ABSTRACT
The police raid of the Vallakh home and a subsequent visit to the Bialystok jail to see his father both made deep impressions on Meer. St. Petersburg’s dailies formed a committee to coordinate their activities to combat the obstacles placed before them by the police and postal authorities, they elected Maxim Maximovich Litvinov as their chairman. Litvinov had planned that the escapees would make a dash for the Dnieper River where a boat would be waiting, but immediately he ran into trouble. In Zurich, Litvinov joined the office of the Foreign League of Russian Social Democrats, which had been created in 1901 to aid socialist emigres and to coordinate the transport of Iskra into the empire. Litvinov was in Paris in early 1906 with instructions to purchase “rifles, machine guns, small arms, and the necessary cartridges.” Litvinov bought a yacht in Fiume and had it refitted for the task, but political squabbling hampered his plans.
