Such was the vein in which a Russian revolutionary leader wrote, not knowing, or perhaps not caring to know, of the iron vise of the Pale of Settlement, of the pitiless expulsions which were taking place just at that time, ignorant altogether of the whole mesh of legal restrictions which placed the Jews on the lowest rung of Russian rightlessness. After presenting this picture of Jewish life, Pestel suggests to the future revolutionary Government ("The Supreme Provisional Administration") two ways of solving the Jewish problem. One consists in breaking up "the influence of the close relationship among the Jews so injurious to the Christians," because it keeps them apart from the other citizens. For this purpose he advises convoking "the most learned rabbis and the most intelligent Jews"--Pestel had evidently heard of Napoleon's Synhedrion--"listening to their representations," and thereupon adopting measures for eradicating Jewish exclusiveness, for, "inasmuch as Russia does not expel the Jews, they ought to be the more careful not to adopt an unfriendly attitude towards the Christians." The second way consists in an honorable expulsion of the Jews or, to use his words, "in assisting the Jews to form a separate commonwealth of their own in some portion of Asia Minor." To this end Pestel makes the proposal to choose a rallying-point for the Jewish people and to supply them with some troops so as to reinforce them. For, as Pestel continues, were all the Russian and Polish Jews to congregate in one place, they would number over two millions. Such a mass of people, being in search of a fatherland would not find it difficult to overcome all obstacles which the Turks might place in their way, and, after traversing the whole of European Turkey, might pass over into Asiatic Turkey, and, having occupied an adequate area, form a separate Jewish State. Pestel himself felt more attracted towards the latter alternative of solving the Jewish problem,[281] but, being fully aware that "this gigantic undertaking depends on particular circumstances," he did not formulate it as "a special obligation upon the Supreme Administration." Accordingly, if Pestel's first plan had materialized, the Jews of Russia would have received from the Supreme Provisional Administration, not civil equality, but a stern _Reglement_ of the Austrian or Old Prussian type, made up of a long string of "correctional measures" aiming at compulsory assimilation or Russification, at the demolition of the whole cultural autonomy of Russian Jewry, not excluding "the right of educating their children in whatever principles they like," and finally culminating in the economic "curbing of Jewry," perhaps in the spirit of that very Government against which the Decembrists were fighting.