provocator Azev, the Member of Parliament and police-spy Malinovsky, Rasputin, the Bishop Pimen, the monk Heliodor, and a whole gang of native and foreign adventurers and pirates of words and thoughts. It was with their help that bureaucracy, in a presentiment of the approaching Day of Judgment, tried to reach the core of national life, to gauge the dimensions of the threatening danger, to capture the foes and to compel the mind of the nation to enter the old kennel of dog-like servility towards the official, the priest, the lord, and the Tsar. None thought of the necessity of directing the awaking popular sense towards the firm ground of nationhood. And if even such men arose, like the authors of the October 17 1905 manifesto, Count Sergius Witte, or the Prime Minister, P. A. Stolypin, they had to meet conspiracies and engage in a life and death struggle for their very existence.
The war, then, had to be fought upon two fronts: against the awakening masses of the nation which were drifting ever nearer towards the revolutionary camp and against those of their own kind, who in their sagacious efforts at the progress of civilisation, desired the State to seize upon the thoughts and energies of the rising nation and to turn them to good account.
On both the fronts the self-same weapon was used, the most dastardly of all-provocation—the practice of conjuring up disturbances during which leaders and participants could be seized. Of those arrested the most depraved were seduced into the service of the
