that terrible year, was bound to disappear from the scene. On May 30,
Count Ignatyev was made to resign, and Count Demetrius Tolstoi was
appointed Minister of the Interior.

Tolstoi was a grim reactionary and a champion of autocracy and police
power, but he was at the same time an enemy of all manifestations of mob
rule which tended to undermine the authority of the State. A few days
after his appointment the new Minister issued a circular in which he
reiterated the recent declaration of his predecessor concerning the
"resolve of the Government to prosecute every kind of violence against
the Jews," announcing emphatically that "any manifestation of disorders
would unavoidably result in the immediate prosecution of all official
persons who are in duty bound to concern themselves with the prevention
of disorders."

This energetic pronouncement of the Government had a magic effect. All
provincial administrators realized that the central Government of St.
Petersburg had ceased to trifle with the promoters of the pogroms, and
the pogrom epidemic was at an end. Beginning with June, 1882, the
pogroms assumed more and more a sporadic character. Here and there
sparks of the old conflagration would flare up again, but only to die
out quickly. In the course of the next twenty years, until the Kishinev
massacre of 1903, no more than about ten pogroms of any consequence may
be enumerated, and these disorders were all isolated movements, with a
purely local coloring, and without the earmarks of a common organization
or the force of an epidemic, such as characterized the pogrom campaigns
of 1881, or those of 1903-1905. This is an additional proof for the
contention that systematic pogroms in Russia are impossible as long as
the central Government and the local authorities are honestly and firmly
set against them.