ABSTRACT
Under Tsar Nicholas the First all the Russians were bound up in wires of organisation that were a kind of magnetic coil. It was intended to govern for the protection of the monarchy and all that belonged thereto, but so many fingers had picked at the insulation that it could generate nothing. When officialdom works from the top downwards, there must be more than a possibility of corruption and a certainty of inaction. The man on the job, the expert, is allowed no say in policy unless he is admitted to an official post, in which case, to protect himself, he must intrigue as ably as his superiors, and the technical needs of which he has knowledge are again subordinated to office politics. The more open-minded Moscow audience was coming to have more unified ideas, because more and more of its members, the naïve and the forthright, were acquiring progressive ones.
