Recognition of these facts need not imply any lack of sympathy with the proletariat in their demands.  The class struggle in modern industrial society is a fact, and there is abundant justification—­the justification of necessity and of achievement—­for aggressive class consciousness and class warfare.  But it is quite obvious that there are times when class interests and class warfare must be set aside in favor of larger social interests.  It is obviously dangerous and reactionary—­and therefore wrong—­to insist upon strikes or other forms of class warfare in moments of great calamity, as, for example, during disasters like the Johnstown flood and the Messina earthquake, or amid the ravages of a pestilential plague.  Marx, to whom we owe the formulation of the theory of class struggle which has guided the Socialist movement, would never have questioned this important truth; he would never have supported class separatism under conditions such as those prevailing in Russia at the end of 1905.  Only doctrinaires, slaves to formulae, but blind to reality, could have sanctioned such separatism.  But doctrinaires always abound in times of revolution.

By December the government was stronger than it had been at any time since the Revolution began.  The zemstvos were no longer an active part of the revolutionary movement.  Indeed, there had come over these bodies a great change, and most of them were now dominated by relatively reactionary landowners who, hitherto apathetic and indifferent, had been stirred to defensive action by the aggressive class warfare of the workers.  Practically all the bourgeois moderates had been driven to the more or less open support of the government.  December witnessed a new outburst in St. Petersburg, Moscow, and other cities.  Barricades were raised in the streets in many places.  In Moscow, where the most bitter and sanguinary struggles took place, more than a thousand persons were killed.  The government was better prepared than the workers; the army had recovered no little of its lost morale and did not refuse to shoot down the workers as it had done on previous occasions.  The strikes and insurrections were put down in bloody vengeance and there followed a reign of brutal repression indescribably horrible and savage.  By way of protest and retaliation, there were individual acts of terrorism, such as the execution of the Governor of Tambov by Marie Spiridonova, but these were of little or no avail.  The First Revolution was drowned in blood and tears.

CHAPTER II

FROM REVOLUTION TO REVOLUTION

I