NOTES 419
you are obtaining the public guarantee for the loan which in essence has long been granted in secret. Your article and your ‘attempt to whitewash yourself and the Shah are only the two last chords, so that Russian public opinion may have nothing against so shameful a transaction as lending money to a hangman. But, Mr Shapshal, your - trouble is quite unnecessary, since Russia is at present passing through a period when no one takes any account of her public opinion, and you can boldly ignore it...
‘Recognizing clearly that it is necessary to make someone or other responsible for all that has happened, you put the whole blame upon Amir Bahadur Jang. ‘To all that you have written about him I am ready to subscribe with both hands, and I could even add something to it; but only on the immutable condition that you should consent to admit that he was merely a simple tool in your hands, and that you were the evil genius inspiring him, so that, for all the evil deeds he committed, the responsibility rests on you and the Legation in whose hands you in your turn are a pliant tool.
“You speak of a revolution in Persia; you make a great mistake, Mr Shapshal: in Persia there is no revolution, only a united people, fighting like one man for the most moderate constitutional nights...
“ Mr Shapshdl, thanks to his superabundant audacity and incapacity, explicitly declares that at the time of the coup d’état ‘hardly anyone’ (in another place ‘no one’) was killed. To say nothing of the five or six hundred Persians killed by the machine-guns of the Cossacks under the command of Colonel Liakhoff, I venture to put to him this one question. Does this ‘no one’ take account of the Maltku’l-Mutakallimin and Jahangir Khan, whose brutal punishment was personally directed by you and Colonel Liakhoff, while the Shah stood on a balcony and admired your artistic tortures? Do you remember how, as you went away, you spat on the corpse mutilated by tortures and said, ‘One dog the less ?’”
At the end of the type-written chapter the following postscript is added in manuscript:
‘‘ The article was finished when there appeared a telegram to say that the well-known Persian public man Shapshal had been received by the Emperor. !
“In Russia hitherto friendship with spies and agents provocateurs has been kept up by the Directors of the Police Department and the Ministry of the Interior. Now the Emperor himself has begun. There is a fine departure!”
The following particulars about Shapshal I owe to an English correspondent long resident in Russia and well acquainted with current events there.
“Shapshal is a Karaite Jew. His relatives are proprietors of a well- known tobacconist firm. I know no details of his early life, except that he was a pupil at a private grammar-school in St Petersburg (Gurevich’s), and that he completed a course at the Oriental Faculty in the St Petersburg University. It is very probable that he was intended for the Consular Service, since most of the students of the Oriental Faculty
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