The aim of the Bolsheviks was not merely to overthrow one government and to establish their own. This was a means toward creating a new society. To that extent the Bolsheviks are as presumptuous as most reformers. In 1917 they must have argued to themselves much to this effect: “We are a minority. The majority has not invited us to rule it. But we know better than the majority what is good for it.” In the interest of the new society a powerful state was set up. The powerful state was privileged to ride roughshod over the individual. The Bolsheviks presume to tell the individual how to act and how to live. This is the “superiority complex” which is one of the most essential characteristics of puritanism. “I am perfect. Watch me. Go thou and do likewise.” The Russian Communists are puritans without religion. In matters of morals the Communists advocate and agitate but do not use force. Only in the case of members of the Communist Party do they interfere if the individual’s actions are likely “directly or indirectly to discredit the party.” (Such a phrase permits of the widest interpretation and misinterpretation.) Thus in an article in the _Pravda_ on The Party and Personal Life, O. Zortzeva, an official of the Central Control Committee, writes that “not long ago one of the representatives of the Control Committee in the South asked for instructions to combat the evil of divorce.” She cites an instance (and there must be many more such instances) where a Communist was required to explain why he left his wife. He replied he could not live with her because she was unfit to mingle in the society of his new friends and acquaintances. The reply was regarded as unsatisfactory. The Soviet state enforces a most liberal divorce law. But the Communists discourage divorce. Within the party it is looked upon with disfavor. The war, the revolution, the civil wars have worked havoc with the Russian family. It is perhaps no exaggeration to say that family life is crumbling. Trotzky, who has given more active attention to these questions of personal behavior than any other Communist leader, seeks to reënforce the collapsing buttresses of the family. (It will be recalled that Engels, the author with Marx of the “Communist Manifesto,” wrote the “Origin of the Family” to prove that the family was a new, unnecessary, and reactionary institution.) Trotzky urges the “communalization of the family household” so as to “disencumber the family of kitchen and laundry.” Take the burden of washing, cooking, sewing, child-raising from the family and “the relation between husband and wife will be cleansed of all that is external, foreign, forced, accidental. Each would cease to spoil the life of the other....”