ABSTRACT
When the revolutionary storm broke at last with the massacre of Bloody Sunday, all the opposition leaders were convinced that they knew what sort of upheaval was in store for Russia. While the central party machinery was still weak and infiltrated by the police, there was a brighter side to the picture. Inside Russia party membership was growing, as one of its leaders wrote, "from hour to hour". Chernov and the Socialist Revolutionaries started the fateful year 1905 at a disadvantage compared to the Marxists, with respect to party organization. When the news of Bloody Sunday reached the exiled editors of Revolutionary Russia, they, in common with all the Russian opposition, recognized its character quickly. A new outbreak of peasant riots in the spring of 1905 led Revolutionary Russia to quote with approval a journalistic enemy, the conservative newspaper New Times. Revolutionary Russia retained its old suspicions of the Menshevik Iskra in 1905.
