n offered in
the course of thirty years, marched to save "the honor of Russia," in
truth, to save the old regime. Squadron upon squadron issued from the
inner recesses of Russia, and marched towards the battlefields of the
South, marched to the slaughter, into the mouths of the cannons of the
English and French, who knew how to conquer without penal conscriptions
and without inflicting tortures upon tender-aged cantonists. The
"gendarme of Europe," who, armed to his teeth, had contemptuously
threatened to "finish the enemy with his soldier caps," could not hold
out against the army of the "rotten West." Hundreds of thousands of
Russian soldiers fell beneath the walls of Sevastopol, upon the heights
of Inkerman. Thousands of Jewish soldiers were laid among them in
"brotherly graves." The Jews, enslaved by pre-reformatory Russia, died
for a fatherland which treated them as pariahs, which had bestowed upon
them a monstrous conscription, the unexampled institutions of
cantonists, penal recruits, and "captives." However, it soon became
clear that those who had fallen under the walls of Sevastopol had sealed
by their death not the honor but the dishonor of the old regime of blood
and iron. Beneath the rotting corpse of an obsolete statecraft, built
upon serfdom and maintained by soldiery and police, the germ of a new
and better Russia began to stir.

4. THE RITUAL MURDER TRIAL OF SARATOV

One more detail was lacking to complete the dismal picture and to bring
out the full symmetry between the end of Nicholas' reign and its ominous
beginning: a medieval ritual murder trial after the pattern of the
Velizh case. And a trial of this nature did not fail to come. In
December, 1852, and in January, 1853, two Russian boys from among the
lower classes disappeared in the city of Saratov, in central Russia.
Their bodies were found two or three months later in the Volga, covered
with wounds and bearing the traces of circumcision. The latter
circumstance led the coroners to believe that the crime had been
perpetrated by Jews. Saratov, a city situated outside the Pale of
Settlement, harbored at that time a small Jewish settlement consisting
of some forty soldiers of the local garrison and several civilian Jewish
tradesmen and artisans who lived in the prohibited Volga town by the
grace of the police. There were also a few converts.

The vigilant eyes of the coroners were riveted on this settlement. An
official by the name of Durnovo,