o me in which a father was an important minister in one of the
various White Governments which have received Allied support, while his
son inside Russia was doing pretty well as a responsible official under
the Communists. Now in the event of a violent change, the Communists
would be outlaws with a price on every head, and those who have worked
with them, being Russians, know their fellow countrymen well enough to
be pretty well convinced that the mere fact that they are without cards
of the membership of the Communist Party, would not save them in the
orgy of slaughter that would follow any such collapse.

People may think that I underestimate the importance of, the
Extraordinary Commission. I am perfectly aware that without this police
force with its spies, its prisons and its troops, the difficulties of
the Dictatorship would be increased by every kind of disorder, and the
chaos, which I fear may come, would have begun long ago. I believe, too,
that the overgrown power of the Extraordinary Commission, and the
cure that must sooner or later be applied to it, may, as in the French
Revolution, bring about the collapse of the whole system. The Commission
depends for its strength on the fear of something else. I have seen it
weaken when there was a hope of general peace. I have seen it tighten
its grip in the presence of attacks from without and attempted
assassination within. It is dreaded by everybody; not even Communists
are safe from it; but it does not suffice to explain the Dictatorship,
and is actually entirely irrelevant to the most important process of
that Dictatorship, namely, the adoption of a single idea, a single
argument, by the whole of a very large body of men. The whole power of
the Extraordinary Commission does not affect in the slightest degree
discussions inside the Communist Party, and those discussions are the
simple fact distinguishing the Communist Dictatorship from any of the
other dictatorships by which it may be supplanted.

There are 600,000 members of the Communist Party (611,978 on April
2, 1920). There are nineteen members of the Central Committee of that
party. There are, I believe, five who, when they agree, can usually sway
the remaining fourteen. There is no need to wonder how these fourteen
can be argued into acceptance of the views of the still smaller inner
ring, but the process of persuading the six hundred thousand of the
desirability of, for example, such measures as those inv