As for the Jews themselves, they were at no time deceived about the effects that were likely to attend the work of the High Commission.  They clearly understood that, if the Government had been genuinely desirous of “revising” the system of Jewish disabilities, it would have stopped, for a time at least, to manufacture new legislative whips and scorpions.  The dark polar night of Russian reaction reigned supreme.  There seemed to be no end to these orgies of the Russian night owls, the Pobyedonostzevs and Tolstois, who were anxious to resuscitate the savagery of ancient Muscovy, and who kept the people in the grip of ignorance, drunkenness, and political barbarism.  Every one in Russia kept his peace and held his breath.  The progressive elements of the Empire were held down tightly by the lid of reaction.  The press groaned under the yoke of a ferocious censorship.  The mystic doctrine of non-resistance preached by Leo Tolstoi was attuned to the mood prevailing among educated Russians, for, in the words of the Russian poet, “their hearts, subdued by storms, were filled with silence and lassitude.”

In Jewish life, too, silence reigned supreme.  The sharp pangs of the first pogrom year were now dulled, and only suppressed moans echoed the uninterrupted “silent pogrom” of oppression.  These were years of which the Jewish poet, Simon Frug, could sing: 

        Round about all is silent and cheerless,
        Like a lonesome and desert-like plain. 
        If but one were courageous and fearless
        And would cry out aloud in his pain! 
        Neither storm-wind nor starshine by night,
        And the days neither cloudy nor bright: 
        O my people, how sad is thy state,
        How gray and how cheerless thy fate!

But in this silence the national idea was slowly maturing and gaining in depth and in strength.  The time had not yet arrived for clearly marked tendencies or well-defined systems of thought.  But the temper of the intellectual classes of Russian Jewry was a clear indication that they were at the cross-roads.  The “titled” inteligenzia, reared in the Russian schools, who had drifted away from Judaism, was now joined by that other intelligenzia, the product of heder and yeshibah, who had acquired European culture through the medium of neo-Hebraic literature, and was in closer contact with the masses of the Jewish people.

True, the Jewish periodical press in the Russian language, which had arisen towards the end of the seventies, had lost in quantity.  The Razvyet had ceased to appear in 1883, and the Russki Yevrey in 1884.  The only press organ to remain on the battlefield was the militant Voskhod, which was the center for the publicistic, scientific, and poetic endeavors of the advanced intellectuals of that period.  But the loss of the Russian branch of Jewish literature was made up by the growth of the Hebrew press.  The old Hebrew organs ha-Melitz