le, an important political personage, and did much
to awaken and keep up the reform enthusiasm.

* As an illustration of this, the following anecdote is
told: One number of the Kolokol contained a violent attack
on an important personage of the court, and the accused, or
some one of his friends, considered it advisable to have a
copy specially printed for the Emperor without the
objectionable article. The Emperor did not at first
discover the trick, but shortly afterwards he received from
London a polite note containing the article which had been
omitted, and informing him how he had been deceived.

But where were the Conservatives all this time? How came it that for two
or three years no voice was raised and no protest made even against
the rhetorical exaggerations of the new-born liberalism? Where were the
representatives of the old regime, who had been so thoroughly imbued
with the spirit of Nicholas? Where were those ministers who had
systematically extinguished the least indication of private initiative,
those "satraps" who had stamped out the least symptom of insubordination
or discontent, those Press censors who had diligently suppressed
the mildest expression of liberal opinion, those thousands of
well-intentioned proprietors who had regarded as dangerous free-thinkers
and treasonable republicans all who ventured to express dissatisfaction
with the existing state of things? A short time before, the
Conservatives composed at least nine-tenths of the upper classes, and
now they had suddenly and mysteriously disappeared.

It is scarcely necessary to say that in a country accustomed to
political life, such a sudden, unopposed revolution in public opinion
could not possibly take place. The key to the mystery lies in the
fact that for centuries Russia had known nothing of political life or
political parties. Those who were sometimes called Conservatives were
in reality not at all Conservatives in our sense of the term. If we say
that they had a certain amount of conservatism, we must add that it
was of the latent, passive, unreasoned kind--the fruit of indolence and
apathy. Their political creed had but one article: Thou shalt love the
Tsar with all thy might, and carefully abstain from all resistance
to his will--especially when it happens that the Tsar is a man of the
Nicholas type. So long as Nicholas lived they had passively acquiesced
in his system--active acquiesc