growth of traditional circle work; because naturally, the police, almost in every case, knew the principal leaders of the local movement, for they had already "recommended" themselves to the police in their school-days, and the latter only waited for a convenient to make their raid. They gave the circle sufficient time to develop their work so that they may obtain a palpable corpus delicti,[1] and always allowed several of the persons known to them to remain at liberty for razvodka (which, I believe is the technical term used both by our people and by the gendarmes)[2] One cannot help comparing this kind of warfare with that conducted by a mob of peasants armed with clubs against :modern troops. One can only express astonishment at the virility displayed by the movement which expanded, grew and won victories in spite of the lack of training among the fighters. It is true that from the historical point-of-view, the primitiveness of equipment was not only inevitable at first, but even legitimate as one of the conditions for the wide recruiting of fighters, but as soon as serious operations commenced (and they commenced in fact with the strikes in the summer of 1896), the defects in our fighting organisations made themselves felt to an increasing extent. Thrown into consternation at first and committing a number of mistakes (for example, its appeal to the public describing the misdeeds of the Socialists, or the deportation of the workers from the capital to the provincial industrial centres) the government very soon adapted itself to the new conditions of the struggle and managed to place its perfectly equipped detachments of agent-provocateurs, spies, and gendarmes in the required places. Raids became so frequent, affected such a vast number of people, and cleared out the local circles so thoroughly, that the masses of the workers literally lost all their leaders, the movement assumed an incredibly sporadic character, and it became impossible to established continuity and connectedness in the work. The fact that the local active workers were hopelessly scattered, the casual manner in which the membership of the circles were recruited, the lack of training in and narrow outlook on theoretical political and organisational questions were all the inevitable result of the conditions described above. Things reached such a pass
- ↑ Offence within the meaning of the law.—Ed.
- ↑ Literally for "breeding purposes," i. e., to breed more victims for the police net. By allowing them to be at liberty and by shadowing their movements, the police were able to use them as innocent tools to betray the whereabouts of other revolutionists as yet unknown to them.—Ed.
96
