a thief and a police spy.[48] How shall we justify men calling
themselves Socialists and proletarian revolutionists, who ally themselves
with such men as these, but imprison, harry, and abuse such men and women
as Bourtzev, Kropotkin, Plechanov, Breshkovskaya, Tchaykovsky, Spiridonova,
Agounov, Larokine, Avksentiev, and many other Socialists like them?

In surveying the fight of the Bolsheviki to establish their rule it is
impossible to fail to observe that their chief animus has been directed
against other Socialists, rather than against members of the reactionary
parties. That this has been the fact they do not themselves deny. For
example, the "People's Commissary of Justice," G.I. Oppokov, better known
as "Lomov," declared in an interview in January, 1918: "Our chief enemies
are not the Cadets. Our most irreconcilable opponents are the Moderate
Socialists. This explains the arrests of Socialists and the closing down of
Socialist newspapers. Such measures of repression are, however, only
temporary."[49] And in the Soviet at Petrograd, July 30, 1918,
according to _Pravda_, Lachevitch, one of the delegates, said: "The
Socialist-Revolutionists of the Right and the Mensheviki are more dangerous
for the government of the Soviets than the bourgeoisie. But these enemies
are not yet exterminated and can move about freely. The proletariat
must act. We ought, once for all, to rid ourselves of the
Socialist-Revolutionists of the Right and of the Mensheviki."

In this summary of the Bolsheviki war against democracy, it will be
observed, no attempt has been made to gather all the lurid and fantastic
stories which have been published by sensational journalists. The testimony
comes from Socialist sources of the utmost reliability, much of it from
official Bolshevist sources. The system of oppression it describes is twin
brother to that which existed under the Romanovs, to end which hundreds of
thousands of the noblest and best of our humankind gave up their lives.
Under the banner of Social Democracy a tyranny has been established as
infamous as anything in the annals of autocracy.

"_O Liberty, what monstrous crimes are committed in thy great
name!_"

CHAPTER VII

BOLSHEVIST THEORY AND PRACTICE

I

Utopia-making is among the easiest and most fascinating of all intellectual
occupations. Few employments which can be called intellectual are easier
than that of devising panaceas for the ills of society, of demon