St. Petersburg the early Nineties of the last century was a city groping its way back into sanity. The Eighties, which opened with the assassination of Alexander II, were a period of bleak reaction when life seemed to move at a snail's pace and nothing was accomplished. "When I look back at the Eighties," the historian Pokrovsky remarked, "it seems to me that there was nothing but a yawning chasm." Now once again the reaction was being tamed, and the lifeblood was flowing through the city. Industry was booming. The peasants were streaming into the towns to take up work in the shops and factories. The national income was soaring. It was not perhaps a very good time for starting a revolution.

Vladimir arrived in St. Petersburg with a handful of books, his father's top hat and frock coat, and his mother's promise of moderate support from the income arising from the Alakayevka estate. A friend in Samara had arranged for him to work in the office of a St. Petersburg lawyer called Volkenstein, but such work was not likely to be very remunerative. He found a lodging house where he could live for fifteen rubles a month. He worked in the law office by day, but every night was devoted to revolutionary affairs.

The charming adolescent who appears on the photograph taken when he was entering Kazan University had in the space of six years given place to a man who appeared twice as old. He was almost completely bald, there were deep lines on his narrow face, and he wore a carefully trimmed beard and mustache. In revolutionary circles in St. Petersburg he was known by the name of Nikolay Petrovich; more commonly he was addressed as Starik, meaning "the old man." Already he had the gravity of a middle-aged person, and he spoke with the authority of one who had spent a lifetime in revolutionary affairs. He was twenty-three years old.

Marxist study groups were already in existence in St. Petersburg. They were to be found especially among young lawyers, and long articles of an impressive subtlety and scholarship were being written on Marxism in the Yuridichesky Vestnik (The Legal Herald), but there was no concerted effort to attract the workers. Here and there a few workmen gathered together to take instruction from a student of Marxism. In those early days Vladimir's chief contribution was to insist that no advance could be made until the workers themselves were thoroughly saturated with revolutionary ideas and the theoreticians were thoroughly saturated with the habits and tastes and modes of thought of the working classes. The dialogue between theory and practice must be maintained.

In the first months be made little progress. He was feeling his way, establishing contacts, studying and writing. As he confessed to Nadezhda Krupskaya a few months later, he was spending most of his free time pounding the streets in search of Marxists, and rarely finding them. For a young intellectual to be seen in the company of workmen was to court danger, for police spies were everywhere. He would throw on a workman's cap and a shabby overcoat, and wander through the desolate working class districts of the Petersburg Side and Vasilyevsky Island, interrogating anyone who would permit himself to be interrogated, asking all manner of questions about the cost of living and labor contracts and under what conditions the workmen would strike; and all this information would be carefully entered into his notebooks. He may have known that he was already being watched by the police.

At this time Maria Alexandrovna was living in Moscow with the younger children, having abandoned Samara and the life of the provinces so that Maria and Dmitry should have a better education. Vladimir spent the winter holidays with them, and one evening in January he attended a student meeting which was being addressed by Vasfly Vorontsov, a medical doctor who had some claim to fame as the author Of a book called The Destiny of Capitalism in Russia. He belonged to that remnant of the Narodnaya Volya party which was called "Land and Freedom," and he was all for the overthrow of capitalism before it struck deep roots in Russia. Like Chernyshevsky, he envisioned a kind of peasant paradise in which all large-scale industries were abolished. It was his constant complaint that the peasants coming to Moscow and St. Petersburg were being melted down in the Satanic mills. Like Marx, but for different reasons, he wanted to overthrow the existing order and bring about the ideal state.

Vladimir had been given a ticket for the meeting at the last moment by a girl who had known him in Samara. The meeting took place in a three-room apartment on Bronnaya Street and was deliberately designed to bring together the different revolutionary groups opposing the government. Victor Chernov, later to become a leading member of the Socialist Revolutionary Party, was among the guests, and years later he remembered someone whispering to him, "Look at that young bald fellow over there; he's a very remarkable person, and something of a big wheel among Marxists in Petersburg." The young bald fellow was Vladimir, who had taken up a position just outside the main room where the speakers of the evening were gathered.

Vorontsov, the chief speaker, known affectionately as "V.V.," was regarded with deep respect by the students, who had read his book and were inclined to regard him as a prophet. He was middle-aged, thickset and corpulent; he, too, was bald and like Vladimir sported a red beard. Vladimir had studied his books and had written in Samara a pamphlet attacking them.

When Vorontsov rose to speak, the audience was hushed; they regarded him with the deference due to a man who was not merely the speaker of the evening, but a legend, a man who incarnated the revolutionary tradition of Russia. For some reason, perhaps because he was partly deaf, Vladimir failed to catch the name of the speaker. He listened attentively, took notes, and when the speaker had finished, he launched into a withering attack on the Narodnaya Volya and all the arguments advanced in its defense. Victor Chernov remembered that it was an unusually vehement and destructive onslaught, delivered with conscious superiority, well argued and without malice, and the gutter words which Vladimir later incorporated in his speeches were notably absent. When he sat down there were murmurs of approval from the audience.

Vorontsov listened to the speech with mounting fury. He realized that his authority as a revolutionary was being questioned and he must fight back.

"You have offered no proof to any of your arguments," he declared. Your statements are quite gratuitous. Show us, if you can, your basis for making these baseless statements. Submit an analysis of your f and figures. I have the authority to demand these proofs from you. My authority rests on my published works, and may I ask what published works have come from your pen?"

Vorontsov was no longer arguing. He was simply giving way conjured innocence. Vladimir replied, more self-assured than ever now that he knew the older man was at his mercy, cutting across Vorontsov’s arguments with the sharp edge of his mockery. The battle royal kept the students on the edge of their seats until at last it degenerated into name calling; then it was abruptly terminated.

Some moments later Vladimir turned to the girl who had accompanied him and said, "What is the name of the fellow I have been arguing with?"

"Vorontsov, of course. He's mad at youl"

"Vorontsov? Why didn't you tell me earlier? If I had known, I would never have debated with him!"

Such was the story told by Maria Golubeva, his friend from amara, and it is not entirely necessary to believe that Vladimir did not know the name of the speaker. It was his first appearance in a public debate outside the small debating society he attended in Samara, and he was perfectly aware of the impact he had created. The secret police were also aware of it, for a report dated January 20, 1894, was found forty years later in the official archives testifying that "a certain Ulyanov (almost certainly the brother of the Ulyanov who was hanged) made a spirited attack against the writer V.V.

Vladimir returned to St. Petersburg, wearing the laurels of his victory over Vorontsov. He was now a marked man, one to be sought after and invited to all the gatherings of Marxist revolutionaries. So it happened that on Shrove Tuesday be found himself at a party attended by most of the leading Petersburg Marxists, who had been invited to meet him. Once again his sharp tongue was in evidence. They were talking about the important tasks facing Marxists in Russia, and someone suggested that the Committee of Literacy was especially worthy of support. Vladimir replied scornfully, "If anyone wants to save the country by working for that committee, let him go ahead!"

Among those who were present at the party was a short, delicate. featured young woman called Nadezhda Konstantinovna Krups. She had a marble-white skin, a broad forehead, full lips, a smoothly rounded chin. It was a face which might have belonged to one of Chekhov's heroines, with its look of youthful daring, responsibility and gentleness. She dressed in somber black and wore her hair brushed sternly back from her forehead, but though she tried to imitate the other women of her time who devoted themselves to revolutionary work and lost their femininity in their driving determination to sacrifice themselves for the revolution, she remained wholly feminine. In time she was to become fat and ungainly, but in those early years she possessed a quiet beauty.

Like Vladimir, she came from the gentry. Both her parents belonged to the nobility; neither had inherited an estate. Her father may have been descended from Prince Andrey Kurbsky, the famous boyar who courageously attacked Ivan the Terrible, for the coats of arms of the Krupsky and Kurbsky families are notably similar. As a very young officer her father had been sent to put down the Polish insurrection of 1863. Unlike the majority of Russians who took part in that savage punitive expedition, he developed a lifelong fondness for the Poles, and he eagerly accepted the post of military governor of a district in Poland when it was offered to him. He was a liberal who detested cruelty in any form; as military governor be shielded the population from the ruthless policy of Russification then being enforced by Alexander 11. He forbade the hounding of Jews and the infliction of arbitrary punishment on the Poles. He built a hospital and a school. The population worshipped him; but a general, visiting the district on a tour of inspection, found him too sympathetic to the Poles and ordered his arrest. He was brought to trial on the charges of speaking Polish and of not attending church. There were appeals and counter appeals. The trumped-up charges were debated in the courts for ten years, while the family sank deeper and deeper into poverty. Nadezhda's father became an insurance agent, a clerk, a factory inspector, always wandering from city to city. He died when she was thirteen or fourteen. He had been vindicated by the courts before his death, but he left his family in debt and poverty.

At fourteen Nadezhda was already helping to support the family by giving lessons to the neighboring children. She took evening courses at the gymnasium and spent the rest of the day teaching, or helping her mother with the boarders, or writing out envelopes for business firms. (Nearly a quarter of a century after her meeting with Vladimir she was still writing addresses on envelopes, in Switzerland, to make ends meet.) Her mother's small widow's pension was not enough to keep them alive.

During the years of her adolescence she was oppressed by the sense of society's failure to help the poor. She was twenty-one when she first realized that men and women had been questioning the bases of society for centuries; and she studied textbooks on the social sciences. It occurred to her that if the workers could read these books, they would soon improve their working conditions, and she therefore regarded the Committee of Literacy, which had been brought into existence by a group of philanthropists, with especial favor. For two years she had been a member of a Marxist study circle. When she met Vladimir and heard him scornfully attacking the committee, she was shocked and at the same time strangely moved; perhaps, after all, there were sharper weapons which could be used to change the existing social system.

In the course of the following months she saw more of him. Once while they were walking along the banks of the Neva he told her about his dead brother Alexander, and about the last summer they spent together, and how Alexander would rise with the first light to peer at worms under a microscope. "I never thought he would become a revolutionary," he told her. "A revolutionary doesn't give himself up to the study of worms!" Vladimir took to spending more and more time with her. He valued her knowledge of the working class, her understanding and sympathy for the oppressed, and she in turn valued his incisive judgments and soaring ambition. Over him she threw the mantle of her maternal protection; and since she was never capable of disputing with him on doctrinal matters, but simply served him faithfully and obediently, endlessly performing chores for him, writing his letters and coding and decoding secret messages, the relationship remained quietly affectionate to the end.

Meanwhile the organization of the study circles continued. It was difficult work, and sometimes dangerous. Vladimir lived in an apartment on Kazachy Street not far from the Fontanka Canal and fifteen To reach a worker's apartment minutes walk from the heart of the city he would usually take a roundabout route to shake off any police spies. A dockworker, Vladimir Kniazev, remembered how Vladimir attended these study meetings in appropriate disguise, wearing a cap drawn over his eyes and his coat collar turned up to hide the lower part of his face. He remembered, too, that Vladimir, whom he knew as Nikolay Petrovich, wore an autumn coat even in the heat of summer. The first time they met the following conversation took place:

"Are you Kniazev?"

"Yes."

"I'm Nikolay Petrovich. I'm late. I had to go a long way round. Well, is everyone ready?"

But the visitor resembled a headmaster rather than a conspirator; he asked precise questions and expected precise replies; he encouraged those who were backward and castigated those whose answers came too easily. He seemed to know everything, and there was something even intimidating in his calm self-assurance. Kniazev describes one of those meetings:

When he bade good evening to the workers, he took his place and explained the reason which had brought us together, and the program to be followed. He spoke seriously, precisely, carefully reflecting on each word; he spoke as though he admitted no counterarguments. The workers listened attentively and answered his questions about their work, the factories, labor conditions, their comrades, what interested them most and what they read and whether they were capable of understanding and assimilating socialist ideas, and so on.

The principal idea of Nikolay Petrovich, as we understood it, was that the working class was not sufficiently conscious of its own interests and did not yet know how to make profitable use of its potentialities. Workmen failed to realize that once they were united, they could break through all the obstacles laced in their path. By continually developing their knowledge, they could improve their situation and ultimately free themselves from slavery.

Nikolay Petrovich spoke for more than two hours. He was easy to listen to, for he explained everything precisely and simply. Comparing his talk with those of other intellectuals we knew, we came to the conclusion that be was altogether different because more convincing; and when be left us after arranging the date of the next meeting, the comrades turned to one another and said, "Well, there's a fellow who knows what he is talking about."

So Nikolay Petrovich went about his secret journeys, establishing cells of six workers, addressing them, saturating himself in their problems-as mysterious a figure as Nechayev, who also used the name Petrovich-and Kniazev might never have known his name except for the fact that his mother died and left him a small legacy, and when he asked for the name of a lawyer who would help him to collect the legacy, he was told of a certain V. Ulyanov who for some reason wanted his address to be kept secret. The address was Apartment 13, at 7 Kazachy Street. Kniazev was told to commit the address to memory . He set out to find the lawyer, rang the bell, and was told that Mr. Ulyanov had not yet returned, though he was expected shortly; meanwhile why not wait for him in his apartment? It was a small apartment: an iron bed, a bureau, a chest of drawers, three or four chairs, nothing more. He had not long to wait. Soon the lawyer came in and threw off his overcoat, saying, "Ah, so you've been waiting, Wait a moment while I change." He vanished into another room, and the dockworker suddenly realized that Nikolay Petrovich and V. Ulyanov were the same person. Kniazev gives a characteristic portrait of the young Petersburg lawyer:

Vladimir Kniazev was a workman who never played a great revo. lutionary role. Ivan Babushkin was a revolutionary in his own right, a man of extraordinary resourcefulness who spent many years transporting illegal documents across the frontier, and was finally shot by order of General Rennenkampf when he was discovered rushing a trainload of arms to Chita, in Siberia, where a Soviet of Workers and Soldiers Deputies had been created following the Moscow insurreo. tion of December 1905. Babushkin was working at the Kronstadt Naval Base when he joined a study circle. He too came in contact with Nikolay Petrovich. "He never consulted any notes," Babusbkin said, "and he was continually pausing to provoke us to speak or start an argument, and if we answered he would always make us justify our positions. These conversations were always lively and interesting, and of course they accustomed us to speaking in public. We were always amazed by the learning of the lecturer. We used to say among ourselves that he had such big brains that they had pushed his hair out." Babushkin complained that Nikolay Petrovich set him so many tasks to do that he had almost no time to do his own work, and his toolbox was full of little notes about wages and working conditions to be reported to the lecturer.

Vladimir was, in fact, making a survey in depth of industrial conditions in St. Petersburg; and all the facts garnered from the workers were grist to his mill. He was compiling vast statistical systems to be used later when he wrote his first full-length work, The Development of Capitalism in Russia. Meanwhile he wrote pamphlets, the most important of them being a hundred-page essay written in reply to an attack on Marxism in the magazine Russkoye Bogatstvo (Russian Wealth). This first pamphlet, like his last, followed a form which was to become familiar. He begins by accusing the adversary of misunderstanding Marx and deliberately distorting Marxist doctrine; he then examines selected passages from the offending work and, after worrying them like a dog chewing on a rag, he shows how implausible and ridiculous are their pretensions. Finally, be makes his own selection of passages from Marx's writings and describes what he conceives to be the pure doctrine of Marxism. The destruction of the adversary is accompanied by a heavy Germanic ill humor, special pleading, and considerable distortion of the evidence. Sarcasm is one of the principal weapons. It is not a weapon which commends itself often to Russians; nor, in his bands, is it always effective. Too often we are made aware of the lion licking his chops as he is about to tear an inoffensive animal apart. The title of the pamphlet, directed against men like Vorontsov, was What the "Friends of the People" Are and How They Fight against the Social Democrats.

"Scratch a 'Friend of the People' and you will find a bourgeois," he writes; and the pamphlet may be regarded as a prolonged attack upon the bourgeois and upon the peasants, who are, according to the anthor, merely bourgeois in disguise. Those who think otherwise "are throwing out the meat from the egg and playing with the shell." Their arguments are "filthy," and their opinions "childish." They are so despicable that it is scarcely worth arguing with them. So he writes, while arguing with them bitterly, coming to the conclusion that the argument is worthwhile only because it offers useful lessons to Russian socialists. As for the bourgeois, they are double-faced, progressive and reactionary at once, demanding an end to all the medieval tyrannies which continued to plague Russia, while seeking to preserve their position of domination; and while attacking the bourgeois, he reserves his most bitter denunciations for the bureaucracy, which is roundly described as "a pack of little judases" who conceal their vast designs "behind the fig leaves of little phrases about loving the people." He writes:

By the "rural proletariat" he means the landless peasants, and the dream of an alliance between the workers and these disfranchised peasants was to pursue him for many years. What the -Friends of the People" Are and Hotv They Fight against the Social Democrats is an extremely important document in the development of Russian Communism, but the attacks on the "Friends of the People" are the least satisfactory part of it. The document is most powerful when argument is abandoned for statements delivered ex cathedra, with a passionate conviction in their truth and certainty.

At such moments, the twenty-four-year old author takes on the role of a prophet, seeing far beyond the confines of Russia to a world where there will be no nobility, no bureaucracy and no bourgeois, and all the ions on the earth will follow the Russian proletariat unnumbered mill to bring about a world-wide revolution. In the final passage of the pamphlet, to which he attached great importance, he devised different arrangements of type to underline the significance of his message. The peroration reads:

Accordingly, it is on the working class that the Social Democrats concentrate all their attention and all their energy. When its advanced representatives have appropriated and mastered the ideas of scientific socialism, the idea of the historic mission of the Russian workers, and when these ideas have become widespread, and when enduring organizations have been established among the workers, transforming the present sporadic economic struggle for the workers into conscious class warfare, -- then the Russian WORKER, having placed himself at the head of all the democratic elements, will overthrow the absolutism and lead THE RUSSIAN PROLETARIAT (side by side with the proletariat OF ALL COUNTRIES) a l o n g t h e s t r a I g h t r o a d o f o p e n p o l I t I c a l s t r u g g l e t o t h e VICTORIUS COMMUNIST REVOLUTION!

Once written, the pamphlet was regarded as having sufficient importance to deserve printing, and a young engineer, Alexey Ganchin, was instructed to set up a printing press. He knew a printer who lived in Yuryev-Polski a hundred miles to the northwest of Moscow, and went off hopefully to help set the type, but after protracted negotiations nothing came of the venture. Finally he bought a typewriter and a lithographic stone, and with the help of friends he succeeded very slowly in producing a few copies. He began work in June. It was November before the final copies on yellow paper were distributed secretly in Moscow.

Winter was the time for agitation, the time when the study circles gathered momentum and more and more workers were caught in the secret web. Previously Vladimir had been something of an amateur revolutionary; now he became a professional, living only for the work of winning disciples to his cause. He was continually building up contacts, devising secret codes, inventing new stratagems to outwit the police spies. He knew all the short cuts in the workers' districts, and the shadowy roads where the police dared not enter. The groups of six members, each group forming a study circle and a close-knit committee for agitating among the workers, were kept separate from one another; only Vladimir knew them all. If he was arrested, the secret organization of workers' groups would fall apart. It was decided therefore to appoint a successor": the choice fell on Krupskaya who, though an active revolutionary, was never followed by the police.

The organization of the St. Petersburg study circles followed closely on the lines laid down by the old Narodnaya Volya. Vladimir deliberately modeled himself on Alexander Mikhailov, the close friend of Zhelyabov, who was constantly inventing new techniques of secrecy. Vladimir ordered that all messages, of whatever kind, should be sent in code, or in invisible ink, or in books where words or letters were marked with penciled dots. Once Krupskaya and others undertook to translate a whole book into code, with unfortunate results. They had translated half the book when they decided to see whether they could translate it back again into ordinary Russian; they failed.

For printing or hectographing revolutionary pamphlets, for building up libraries of books, and for occasional bribes to the police, large sums of money had to be found. During his two years in St. Petersburg, Vladimir relied largely on the financial support of Alexandra Kahnykova, a woman of wealth married to a high official in the government, who despised her own class and threw herself into the revolutionary struggle. She opened a bookshop on the Liteiny, one of the principal streets of St. Petersburg, and built up a small publishing empire distributing cheap books for the masses. Like Krupskaya, who was her close friend, she gave lectures to the workers. On all matters connected with printing illegal literature Alexandra Kalmykova could be relied upon for help. The first struggle-the struggle for printing presses and the means to provide an unending stream of illegal literature-seemed to be over in the early spring of 1895. The time had come to strengthen the foundations of the party.

In the spring Vladimir could look back on an exhausting year and a half spent in building up a tenuous web of secret study circles. He had tramped through countless streets, met countless workers, slipped out of the nets of countless police spies, and he knew as much as any intellectual knew about the mood of industrial St. Petersburg. Suddenly in March he fell ill. The illness was sufficiently serious to bring his mother up from Moscow to his bedside. It was pneumonia. He rallied quickly, but he was too weak to take an active part in conspiratorial affairs. He had been planning a trip abroad to confer with Plekhanov and Axelrod, the two exiled leaders of the Social Democratic Party who were living in Switzerland. A passport, dated March 15, was already in his possession, but he did not leave Russia until April 25. Thin, pale, suffering from some undiagnosed stomach trouble and not completely recovered from the effects of pneumonia, be took the train to Berlin, and so by way of Salzburg to Switzerland.

At Salzburg, where he changed trains, he wrote a letter to his mother complaining with a kind of amused tolerance that whenever he tried to speak German on the train no one could understand him, and he understood the Germans "with the greatest difficulty, or rather I don't understand them one little bit." He had trouble understanding the simplest words. He tried to say something to the conductor, but the conductor obviously understood nothing at all and began shouting, growing more and more angry with the strange red-bearded passenger who seemed to be talking some incomprehensible foreign language. Then he was gone, and Vladimir was left to reflect that the important thing was not to lose courage but to go on trying to talk German even though it meant assiduously distorting the language.

In Geneva he met Plekhanov, who twelve years before had founded with Axelrod and Vera Zasulich the "Group for the Emancipation of Labor," which aimed through the publication of books and pamphlets to arouse a conscious working-class movement in Russia. Plekhanov himself belonged to the nobility, but as a very young man he had thrown himself into the struggle on behalf of the workingmen in St. Petersburg. He was completely fearless. He made fiery speeches against the Tsar's government. He led demonstrations. He was always in the forefront, but for some reason the police were never able to get their hands on him. In 1880, at the age of twenty-three, he was forced to leave Russia, having already led a full revolutionary life. Tall and elegant, always impeccably dressed, with a pointed black beard and sweeping mustaches, he spent his time writing books on the nature of socialism in a villa overlooking the lake.

Though Plekhanov was the high priest of Russian Marxism, and all the young Marxist revolutionaries looked up to him, he had long ago lost any effective control of the revolutionary movement. The Group for the Emancipation of Labor existed in a kind of limbo, with Plekhanov speaking and writing as though he were drawing up the preliminary blueprints for a revolution to take place in a hundred years. Vladimir found him cold and distant, though courteous and well-disposed. Plekhanov read some of the articles Vladimir had written, uncomfortably aware of their violence. Reading one of these articles he said, "You show the bourgeois your behind!" and then he added, "We, on the contrary, look them in the face." It was a just rebuke. For the rest of his life Plekhanov was to be troubled by the raw violence and venomous passion which filled so many of Vladimir's articles.

Axelrod was made of coarser material than Plekhanov. This was at once apparent in their appearance: Plekhanov carrying about with him an air of refinement, Axelrod resembling a shaggy bear. Plekhanov was reserved, Axelrod quivered with excitement. On intellectual matters they were in agreement, but in all other matters they were at poles apart. When Vladimir reached Zurich the day after his meeting with Plekhanov, Axelrod greeted him like a long-lost brother. They talked late into the night, resumed their conversation the next morning, and went on talking for three or four days. As usual there were Russian police spies in Zurich. Axelrod suggested they should go into the country and continue their discussions unmolested by the attentions of the spies. For a week they wandered among the bills, endlessly debating the coming revolution in Russia, which seemed to grow closer and more desirable the more they debated it. On one subject Axelrod was firm. In all his articles Vladimir poured scorn on the liberals. Axelrod, whose roots were deep in the Narodnaya Volya, insisted that there must be a common front of all revolutionary parties, in the common need to overthrow the autocracy. Nothing was to be gained by relentlessly reviling the other parties who were also aiming to make Russia a socialist state. Vladimir professed to be convinced by the force of the argument, though with secret reservations. He had no reservations however in agreeing with Axelrod's suggestion that the study circles should be organized into an active political party. it was also agreed to publish a political magazine to include articles written inside Russia and smuggled out. Finally Vladimir agreed to try to seek funds to support the exiled revolutionaries. They parted on the best of terms. Axelrod was particularly impressed by Vladimir's courtesy and fairmindedness.

From Zurich, Vladimir went on to Paris. He was amazed by the size of the city, the wide, well-lighted streets, the boulevards, the Frenchmen's lack of restraint, "so different from the respectability and severity of St. Petersburg." Living was cheap - he could obtain a furnished room for six to ten francs a week. He thought of settling down for a month or two of study. The Paris Commune had taken place a quarter of a century before, but there were men still living who could describe it as though it had happened a week ago. Among them was Paul Lafargue, the son-in-law of Marx, who was living quietly with his wife Laura in Passy. Vladimir could scarcely contain his excitement. He brought flowers to them and talked at length about the coming revolution, describing how the workmen of St. Petersburg spent their evenings poring over the works of Karl Marx.

"You mean the workers are reading Marx?" Lafargue asked incredulously.

"Yes, they are reading him."

"But do they understand him?"

"Yes, they understand him."

"I am afraid you are mistaken," Lafargue said gently. "No, they don't understand anything. Here in France, after twenty years of socialist propaganda, nobody understands Marxl"

Vladimir spent about a month in Paris, going everywhere. It was summer, and he no longer felt an overmastering desire to work. He sauntered along the boulevards, examined the shops, visited the Mur des Fe'de're's at P'ere Lachaise, where the Communards were shot, and sought out French socialists. Though he had been learning French from childhood, he had the usual trouble making himself understood. His stomach still troubled him. A friend told him about a Swiss watering place where he might effect a cure, and he was off again to Switzerland, his money low, his spirits high, and there was apparently no thought in his head about study circles and illegal printing presses and the grim tasks of the future. He spent a few days at the watering place, and wrote off a letter to his mother, "I have exceeded my budget, and cannot hope to manage on my resources. Please send me another hundred rubles." Evidently his mother had already been providing him with funds.

From Switzerland during the first days of August he went on to Germany. In Berlin he took a small apartment near the Tiergarten. The doctors had told him to bathe as frequently as possible, and so he bathed every morning in the Spree and spent the rest of the day in the Royal Library; and sometimes, weary of study, he would spend whole days sauntering through the streets, picking up the sounds of German which he still found difficult to understand, or buying books. He bought so many books that he was soon out of funds again and more money had to be sent- to him. In the evening he sometimes attended the theater. Before a performance of Hauptinann's The Weavers he read the play through in the hope that he would understand everything being said on the stage; but the sounds of German proved too much for him. Maria Alexandrovna hinted that he would be well advised not to return home too soon-she may have heard that the police had been following him and knew all about his movements. "It's nice to be invited out, but home is best," he answered, and early in September he was on his way to St. Petersburg. When he crossed the frontier, the police officials examined his luggage minutely. They failed to find the polygraph machine and the illegal literature concealed in the false bottom of his trunk

In St. Petersburg he was restless. He had difficulty picking up the threads of his existence. There were revolutionary matters to attend to, but there was also the pressing problem of earning a living. He had trouble finding a suitable apartment, and he was continually having to ask for more money from his mother. His cousins, the Ardashevs, thought of employing him on a lawsuit over an inheritance, but nothing came of it. To make matters worse, a wave of strikes was spreading over St. Petersburg and be wanted to spend every moment of the day in writing propaganda leaflets and in seeing that they fell into the right hands. He was in continual correspondence with Plekhanov and Axelrod, sending them reports about the strikes in the bindings of books, receiving in exchange books which had to be torn apart in order to find the letter hidden somewhere in the spine; he complained that Axelrod was using too strong a glue and said that ordinary potato flour was sufficient. He planned a newspaper for workers to be printed on the illegal press of the Narodnaya Volya. It was to be called Rabocheye Dyelo (The Workers' Cause). The police were shadowing him. They were becoming more expert; he would leave his apartment only to discover a police spy in the street and, after shaking him off and taking a streetcar and then wandering down some deserted street, he would find another waiting for him at a turn in the road. They were like ghosts, and they sprang up everywhere.

The first issue of Rabocheye Dyelo was ready to go to the printer by December 20, 1895. On that evening there was a meeting in Krupskaya's apartment to discuss last-minute changes in the copy; one set of proofs was given to a young revolutionary called Vaneyev, the other remained in Krupskaya's hands. It was arranged that Vaneyev should make the final revisions, and Krupskaya would call for them in the morning. There was no sign of Vaneyev in his lodgings the next morning. The night before, the police had spread their net wide and caught nearly all the leading members of the revolutionary organization. Interrogated, Vladimir answered calmly, denied that he was a Social Democrat, and when asked to explain why illegal literature had been found on him, he shrugged his shoulders and said he must have picked it up merely as reading matter in the house of someone whose name he had forgotten.

Thrown into a small narrow cell in the House of Preliminary Detention on Shpalernaya Street, he became a model prisoner. Outwardly he was obedient, helpful, disciplined. Inwardly he was a seething volcano of activity, working as hard as ever to bring about the revolution. The workers' study groups were still in existence, and lectures and pamphlets were secretly smuggled out. He learned a little to his surprise that he was permitted to borrow books from outside libraries, and he borrowed hundreds: some of them contained secret messages indicated by microscopic dots on the letters. He planned a vast work on the development of capitalism in Russia and set about writing it. Communication with the outside world depended on the supply of milk. Between the lines of perfectly innocuous letters there would be words written in milk; and when they were held over a candle flame the messages in milk would appear in yellowish brown. In his cell he kneaded bread to form hollow pellets for the milk; when he heard the peephole being opened, be popped the pellets into his mouth. Once he wrote, "Today I have eaten six inkpots." Since be could not use a candle flame in his cell to decipher the messages sent to him, he immersed them in boiling tea. Every waking moment was spent in agitation. An angry proclamation entitled "To the Tsar's Government , first written in milk, was produced in hundreds of hectographed copies, while the police went in search of the author. "I'm in a far better position than most of the citizens of Russia," he wrote in one of his milk letters to his mother. "They can never find me."

He spent a little more than a year in prison. Prison life agreed with him. He gained weight and rejoiced in exercising his revolutionary authority while hoodwinking the guards. To keep fit, be did Swedish exercises in his cell. He was luckier than some of the other prisoners who were arrested with him. Vaneyev contracted tuberculosis, from which he never recovered, and another went insane. The prison was bitterly cold in winter, and most prisoners found it difficult to sleep on their iron beds with their rough straw mattresses and thin gray sheets which smelled of disinfectant. Vladimir attacked the problem of sleep with the same careful planning which went into his reading and his messages written in milk. He decided that just before going to bed he would perform fifty genuflections. Fifty times every evening he prostrated himself in his cell, to the amusement of the guard who sometimes watched through the peephole, wondering at the religious devotions of this man who refused to attend services in the prison chapel. These exercises sent a warm glow through his body, and he was able to sleep in the coldest weather as soon as he lay down on the bed. He did not waste his strength in nightlong quarrels with himself, like most of the other prisoners.

Like Nechayev, he was already powerful, though behind bars. The small man in Cell 193, with his books and his bread pellets, was already exerting an influence out of all proportion to his means. Among the study groups he was still Nikolay Petrovich or K. Tulin, or any of the other pseudonyms which he gathered about him as though these changing names provided him with a cloak of invisibility. In a few years another and more memorable name would arise. It would be a soft and caressing name like a girl's - a strange name for a man so hard and so determined to destroy the world from which he sprang.

Vladimir Ulyanov vanishes, and instead there is Lenin.

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