German military machine would soon triumph.  But when they witnessed the great victorious onward rush of the Russian army, which for a time manifested such a degree of efficiency as they had never believed to be possible, they began to bestir themselves.  From this quarter came the suggestion, very early in the war, as Plechanov and his associates charged in their Manifesto, that the Czar ought to make an early peace with Germany.

They went much farther than this.  Through every conceivable channel they contrived to obstruct Russia’s military effort.  They conspired to disorganize the transportation system, the hospital service, the food-supply, the manufacture of munitions.  They, too, in a most effective manner, were plotting to weaken and corrupt the morale of the army.  There was universal uneasiness.  In the Allied chancelleries there was fear of a treacherous separate peace between Russia and Germany.  It was partly to avert that catastrophe by means of a heavy bribe that England undertook the forcing of the Dardanelles.  All over Russia there was an awakening of the memories of the graft that ate like a canker-worm at the heart of the nation.  Men told once more the story of the Russian general in Manchuria, in 1904, who, when asked why fifty thousand men were marching barefoot, answered that the boots were in the pocket of Grand-Duke Vladimir!  They told again the story of the cases of “shells” for the Manchurian army which were intercepted in the nation’s capital, en route to Moscow, and found to contain—­paving-stones!  How General Kuropatkin managed to amass a fortune of over six million rubles during the war with Japan was remembered.  Fear that the same kind of treason was being perpetrated grew almost to the panic point.

So bad were conditions in the army, so completely had the Germanophile reactionaries sabotaged the organization, that the people themselves took the matter in hand.  Municipalities all over the country formed a Union of Cities to furnish food, clothes, and other necessaries to the army.  The National Union of Zemstvos did the same thing.  More than three thousand institutions were established on the different Russian fronts by the National Union of Zemstvos.  These institutions included hospitals, ambulance stations, feeding stations for troops on the march, dental stations, veterinary stations, factories for manufacturing supplies, motor transportation services, and so on through a long catalogue of things which the administration absolutely failed to provide.  The same great organization furnished millions of tents and millions of pairs of boots and socks.  Civil Russia was engaged in a great popular struggle to overcome incompetence, corruption, and sabotage in the bureaucracy.  For this work the civilian agencies were not thanked by the government.  Instead, they were oppressed and hindered.  Against them was directed the hate of the dark forces of the “occult government” and at the same time the fierce opposition and scorn of men who called themselves Socialists and champions of proletarian freedom!