new novel,
"The Scum of the Age," picturing the life of the modern Jewish youth who
were engulfed in the Russian revolutionary propaganda. But the hand
which knew how to portray the horrors of the old conscription was
powerless to reproduce, except in very crude outlines, the world of
political passions which was foreign to the author, and the novel
remained unfinished.

[Footnote 1: See on that period Vol. I, p. 144 et seq.]

The reaction of the eighties produced no change in Bogrov's attitude. He
breathed his last in a distant Russian village, and was buried in a
Russian cemetery, having embraced Christianity shortly before his death,
as a result of a sad concatenation of family circumstances.

Before the young generation which entered upon active life in the
eighties lay the broken tablets of Russian Jewish literature. New
tablets were needed, partly to restore the commandments of the preceding
period of enlightenment, partly to correct its mistakes.

CHAPTER XXI

THE ACCESSION OF ALEXANDER III. AND THE INAUGURATION OF POGROMS

1. THE TRIUMPH OF AUTOCRACY

On March 1, 1881, Alexander II. met his death on one of the principal
thoroughfares of St. Petersburg, smitten by dynamite bombs hurled at him
by a group of terrorists. The Tzar, who had freed the Russian peasantry
from personal slavery, paid with his life for refusing to free the
Russian people from political slavery and police tyranny. The red
terrorism of the revolutionaries was the counterpart of the white
terrorism of the Russian authorities, who for many years had suppressed
the faintest striving for liberty, and had sent to gaol and prison, or
deported to Siberia, the champions of a constitutional form of
government and the spokesmen of social reforms. Forced by the
persecutions of the police to hide beneath the surface, the
revolutionary societies of underground Russia found themselves compelled
to resort to methods of terrorism. This terrorism found its expression
during the last years of Alexander II. in various attempts on the life
of that ruler, and culminated in the catastrophe of March 1.

Among the members of these revolutionary societies were also some
representatives from among the young Jewish _intelligenzia._ They were
in large part college students, who had been carried away by the ideals
of their Russian comrades. But few of them were counted among the active
terrorists. The group which prepared the murder of the Tzar comprised