GENERAL belief exists that the old Russian army, especially that exclusive portion of it, the Imperial Guard, played an important role in the outbreak of the Revolution in March, I9I7. (February, according to the Russian calendar). Without doubt, this belief is based on the fact that in the early press reports describing the street demonstrations of the workers and the mutiny of the troops in Petrograd, and in the historical accounts which were subsequently published and widely circulated (such as Leon Trotsky's History of the Revolution), the names of the crack Guard regiments figured prominently. In these accounts one reads that a mutiny broke out in the Volynski and Pavlovski regiments, units of the 2nd and 3rd Infantry Divisions of the Guard which had won great distinction in the Napoleonic wars; that the whole Preobrazhenski regiment, one of the two oldest regiments of the Ist Infantry Division of the Guard formed by Peter the Great, "was marching [in mutiny] down the street . . . without a single officer"; and that Voroshilov, one of Lenin's and Trotsky's close associates at the time, "led the Izmailovski Guard Regiment [another unit of the Ist Infantry Division] in street battles." Such statements create the impression that the three infantry divisions of the Guard, and some additional troops of the line assembled at the capital, all mutinied almost overnight when street riots occurred there.