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MOSCOW, March 22, 1890. ... Yesterday a young lady told me that Professor Storozhenko had related to her the following anecdote. The Sovereign liked the Kreutzer Sonata. Pobyedonostsev, Lubimov, and the other cherubim and seraphim, hastened to justify their attitude to Tolstoy by showing his Majesty "Nikolay Palkin."
Nicholas Ignatiev, a rabid reactionary, a second Jeffreys, became chief of the Ministry of the Interior; Katkoff, a repentant liberal and exile, was appointed the czar's chief adviser, the Richelieu behind the throne; and Pobyedonostsev, whom Turgenief called the "Russian Torquemada," obtained supremacy over Melikoff, and was appointed procurator of the Holy Synod.
And again, as it had been during the reign of Alexander I after his acquaintance with Baroness Krüdener, 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.
They contributed forty-eight pupils to the gymnasia out of every ten thousand, while the Christians contributed only twenty-two. This was regarded an unpardonable sin. "These Jews have the audacity to excel us pure Russians," Pobyedonostsev is reported to have exclaimed, and measures were taken to suppress their dangerous tendency.
If Pobyedonostsev accomplished his fiendish design as regards emigration, more than a million Jews having left Russia within the last twenty years; if he has almost succeeded in causing them to die of starvation; yet his hope of forcing a third of them to conversion was a disappointment and a delusion.
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.
Remember that Katkov, Pobyedonostsev, Vishnegradsky, were nurselings of the Universities, that they were our Professors not military despots, but professors, luminaries.... I don't believe in our educated class, which is hypocritical, false, hysterical, badly educated and indolent. I don't believe in it even when it's suffering and complaining, for its oppressors come from its own entrails.
The police have made a raid upon Tchertkov, the well-known Tolstoyan, have carried off all that the Tolstoyans had collected relating to the Duhobors and sectarians and so all at once as though by magic all evidence against Pobyedonostsev and his angels has vanished.
Such a policy was inaugurated against the Jews as would, according to Pobyedonostsev, "force one-third of them to emigrate, another third to embrace Christianity, and the remainder to die of starvation."
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