ital, _en route_ to Moscow, and found
to contain--paving-stones! How General Kuropatkin managed to amass a
fortune of over six million rubles during the war with Japan was
remembered. Fear that the same kind of treason was being perpetrated grew
almost to the panic point.

So bad were conditions in the army, so completely had the Germanophile
reactionaries sabotaged the organization, that the people themselves took
the matter in hand. Municipalities all over the country formed a Union of
Cities to furnish food, clothes, and other necessaries to the army. The
National Union of Zemstvos did the same thing. More than three thousand
institutions were established on the different Russian fronts by the
National Union of Zemstvos. These institutions included hospitals,
ambulance stations, feeding stations for troops on the march, dental
stations, veterinary stations, factories for manufacturing supplies, motor
transportation services, and so on through a long catalogue of things which
the administration absolutely failed to provide. The same great
organization furnished millions of tents and millions of pairs of boots and
socks. Civil Russia was engaged in a great popular struggle to overcome
incompetence, corruption, and sabotage in the bureaucracy. For this work
the civilian agencies were not thanked by the government. Instead, they
were oppressed and hindered. Against them was directed the hate of the
dark forces of the "occult government" and at the same time the fierce
opposition and scorn of men who called themselves Socialists and champions
of proletarian freedom!

There was treachery in the General Staff and throughout the War Department,
at the very head of which was a corrupt traitor, Sukhomlinov. It was
treachery in the General Staff which led to the tragic disasters in East
Prussia. The great drive of the Austrian and German armies in 1915, which
led to the loss of Poland, Lithuania, and large parts of Volhynia and
Courland, and almost entirely eliminated Russia from the war, was
unquestionably brought about by co-operation with the German General Staff
on the part of the sinister "occult government," as the Germanophile
reactionary conspiracy in the highest circles came to be known.

No wonder that Plechanov and his friends in their Manifesto to the Russian
workers declared that the reactionaries were defending Russia from
subjugation by Germany in "a half-hearted way," and that "our people will
never forget the