Page:Samuel Gompers - Out of Their Own Mouths (1921).djvu/60

 34 situation, and hence originates the unwisdom of the talk of equality, freedom and democracy, by those who do not understand the actual situation. (From Soviet Russia, December 25, 1920.)

So all the fraudulent pretenses of "democracy," even in the most strained interpretation of the word, have been abandoned. Let us now examine the pretense that there has been instituted a government of "Soviets." In Russian the word "Soviets" means simply "councils." And so it is used, even in Bolshevist Russia, in senses that vary almost from day to day. It is true they have a Soviet constitution but it is subject to unlimited interpretation and administration by the Communist Party—who constructed it, in the first place, for their own purposes. If, however, we turn to the Soviet constitution, on the momentary supposition that it means in practice what it says on paper, we find it full of anti-democratic clauses. Even in the very friendly report of the British Labor Party it is pointed out that clause 23 of the constitution reads:

The British Labor Party report also points out that the peasants have only one-third of the vote per capita of the town electors, that the system of voting is always open, there being no secret ballot, and that the elections are so indirect that the handful of Moscow Commissars