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Yet what I have done is only at direct orders from Helsingfors orders that are stern, pitiless and unjust. Men have been torn from their families and sent to the mines, women have been arrested for no offense and shipped off to Saghalien, and mere children have been cast into prison on charges of political conspiracy with their elders in order to Russify the province!
I gasped. "Certainly. Did you not know?" she said, dropping into French. "It is four years now that he has held supreme power to crush and Russify these poor Finns. Ah, m'sieur! this country, once so prosperous, is a blot upon the face of Europe. His methods are the worst and most unscrupulous of any employed by Russia.
Nothing can excuse the treatment of the Jews in Russia during the last thirty-five years, and the guilt lies almost entirely upon the Government, which, instead of leading the people and educating them by initiating an enlightened policy towards the Jews, a policy which might in fact have done more than anything else to "Russify" the latter, has persistently aided and abetted the worst elements of the population in their acts of violence.
The one side was anxious to Russify, the other was equally anxious to be Russified, and the natural result was an entente cordiale between the new Jewish intelligenzia and the Government.
For in 1864, after quelling the Polish insurrection, the Government undertook to Russify the Western region, and both Poles and Jews were strictly barred from acquiring estates in the nine governments forming the jurisdiction of the governors-general of Vilna and Kiev.
The laws which seemed favorable to the Jews, and apparently aimed at promoting culture among them, went hand in hand with laws of the most rigorous character. It is true that the Jews were not the only unfortunates whom the fanatic autocrat wished to Russify, that is, compel to see the pure light of Greek Orthodoxy. But they, of course, suffered the most.
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