Page:Arthur Ransome - The Truth about Russia.djvu/7

 that the next meeting of the All-Russian Assembly of Soviets would find it in a minority, treacherously sought new foothold in an artificial democratic assembly. Not even the tactics of the Moderate party shook the actual fabric of the Soviets, and when, in October, first Petrograd, then Moscow, showed a huge Bolshevik majority, the Bolshevik leaders were so confident that they had the country behind them that they made every single arrangement for the ejection of the Government openly over the telephone, and, notwithstanding, neither the Government nor the old Moderates (now in a minority) could muster authority to prevent them.

The point that I wish to make is this: that, from the first moment of the revolution to the present day the real authority of the Soviets has been unshaken. The October revolution did not give authority to the Soviets. That had always been theirs, by their very nature. It was merely a public open illustration of the change of opinion brought about in the Soviets themselves by the change of opinion in the working men and soldiers who elected them. The October revolution cleared away the waste growths that hid the true government of Russia from the world, and, as the smoke of the short struggle died away, it was seen that that Government had merely to formulate an authority it already possessed.

The actual formulation of the Soviet constitution was a matter of practice in a developing democratic revolutionary power. There have been a number of small formal changes, of readjustments of interdependent parts in the machine, but I do not think either opponents or supporters of the Soviet Government can quarrel very seriously with the following statement:

Every workman, every peasant, in Russia has the right to vote in the election of deputies to his local Soviet, which is made up of a number of deputies corresponding to the number of electors. The local Soviets choose their delegates to an All-Russian Assembly of Soviets. This All-Russian Assembly elects its Central Executive Committee on a basis of approximately one in five of the delegates to the Assembly. This central executive committee controls, appoints and dismisses the People's Commissaries who are the actual government. All decrees of State importance are passed by the Central Executive Committee before being issued as laws by the Council of People's Commissaries.

At each successive All-Russian Assembly of Soviets the executive committee automatically resigns, and the Assembly as a whole expresses its approval or disapproval of what has been done by its representatives and by the Council of Commissaries during the period since the previous All-Russian Assembly, and, electing a new Executive Committee, which in political character accurately corresponds to the party colouring of the Assembly, insures that the controlling organ shall accurately reflect the feeling of the electorate.