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fired on a crowd of workingmen who had come to petition the Czar for a constitution. About one thousand were killed. The terrorists now made plans to assassinate the Czar and his uncles, the Grand Duke Vladimir, who was held responsible for the massacre, and the Grand Duke Sergei, who was said to be the person with the greatest influence on the Czar. As Governor-General of Moscow, Sergei was known for the merciless brutality of his rule, for a capricious and domineering character and extremes of autocratic temperament bordering on derangement. According to an English observer, he was “conspicuous for his cruelty and renowned, even among the Russian aristocracy, for the peculiarity of his vices.” Although in the pay of the police, Azev had to allow the Brigade enough successes to satisfy them and to maintain his position as their chief, without which he would have been of far less value to the police. In February, 1905, Sergei was blown up with a bomb thrown by a young revolutionary named Kaliaev who was left standing alive in the midst of the debris, in his old blue coat with a red scarf, his face bleeding, but otherwise unhurt. All that was left of the Grand Duke and of his carriage and horses was “a formless mass of fragments about eight or ten inches high.” That evening when the Czar heard the news he came down to dinner as usual and did not mention the murder, but, according to a guest who was present, “after dinner the Czar and his brother-in-law amused themselves by trying to edge one another off the long narrow sofa.”

At his trial in April, 1905, Kaliaev, thin, haggard and with eyes sunken in their sockets, said to the judges, “We are two warring camps,… two worlds in furious collision. You, the representatives of capital and oppression; I, one of the avengers of the people.” Russia was in the midst of war, outside against the Japanese, and inside against her own people, who were in open revolt. “What does all this mean? It is the judgment of history upon you.” When sentence of death was pronounced, Kaliaev said he hoped his executioners would have the courage to carry it out openly and publicly. “Learn to look the advancing revolution straight in the eye,” he told the Court. But he was hanged, dressed in black, after midnight in the prison yard and buried beneath the prison wall.

In October the Revolution came; propaganda of the deed, in the murders of von Plehve and the Grand Duke Sergei, had helped to excite the nerves of the masses toward the point of insurrection. Neither organized nor led by the Socialist-Revolutionaries, Social-Democrats or Anarchists, it was the spontaneous revolution Bakunin had believed in and did not live to see. In accordance with Syndicalist theory it erupted out of a general strike by the workers, and during the regime’s first fright, succeeded in forcing the concession of a constitution and a Duma. Although these were subsequently withdrawn, and the Revolution, when the regime had recovered its nerve, ferociously suppressed, it heartened the Syndicalists’ belief in “direct action” through the general strike, and re-enforced the movement of Anarchists into the industrial unions. In Russia the Terror Brigade accomplished several more deaths before it disintegrated under the shock of the exposure of Azev in 1908. By the time the Premier, Stolypin, was assassinated in 1911 the half-lunatic world of the Romanov twilight had so darkened that it was never clear whether the assassins were genuine revolutionaries or agents provocateurs of the police.

However self-limited its acts, however visionary its dream, Anarchism had terribly dramatized the war between the two divisions of society, between the world of privilege and the world of protest. In the one it shook awake a social conscience; in the other, as its energy passed into Syndicalism, it added its quality of violence and extremism to the struggle for power of organized labour. It was an idea which drew men to follow it but because of its built-in paradox could not draw them together into a group capable of concerted action. It was