Page:Samuel Gompers - Out of Their Own Mouths (1921).djvu/55

 Rh and nearer and nearer to the absolute dictatorship of Lenin and those about him.

At the outset Lenin made a strained effort to claim that the Bolshevist régime was democratic. In order to do this he made use of the favorite Bolshevist propaganda trick of employing a word to mean the very opposite of what it does mean. Nevertheless at that time he did wish the world to believe that the Bolshevists, in some sense, represented the Russian people.

In the Die Kommunistische Internationale in 1919 Lenin similarly wrote:

So anxious was the Bolshevist dictator to claim that he had the support of the Russian people and so con-