The only one whose soul was deeply stirred by the sight of the new sufferings of an ancient people was the Russian satirist, Shchedrin-Saltykov, and he poured forth his, sentiments in the summer of 1882, after the completion of the first cycle of pogroms, in an article marked by a lyric strain, so different from his usual style. [1] But Shchedrin was the only Russian writer of prominence who responded to the Jewish sorrow.  Turgenyev and Tolstoi held their peace, whereas the literary celebrities of Western Europe, Victor Hugo, Renau, and many others, came forward with passionate protests.  The Russian intelligenzia remained cold in the face of the burning tortures of Jewry.  The educated classes of Russian Jewry were hurt to the quick by this chilly attitude, and their former enthusiasm gave way to disillusionment.

[Footnote 1:  The article appeared in the Otyechestvennyia Zapiski in August, 1882.  The following sentences in that article are worthy of re-production:  “History has never recorded in its pages a question more replete, with sadness, more foreign to the sentiments of humanity, and more filled with tortures than the Jewish question.  The history of mankind as a whole is one endless martyrology; yet at the same time it is also a record of endless progress.  In the records of martyrology the Hebrew tribe occupies the first place; in the annals of progress it stands aside, as if the luminous perspectives of history could never reach it.  There is no more heart-rending tale than the story of this endless torture of man by man.”

In the same article the Russian satirist draws a clever parallel between the merciless Russian Kulak, or “boss,” who ruins the peasantry, and the pitiful Jewish “exploiter,” the half-starved tradesman, who in turn is exploited by everyone.]

This disillusionment found its early expression in the lamentations of repentant assimilators.  One of these assimilators, writing in the first months of the pogroms, makes the following confession: 

The cultured Jewish classes have turned their back upon their history, have forgotten their traditions, and have conceived a contempt for everything which might make them realize that they are the members of the “eternal people.”  With no definite ideals, dragging their Judaism behind them as a fugitive galley-slave drags his heavy chain, how could these men justify their belonging to the tribe of “Christ-killers” and “exploiters"?...  Truly pitiful has become the position of these assimilators, who but yesterday were the champions of national self-effacement.  Life demands self-determination.  To sit between two stools has now become an impossibility.  The logic of events has placed them before the alternative:  either to declare themselves openly as renegades, or to take their proper share in the sufferings of their people.

Another representative of the Jewish intelligenzia writes in the following strain to the editor of a Russian-Jewish periodical: