ed
from the prison for the purpose. Officially known as the Association of
the Russian People and the Association to Combat the Revolution, these
organizations were popularly nicknamed the Black Hundreds. Most of the
members were paid directly by the government for their services, while
others were rewarded with petty official positions. The Czar himself
accepted membership in these infamous organizations of hired assassins.
Within three weeks after the issuance of the Manifesto more than a hundred
organized pogroms took place, the number of killed amounting to nearly four
thousand; the wounded to more than ten thousand, according to the most
competent authorities. In Odessa alone more than one thousand persons were
killed and many thousands wounded in a four-days' massacre. In all the
bloody pages of the history of the Romanovs there is nothing comparable to
the frightful terror of this period.

Naturally, this brutal vengeance and the deception which Nicholas II and
his advisers had practised upon the people had the immediate effect of
increasing the relative strength and prestige of the Socialists in the
revolutionary movement as against the less radical elements. To meet such
brutality and force only the most extreme measures were deemed adequate.
The Council of Workmen's Deputies, which had been organized by the
proletariat of St. Petersburg a few days before the Czar issued his
Manifesto, now became a great power, the central guiding power of the
Revolution. Similar bodies were organized in other great cities. The
example set by the city workers was followed by the peasants in many places
and Councils of Peasants' Deputies were organized. In a few cases large
numbers of soldiers, making common cause with these bodies representing the
working class, formed Councils of Soldiers' Deputies. Here, then, was a new
phenomenon; betrayed by the state, weary of the struggle to democratize
and liberalize the political state, the workers had established a sort of
revolutionary self-government of a new kind, entirely independent of the
state. We shall never comprehend the later developments in Russia,
especially the phenomenon of Bolshevism, unless we have a sympathetic
understanding of these Soviets--autonomous, non-political units of
working-class self-government, composed of delegates elected directly by
the workers.

As the revolutionary resistance to the Black Hundreds increased, and the
rapidly growing Soviets of workme