However, the Empress and her exalted prompters calculated wrongly. The cruel expulsion decree did not draw a single Jew into the fold of the Greek Orthodox Church, while the reason given in the ukase for the expulsion, "the extreme injury" inflicted by the enemies of Christ "upon our faithful subjects," failed to carry conviction to the latter. The ukase had been designed in particular to "benefit" the inhabitants of the two border provinces of Little Russia and Livonia by eliminating the Jews from their midst. These inhabitants, however, speaking through their local representatives, declared that such "beneficence" would only result in ruining them. From Little Russia the Greek contractors of the customs duties complained to the Senate that the repressions against the Jews, which hampered their commercial visits to Poland, had caused great losses to the state revenues by lowering the income from imported goods, that a sudden expulsion of Jews, who were bound up with the Christian merchants by business interests and monetary obligations, would ruin both sides, and that it was therefore necessary to allow the Jews to retain their former right of free admission into Little Russia for business purposes. Even more energetic representations were sent to the Senate from the Baltic province of Livonia. The gubernatorial administration of the province and the magistracy of the city of Riga stated that, in accordance with the promulgated ukase, the Jews living in the suburb of Riga and in the surrounding district had been ordered to leave within six weeks, but that this expulsion was bound to cause great injury to the exchequer and to spell ruin for the whole mercantile class. For the Polish pans and merchants, who had their Jewish brokers in Riga, would stop buying their goods there, and would prefer to import them, with the aid of their expelled Jewish middlemen, from Germany, so that "trade in Riga would fall off, and commerce might be destroyed entirely," the Russian merchants finding themselves unable to secure customers for "the goods imported by sea." The Livonians therefore pleaded to grant the Jews free admission into Riga for carrying on business, though it be only in the capacity of temporary residents.