Solzhenitsyn, while not attempting to justify all the repressive aspects of the May Laws and other Jewish legislation, claims that they were motivated by a desire for social stability rather than religious or racist anti-Semitism, and that they were not as repressive as they might have been. For example, he shows that the edict forbidding rural settlement only applied to new Jewish settlers, and claims that many villages were exempt. The edict itself was advocated by Count Nikolay Pavlovich Ignatyev not only on the grounds that "the inhabitants of the countryside may know the government is protecting them from the Jews", but also because "governmental power is unable to defend [the Jews] against pogroms which might occur in scattered villages."