nity
peasants and shopkeepers. The former have decided to do away with
'Stolypin heirs,' as they call the shopkeepers. The latter,
however, have organized and are ready for a stubborn resistance.
Combats have already taken place. The peasants demolish farms, and
farmers set fire to towns, villages, thrashing floors, etc."

Indeed, the results of confiscation and socialization were so bad from
the very beginning that no less a personage than Lenine himself, in "A
Letter to American Workingmen," published by the Socialist Publication
Society of Brooklyn, New York, on pages 12 and 13, says:

"Mistakes are being made by our peasants who, at one stroke, in the
night from October 25 to October 26 (Russian Calendar), 1917, did
away with all private ownership of land, and are now struggling,
from month to month, under the greatest difficulties, to correct
their own mistakes, trying to solve in practice the most difficult
problems of organizing a new social state, fighting, against
profiteers to secure the possession of the land, for the workers
instead of for the speculator, to carry on agricultural production
under a system of communist farming on a large scale.

"Mistakes are being made by our workmen in their revolutionary
activity, who, in a few short months, have placed practically all
the large factories and workers under state ownership, and are now
learning, from day to day, under the greatest difficulties, to
conduct the management of entire industries, to reorganize
industries already organized, to overcome the deadly resistance of
laziness and middle-class reaction and egotism."

The Socialists of the United States and other radical elements in our
country, after the World War, began to laud to the skies the Russian
Soviets as the most perfect form of government that the world had ever
seen. They were held to far surpass parliaments, congress and other
legislative bodies and to be the supreme accomplishments of a democratic
form of government. The deputies of the soviets, according to the
Bolshevist Constitution, were to be elected by the secret, direct and
equal vote of all the working masses. Theoretically the soviets were
very attractive, but in reality fall far short of the ideal. "Struggling
Russia," a well-known weekly magazine published in New York City by one
of the groups of Russian Socialists, has thi