Fortunately the Government itself came to the conclusion that the time of war was not a fit opportunity for arranging pogroms. The governors received orders to adopt energetic measures for the prevention of Passover excesses. Governor Urussov of Bessarabia and the city-governor of Odessa addressed serious warnings to the Russian population. These steps had the desired effect. As soon as the police and population realized that the pogroms were not desired from above, the agitation collapsed; and in April the papers were able to tell their readers that "Passover has passed quietly everywhere." In his _Memoirs_ Urussov tells us that, during the restless day preceding the Easter festival in Kishinev, he had been engaged, together with the Chief of Police, in working out a plan looking to the maintenance of public order in the city; during this conference he noticed that the Chief of Police was rather hesitant and puzzled. This hesitation continued until the governor received from Plehve a telegram in cipher, calling upon him to prevent pogroms. No sooner had Urussov shown the Chief of Police the deciphered telegram than the latter exclaimed: "Don't trouble yourself--now there will be no disorders in Kishinev." Such was the spirit in which the provincial administrators had been trained. Without a special order from St. Petersburg, they did not have the courage to suppress the pogroms. 4. THE "POLITICAL SPRING" On the morning of July 15, 1904, the square before the Warsaw depôt in St. Petersburg presented a terrible sight. Upon the pavement lay the blood-stained body of Plehve, who had been smitten by the bomb of the Russian terrorist Sazonov while on his way to Peterhof where he was to report to the Tzar. This meant that the revolution had again raised its head. After two years of frenzied police terrorism, and in spite of all attempts to divert the attention of the public from the necessity of reforms, first by pogroms and then by the war against Japan--Plehve had insisted upon the declaration of war, hoping to drown the "seditious" movement in chauvinism--the revolutionary spectre was once more haunting the country. The martyrs of the autocratic inquisition perceived the "finger of God" in the calamities caused by the war and in the miserable end of Plehve. In February, 1904, the Russian censor confiscated an issue of the _Voskhod_ in which a young Jewish sibyl, in a poem entitled "To Haman," referring to the biblical _Mene, Mene, Tekel u-Farsin_, predicted a shameful death for the new Haman who was easily identified as the hero of Kishinev. One could feel in the air the coming of a cleansing tempest. Even the reactionary Government was taken aback by the approaching storm. It did not dare to answer the terrorism of the revolution with police terrorism. On the contrary, it made an attempt to moderate the régime of serfdom.