Note (return) — Chapter V

The extreme reactionaries, consisting mostly of nobles who had become impoverished by the emancipation of the serfs, grasped the opportunity to point out to the bewildered czar the evil of his liberal policy. Slavophilism was rampant. Men like Turgenief, Dostoyevsky, and Tolstoi, were condemned as "Westernists," or German sympathizers, the enemies of Russia. At the recommendation of Princess Helena Petrovna, the czar engaged as the teacher of his children a comparatively unknown professor of history, Pobyedonostsev, who later became the soul of Russian despotism. This man, meek as a dove and cunning as a serpent, easily ingratiated himself with the czar, and soon there began "a war upon ideas, a crusade of ignorance." "Karakazov's pistol-shot," as Turgenief says, "drove back into the shade the phantom of liberty, the appearance of which all Russia had hailed with acclamations. From that moment to the end of his life, the emperor devoted himself to the undoing of all he had accomplished. If he could have cancelled with one stroke the glorious ukase that had proclaimed the emancipation of the serfs, he would have been only too glad to disgrace himself."22