The Jewish question was also touched upon in the conferences at Peterhof, which were held during the month of July under the chairmanship of the Tzar, to formulate plans for an Imperial Duma. Naryshkin, a reactionary dignitary, demanded that "the dangerous Jewish nation" be barred from the Duma. But a number of other dignitaries--the Minister of Finance, Kokovtzev, the Assistant-Minister of the Interior, Trepov, and Obolenski and Chikhachev, members of the Council of State--advocated their admission, and the discussions were terminated by the brief remark of the Tzar: "The project [with the insertion of the Council of Ministers in favor of the Jews] shall be left unaltered." By this action, the Government made itself guilty of a flagrant inconsistency. It conferred upon the Jews the highest political privilege--the right of voting for popular representatives--but left them at the same time in a state of complete civil disfranchisement, even with regard to such elementary liberties as the right of domicile, the right of transit, and so on. Only one month previously, on June 8, the Tzar had approved the "Opinion" of the Committee of Ministers--in pursuance of the ukase of December 12, 1904, the Committee had been busy discussing the Jewish problem--to the effect that the consideration of the question of ameliorating the condition of the Jews should be deferred until the convocation of the new Parliament. Evidently, the anti-Jewish conscience of the Tzar made it impossible for him to grant even the slightest relief to the Jews who from pariahs had been turned into revolutionaries. FOOTNOTES: [44] The author of the present volume, who resided in Vilna at that time. [45] See vol. II, p. 246. [46] "I shall set the nether-world in motion." [47] A mutilated form of "Socialists" which is in vogue among the ignorant Russian masses. CHAPTER XXXVI THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION AND THE OCTOBER MASSACRES 1. THE FIENDISH DESIGNS OF THE "BLACK HUNDRED"