“On the basis of the power entrusted to me according to Paragraph 6, Article 415, Section 6, I prohibit postal and telegraph communications within the district occupied by the army entrusted to me, in the Jewish, German, and Hungarian languages.”[33] By this order the Russian government not only branded the entire Jewish people as spies and traitors, but also prevented hundreds of thousands of Jewish soldiers at the front from communicating with relatives and friends, because many of the soldiers had been prevented by educational restrictions from learning to read and write Russian. To the Jewish soldier unable to read or write was thus denied even that scant comfort which his Russian comrades might derive from the stereotyped communications checked on the regulation postal card and mailed by field-post. At the beginning of the war the military censors assumed command of the entire press of Russia. That they used their power with the utmost unfairness against the Jewish press was charged without contradiction in the Duma by Professor Milyukov, Deputies Bomash, Suchanov and others, who pointed out that if the aim of the censor was to suppress every truth and encourage every lie against the Jews, they could not possibly have pursued a more consistent policy. Deputy Bomash furnished the following concrete instances of perversion of facts by the censorship. 1. It systematically expunged or mutilated the names of Jews to whom the cross of St. George had been awarded.[34] 2. When the Mayor of Petrograd congratulated the Jewish community upon the heroic conduct of a lad of 13, named Kaufman, the censor suppressed the fact that Kaufman was a Jew, and that the community referred to was the Jewish community. 3. Stories in the Russian press of the valor of Jews in the French armies are either suppressed or the Jewish names cut out. 4. A news item referring to the fact that General Semenov, whom Jewish soldiers had saved from capture by the Germans, was treating Jews kindly was suppressed by the censor. 5. Letters of regimental commanders to the parents of Jewish hussars congratulating them on the valor of their sons, or notifying them of medals of honor bestowed upon them, were suppressed by the censor. 6. The military censorship also suppressed news of an absolutely non-military nature, whenever it might in any manner have been construed as friendly to Jews. Thus, a news item referring to the non-sectarian activities of the National Relief Committee, headed by the Princess Tatyana, daughter of the Czar, was suppressed. A news item regarding the disapproval of the Council of Ministers of the policy of expelling Jews _en masse_ and of wholesale charges of treachery was also suppressed. 7. Even the official declaration of Count Bobrinski, Military-Governor of Galicia, referring to the correctness of the conduct of the Jews of Galicia, was suppressed.