Quite obviously, as shown by their own official reports, Mr. Hard and gentlemen of the _New Republic_, Mr. Oswald Villard and gentlemen of _The Nation_, and you, too, Mr. Norman Thomas, who find Mr. Hard’s disingenuous pleading so convincing,[61] the hostility of the Bolsheviki to freedom of the press was manifest from the very beginning of their rule. On the night of November 30th ten important newspapers were suppressed and their offices closed, among them being six Socialist newspapers. Their offense lay in the fact that they urged their readers to stand by the Constituent Assembly. Not only were the papers suppressed and their offices closed, but the best equipped of them all was “requisitioned” for the use of a Bolshevist paper, the _Soldatskaia Pravda_. The names of the newspapers were: _Nasha Rech_, _Sovremennoie Delo_, _Utro_, _Rabochaia Gazeta_, _Volia Naroda_, _Trudovoe Slovo_, _Edinstvo_, and _Rabotcheie Delo_. The suppression of the _Rabochaia Gazeta_, official organ of the Central Committee of the Social Democratic Party, caused a vigorous protest and the Central Committee of the party decided “to bring to the knowledge of all the members of the party that the central organ of the party, the _Rabochaia Gazeta_, is closed by the Military Revolutionary Committee. While branding this as an arbitrary act in defiance of the Russian and international proletariat, committed by so-called Socialists on a Social-Democrat paper and the Labor Party, whose organ it is, the Central Committee has decided to call upon the party to organize a movement of protest against this act in order to open the eyes of the labor masses to the character of the régime which governs the country.” [61] See _The World Tomorrow_, February, 1920, p. 61. In consequence of the tremendous volume of protest and through the general adoption of the devices familiar to the revolutionaries under czarism--using new names, changing printing-offices, and the like--most of the papers reappeared for a brief while in one form or another. But in February, 1918, all the anti-Bolshevist papers were again suppressed, save one, the principal organ of the Cadets, formerly the _Rech_, but later appearing as the _Nash Viek_. This paper was suffered to appear for reasons which have never been satisfactorily explained. Mr. Shub’s article contains a detailed, though by no means full, account of the further suppressions: