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largely young blood, there remain Stalin and his smallband of seasoned henchmen.The second main basis of the revolutionary power,the Soviets, was likewise new; but, unlike the party, theSoviets did not originate in any Marxist theory and werenot modelled on any preconceived plan. Soviets, orcouncils, of workmen and others sprang up spontaneouslyin the 1905 Revolution in a number of places, particularlySt Petersburg and Moscow, mainly as strike committees,though not merely of trade unionists. They were incoherentin their aims, had practically no interconnexions,and quickly dissolved or were suppressed. TheSt Petersburg soviet, which was mainly a Menshevikbody and included Trotsky, with Lenin in the background,after six weeks' existence accepted disbandmentby the government; but the Moscow soviet literallystuck to its guns, and it took a desperate week of streetfighting before guard battalions, summoned from thecapital, overpowered the Moscow workers (December1905). This was the culminating point of the 1905Revolution. Henceforward the Soviets had the aureoleof blood and martyrdom, as Sinn Fein after the DublinEaster Rebellion (cf. pp. 368-369).Lenin had preached the necessity of self-constitutedcommittees of the peasantry taking the law into their ownhands and settling the land question for themselves (ashappened in 1917 and 1918), but he had not formulatedSoviets. Now, with his unerring feel for popular initiativeand for what was Russian, he seized on the Soviets asspontaneous fighting organizations in which lay the germsof a revolutionary government, as the indispensable formfor a radically new kind of democracy, not that of anational parliamentary republic, but one to be combinedwith party dictatorship.When the March Revolution broke out, Soviets ofevery description sprang up everywhere, in the armyand navy included. After a few months they linked upwith each other on a national scale in the Congress ofSoviets of Soldiers', Workers', and Peasants' Delegates,under the leadership of the Petrograd Soviet. Thisbody acted as a rival to the Provisional Government,63