from the prisons, who worked in the fishing industry at the mouth of the Amur, robbed the stores of their employers and burned their houses; in Blagoveschensk a crowd of drunken workers from the gold-mines attacked the bank in an effort to reach the concrete vaults where the gold ingots were kept; and General Linievitch wrote to me that the proclamations of the Harbin group were not without echoes in the army and that these echoes were invariably followed by harsh sentences in the military courts.
Conditions were such that our Committee suddenly found itself facing two distinct enemies, the first of which was coming from the west in the form of the penal detachments of the most reactionary Generals, Meller and Rennenkampf, whose aim was to throttle the revolutionary movement in Siberia. From the Urals to Transbaikalia the courts-martial sent hundreds of men to death on the gallows or by shooting. General Rennenkampf had already worked eastward through Transbaikalia and was nearing the Manchurian frontier.
Our second enemy was none other than the Little Committee, whose intention was to instigate a civil war and to destroy the morale of the army, so that it could not be effectively used in support of the revolution. This was the much more dangerous of the two, as we knew that anarchy would follow in the wake of its victory, an anarchy of the most terrible kind, inasmuch as it would be directed by the most wild, the most immoral and the most cruel of individuals, who were numerous in the Russian Far East.
The activities of this Little Committee were but the earnest of the deeds of Lenin and Trotzky, when these two, thirteen years later, put the power for the execution of their plans into the hands of proven crimi-
