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continuous and direct collaboration in public life, not of a Parliament but of the people directly, a form in which the sovereign was not above the people, but, on the contrary, came from the people. This form which had been the basis of Russian history at the time of the domination of its first princes, had been forgotten. Later on it was completely perverted, in order, at the period of the liberation of Russia from the Tartar yoke, to borrow from the East the despotism of the Khans and, ultimately, in modern times, to copy the absolutism of the Devine Right of Kings from the West. It was of this adaptation of the ancient patriarchal and popular form of governments of the princes, to modern life, that I was thinking of when speaking of the re-establishment of a monarchic government. I was even so profoundly absorbed in this democratic and popular monarchic conception, that I quite overlooked its opposition to the soviet idea which, little by little, began to penetrate into my mind, but which, owing to a complete blunder on my part, I regarded as the anti-thesis of Bolshevism. Although at that time I believed the revolution to be dead for ever,—I was brought back, by some kind of irresistible instinct, wich said to me that it was the Soviets alone which could be the basis of a new Russian life,—instead of understanding that this formula of the soviets was inseparable from bolshevism, or more exactly, that bolshevism whose existence I persisted in not seeing was nothing else than the practical realisation of the formula of the Soviets.
Such is the spirit in which I lived almost up to July. I have ben careful to note down all
