Even this terrible weapon of despotism and oppression did not satisfy the Bolsheviki, however. For one thing, the decree constituting the Revolutionary Tribunal provided that its session must be held in the open; for another, its members must be elected. Consequently, a new type of tribunal was added to the system, the Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution--the infamous _Chresvychaika_. Not since the Inquisitions of the Middle Ages has any civilized nation maintained tribunals clothed with anything like the arbitrary and unlimited authority possessed by the central and local Extraordinary Commissions for Combating Counter-Revolution. They have written upon the pages of Russia’s history a record of tyranny and oppression which makes the worst record of czarism seem gentle and beneficent. It is not without sinister significance that in all the collections of documents which the Bolsheviki and their sympathizers have published to illustrate the workings of the Soviet system, in this country and in Europe, there is not one explaining the organization, functions, methods, and personnel of it’s most characteristic institution--more characteristic even than the Soviet. Neither in the several collections published by _The Nation_, the American Association for International Conciliation, the Russian Soviet Government Bureau, nor in the books of writers like John Reed, Louise Bryant, William C. Bullitt, Raymond Robins, William T. Goode, Arthur Ransome, Isaac Don Levine, Colonel Malone, M.P., Lincoln Eyre, Etienne Antonelli, nor any other volume of the kind, can such information be found. This silence is profoundly eloquent. This much we know about the _Chresvychaikas_: The Soviet Government created the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution, Sabotage, and Profiteering, and established it at the headquarters of the former Prefecture of Petrograd, 2, Gorokhovaia Street. Its full personnel has never been made known, but it is well known that many of the spies and confidential agents of the former secret police service entered its employ. _Until February, 1919, it possessed absolutely unlimited powers of arrest, except for the immunity enjoyed by members of the government; its hearings were held in secret; it was not obliged to report even the names of persons sentenced by it; mass arrests and mass sentences were common under its direction; it was not confined to dealing with definite crimes, violations of definite laws, but could punish at will, in any manner it deemed fit, any conduct which it pleased to declare to be “counter-revolutionary.”_