revolutionary Finnish Socialist leader, former Prime Minister of Finland, declares that “freedom of assemblage, association, free speech, and free press is altogether destroyed,"[29] the Bolsheviki and their sympathizers cannot plead that they are the victims of “capitalist misrepresentation.”  The attitude of the Bolshevik leaders toward the freedom of the press has been frankly stated editorially in Pravda, their official organ, in the following words: 

The press is a most dangerous weapon in the hands of our enemies.  We will tear it from them, we will reduce it to impotence.  It is the moment for us to prepare battle.  We will be inflexible in our defense of the rights of the exploited.  The struggle will be decisive.  We are going to smite the journals with fines, to shut them up, to arrest the editors, and hold them as hostages.[30]

Is it any wonder that Paul Axelrod, who was one of the representatives of Russia on the International Socialist Bureau prior to the outbreak of the war, has been forced to declare that the Bolsheviki have “introduced into Russia a system worse than Czarism, suppressing the Constituent Assembly and the liberty of the press"?[31] Or that the beloved veteran of the Russian Revolution, Nicholas Tchaykovsky, should lament that “the Bolshevik usurpation is the continuation of the government by which Czarism held the country in an iron grip"?[32]

III

Lenine, Trotzky, Zinoviev, and other Bolshevik leaders early found themselves so much at variance with the accepted Socialist position that they decided to change their party name.  They had been Social Democrats, a part of the Social Democratic party of Russia.  Now ever since Bronterre O’Brien first used the terms “Social Democrat” and “Social Democracy,” in 1839, their meaning has been pretty well established.  A Social Democrat is one who aims to base government and industry upon democracy.  Certainly, this cannot be said to be an accurate description of the position of men who believe in the rule of a nation of one hundred and eighty millions by a small party of two hundred thousand or less—­or even by an entire class representing not more than six per cent. of the population—­and Lenine and his friends, recognizing the fact, decided to change the name of their group to the Communist party, by which name they are now known in Russia.  Lenine frankly admits that it would be a mistake to speak of this party as a party of democracy.  He says: 

The word “democracy” cannot be scientifically applied to the Communist party.  Since March, 1917, the word democracy is simply a shackle fastened upon the revolutionary nation and preventing it from establishing boldly, freely, and regardless of all obstacles a new form of power; the Council of Workmen’s, Soldiers’ and Peasants’ Deputies, harbinger of the abolition of every form of authority.[33]