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32 forget that the bourgeois and petty bourgeois environment is offering resistance to the Soviet rule in two ways: on the one hand, by external pressure—by the methods of the Savinkovs, Gotz, Gegechkoris and Kornilovs, by conspiracies and insurrections, with their ugly "ideologic" reflection, by torrents of falsehood and calumny in the press of the Cadets, Socialists-Revolutionists of the Right and Mensheviks; on the other hand, this environment exerts internal pressure, taking advantage of every element of decay, of every weakness, to bribe, to increase the lack of discipline, dissoluteness, chaos. The nearer we get to the complete military suppression of the bourgeoisie, the more dangerous become for us the petty bourgeois anarchic inclinations. And these inclinations cannot be combated only by propaganda and agitation, by the organization of emulation, by the selection of organizers; they must also be combated by compulsion.

To the extent to which the principal problem of the Soviet rule changes from military suppression to administration—suppression and compulsion will, as a rule, be manifested in trials, and not in shooting on the spot. And in this respect the revolutionary masses have taken, after November 7, 1917, the right road and have proved the vitality of the revolution, when they started to organize their own workmen's and peasants' tribunals, before any decrees were issued dismissing the bourgeois-democratic judicial apparatus. But our revolutionary and popular tribunals are excessively and incredibly weak. It is apparent that the popular view of courts—which was inherited from the regime of the landowners and the bourgeoisie—as not belonging to the workers, has not yet been completely destroyed. It is not sufficiently appreciated that the courts serve to attract all the poor to administration (for judicial activity is one of the functions of state administration); that the court is an organ of the rule of the proletariat and of the poorest peasantry; that the court is a means of training in discipline. There is a lack of appreciation of the simple and obvious fact that, if the chief