They organized unions, educational societies, and co-operatives, confident that through these agencies the workers would develop cohesion and strength, which, at the right time, they would use as their class interests dictated.  The Bolsheviki, on the other hand, clung to the old conspiratory methods, always mastered by the idea that a sudden coup must some day place the reins of power in the hands of a revolutionary minority of the workers and enable them to set up a dictatorship.  That dictatorship, it must be understood, was not to be permanent; democracy, possibly even political democracy, would come later.

As we have already noted, into the ranks of the terrorist Socialist-Revolutionaries and the Bolsheviki spies and provocative agents wormed their way in large numbers.  It is the inevitable fate of secret, conspiratory movements that this should be so, and also that it should result in saturating the minds of all engaged in the movements with distrust and suspicion.  More than once the charge of being a provocateur was leveled at Lenine and at Trotzky, but without justification, apparently.  There was, indeed, one incident which placed Lenine in a bad light.  It belongs to a somewhat later period than we have been discussing, but it serves admirably to illustrate conditions which obtained throughout the whole dark period between the two great revolutions.  One of Lenine’s close friends and disciples was Roman Malinovsky, a fiery speaker of considerable power, distinguished for his bitter attacks upon the bourgeois progressive parties and upon the Mensheviki.  The tenor of his speeches was always the same—­only the interest of the proletariat should be considered; all bourgeois political parties and groups were equally reactionary, and any co-operation with them, for any purpose, was a betrayal of Socialist principle.

Malinovsky was trusted by the Bolsheviki.  He was elected to the Fourth Duma, where he became the leader of the little group of thirteen Social Democrats.  Like other members of the Bolshevik faction, he entered the Duma, despite his contempt for parliamentary action, simply because it afforded him a useful opportunity for agitation and demonstrations.  In the Duma he assailed even a portion of the Social Democratic group as belonging to the bourgeoisie, succeeding in splitting it in two factions and becoming the leader of the Bolshevik faction, numbering six.  This blatant demagogue, whom Lenine called “the Russian Bebel,” was proposed for membership in the International Socialist Bureau, the supreme council of the International Socialist movement, and would have been sent as a delegate to that body as a representative of Russian Socialist movement but for the discovery of the fact that he was a secret agent of the Czar’s government!