Its conclusion was that it was necessary to "beat" the Jews, but, in
view of the fact that Russia was a monarchical state with conservative
tendencies, this function ought not to be discharged by the people but
by the Government, which by its method of legal repression could beat
the Jews much more effectively than the crowds on the streets.

The editor of the Moscow newspaper _Russ_, Ivan Aksakov, [1] attacked the
Russian liberal press for expressing its sympathy with the Jewish pogrom
victims, contending that the Russian people demolished the Jewish houses
under the effect of a "righteous indignation," though he failed to
explain why that indignation also took the form of plundering and
stealing Jewish property, or violating Jewish women. Throwing into one
heap the arguments of the medieval Church and those of modern German
anti-Semitism, Aksakov maintained that Judaism was opposed to "Christian
civilization," and that the Jewish people were striving for "world
domination" which they hoped to attain through their financial power.

[Footnote 1: Compare above, p. 208.]

The bacillus of German anti-Semitism had penetrated even into the
circles of the Russian radical _intelligenzia_. Among the "Populists,"
[1] who were wont to idealize the Russian peasantry, it became the
fashion to look upon the Jew as an economic exploiter, with this
distinction, however, that they bracketed him with the host of Russian
exploiters from among the bourgeois class. This resulted in a most
unfortunate misunderstanding. A faction of South Russian revolutionaries
from among the party known as "The People's Freedom" [2] conceived the
idea that the same peasants and laborers who had attacked the Jews as
the representatives of the non-Russian bourgeoisie might easily be
directed against the representatives of the ruling classes in general.