taken by Nicholas I against the Dekabrists (1825) proved of no avail.  Nor did the reforms of Alexander II help to heal the breach.  On the contrary, seeing that the constitution they expected from the Liberator Czar was not forthcoming, and the democracy they hoped for was far from being realized, they became desperate, and determined to demand their rights by force.  The peasants, too, sobering up from the intoxication, the figurative as well as the literal, caused by the vodka drunk in honor of their newly-acquired volyushka (sweet liberty), discovered that the emancipation ukase of the czar had been craftily intercepted by the bureaucrats, and their dream of owning the land they had hitherto cultivated as serfs would never come true.  Russia was rife with discontent, and disaffection assumed a national range.  The cry was raised for a “new freedom.”  A certain Anton Petrov impersonated the czar, and gathered around him ten thousand Russians.  Pamphlets entitled Land and Liberty (Zemlya i Volya) were spread broadcast among the masses, the mind of the populace was inflamed, and attempts on the life of the czar ensued.

The extreme reactionaries, consisting mostly of nobles who had become impoverished by the emancipation of the serfs, grasped the opportunity to point out to the bewildered czar the evil of his liberal policy.  Slavophilism was rampant.  Men like Turgenief, Dostoyevsky, and Tolstoi, were condemned as “Westernists,” or German sympathizers, the enemies of Russia.  At the recommendation of Princess Helena Petrovna, the czar engaged as the teacher of his children a comparatively unknown professor of history, Pobyedonostsev, who later became the soul of Russian despotism.  This man, meek as a dove and cunning as a serpent, easily ingratiated himself with the czar, and soon there began “a war upon ideas, a crusade of ignorance.”  “Karakazov’s pistol-shot,” as Turgenief says, “drove back into the shade the phantom of liberty, the appearance of which all Russia had hailed with acclamations.  From that moment to the end of his life, the emperor devoted himself to the undoing of all he had accomplished.  If he could have cancelled with one stroke the glorious ukase that had proclaimed the emancipation of the serfs, he would have been only too glad to disgrace himself."[22]

And again, as it had been during the reign of Alexander I after his acquaintance with Baroness Kruedener, so it was with the reign of Alexander II after his acquaintance with Pobyedonostsev.  The status of the Jews constituted the first indication of the ill-boding change.  How little the officials had been in sympathy with the reformatory efforts of their czar, even when the atmosphere had been filled with peace and good-will to all including the Jews, is shown by the fact that when, in 1863, through the efforts of Doctor Schwabacher, the Jewish community of Odessa applied for a charter to build a Home for Aged Hebrews, the charter, though granted by the higher authorities,