The Fortnightly Review: No. CCCCLXIII, New Series [‎642r] (174/239)

PEACE AND INTERNAL POLITICS : A LETTER FROM RUSSIA. 143
nounced, and do a hundred other things which no Government
thinking only of its immediate preservation would have time to
dream of.
The Trepoff appointment is disliked not only by the Liberals.
The extreme reactionaries also are not pleased, for their demand
w^as for a hectoring, high-stepping dictatorship—which would make
a great fuss and do nothing—coupled with an expression of in
flexible resolution to continue the war. But the limited number
of moderate persons who detest equally Absolutist tyranny and
popular license declare that the Trepoff dictatorship is the wisest
—indeed the only wise—step taken by the Government since the
beginning of the Constitutionalist movement. They have an
excellent prima facie argument : since January 22nd, nearly
every town in the Empire has been visited by murder and pillage.
The capital has been the great exception ; not a shot has been
fired from political motives, scarcely a nagaiha flourished; the
only victims of bomb-throwing have been would-be bomb-
throwers themselves. Yet St. Petersburg is the city where, as
January showed, the lower-class Opposition is most numerous,
wealthiest, most advanced in its political consciousness. Every
one predicted an era of butcheries and barricades. Everyone
was wrong. From the hour of Governor-General Trepoff’s ap
pointment security reigned. There was no provoking riot to
gain for underlings the glory of repression. There was no exces
sive harshness. There were multitudinous arrests, but not more
arrests than under the mild sway of Sviatopolk-Mirsky; and ten
Radical daily newspapers thundering unsuppressed against Auto
cracy could not nerve a single workman to march with a red flag.
1 eople wrote and said what they liked. On the morrow of
Serge’s murder three thousand inflamed students were allowed
to meet and call openly for the assassination of l< the scoundrel
Irepoff, as the scoundrel Serge has already been assassinated.”
Illegal meetings, with some exceptions, were tolerated, as the
late M. Plehve never tolerated them. The Cossack patrols were
withdrawn from the streets, and concealed in courtyards—most
people, it should be added, discovering them in someone else’s
courtyard, not their own. A policy, secretive, omniscient, and
in its mechanism invisible, replaced the old policy of alternating
license, pro\ocation, and reckless repression. After a dozen days
appointed for bomb-throwing en masse passed serenely, people
began to say that Trepoff had got the city in hand. And the
city, everyone agreed, was uncommonly pleasant—a Paradise
compared with Yalta, Kalisch, or Zhitomir, where half-a-dozen
policemen should suffice for the order which half-a-dozen bat
talions failed to keep. The Trepoffstchina had triumphed. If