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42 Constituent Assembly, as Turgenev was attracted sixty years ago to a moderate monarchist and aristocratic consitution, as he was averse to the peasant democracy of Dobrolubov and Tchernyshevsky.

This proximity of the Soviets to the toiling people creates special forms of recall and other methods of control by the masses which should now be developed with special diligence. For instance, the councils of popular education deserve the fullest sympathy and support as periodical conferences of the Soviet electors and their delegates to discuss and to control the activity of the Soviet authorities of the particular region. Nothing could be more foolish than turning the Soviets into something settled and self-sufficient. The more firmly we now have to advocate a merciless and firm rule and dictatorship of individuals for definite processes of work during certain periods of purely executive functions, the more diverse should be the forms and means of mass control in order to paralyze every possibility of distorting the Soviet rule, in order repeatedly and tirelessly to remove the wild grass of bureaucratism.

An unusually grave, difficult and dangerous international situation exists; a period of "tacking;" a period of waiting for new outbursts of revolution in the West, which is painfully slow in coming. Within the country we are passing through a period of slow constructive work and of merciless rigor, of a long and persistent struggle of the proletarian discipline with the threatening petty bourgeois dissoluteness and anarchy. Such, in short, are the distinctive features of the present stage in the Socialist revolution. Such is the link in the historical chain of events which we must now grasp with all our strength to come out with honor, before we pass to the next link—which draws us by its glory, by the glory of the victories of the international proletarian revolution.