The cringing and reactionary papers would not, and the liberal papers could not, report the exploits of the Russian Government in their war against the Jews.

The liberal press was ordered by the Russian censor to refrain altogether from touching on the Jewish question.

The only Russian-Jewish press organ which, defying the threats of the censor, had dared to fight against official Russian Judaeophobia, the _Voskhod_, had been suppressed already in March, before the promulgation of the Moscow expulsion edict, "for the extremely detrimental course pursued by it." A similar fate overtook the _Novosti_ of St.Petersburg which had printed a couple of sympathetic articles on the Jews.
In this way the Government managed to gag the independent press on the eve of its surprise attack upon Moscow Jewry, so that everything could be carried out noiselessly, under the veil of a state secret.
Fortunately, the foreign press managed to unveil the mystery.

The Government of the United States, faced by a huge immigration tide from Russia, sent in June, 1891, two commissioners, Weber and Kempster, to that country.

They visited Moscow at the height of the expulsion fever, and, travelling through the principal centers of the Pale of Settlement, gathered carefully sifted documentary evidence of what was being perpetrated upon the Jews in the Empire of the Tzar.
While decimating the Jews, the Russian Government was at the same time anxious that their cries of distress should not penetrate beyond the Russian border.