It has often been argued, or simply stated, that the pogroms were organized by the Tsarist government. But conclusive evidence of this has never been produced. True, many local police officers responded slowly, some even supported the pogromists or directed them, the army was slow to appear, in many places incompetence and a reluctance to resort to drastic measures could be observed and all this let things get out of hand. One has, however, to give the authorities their due: in other places pogroms were ruthlessly suppressed, the police killed pogromists by using fire-arms against them even in the first wave of pogroms , and there was a complaint by at least one liberal journalist with impeccable credentials against what he saw as an overly ruthless suppression of anti-Jewish violence . Not only is any direct evidence of the government's supposed complicity in organizing the pogroms not to come by, but the circumstantial evidence also does not prove a conspiracy to organise a wave of pogroms, with the government privy to it. Had there been such a conspiracy, it would be difficult to explain why in many places the police had taken precautions and prevented pogroms, or why, if violence started, they acted swiftly and were able to avoid the worst. It does not agree with a conspiracy theory either that pogroms did not occur over the Pale of Settlement, but rather in the south and south-west. Beyond this, Russia's police were pitifully undermanned, undertrained, underpayed and ill-equipped, singularly unsuited to deal with outbreaks of mass violence on the scale of the pogroms. Morale was low and had only recently been dealt another blow by the assassination of the emperor....
The government was taken by surprise and at first was deeply afraid that the pogroms could be the work of the revolutionaries and as such only the beginning of a much more frightening attack on order and property. After all, the pogroms happened not too long after the murder of the "Tsar-Liberator" by a terrorist group whose strength was imagined to be almost unlimited, a belief which was grotesquely out of touch with the reality. Still, their involvement was not to be dismissed easily . In its internal communications the government did not betray any sign of foreknowledge of the pogroms; nor did Alexander III himself. Rather, he showed himself anguished and angered. The Tsar ordered a careful investigation - particularly into a possible involvement of the revolutionaries . It should also be remembered that the Minister of Interior was not the rather anti-Semitic and demagogic Ignat'ev when the first wave broke, but the liberal and level-headed Loris-Melikov whose purpose was to win moderate public opinion back for the regime. It was not in his interest to unleash the forces of the chern, the rabble.