arty, of the Control Committees, and
of the Executive Committee of the party may be shot at any time by the
decision of any Extraordinary Commission of a small district town if they
happen to be on its territory, and a report of that made _afterward._[44]

VII

While in some respects, such as this terrible savagery, Bolshevism has
out-Heroded Herod and surpassed the regime of the Romanovs in cruel
oppression, upon the whole its methods have been very like that of the
latter. There is really not much to choose between the ways of Stolypin and
Von Plehve and those of the Lenine-Trotzky rule. The methods employed have
been very similar and in not a few instances the same men who acted as the
agents of espionage and tyranny for the Czar have served the Bolsheviki in
the same capacity. Just as under Czarism there was alliance with the Black
Hundreds and with all sorts of corrupt and vicious criminal agents, so we
find the same phenomenon recurring under the Bolsheviki. The time has not
yet arrived for the compilation of the full record of Bolshevism in this
particular, but enough is known to justify the charge here made. That
agents-provocateurs, spies, informers, police agents, and pogrom-makers
formerly in the service of the Czar have been given positions of trust and
honor by Lenine and Trotzky unfortunately admits of no doubt whatever.

It was stated at a meeting of Russians held in Paris in the summer of 1917
that one of the first Russian regiments which refused to obey orders to
advance "contained 120 former political or civil police agents out of 181
refractory soldiers." During the Kerensky regime, at the time when Lenine
was carrying on his propaganda through _Pravda_,[45] Vladimir Bourtzev
exposed three notorious agents of the old police terror, provocateurs, who
were working on the paper. In August, 1917, the Jewish Conjoint Committee
in London published a long telegram from the representative of the Jewish
Committee in Petrograd, calling attention to the fact that Lenine's party
was working in tacit agreement with the Black Hundreds. The telegram is
here given in full:

Extreme Russian reactionaries have allied themselves closely with
extreme revolutionaries, and Black Hundreds have entered into
tacit coalition with the Lenine party. In the army the former
agents and detectives of the political police carry on ardent
campaign for defeat, and in the rear the former
agents-provocateurs