But while the Communist Party represents a little more than one per cent, of the adult population of Russia, Zinoviev, in opening the congress of the Soviets last December (see Pravda, December 29, 1920) boastfully asserted that the percentage of Communists in the provincial executive commissions was ninety-nine! From these figures, we may see that in Soviet Russia each Communist counts for as much as ten thousand non-party members.
Yet the Soviet chiefs continue to make the most preposterous claims on behalf of the party. For example Lenin declared in his closing speech at the Tenth Congress of the Communist Party (see Moscow Wireless of March 20, 1921) that "there is no other power except the Communist Party that is capable of uniting millions of widely distributed small farmers." In view of the fact shown in the above statistics that the agriculturists do not include more than two or three per cent, of the membership of the Communist Party although they outnumber that party by more than fifty to one, we can get some notion of the extreme degree of untruthfulness which the Bolshevists, by long and strenuous practice, have finally attained. But all this flood of falsehood is proving useless for Bolshevist purposes, since the discussion within the Communist ranks itself is now disclosing the full truth. Late in 1920 Trotzky complained in the Pravda:
The people are now maintaining the same attitude toward the Soviet Régeme which they maintained against capitalism, as a force exploiting it and robbing it of its toil. Our problem is to regain the support of the workers.
