With respect to ... the significance of individual dictatorial power from the standpoint of the specific problems of the present period, we must say that every large machine industry—­which is the material productive source and basis of Socialism—­requires an absolute and strict unity of the will which directs the joint work of hundreds, thousands, and tens of thousands of people.  This necessity is obvious from the technical, economical, and historical standpoint, and has always been recognized by all those who had given any thought to Socialism, as its prerequisite.  But how can we secure a strict unity of will? By subjecting the will of thousands to the will of one.

This subjection, if the participants in the common work are ideally conscious and disciplined, may resemble the mild leading of an orchestra conductor; but may take the acute form of a dictatorship—­if there is no ideal discipline and consciousness.  But at any rate, complete submission to a single will is absolutely necessary for the success of the processes of work which is organized on the type of large machine industry.  This is doubly true of the railways.  And just this transition from one political problem to another, which in appearance has no resemblance to the first, constitutes the peculiarity of the present period.  The Revolution has just broken the oldest, the strongest, and the heaviest chains to which the masses were compelled to submit.  So it was yesterday.  And to-day, the same Revolution (and indeed in the interest of Socialism) demands the absolute submission of the masses to the single will of those who direct the labor process.  It is self-evident that it can be realized only after great upheavals, crises, returns to the old; only through the greatest strain of the energy of the proletarian vanguard which is leading the people to the new order....

To the extent to which the principal problem of the Soviet rule changes from military suppression to administration, suppression and compulsion will, as a rule, be manifested in trials, and not in shooting on the spot.  And in this respect the revolutionary masses have taken, after November 7, 1918, the right road and have proved the vitality of the Revolution, when they started to organize their own workmen’s and peasants’ tribunals, before any decrees were issued dismissing the bourgeois-democratic judicial apparatus. But our revolutionary and popular tribunals are excessively and incredibly weak.  It is apparent that the popular view of the courts—­which was inherited from the regime of the landowners and the bourgeoisie—­as not their own, has not yet been completely destroyed.  It is not sufficiently appreciated that the courts serve to attract all the poor to administration (for judicial activity is one of the functions of state administration); that the court is an organ of the rule of the proletariat and of the poorest