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defined groups within it were striving for a republic and the overthrow of me monarchy.
Take now the great writers, the poets, who also were officers at one time, and you will see that from their ranks also issued geniuses, talents of a high order, and the first harbingers of the revolutonary struggle. The great Russian poet Lermontov was an officer; Pushkin, the national poet, also was in touch with military spheres, and scores of years ago wrote these lines. which should be recalled to our officers' memory and which you probably know:—
Thou tyrant most iniquitous,
Oh, how I hate thy race and thee!
Thy downfall and thy children's death
Would fill me with a wicked glee!
And these fiery words were wrung scores of years ago from the heart of one whose whole existence was bound up with the privileged classes. He hated Tsarism to the bottom of his soul, and was the first to create circles of young men, like himself haters of Tsarism. Later in the sixties, among the men who worked for the emancipation of the serfs, there were some few representatives of the officer class. Later, in the seventies and in the eighties, there were not a few noble representatives of the officer class, in that generation of revolutions, who perished on the gallows in the cause of the Revolution. Among others a whole group of Russian officers were killed in the eighties, who
