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circles is comparatively new, and is now in full bloom.
It began under Alexander II. It was not that this
monarch was favorable to it; far from that. But his consort,
a German princess, at first from a desire for popularity,
afterwards from a want of an object in life, when
she felt that she had entirely glided out of the
existence of her volatile husband, took up the cause of
the Greek-orthodox Church with constantly increasing
warmth. Thus it happened for the first time from time
immemorial in this empire, where the clergy occupy an
inferior position and have little influence, that a priest
of the imperial household, the wise and fanatical
Bashanof, became influential at court. It was to this
man to whom it also happened to prepare the present
Tsaritsa, by instruction in the Greek religion, for her
change of confession. And among the court ladies
who were smitten with zeal for spreading abroad the
sound doctrine, and combating Roman Catholicism and
Lutheran Protestantism, especially when found within
the boundaries of the Russian Empire, Countess Antonie
Dmitrievna Bludova, a slightly deformed, energetic,
and intelligent girl, made herself very conspicuous. It
was she who, under Alexander II., cemented the union
between the Muscovite Slavophile party and Aksákof and
Katkóf, and was the first to master the Polish Marquis
Wielopolski’s plan for a reconciliation between Russia
and Poland, with a hostile attitude towards Germany.
Through her father, the well-known powerful minister,
she accomplished the appointment of Wielopolski as
governor in Poland; but then, after the revolt in 1863,
she was converted to the doctrine of the necessity of
the eradication of Roman Catholicism, and actually
initiated the horrible religious persecutions in Lithuania
and White Russia. It was she who stood at the head
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