The "dictatorship of the proletariat" appeals to Trotzky, because he has become virtually the dictator of the proletariat and everything else in Russia within the power of the "Red Guards" and his Chinese battalions. These Chinese battalions, recruited from Chinese labourers employed behind the military lines while Russia was in the war, may be responsible for some of the "executions" which have taken place. The Bolshevist emissary, Maxim Litvinoff, pooh-poohs all stories of massacres. It is generally the dregs of the Chinese population who are recruited for labour gangs abroad; and if "removals" of "counter-revolutionaries" can be accomplished by Chinese battalions, the Bolsheviks can then aver that they have not had a hand in it! Since the acceptance of the Brest-Litovsk Treaty because Russia could fight no longer, Trotzky has not only talked of raising Bolshevik armies, but has succeeded in raising them and officering them by officers of the old Tsarist regime. What Trotzky would not do against the German armies he is quite prepared to do against those portions of Russia that have taken advantage of the self-determination granted by the Bolshevist Administration. Perhaps the peculiar Bolshevist philosophy regarding wars of defence is also to apply to neighbouring States if they do not happen to be strong militarily. You must not prevent the "self-determination" of any portion of an existing State, but you may attack it when "self-determined," in the interests of the "international Social Revolution" and the "dictatorship of the proletariat." That sort of action, when undertaken by an autocracy, is usually described as an act of imperialist aggression in order to divert attention from internal difficulties; and Bolshevism in Russia is an autocracy--a dictatorship not of the proletariat, but over the proletariat. It cannot possibly be anything else. The Russian Revolution of March, 1917, was in many respects similar to the French Revolution of 1789. It brought the downfall of absolute monarchy. It was not so bourgeois in character as the French Revolution, because there was a definite proletarian class in Russia, though small in comparison with its immense population, and capitalist production was established. But the Russian Revolution had this disadvantage compared with the French Revolution--there was practically no class able to take over the administration in the interests of the Revolution as with the French; and if that was so when certain bourgeois elements were with the Revolution, how much less of administrative knowledge would there be in a Bolshevist Government over millions of ignorant workers and peasants accustomed only to a despotic regime, whose "Commissaries" are mainly refugees, most of whom have lost all real touch with Russian internal affairs? Bolshevist Inquisition.