labor-card system.  Loafing on the job by workers and sabotage by upper-class directors, managers, experts and clerks have been overcome.  Russia has settled down to work.

     The soviet form of government, which sprang up so
     spontaneously all over Russia, is established.

This is not a paper thing; not an invention.  Never planned, it has not yet been written into the forms of law.  It is not even uniform.  It is full of faults and difficulties; clumsy, and in its final development it is not democratic.  The present Russian Government is the most autocratic government I have ever seen.  Lenin, head of the Soviet Government, is farther removed from the people than the Tsar was, or than any actual ruler in Europe is.

The people in a shop or an industry are a soviet.  These little informal Soviets elect a local soviet; which elects delegates to the city or country (community) soviet; which elects delegates to the government (State) soviet.  The government Soviets together elect delegates to the All-Russian Soviet, which elects commissionaires (who correspond to our Cabinet, or to a European minority).  And these commissionaires finally elect Lenin.  He is thus five or six removes from the people.  To form an idea of his stability, independence, and power, think of the process that would have to be gone through with by the people to remove him and elect a successor.  A majority of all the Soviets in all Russia would have to be changed in personnel or opinion, recalled, or brought somehow to recognize and represent the altered will of the people.

No student of government likes the soviet as it has developed.  Lenin himself doesn’t.  He calls it a dictatorship, and he opposed it at first.  When I was in Russia in the days of Milyoukov and Kerensky, Lenin and the Bolsheviks were demanding the general election of the constituent assembly.  But the Soviets existed then; they had the power, and I saw foreign ambassadors blunder, and the world saw Milyoukov and Kerensky fall, partly because they would not, or could not, comprehend the nature of the soviet; as Lenin did finally, when, against his theory, he joined in and expressed the popular repudiation of the constituent assembly and went over to work with the soviet, the actual power in Russia.  The constituent assembly, elected by the people, represented the upper class and the old system.  The soviet was the lower class.

The soviet, at bottom, is a natural gathering of the working people, of peasants, in their working and accustomed groupings, instead of, as with us, by artificial geographical sections.

Labor unions and soldiers’ messes made up the Soviets in the cities; poorer peasants and soldiers at the village inn were the first Soviets in the country; and in the beginning, two years ago, these lower class delegates used to explain to me that the “rich peasants”