Within four days of the Czar’s abdication, the workers of Perm, in the Government of the Urals, organized a Soviet--the Urals Workers’ and Soldiers’ Soviet. At the head of it, as president, was Jandarmov, a machinist, who had been active in the Revolution of 1905, a Soviet worker and trades-unionist, many times imprisoned under the old régime. This Soviet supplemented and co-operated with the Provisional Government, worked for a democratic Constituent Assembly, and, after the first few days of excitement had passed, greatly increased production in the factories. But when the Bolshevist régime was established, after the adoption of the Constitution, the Government of the Urals, with its four million inhabitants, did not represent, even on the basis of the Soviet figures, more than 72,000 workers. That was the number of workers supposedly represented by the delegates of the Soviet Government. As a matter of fact, in that number was included the anti-Bolshevist strength, the workers who had been outvoted or intimidated, as the case might be. When the peasants elected delegates they were refused seats, because they were known to be, or believed to be, anti-Bolshevists. This is the much-vaunted system of Soviet “elections” concerning which so many of our self-styled Liberals have been lyrically eloquent. Of course, even under the conditions described, anti-Bolshevists were frequently elected to the Soviets. It was a very general practice, in the early days of the Bolshevist régime, to quite arbitrarily “cleanse” the Soviets of these “undesirable counter-revolutionaries,” most of whom were Socialists. In December, 1917, the Soviets in Ufa, Saratov, Samara, Kazan, and Jaroslav were compelled, under severe penalties, _to dismiss their non-Bolshevist members_; in January, 1918, the same thing took place at Perm and at Ekaterinburg; and in February, 1918, the Soviets of Moscow and Petrograd were similarly “cleansed.”