Here is
another Socialist witness: One of the ablest of the leaders of the Bohemian
Socialists in the United States is Joseph Martinek, the brilliant and
scholarly editor of the Bohemian Socialist weekly, the _Delnicke Listy_. He
has always been identified with the radical section of the movement. A
student of Russian history, speaking the language fluently, it was his good
fortune to spend several weeks in Petrograd immediately before and after
the Bolshevik counter-revolution. He testifies that the "freedom of the
press established by Kerensky" was "terminated by the Bolsheviki."[27]
This is not the testimony of "capitalist newspapers," but of Socialists of
unquestionable authority and standing. The _Dielo Naroda_ was a Socialist
paper, and the volunteer venders of it, who were brutally beaten and shot
down by Red Guards, were Socialist working-men.[28] When Oskar Tokoi, the
well-known 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