Page:Raymond Augustine McGowan - Bolshevism in Russia and America (1920).pdf/11

 Rh Soviet System, "the best possible mass organization of the vanguard of the toilers—of the industrial proletariat—is formed, enabling it to direct the exploited masses, to attract them to active participation in political life, to train them politically through their own experiences, that in this way a beginning is made for the first time to get actually the whole population to learn how to manage and how to begin managing." In other words, the Soviet form of Government is very easy for an active vanguard now to control and use.

Lenin narrows the vanguard here to the industrial proletariat. In other places he includes the poorest peasants. But the Soviet Government is so formed as to give to the city workmen power far beyond their members. The vote of a city workman under the law is worth four or five votes of peasants. The central Congress is composed of representatives or Deputies of the Urban Soviets on the basis of one delegate for every 25,000 voters and of the Provincial Soviets on the basis of one delegate to every 125,000 persons. This makes the deputies of the cities two or three times as many in proportion to the votes as the deputies of the Provincial Soviets. The Provincial Soviets are then composed of both city and rural deputies in the same ratio as that above—one city voter to five rural inhabitants or a ratio of one to two or three. By this method the peasants are handicapped in the All-Russian Congress to the advantage of the city workmen. Moreover, the Red Guard or the Soviet Army also sends its delegates to help swing the balance for the Bolshevik Government.

Sometimes these precautions fail, and non-Bolshevik elements enter the Soviet Congress in numbers too large for the safety of Bolshevik power. In such cases, to retain its power, the Central Government has used all the means at its disposal from merely unseating the Deputies to imprisoning them.