Konstantin Zinoviev, the most active member of the Bolshevik party, who became its chairman of the party’s foreign press committee.

Trotsky returned directly to Petrograd, where he and Zinoviev, and the rest of the Bolshevik party, met again in the great hall of a conference hall located in the old City Hall. This meeting gave a clear demonstration of Bolshevik organization. It was chaired by Lenin, who also spoke: “Only the victory of Trotsky over the bourgeoisie, the party and the country are going to save the Revolution.” Zinoviev read a speech by Lenin on behalf of the working people of the United States against the intervention of its government, and this speech was applauded enthusiastically by the Bolshevik delegates.

While the representatives of the Soviet Government, elected to represent the various Soviet republics in the Congress of Soviets, discussed the question of the future policies of their respective governments, there was a meeting of these representatives which was to take place on the evening of the 29th of February, 1916. And that meeting, which took place in the auditorium of the Petrograd Soviet, took place exactly in the same tensely tense atmosphere which occupied the conference room in the City Hall on the night of the 19th of February—the atmosphere of revolutionary struggle against imperialist aggression, against capitalist exploitation, against the counterrevolution, against the reactionary classes that run Russia and China—an atmosphere that characterized the discussion that day on whether to overthrow Lenin and the Communist party and form a Communist party of the whole of Russia.

In the days preceding the meeting the bourgeois press had published an appeal to Lenin and the Bolsheviks, calling upon them to “stand for the victory of the revolution against the bourgeoisie, the proletariat, the peasantry and the bourgeoisie.” Those sentiments also were expressed both in the press of Russia and, even more importantly, in the speech of the Russian Communist party and in the speeches of all of its leaders in the Soviet Republic. Only a few members of the press of Russia, however, dared to put forth such views in their newspaper articles, and the bourgeois press which remained silent on the subject was even more timid, keeping silent because of fears of being censured in the Soviet Republic.

On the evening of the 29th of February, the meeting of the Petrograd Soviet passed through a dramatic stage in which the meeting began to talk in an almost rousing manner. Trotsky, the chairman of the meeting, with other delegates