Following the example of Mr. Arthur Ransome, many pro-Bolshevist writers have assured us that after 1918 the Red Terror practically ceased to exist. Mr. Ransome makes a great deal of the fact that in February, 1919, the Central Executive Committee of the People’s Commissaries “definitely limited the powers of the Extraordinary Commission.”[22] Although he seems to have attended the meeting at which this was done, and talks of “the bitter struggle within the party for and against the almost dictatorial powers of the Extraordinary Committee,” he appears not to have understood what was done. Perhaps it ought not to be expected that this writer of fairy-stories who so naïvely confesses his ignorance of “economics” should comprehend the revolutionary struggle in Russia. Be that how it may, he does not state accurately what happened. He says: “Therefore the right of sentencing was removed from the Extraordinary Commission; but if, through unforeseen circumstances, the old conditions should return, they intended that the dictatorial powers of the Commission should be returned to it until those conditions had ceased.” Actually the decision was that the power to inflict the death penalty should be taken from the Extraordinary Commissions, _except where and when martial law existed_. When Krylenko, Diakonov, and others protested against the outrage of permitting the Extraordinary Commissions to execute people without proof of their guilt, _Izvestia_ answered in words which clearly reveal the desperate and brutal spirit of Bolshevism: “_If among one hundred executed one was guilty, this would be satisfactory and would sanction the action of the Commission._” [22] _Russia in 1919_, by Arthur Ransome, pp. 108-114.