Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 1.pdf/218

192 found university professors willing to write lying pamphlets and lying books, to furnish historical and social arguments justifying the doings of the black hundred. In these compilations all who display any tincture of liberal sentiment, and in especial all freemasons, Jews, Englishmen, and revolutionaries, are not merely denounced, but are represented as the spawn of an antirussian inferno.

There exists documentary proof that the police and various other instruments of the government, including some of the high officials, did not merely neglect to suppress the pogroms, but positively furthered and organised these atrocities. It has been demonstrated that the League of the Russian People was privy to the murder of Herzenstein, to that of Jollos, etc. We read, for example, in the "Věče": "O Russians, save Russia while salvation is yet possible. The death of Herzenstein cannot atone for all the murders of our Russian men, whose blood still calls for vengeance"!!!

The League of the Russian People had various branches and brother organisations, among which may be mentioned the League of the Archangel Michael, led by the notorious deputy Puriškivič. This league sent the monarchical sections a description of students who had disturbed lectures at the mining institute, and did everything in its power to promote denunciations.

It was the deliberate aim of the League of the Russian People to bring about the salvation of the fatherland by the use of such means as have been indicated. With this end in view absolute monarchy, Orthodoxy, and the Russian national spirit were to be strengthened, thus reviving Uvarov's trinitarian doctrine. At the congress of all the afﬁliated organisations held in October 1909, among the demands voiced were the re-establishment of the patriarchate, the annexation to Russia of Finland and of the Chelm administrative district, the expulsion of the Jews (who were not even to be allowed to write Russian), and so on. In a word, the demand was a panrussian, "For God, Tsar, and Fatherland."

Shortly after the issue of the October manifesto, Nicholas II received a deputation from the League of the Russian People. The spokesman, the notorious President Dubrovin, begged the tsar not to relinquish his autocracy. In response Nicholas pledged himself in words borrowed from Katkov, saying: "I shall continue to reign as autocrat, and to no one but God