rich and highly educated publisher of sociological, historical, and psychological works, Mr. W. Bonch-Bruyevich. The brother of this revolutionary, who is now chief of the Chancery of the Soviet Cabinet, was a General of the General Military Staff, and for a time Commander-in-chief of the Russian army during the first revolutionary Government.
Bonch-Bruyevich was a welcome guest in the best Petersburg society, in circles of higher military officers, and of the best educated classes. He knew all and everybody, he seemed a true gentleman of old family, well educated, amiable. At the same time he was the secret leader of extreme socialist factions, bordering on anarchism.
It was he who during the 1905 revolution sheltered the present dictator of Russia, Trotsky, then Vice-President of the Workmen and Soldiers' Council, and who, remaining invisible, directed the work of Chrustalov Nosario, the President of the Council, pushing him in the direction of Maximalism, and all the time organising the Bolshevik party.
I was told that it often happened in Bonch-Bruyevich's house that the host, smartly dressed, entertained in his luxuriously furnished drawing-room the flower of Russian society; while in his study and library, the unwashed crowd of future dictators, breathing fire and smelling rank, discussed the means of destroying Tsarist, bourgeois, and socialist Russia,
