When the Pahlen Commission was discharged, the Tzar having “attached himself to the opinion of the minority,” [1] the Government had no difficulty in finding a few kind-hearted officials who were eager to carry the project framed by this reactionary minority into effect.  The project itself, which had been elaborated in the Ministry of the Interior under the direction of Plehve, the sinister Chief of Police, was guarded with great secrecy, as if it concerned a plan of military operations against a belligerent Power.  But the secret leaked out very soon.  The Minister had sent out copies of the project to the governors-general, soliciting their opinions, and ere long copies of the project were circulating in London, Paris, and Vienna.  In the spring of 1890, Russia and Western Europe were filled with alarming rumors concerning an enactment of some “forty clauses,” which was designed to curtail the commercial activities of the Jews, to increase the rigor of the “Temporary Rules” within the Pale, and restrict the privileges conferred upon several categories of Jews outside of it, to establish medieval Jewish ghettos in St. Petersburg, Moscow, and Kiev, and similar measures.  The foreign press made a terrible outcry against these contemplated new acts of barbarism.

[Footnote 1:  See p. 370.]

The voice of protest was particularly strong in England.  The London Times assailed in violent terms the reactionary policies of Russia, and a special organ, called Darkest Russia, was published for this purpose by Russian political refugees in England.  The Russian Government denied these rumors through its diplomatic channels, though at the very same time the well-informed Novoye Vremya and Grazhdanin were not barred from printing news items concerning the projected disabilities or from recommending ferocious measures against the Jews for the purpose “of removing them from all branches of labor.”

This comedy was well understood abroad.  At the end of July and in the beginning of August interpellations were introduced in both Houses of the English Parliament, as to whether Her Majesty’s Government found it possible to make diplomatic representations in defence of the persecuted Russian Jews for whom England would have to provide, were they to arrive there in large masses.  Premier Salisbury, in the House of Lords, and Fergusson, the Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, in the House of Commons, replied that “these proceedings, which, if rightly reported to us, are deeply to be regretted, concern the internal affairs of the Russian Empire, and do not admit of any interference on the part of Her Majesty’s Government.” [1] When shortly afterwards preparations were set on foot for calling a protest meeting in London, the Russian Government hastened to announce through the British ambassador in St. Petersburg that no new measures against the Jews were in contemplation, and the meeting was called off.  Rumor had it that the Lord Mayor of London, Henry Isaacs, who was a Jew, did not approve of this meeting, over which, according to the English custom, he would have to preside.  The action of the Lord Mayor may have been “tactful,” but is was certainly not free from an admixture of timidity.