But this time, too, the hope for Jewish emancipation proved an illusion. The Duma was soon dissolved, under the pretext that a revolutionary conspiracy of the Socialistic deputies had been uncovered. On June 3, 1907, another _coup d'état_ took place. The former electoral law which made it possible for the Russian democracy and the oppressed nationalities to send their representatives to the Duma was arbitrarily changed by the Tzar in order to insure a conservative pro-Government majority in the Russian parliament. There followed an era of dismal reaction. FOOTNOTES: [48] In Russian, _Mitropolit_, the highest ecclesiastical dignitary in the Greek-Orthodox Church. There are three Mitropolits in Russia, residing in Petrograd, Moscow, and Kiev. [49] See above, p. 81. CHAPTER XXXVII EXTERNAL OPPRESSION AND INTERNAL CONSOLIDATION 1. THE NEW ALIGNMENTS WITHIN RUSSIAN JEWRY The terrible quadrennium of 1903-1906 had an extraordinarily quickening effect upon the national and political thought of the classes as well as of the masses of Russian Jewry. The year of Kishinev and Homel, when the rightless Jews were made defenceless; the year of the Russo-Japanese War, when these rightless and defenceless pariahs were called upon to fight for their fatherland against the enemy from without; the year of the revolution when after the sanguinary struggle for liberty the Jews received a "constitutional charter wrapped up in pogroms"; finally, the first year of the Duma when indignant utterances of the Jewish deputies from the platform of the Duma were accompanied by the moans of the wounded Jews of Bialystok--these terrible upheavals might have proved fatal to Russian Israel had it not, during the preceding period, worked out for itself a definite _nationalistic_ attitude towards the non-Jewish world. There were several varieties of this national-political formula. At the one pole stood Zionism, with its theory of a new "exodus." At the other pole was the Social-Democratic party with its premise that "the blood of the Jew must serve as lubricating oil upon the wheels of the Russian Revolution." But even these two poles came somewhat closer to one another at the moment of the great national danger, converging, in spite of all their differences in program and tactics, toward the central line above which floated the banner proclaiming the fight for the civil, political, and national rights of the Jewish people. Disfranchised, battered by pogroms, victimized by tyrannous Tzardom, the Jews of Russia never thought of degrading themselves to the point of begging equal rights "in instalments." They demanded their rights in full, and demanded them not merely as "the Jewish _population_," but as the Jewish _people_, as an autonomous nation among other nations with a culture of its own. The doctrine of "National-Cultural Autonomism"[50] was crystallized in definite slogans. These slogans were proclaimed,