Page:Samuel Gompers - Out of Their Own Mouths (1921).djvu/57

 Rh Of course, there was never any foundation in fact for these statements any more than there is any truth in most of the other assertions of this Communist Marx. The Reign of Terror and the dictatorship of the Communist Party held in Soviet Russia then as now. Moreover Lenin himself was forced to state repeatedly that in using the word "democracy" he did not mean to suggest anything at all similar to any democracy that had ever existed anywhere in the world before, until, finally, he was forced to give such strange interpretations to the word as to make it mean its very opposite.

On the 8th of April, 1920, he said at the Russian Labor Union Congress that no state had shown such a democratic spirit as Soviet Russia and proceeded to show what he meant by democracy by demanding that the policy be continued of "making the laboring masses participate in politics under the direction of the Communist Party."

During the course of 1920 the anti-democratic course of the Soviet régime became more and more marked and its support among the population became narrower and narrower. In the opening speech of the Congress of the Communist Internationale, Zinoviev declared: