conditions, within the Bialystok group of anarchists, discussions began on the question of the forms of activity. The entire old nucleus of the group, which sympathized with the Black Banners, tended to strengthen the fighting component as the only means to radicalize the class struggle and prevent it from dying out. However, several comrades who came from abroad, who belonged to the bread-food trend, spoke in favor of legalizing the group's activities. There was a split.
The advocates of legalization adopted the name of the group "Anarchy", published an article from "Bread and Freedom" "Anarchism and Political Struggle", and then ceased their activities. The radical wing of the Bialystok anarchists officially proclaimed themselves the Black Banners and reorganized the group, transforming the circles into professional federations on a guild basis. It was assumed that these federations, rooted in the environment of one profession or another, would take the initiative in the strike action.
In May 1906, a general strike began in Bialystok. The first to strike were the Nityari - about 300 people. But due to the peculiarities of production, the simple-to-work thread made other workers in the textile industry idle - only a few thousand people. During the dismissal from work in one of the factories, there was a clash with the police. The Bialystok entrepreneurs have finally decided to dot the i's. "We have to decide who is the boss in the city - we or the anarchists?" - approximately the same question was put on the agenda during a meeting of large businessmen of the city. The manufacturers united in the Snndikat refused to fulfill the demands of the strikers. By not paying the workers wages, the factory owners were sure that hunger would force the workers to return to their factories and continue working. The manufacturers Freundkin and Gendler proposed to the capitalist syndicate to declare a lockout, dismissing all workers in order to force them to abandon the strike. The lockout idea was supported by the owners of many factories.
One after another, bombs flew into the houses of the manufacturers Gendler and Richert, which caused significant destruction in the mansions, but did not injure anyone. Then the anarchist Joseph Myslinsky threw a bomb into the house of the initiator of the lockout, Freindkin. The manufacturer received a severe concussion. Another bomb exploded in the apartment of the factory director, Komihau, and injured his wife.
The summer of 1906 was marked in Bialystok by numerous terrorist acts by anarchists. In many respects, it was the tendency of the "Chernoznamens" to armed clashes and terrorist acts that caused the actual "fading" of the Bialystok anarchist movement by 1907. During the terrorist acts and shootings with the police, the entire "bloom" of Bialystok anarchists perished. So, on May 9, 1906, Aron Yelin was killed in a shootout with the police, and Benjamin Bakhrakh was also shot in a shootout with the police. In December 1906, in the Warsaw citadel, they hanged anarchists transported from Bialystok - militants Iosif Myslinsky, Celek and Saveliy Sudobiger (Tsalka Portnoy).
Slonim escape
However, by no means in all cases the score in the confrontation between the law enforcement system and the anarchists was 1: 0 in favor of the authorities. Sometimes, even when arrested, the anarchists were dangerous - at least this is clearly evidenced by the event that went down in history as the "Slonim escape".
On March 16, 1906, anarchists were arrested in Bialystok, under whom they found stuffed bombs and propaganda literature in Russian and Yiddish. The bombs were fuses, and the anarchists had no matches to light the fuse. Therefore, they were unable to provide armed resistance and were able to detain them. At first, the detained anarchists were held in the Bialystok gendarme office, and interrogated there. The investigators faced three active workers - militants of the Bialystok group - clerk Abram Rivkin, baker Mikhail Kaplansky and tailor Gersh Zilber ("London"). They were charged with belonging to an anarchist communist organization and with possession of explosive shells and literature.
For the trial, which began on November 29, 1906, the anarchists were convoyed to the small town of Slonim. The authorities expected that in Slonim, where there was no strong anarchist group, the prisoners would not be able to escape. Anarchists received fifteen years in hard labor. But Zilber and Kaplansky, as minors, were reduced to ten years in prison, and Abram Rivkin was charged with another charge in the Yekaterinoslav District Military Court.
Almost simultaneously with Zilber, Kaplansky and Rivkin, another Belostochanin was tried in Slonim. Benjamin Friedman, a fifteen-year-old boy, was known in the anarchist group as "Little German." On January 10, 1905, he detonated a bomb in the synagogue of the Bialystok suburb of Krynka. Little German also refused to testify and was sentenced to twenty years in hard labor, but given the age of the defendant, the court reduced the sentence to eight years.
The Socialist-Revolutionary maximalist Jan Zhmuidik (pseudonym - Felix Bentkovsky) was tried separately. A native of a peasant family in the Slonim district, he was engaged in the propaganda of agrarian terror among the peasants of the surrounding villages, for which he was given an eternal settlement in Siberia. All three trials ended in the Slonim Court of Justice on December 1, 1906. And on December 6, the anarchists and maximalist Zhmuidik, sentenced to hard labor, were sent under escort to Grodno, to the provincial prison. The arrested socialist-Zionist Hirsch Graevsky was also transported with them. They were taken in the prison carriage of the Slonim-Grodno train.
The soldiers escorting the anarchists were not particularly vigilant: the convicts managed to hide the Browning in bread (!). Improving the moment when the train, having passed four miles, walked through the forest near the station "Ozertsy", the comrades attacked the guards. All the anarchists fired at the same time and accurately - four soldiers were killed at once, the fifth tried to fire a rifle, but was also shot. The three anarchists left by opening the window. The other three people passed through the doors, killing two more guards. For a week the fugitives hid in Slonim, waiting for the fuss associated with their escape to subside, then moved to Minsk. The backbone of the Minsk group of communist anarchists "Black Banner" was made up of Gersh Zilber, Benjamin Friedman and Jan Zhmuidik.
During a short period of activity in Minsk, the Bialystok anarchists were noted for several notable assassination attempts and terrorist acts. Gersh Zilber killed the chief of artillery Beloventsev, while Spindler periodically visited Bialystok, where each visit left the corpse of a policeman or spy. Understanding perfectly well what awaits them for the murder of seven guards, the Slonim fugitives behaved appropriately on death row. On January 11, 1907, they killed the senior prison warden Kokhanovsky, while the police followed Fridman's trail, and the anarchist, fearing to be captured, committed suicide. Gersh Zilber died in the explosion of a bomb that he threw into the banking office of Broyde-Rubinstein.
- Minsk group of communist anarchists "Black Banner"
On March 30, 1907, the police went on the trail of the anarchists in Minsk. The bomb laboratory belonging to the "Anarchy" and "Black Banner" groups operating in the city was covered. When it was taken, Jan Zhmuydik put up armed resistance, shooting a policeman and wounding another policeman and an assistant bailiff. With the last bullet Zhmuidik, according to the anarchist tradition, wanted to commit suicide, but they managed to capture him. In August 1907, he was shot in Vilna by a court sentence for the crimes he had committed.
Ultimately, the Russian authorities managed to significantly weaken the anarchist and generally revolutionary movement on the western outskirts of the empire. The deaths and arrests of the most prominent activists entailed a natural weakening of the movement, on the other hand, the liberalization of the empire's political course after the adoption of the 1905 Manifesto, which granted political freedoms, also affected. Ultimately, by 1907-1908. the anarchist movement in the Bialystok region lost its former positions. The First World War became the final point in the history of Bialystok anarchism, and during the Civil War, the former capital of the Russian "Black Banners" did not show itself in this respect, did not give new and equally decisive opponents of the state system.
