Page:Arthur Ransome - The Truth about Russia.djvu/8

 No limit is set to local re-election. Deputies are withdrawn and others substituted for them whenever this seems necessary to the local electorate. Thus the country is freed from the danger of finding itself governed by the ghosts of its dead opinions, and, on the other hand, those ghosts find themselves expeditiously laid in their graves as soon as, becoming ghosts, they cease to have the right to rule.

Just as the Soviet constitution insures that the actual lawgivers shall be in the closest touch with the people, just as it insures that in deed instead of in amiable theory, the people shall be their own lawgivers, so also it provides for intercommunication in a contrary direction. The remotest atom on the periphery is not without its influence on the centre. So also the centre through the Soviets affects the atoms on the periphery. The institution of Soviets means that every minutest act of the Council of People's Commissaries is judged and interpreted in accordance with its own local conditions by each local Soviet. No other form of government could give this huge diverse entity of Russia, with its varying climates and races, with its plains, its steppes, its wild mountains, the free local autonomy of interpretation which it needs. The shepherd of the Caucasus, the Cossack from the Urals, and the fisherman from the Yenisei can sit together in the All-Russian Assembly, and know that the laws whose principles they approve are not steel bands too loose for one and throttling another, but are instruments which each Soviet can fashion out in its own way for the special needs of its own community.

This constitution is one particularly apt for Russia. It is also particularly apt for a country in a time of revolution. It affords a real dictatorship to the class that is in revolt, and such dictatorship is necessary, since no one could expect from members of the class that is being ousted from its place of domination whole-hearted assistance in its own undoing. Those democrats in other countries and in Russia who do not understand what is happening under their eyes exclaim at the unfairness of excluding the bourgeoisie from power. They forget, or have never realised, that the object of the social revolution is to put an end to the existence of a bourgeois, or exploiting class, not merely to make it powerless. If exploitation is destroyed then there can be no class of exploiters, and the present exclusion of the bourgeoisie from the government is merely a means of hastening and rendering less painful the transition of the bourgeois from his parasitic position to the more honourable position of equality with his fellow workers. Once the conditions of parasitism, privilege and exploitation have been destroyed, the old divisions of the class struggle will automatically have disappeared.

By the nature of things it has so happened that practically all the foreign observers of events in Russia have belonged to the privileged classes in their respective countries, and have been accustomed to associate with the privileged classes in Russia. They have consequently found it difficult to escape from their class in judging the story happening before their