insurrections by the masses, believed that the supreme necessity was
education and organization of all the working-people. Still relying upon
the industrial proletariat to lead the struggle, they nevertheless
recognized that the peasants were indispensable. The Bolsheviki, on the
other hand, relied exclusively upon armed insurrection, initiated and
directed by desperate minorities. The Mensheviki contended that the time
for secret, conspiratory action was past; that Russia had outgrown that
earlier method. As far as possible, they carried the struggle openly into
the political field. They organized unions, educational societies, and
co-operatives, confident that through these agencies the workers would
develop cohesion and strength, which, at the right time, they would use as
their class interests dictated. The Bolsheviki, on the other hand, clung to
the old conspiratory methods, always mastered by the idea that a sudden
_coup_ must some day place the reins of power in the hands of a
revolutionary minority of the workers and enable them to set up a
dictatorship. That dictatorship, it must be understood, was not to be
permanent; democracy, possibly even political democracy, would come later.

As we have already noted, into the ranks of the terrorist
Socialist-Revolutionaries and the Bolsheviki spies and provocative agents
wormed their way in large numbers. It is the inevitable fate of secret,
conspiratory movements that this should be so, and also that it should
result in saturating the minds of all engaged in the movements with
distrust and suspicion. More than once the charge of being a provocateur
was leveled at Lenine and at Trotzky, but without justification,
apparently. There was, indeed, one incident which placed Lenine in a bad
light. It belongs to a somewhat later period than we have been discussing,
but it serves admirably to illustrate conditions which obtained throughout
the whole dark period between the two great revolutions. One of Lenine's
close friends and disciples was Roman Malinovsky, a fiery speaker of