The Coming Revolution
The revolutionary intellectuals sensed that their day of isolation was drawing to a close; tomorrow they might find themselves captains of multitudes and determiners of Russia's destiny and perhaps the world's. With fiercer passion than ever, they fell to engaging in controversies of a minuteness, stubborness, sweep, and fury unheard of in all the history of politics. At socialist congresses in 1903 and 1907, men who were hunted together and exiled together and shared a common basic program, yet wrangled endlessly with fanatical fury and subtlety- in the one case for three and in the other for five whole weeks of days and nights on end, reckless of financial cost, drain on health, buzzing of spies, and the fact that they were actually drived during the course of the exhausting debates from one land to another. Even on the boat going over the English Channel, they never stopped the argument for a moment.

Written declaration of the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II The controversies of the period carries over into the underground movement inside Russia, into the prisons and places of penal exile in Siberia, into the cafes and hovels and lodging-houses of distant and alien cities. So great was the turmoil and the chatter, so unearthly the hours kept, that it became commonplace in hospitable Geneva and Zurich to see advertisements reading: "Roomers Wanted, No Russians."

The angry, intolerant battle went on under the very eyes of the tsarist police; government archives filled up with reports of positions and faction documents. Police spies were as energetic as others in taking sides. Even as the revolutionists began the opening skirmishes with the common enemy, their war with each other conintued to gain in fury....The continued "discussion" was to make up the principal content of the two decades of Russian history from the Revolutions of 1917 to the purges of 1937, and its echoes were to shake the foundations not of Russia alone, but of all the world.

Quote from Three Who Made a Revolution, by Bertram D. Wolfe.
Copyright 1983, Stein and Day Publications.
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