A. I do not think so. That fellow, Vlada Georgiev, was a member of the famous Imro, the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization, which had the only system I ever heard of to guarantee that their members carry out assigned assassinations, no matter what the police terror might be. The Imro’s object was to unify and obtain the greatest possible degree of independence for Macedonia, divided among Bulgaria, Greece, and Jugoslavia. Their chief weapon was assassination, and when the Imro decreed a person’s death it was about as certain to be carried out as any human decision can be. The procedure was to appoint a killer and provide that he be killed unless he fulfilled his task. To make this principle work it was necessary that the appointed assassin realize he would more surely die if he failed than if he succeeded and risked legal execution. A long tradition of killings within the Imro made this fearful compulsion effective. The mechanics of the system were simple. Like the Russian Nihilists under Boris Savinkov, the Imro used to try and formally condemn their victims to death. Thereupon the committee would draw beans from a bag. The man drawing a black bean was the appointed assassin. He was _A_. He had to leave the room. The others drew again. The man drawing the second black bean, _B_, was appointed to kill _A_ if _A_ didn’t kill the chosen victim. _B_ then left the room and a third black bean, _C_, was appointed to kill _B_ if _B_ failed to carry out his assignment, and so on until the whole committee had lined up, each with a gun in the back of another. No one knew who among his comrades was his potential executioner, but each knew that death was certain if the decisions of the committee were not obeyed. Now this sort of system would work, I believe, even in Nazi Germany, but the democracies are far too squeamish to indulge in such practical methods.[1] FOOTNOTE: [1] A German statistician objected to this description of the Imro system on the ground that the second to the last man would know that it was the last man who was delegated to kill him if necessary; and the last man would not have a gun in his back. True enough mathematically, but the Imro system was run by practical assassins, not mathematicians. They never let it get to the last man; the existence of the chain, incomplete though it had to be, guaranteed that the originally appointed assassin performed his duty. Q. _Did the Nazis or the Bolsheviks practice assassination?_