Revolution._

Next day, July 26th, _Izvestya_ published the information that "after
minute questionings and full inquiry" a special commission appointed to
inquire into the events relating to the insurrection at Jaroslav had listed
350 persons as having "taken an active part in the insurrection and had
relations with the Czecho-Slovaks," and that by order of the commissioners
the whole band of 350 had been shot!

It is needless to multiply the illustrations of brutal oppression--of men
and women arrested and imprisoned for no other crime than that of engaging
in propaganda in favor of government by universal suffrage; of newspapers
confiscated and suppressed; of meetings banned and Soviets dissolved
because the members' "state of mind" did not please the Bolsheviki. Maxim
Gorky declared in his _Novya Zhizn_ that there had been "ten thousand
lynchings." Upon what authority Gorky--who was inclined to sympathize with
the Bolsheviki, and who even accepted office under them--based that
statement is not known. Probably it is an exaggeration. One thing, however,
is quite certain, namely, that a reign of terror surpassing the worst days
of the old regime was inflicted upon unhappy Russia by the Bolsheviki. At
the very beginning of the Bolshevik regime Trotzky laughed to scorn all the
protests against violence, threatening that resort would be had to the
guillotine. Speaking to the opponents of the Bolshevik policy in the
Petrograd Soviet, he said:

"You are perturbed by the mild terror we are applying against our class
enemies, but know that not later than a month hence this terror will take a
more terrible form on the model of the terror of the great revolutionaries
of France. Not a fortress, but the guillotine will be for our enemies."

That threat was not literally carried out, but there was a near approach to
it when public hangings for civil offenses were established. For
reintroducing the death penalty into the army as a means of putting an end
to treason and the brutal murder of officers by rebellious soldiers, the
Bolsheviki excoriated Kerensky. _Yet they themselves introduced hanging and
flogging in public for petty civil crimes!_ The death penalty was never
inflicted for civil crimes under the late Czar. It was never inflicted for
political offenses. Only rarely was it inflicted for murder. It remained
for a so-called "Socialist" government to resort to such savagery as we
find described in the following extract fr