The autocratic government of the Romanoffs was destroyed by its own tyranny and corruption. The great masses of the peasantry and the laboring class were sunk in poverty, misery and ignorance. Any attempts to ameliorate their condition were met with opposition and repression. Hundreds, nay thousands, of the noblest men and women of Russia’s intelligentsia who, in their sympathy with the oppressed, risked their life and liberty to open the eyes of the people through education, were branded as traitors and revolutionists and were imprisoned in the Russian jails or exiled to the wilds of Siberia. A few of them escaped to the more liberal countries of Europe and America, where they made a name for themselves in science and literature and exposed the conditions under which the rest of their countrymen lived. The Jews, even those who attended to their own business and took no part in politics, were specially singled out as a people for persecution and oppression. Their rights were restricted, freedom of movement was denied to them, and a pale of settlement, a veritable ghetto on a large scale, was established to which, with few exceptions, all Jews were confined under pain of arrest and punishment. This resulted in a wide-spread movement of opposition to the existing government shared in equally by Jew and Gentile. Nihilism, anarchism, social revolution, terrorism, were the various party names adopted by the opponents of the government, and despite the ruthless efforts of the powers that be to suppress it, the movement spread during the greater part of the nineteenth century and constituted a menace to the Czaristic regime.
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