 In this way he was able to avoid the legal disabilities imposed on Jews under Tsarist rule, especially the geographical limitation to the Pale of Settlement, banning Jews from living in the Empire's main cites - without needing to regularly attend a church and be visibly practising Christianity.As became evident especially in the later part of his life, he retained a strong concern for the situation of the Jews, even if formally no longer one of them.Following the wave of pogroms of the 1880s and the early 1890s, a commission headed by the vociferously antisemitic Interior Minister Vyacheslav von Plehve recommended a further worsening of the Jews' legal position.