It is impossible to say how many of the old police force actually served under the Soviets. I found, on personal investigation, that many of the stories were largely myths. The most typical legend was the one concerning Lapochine, once head of the Okrana and exiled by the Tsar for telling a Social Revolutionist that Azef was a spy. The rumor that he now holds an important post in the Cheka is not true. His daughter was one of my intimate friends in Moscow and I went very often to her home. Her father was holding two small clerkships which took all his time, in order to get double rations to support himself and his invalid wife. Lapochine was never connected with the secret police after his exile, although he was brought back to Russia after six years in Siberia and publicly forgiven by the Tsar. He was governor of Esthonia at the outbreak of the revolution. However, to the ordinary individual, all this makes little difference. A detective is simply a detective, working in dark ways, someone to be feared and someone to be despised. And as for the Lapochines, the last time I heard of them they were trying to borrow money in America to start a sausage factory near Moscow. All the important posts in the Cheka have been and still are largely held by Letts or Poles with unimpeachable revolutionary records. The rank and file are Russians. There are scarcely any Jews. The reason why the Russians hold minor positions is not exactly clear but the general calculation is that they are more susceptible to bribery and more easily influenced. Certainly, the Cheka has played an important rôle in the revolution; it is no exaggeration to state that without the vigilance of the Extraordinary Commission, the Soviets would never have maintained themselves through numerous critical moments. It was Peters and other Lettish secret agents who discovered such counter-revolutionary plots as the Lockwood plan to blow up bridges and cut off Petrograd and the government from all communications. And as military intervention developed, the Communists were forced to consider Russia in a state of siege and the Cheka their most necessary means of self-protection. In a speech before a session of the Extraordinary Delegation, Trotsky made this statement: “The monopoly of using force and reprisals in any normally functioning state, regardless of its external form, is an attribute of the government.... Every state organization is in this way fighting for its existence. It is sufficient to picture to one’s self the society of the present day, this complicated and contradictory co-operation in such a tremendous country as Russia, for example, in order at once to understand that in the present condition of affairs, torn by every social contradiction, reprisals are absolutely inevitable.”