Page:Emile Vandervelde - Three Aspects of the Russian Revolution - tr. Jean Elmslie Henderson Findlay (1918).djvu/91

 constantly imprisoned or exiled to Siberia. It has been dissolved five or six times. But in spite of that it has maintained its existence, and its members have kept in touch with each other even when the police suppressed the association. It has had a chequered career, dormant at times but never actually dead; it seemed impossible to destroy it because it answered a deep, elementary necessity, over which all the power of the Czar could not prevail. From the very beginning of the Revolution the organization has developed marvellously in the atmosphere of liberty. On May 1, 1917, it already numbered eighty thousand members; in the last phase of its legal existence in 1915, under the government of the Czars, it had only eight thousand.

The history of the metallurgists' Trade Union is that of all the others. All have experienced the same trials, and now have reached comparative prosperity. On May 1, 1917, round Petrograd alone there were sixty-one Trade Unions, of which more than half had been entirely reorganized and affiliated to a general Trade Union