ABSTRACT
Beginning in 1901, under the leadership of a police official named Sergei Zubatov, the government actually had been organizing workers into worker associations controlled by the police. Zubatov, a revolutionary turned police official who envisioned himself serving both the workers and the state that oppressed them, somehow had convinced his superiors that his 'police socialism' could direct the proletariat's energies away from dangerous political concerns to a less-threatening concentration on wages and working conditions. As Nicholas Berdyaev, a former Marxist turned conservative religious philosopher, put it: In Russia it was not the communist revolution but the liberal bourgeois revolution that proved to be a utopia. In the aftermath of the 1905 defeat, however, the prospects of any revolution seemed, if not utopian, at least remote. Russia's next revolution still would have to be bourgeois. Only afterward, as Russian capitalism matured and the proletariat grew, would the proletariat's chance for power come.
