for their services, while others were rewarded with petty official positions.  The Czar himself accepted membership in these infamous organizations of hired assassins.  Within three weeks after the issuance of the Manifesto more than a hundred organized pogroms took place, the number of killed amounting to nearly four thousand; the wounded to more than ten thousand, according to the most competent authorities.  In Odessa alone more than one thousand persons were killed and many thousands wounded in a four-days’ massacre.  In all the bloody pages of the history of the Romanovs there is nothing comparable to the frightful terror of this period.

Naturally, this brutal vengeance and the deception which Nicholas II and his advisers had practised upon the people had the immediate effect of increasing the relative strength and prestige of the Socialists in the revolutionary movement as against the less radical elements.  To meet such brutality and force only the most extreme measures were deemed adequate.  The Council of Workmen’s Deputies, which had been organized by the proletariat of St. Petersburg a few days before the Czar issued his Manifesto, now became a great power, the central guiding power of the Revolution.  Similar bodies were organized in other great cities.  The example set by the city workers was followed by the peasants in many places and Councils of Peasants’ Deputies were organized.  In a few cases large numbers of soldiers, making common cause with these bodies representing the working class, formed Councils of Soldiers’ Deputies.  Here, then, was a new phenomenon; betrayed by the state, weary of the struggle to democratize and liberalize the political state, the workers had established a sort of revolutionary self-government of a new kind, entirely independent of the state.  We shall never comprehend the later developments in Russia, especially the phenomenon of Bolshevism, unless we have a sympathetic understanding of these Soviets—­autonomous, non-political units of working-class self-government, composed of delegates elected directly by the workers.

As the revolutionary resistance to the Black Hundreds increased, and the rapidly growing Soviets of workmen’s, peasants’ and soldiers’ delegates asserted a constantly increasing indifference to the existing political state, the government again tried to stem the tide by making concessions.  On November 3d—­new style—­in a vain attempt to appease the incessant demand for the release of the thousands of political prisoners, and to put an end to the forcible release of such prisoners by infuriated mobs, a partial amnesty was declared.  On the 16th a sop was thrown to the peasants in the shape of a decree abolishing all the remaining land-redemption payments.  Had this reform come sooner it might have had the effect of stemming the tide of revolt among the peasants, but in the circumstances it was of no avail.  Early in December the press censorship was abolished by