[Footnote 231:  The whole document is printed in the Appendix to “Stepniak’s” Underground Russia.]

It is difficult to say whether the Nihilists meant this document as an appeal, or whether the addition of the demand of a general amnesty was intended to anger the Czar and drive him into the arms of the reactionaries.  In either case, to press for the immediate pardon of his father’s murderers appeared to Alexander III. an unpardonable insult.  Thenceforth between him and the revolutionaries there could be no truce.  As a sop to quiet the more moderate reformers, he ordered the appointment of a Commission, including a few members of Zemstvos, and even one peasant, to inquire into the condition of public-houses and the excessive consumption of vodka.  Beyond this humdrum though useful question the imperial reformer did not deign to move.

After a short truce, the revolutionaries speedily renewed their efforts against the chief officials who were told off to crush them; but it soon became clear that they had lost the good-will of the middle class.  The Liberals looked on them, not merely as the murderers of the liberating Czar, but as the destroyers of the nascent constitution; and the masses looked on unmoved while five of the accomplices in the outrage of March 13 were slowly done to death.  In the next year twenty-two more suspects were arrested on the same count; ten were hanged and the rest exiled to Siberia.  Despite these inroads into the little band of desperadoes, the survivors compassed the murder of the Public Prosecutor as he sat in a cafe at Odessa (March 30, 1882).  On the other hand, the official police were helped for a time by zealous loyalists, who formed a “Holy Band” for secretly countermining the Nihilist organisation.  These amateur detectives, however, did little except appropriate large donations, arrest a few harmless travellers and no small number of the secret police force.  The professionals thereupon complained to the Czar, who suppressed the “Holy Band.”

The events of the years 1883 and 1884 showed that even the army, on which the Czar was bestowing every care, was permeated with Nihilism, women having by their arts won over many officers to the revolutionary cause.  Poland, also, writhing with discontent under the Czar’s stern despotism, was worked on with success by their emissaries; and the ardour of the Poles made the recruits especially dangerous to the authorities, ever fearful of another revolt in that unhappy land.  Finally, the Czar was fain to shut himself up in nearly complete seclusion in his palace at Gatchina, near St. Petersburg, or in his winter retreat at Livadia, on the southern shores of the Crimea.