Expulsion of Jews from the town, ordered by Nicolas Iᵉʳ

Kiev was no ordinary city in the Pale of Settlement: it was the holy city of the Rus', and Christian merchants claimed it was threatened by Jewish competition. The ukase of Nicholas I ordered the expulsion of the community and closed the city to Jewish residence, giving families a two-year period to liquidate their assets and leave. The prohibition was applied with exceptions — trade fairs, first-guild merchants, licensed artisans — so that a Jewish population persisted in Kiev without the right to remain there, housed in two suburbs and subject to nightly police raids. It was this situation — a forbidden city and yet an inhabited one — that prepared the ground for the pogroms of the end of the century.