When the anarchy resulting from the incompetence, stupidity and perhaps treason of the old bureaucracy reached such an acute stage in the first weeks of March that the leaders of the Russian public saw that some action must be taken by some one, it was the Duma that assumed the initiative, acting in a revolutionary manner, through an executive committee. The municipal and provincial councils, organized in unions for war-work, and the war-industry committees, turned without delay to the revolutionary parliament, in which many of their leading workers were members. The leaders of the cooeperative movement could not act with such rapidity and precision. They had not been permitted to organize a central committee, to coordinate the work of the thousands of small and scattered societies. These first leaders of the revolution felt justified in taking the initiative because they alone were organized. Also they thought they could speak in the name of all classes, including the most democratic, because the institutions through which they acted did include representatives of all classes. To emphasize its special anxiety that the more democratic groups feel their direct participation in the movement of which it had taken the leadership, the Executive Committee of the Duma not only accepted but encouraged the development of the revolutionary institutions of the second category, of which the first to emerge was the Petrograd Council of Workmen's and Soldiers' Deputies. This Council was organized during the very first days of the revolution; it was in fact the resurrection of a revolutionary body of the 1905 revolution. The Duma invited the Council to share its own convenient quarters. Perhaps the invitation was an afterthought, for the workmen and soldiers of Petrograd in revolt had gravitated toward the Duma, had calmly entered and taken possession of the large corridors of the palace. The Council was a strictly revolutionary, and a very democratic body, composed of directly elected delegates from the factories and garrison regiments of Petrograd. It immediately became the organizing center for what came to be called the "revolutionary democracy," as opposed to the "bourgeoisie."