To this should be added also the fact that the elections themselves were held during the first weeks after the October revolution. The news of the change traveled rather slowly from the capital to the provinces, from the cities to the villages. The peasantry in many places had but a very vague idea of what was taking place in Petrograd and Moscow. They voted for "Land and Liberty," for their representatives in the land committees, who in most cases gathered under the banner of populism: but thereby they were voting for Kerensky and Avksentiev, who were dissolving the land committees, and arresting their members. As a result of this, there came about the strange political paradox that one of the two parties which dissolved the Constituent Assembly--the Left Social-Revolutionists--had won its representation by being on the same list of names with the party which gave a majority to the Constituent Assembly. This matter-of-fact phase of the question should give a very clear idea of the extent to which the Constituent Assembly lagged behind the course of political events and party groupings. We must consider the question of principles. THE PRINCIPLES OF DEMOCRACY AND PROLETARIAN DICTATORSHIP As Marxists, we have never been idol-worshippers of formal democracy. In a society of classes, democratic institutions not only do not eliminate class struggle, but also give to class interests an utterly imperfect expression. The propertied classes always have at their disposal tens and hundreds of means for falsifying, subverting and violating the will of the toilers. And democratic institutions become a still less perfect medium for the expression of the class struggle under revolutionary circumstances. Marx called revolutions "the locomotives of history." Owing to the open and direct struggle for power, the working people acquire much political experience in a short time and pass rapidly from one stage to the next in their development. The ponderous machinery of democratic institutions lags behind this evolution all the more, the bigger the country and the less perfect its technical apparatus.