Soviet chiefs would find it difficult at present to hold their bands in hand. 
How could the Bolshevics then be possibly expected to destroy their widely 
ramified propaganda-organisation under these conditions? 
While the propaganda and the preparation for a world-upheaval are 
thus both inseparable features of the Soviet State management, the revo- 
lution itself remains to this day the fervent aim and object of the Soviet 
men, in spite of all the failures they have experienced up till now: a 
world-cataclism is not only a narcotic, it is also the object of ardent 
desire. All these people’s claims for the acknowledgement of their “scien- 
tific’ attitude towards the history they are creating, are but common 
charlatanisms based on treble deceit: that Marxism is a science, while it is 
only a tasteless concoction of scientific thought and quackery; that they, 
the Soviet men, are Marxists, and that life can be at all constructed accord- 
ing to any particular dogma. 
The historic conception of the Bolshevics is in reality very primitive 
indeed: if it has succeeded onoe, why should it not succeed again and 
again? Yesterday in Petersburg, to-day in Shanghai, to-morrow — in 
London. On these hopes the Bolshevics subsist; and repudiate them, they 
cannot. They cannot do so because their numbed members could only be 
warmed by a universal funeral-pile. It is not only that their economic 
organisation consumes itself, that the Soviet existence — as already men- 
tioned — is tedious to the utmost limit, but it is that the Soviet system, 
owing to its very nature, cannot exist without robbery, roistering and 
violence, for this is its true foundation. This system is the absolutism of 
ruffianism consistent to the end. Amidst the tumult and roar of revolt, in 
barracks, at the factories, wherever it happens, a disorderly crowd with 
noise and yells “selects” representatives who mix up with numberless 
imposters, meritricious rebels, and people who have but recently joined 
the rebellion, — they all in, a lump emit laws, and all their decrees have 
but one purpose: everything belongs to us, everybody is under our domi- 
nation; — this is the Soviet system. The great advantage of this system 
lies in the fact that it furnishes immediate tasks for the mob — the 
thousands, scores of thousands and hundreds of thousands of incidental, 
ignorant, vicious but active and impudent folk. And it can afford to do so, 
since by the very next task, consisting of suppression, expropriation, 
plunder, — the problems of the government became in a moment unlimited 
and interminable, while the quality of State management grew indifferent. 
Such immediate and direct action unites and welds together. The feeling 
of unlimited power, of sudden and unexpected omnipotence intoxicates, the 
common cause and the common guilt rivet together. This debauch con- 
tinued in Russia for months and years, merely altering its form. In this 
heyday of Bolshevism, it was the rulers that were lacking; there was more 
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