Page:Ossendowski - The Shadow of the Gloomy East.djvu/103

Rh French and Russian press sensational revelations, unmasking Azev. The scandal was astounding, but it came too late, for the revolutionary parties were utterly crushed by the arrests due to Azev's informations, still more by the mutual distrust and suspicion engendered by these denunciations.

Just at that time there appeared a new faction which changed the Internal organisation, and several years later came to the surface of the international stage as Bolshevism first and Communism afterwards.

The famous leader of the workmen in the revolutionary period of 1905, the priest Gapon, was also a tool of the secret police; for it was he who led the enthusiastic masses to implore the Tsar to grant a Constitution, and to be massacred before the gates of the Winter Palace in Petrograd by General Trepov's troops.

The priest Gapon, preacher, socialist, and god of the working classes, was Kurlov's agent, and for Judas's silver delivered to death hundreds of defenceless workmen who put their trust in him. The "Okhrana" helped him to escape to Finland, but the Revolutionary Tribunal tracked him to his hiding-place, and the engineer Ruthenberg carried out the sentence and hanged him in a solitary hut in Teryoki.

Side by side with these ghouls of reaction there worked amongst the same people very different men—the revolutionary agents. There were many, but I shall mention only those who were not regarded as