acceptance of the Constitution, but this was carried in a hurried manner at the close of the session and without any debates to speak of, when the opposition had been ejected from the As- sembly. Nevertheless it is advisable to begin with a summary of its most important provisions. It proclaims itself to be the Consti- tution of the Federal Socialistic Republic of Soviets. As a mat- ter of fact there was no federalism about it, as no means had been provided for any genuine expression of the will of the component parts. The Ukraine, for instance, was never allowed any self- determination, but was simply conquered by the Bolshevik armies and subjected to the rule of Moscow authorities, although the pretence of separate existence and organization was kept up. The social basis of the republic was formed by the workmen and the peasants, while all those who used the labour of others for their benefit were disfranchised. 1 One of the fundamental assumptions of the system was that the normal kind of work that counts is manual work and all forms of activity which do not take the shape of manual work have, as it were, to justify their existence in relation to manual work. At best a rough equation was established between various forms of employment, at the worst people who could not claim the designation of work- men were declared to be bourgeois under suspicion. In principle no distinction was made between various kinds of performance in point of quality, and in introducing the project of the Con- stitution the reporter, Stekloff, appealed in as many words to the famous maxim of Fourier: " To everyone according to his needs." It may be noticed, however, that the other side of the saying " From everyone according to his faculties " was also acknowledged in a somewhat peculiar form (by Trotsky) : those who refuse to work need not eat. The threat was directed primarily against the civil servants who had thrown up their office work, but the principle admitted of wider application and came to be applied to workmen in general.
There was no attempt at democratic equality, in any sense. As regards electoral representation, for instance, an industrial worker was treated right through as worth five peasants: 25,000 of the former were reckoned for each delegate of a Soviet Con- gress and 125,000 of the latter; the same ratio obtained in local and provincial organization. 2 Instead of the direct elections on which so much insistence was laid in the democratic stages of the revolutionary movement, all elections were managed on the principle of an ascending scale from lower to higher units. The result was that undesirable elements were weeded out in the process by means of wire-pulling or by downright violence. The clubs of Communists in the various local centres acted as com- mittees of supervision, and terrorized the country so effectually that the Communist party, which on its own showing did not number more than 600,000 members, invariably captured three- fourths or more of the seats in the Assemblies.
The masses of the peasantry, to whom reference was so often made in the speeches of official Bolshevik orators, had much less chance of being heard than in the gerrymandered Dumas of the Tsarist regime: the so-called delegates of workmen, soldiers and peasants were generally intellectuals with a more or less incomplete educational record, but expert in journalistic propaganda and free from all received notions as to morality, humanity or justice. The Congress of Soviets should have met at least once in six months; but this rule fell into abeyance, and the years 1919 and 1920 saw only two congresses (the seventh and the eighth). The intermediate institution of the Central Executive Committee of 200 (later 300) had to act as a kind of Parliament in the absence of the Congress, and was entrusted with supreme authority all the while; but the Board of Commis- sars of the People, corresponding to a Council of Ministers
'Chap. IV., 7. The Fifth All-Russia Congress of Soviets of Workers', Soldiers' and Peasants' Delegates considers that now, at the decisive moment in the struggle between the workers and their exploiters, there can be no place for the latter on any governing body.
Chap. XIII., 65. The following persons have neither the right to vote nor to be elected :
(a) Those who employ others for the sake of profit.
(6) Those who live on income not arising from their own work.
' Chap. X., 53.
under the Parliamentary regime, wielded the real authority. It took its lead again from its presidium, on which the Govern- ment of Russia entirely depended. In this way the appearance of democracy was reconciled with the reality of a very narrow oligarchy, according to the pattern worked out by the French Jacobins in the days of the Committee of Public Safety. A curious device of the sophistical combination consisted in making members of the Central Executive Council at the same time supervisors and subordinates of the commissars, as if genuine control could be expected from persons employed in working the machinery under control.
Local units were subjected to similar limitations: the bour- geois of all descriptions were condemned in every respect to the position of outcasts. Elections were to be conducted under constant pressure from the Communist clubs, and inconvenient persons were to be removed from participation in local as well as central government. A characteristic application of this all- pervading suppression of the bourgeois is the handing over of all technical means of publicity, in other words of the Press, to the workmen and peasants. This meant that there is no possibility for expressing any opinions except those approved by the Bolshevik clubs. The Press was not gagged it ceased to exist as a free agent. It became a means of reproducing in thousands of copies the standard views decreed by the Bolsheviks. The Tsarist regime never aspired to this complete suppression of public opinion. The right of assembly was vindicated in the same way in the Constitution. The preamble of it started with a sounding declaration of freedom; but it was sufficient for commissars to declare a meeting to be counter-revolutionary in order to be entitled to put an end to it by force.
The Bolshevik legislators prided themselves on having got rid of the division of the functions of legislation and adminis- tration, and treating both as alternative manifestations of the will of the living communities of workmen and peasants. One of the effects of this unification of power in the collective unit was the right to recall representatives which belongs to the rural communities, the trade unions and the military units. In actual practice the recall was used to allow free play to the Com- munist wire-pullers, who were careful to watch over the ortho- doxy of the various Soviets. The alternation of functions opened the door to log-rolling and capricious changes of policy. Per- haps the most striking expression of the inanity of these consti- tutional functions was to be found in the position of the delegates of the Red army, who had to represent simultaneously control- ling power in the Executive Council and the " iron discipline " of the Bolshevik regime in the ranks.
Altogether the " Constitution " of the Federal Republic of Soviets was clearly intended to be an instrument for the oppres- sion of the formerly privileged classes and a means of propaganda for the edification of people who want to believe in the benefits of Communist rule. When reproached with the duplicity and the contradictions of this paper arrangement the Bolshevist answers: all derogations from principle are justified by the necessity to fight the counter-revolutionaries and to destroy the bourgeoisie. Pure Communism can be introduced only when the people have been ground into uniform pulp: then Law and the State will disappear of themselves. As long as there is any opposition anywhere dictatorship of the proletariat has to be kept up, and as the mass of the people is not permeated with Communist consciousness the dictatorship can only be constituted by the enlightened minority. Hence the necessity of the rule of the few for the sake of the proletariat. It is inter- esting to read the justification of the Soviet system on the ground that it makes popular government a reality while parlia- mentary institutions provide mere fictions:
" In democracies the only way in which a workman or a peasant participates in government is that he puts a voting paper once in four years in a ballot box. The Soviets are direct organizations of the masses; they are not impermeable, there is the right of recall. . . And this is not only the case with the Soviets which form, as it were, the top of power . . . the organization does not only belong to workmen, it is indeed a working one. In democratic common- wealths the supreme power belongs to parliaments, that is, to talking-
