c character of the activity of the institutions in which
they were the leaders. They put particular stress on the fact that the
activities of the local provincial councils, for example, were
directed mainly toward the amelioration of conditions of life among the
peasantry. But the fact that the control over these institutions, even
in the cooperative movement (so far as independent control was
allowed by the bureaucracy of the old regime), was secured to the
less democratic elements of the community, did contradict the idea of
coalition, of the bringing together of all interests and forces. These
institutions had been permitted to exist and develop only because
they were controlled by the more conservative groups. The cooperative
societies represented more truly the idea of coalition. Here in the
cooperative movement the leaders of political liberalism had always
noted with relief that one was gradually attaining the end toward
which they knew they must work--the organic union between the so-called
Intelligentsia, and the "people," meaning the broader, democratic
classes.

When the anarchy resulting from the incompetence, stupidity and perhaps
treason of the old bureaucracy reached such an acute stage in the first
weeks of March that the leaders of the Russian public saw that some
action must be taken by some one, it was the Duma that assumed the
initiative, acting in a revolutionary manner, through an executive
committee. The municipal and provincial councils, organized in unions
for war-work, and the war-industry committees, turned without delay to
the revolutionary parliament, in which many of their leading workers
were members. The leaders of the cooeperative movement could not act with
such rapidity and precision. They had not been permitted to organize a
central committee, to coordinate the work of the thousands of small
and scattered societies. These first leaders of the revolution felt
justified in taking the initiative because they alone were organized.
Also they thought they could speak in the name of all classes, including
the most democratic, because the institutions through which they acted
did include representatives of all classes. To emphasize its special
anxiety that the more democratic groups feel their direct participation
in the movement of which it had taken the leadership, the Executive
Committee of the Duma not only accepted but encouraged the development
of the revolutionary institutions of the s