form a committee of their own. Failing in my attempts to arrive at an understanding with the leaders of this new organization, I could do nothing more than delimit strictly their sphere of activities, leaving to them the management of the life of the workshops and the stores of the railway, with the distinct understanding that they were in nowise to interfere with the operations of the Chief Committee. A locksmith from European Russia, one F. Ivanoff, was chosen chairman of this Workers' Committee. Colonel Zaremba, a Pole and the Chief of Police in Harbin, and his associate, Captain von Ziegler, a German, confidentially informed me that Ivanoff was a secret agent of the political police, had close relations with the Union of the Russian Nation and was put in his present place to start a civil war in the Far East, with the idea that he should induce the army to join in the struggle of the working masses against the intelligentsia and thus give the Government an excuse for sending a punitive expedition to the Far East to liquidate the revolution in the territory of the Manchurian army.
The plan was well laid with that subtle, Byzantine treachery which always characterized the Tsar's Government and which, in unchanged form, is equally characteristic of that of the Soviets. I saw quite distinctly the extent and seriousness of the danger before me; but I was young then and without experience, though I did possess one very useful quality for the president of a temporary government, into which the course of rapidly moving events metamorphosed our Committee. I was daring—and I profited simply and directly from my boldness.
Taking with me one of my associates in the Committee, a young official from the railway, named Vlasienko, I started off in my drosky, drawn by my beautiful white
