delineated in his novel "Ivan Vyzhigin" (1829) the type of a
Lithuanian Jew by the name of Movsha (Moses), who appears as the
embodiment of all mortal sins. The product of an untalented and tainted
pen, Bulgarin's novel was soon forgotten. Yet it contributed its share
toward instilling Jew-hatred into the minds of the Russian people.

CHAPTER XVII

THE LAST YEARS OF NICHOLAS I.

1. THE "ASSORTMENT" OF THE JEWS

The beginning of the "Second Emancipation" of 1848 in Western Europe
synchronized with the last phase of the era of oppression in Russia.
That phase, representing the concluding seven years of pre-reformatory
Russia, was a dark patch in the life of the country at large, doubly
dark in the life of the Jews. The power of absolutism, banished by the
March revolution from the European West, asserted itself with
intensified fury in the land of the North, which had about that time
earned the unenviable reputation of the "gendarme of Europe." Thrown
back on its last stronghold, absolutism concentrated its energy upon the
suppression of all kinds of revolutionary movements. In default of such
a movement in Russia itself, this energy broke through the frontier line
and found an outlet in the punitive expedition sent to support the
Austrians in the pacification of mutinous Hungary. The triumphant
passwords of political freedom which were given out on the other side of
the Western frontier only intensified the reactionary rage on this side.
Since it was impossible to punish action--for under the vigilant eye of
the terrible "Third Section" [1] revolutionary endeavors were a matter
of impossibility--word and thought were subject to punishment.
Censorship ran riot in the subdued literature of Russia, tearing out by
the roots anything that did not fit into the mould of the bureaucratic
way of thinking. The quiet precincts of the Russian _intelligenzia_,
who, in the retirement of their homes, ventured to dream of a better
political and social order, were invaded by political detectives who
snatched thence numerous victims for the scaffold, the galleys, and
conscription. Such were the contrivances employed during the last years
of pre-reformatory Russia to hold together the old order of things in
the land of officialdom and serfdom, in that Russia which the poet
Khomyakov, though patriot and Slavophile, branded thus:

[Footnote 1: Compare above, p. 21, n. 1.]

Blackened in court with falsehood's blackness,