The “return to capitalism,” as it was commonly and justly described, had begun in earnest some months before Lomov made the declaration just quoted. The movement was attended by a great deal of internal conflict and dissension. In particular the trades-unions were incensed because they were practically suppressed as autonomous organs of the working-class. The dictatorship of the proletariat was already assuming the character of a dictatorship over the proletariat by a strongly centralized state. The rulers of this state, setting aside the written Constitution, were in fact not responsible to any electorate. They ruled by fiat and proclamation and ruthlessly suppressed all who sought to oppose them. They held that, industry having become nationalized, trades-unions were superfluous, and that strikes could not be tolerated because they became, _ipso facto_, acts of treason against the state. Such was the evolution of this anti-Statist movement. The unions resisted the attempts to deprive them of their character as fighting organizations. They protested against the denial of the right to strike, the suppression of their meetings and their press. They resented the arbitrary fixing of their wages by officials of the central government. As a result, there was an epidemic of strikes, most of which were suppressed with great promptitude and brutality. At the Alexander Works, Moscow, eighty workers were killed by machine-gun fire. From March 6 to 26, 1919, the _Krasnaya Gazeta_ published accounts of fifteen strikes in Petrograd, involving more than half the wage-workers of the city, some of the strikes being attended with violence which was suppressed by armed troops. At the beginning of March there was such a strike at the Tula Works, reported in _Izvestia_, March 2, 1919. On March 16, 1919, the _Severnaya Communa_ gave an account of the strike at the famous Putilov Works, and of the means taken to “clear out the Social Revolutionary blackguards”--meaning thereby the striking workmen. _Pravda_ published on March 23, 1919, accounts of serious strikes at the Putilov Works, the Arthur Koppel Works, the government car-building shops, and elsewhere. Despite a clearly defined policy on the part of the press to ignore labor struggles as far as possible, sufficient was published to show that there was an intense struggle by the Russian proletariat against its self-constituted masters. “The workers of Petrograd are in the throes of agitation, and strikes are occurring in some shops. The Bolsheviki have been making arrests,” said _Izvestia_ on March 2, 1919.