Let us hear from some of the leading Bolsheviki who participated in the debate on the subject of the relation of the central Soviet authority to local self-government at the eighth Congress of the Communist Party, March, 1919. Nogin, former president of the Moscow Soviet, said: “The time has come to state openly before this meeting how low our party has fallen. We have to confess that the representatives both of the central and the local authorities disgrace the name of the party by their conduct. _Their drunkenness and immorality, the robberies and other crimes committed by them, are so terrible as scarcely to be believed._” Commissar Volin said: “Some of the local authorities give themselves over to outrageous abominations. How can they be put a stop to? The word ‘communist’ rouses deep hatred, not only among the bourgeoisie, but even among the poorer and the middle classes which we are ruining. What can we do for our own salvation?” Pakhomoff said: “I sent several comrades to the villages. _They had barely reached their destination when they turned bandits._” Ossinsky said, “The revolts now taking place are not White Guard risings, as formerly, but rebellions caused by famine _and the outrageous behavior of our own commissaries_.” Zinoviev was equally emphatic in his declaration: “It cannot be concealed from this meeting that in certain localities the word ‘communist’ has become a term of abuse. The people are beginning to hate the ‘men in leather jackets,’ as the commissaries were nicknamed in Perm. The fact cannot be denied, and we must look the truth in the face. Every one knows that both in the provinces and in the large towns the housing reform has been carried out imperfectly. True, the bourgeoisie has been driven out of its houses, _but the workmen have gained nothing thereby. The houses are taken possession of by Bolshevist state employees_, and sometimes they have been occupied, not even by the ‘Soviet bureaucrat,’ but by his mother-in-law or grandmother.” Not only has the bribery of officials grown, as revealed by the reports of the Extraordinary Commissions, but many of the Bolshevist officials have engaged in food speculation. That the greatest buyers of the food illegally sold at the Sukharevka market are the highly paid Soviet officials is a charge frequently made in the Bolshevist press. In November, 1919, Tsurupa, People’s Commissary for Supplies, published an article in _Izvestia_ (No. 207), exposing the speculation in foodstuffs at the Sukharevka market, formerly the largest market for second-hand goods in Moscow, now the center of illicit speculation. Tsurupa said: