The Bolshevist régime does not even represent the proletariat, however. The fact is thoroughly well established that the political power rests in the Communist Party, which represents only a minority of the proletariat. What we have before us in Russia is not even a dictatorship of the proletariat, but a dictatorship over an entire people, including the proletariat, by the Communist Party. The testimony of the Bolsheviki themselves upon this point is abundant and conclusive. If any good purpose were served thereby, pages of statements to this effect by responsible Bolshevist leaders could be cited; for our present purpose, however, the following quotations will suffice: In a letter to workmen and peasants issued in July, 1918, Lenin said, “The dictatorship of the proletariat _is carried out by the party of the Bolsheviki_, which, as early as 1905, and earlier, became one with the entire revolutionary proletariat.” In an article entitled, “The Party and the Soviets,” published in _Pravda_, February 13, 1919, Bucharin, editor-in-chief of that important official organ of the Communist Party, said: “It is no secret for any one that in a country where the working-class and the poorest peasantry are in power, that party is the directing party which expresses the interests of these groups of the population--the Communist Party. All the work in the Soviet goes on under the influence and the political leadership of our party. It is the forms which this leadership should assume that are the subject of disagreement.” In _Pravda_, November 5, 1919, the leading editorial says of the “adventure of Yudenich” that in the last analysis “this ordeal has strengthened the cause of revolution and has _strengthened the hegemony of the Communist Party_.” In the _Samara Kommuna_, April 11, 1919, we read that “The Communist Party as a whole is responsible for the future of the young Soviet Socialist Republic, for the whole course of the world Communist revolution. In the country _the highest organ of authority, to which all Soviet institutions and officials are subordinate, is again the Communist Party_.” Not only do we find that the Bolshevist régime rests upon the theory of the hegemony of the Communist Party, but in practice the party functions as a part of the state machinery, as the directing machinery, in point of fact, placing the Soviets in a subordinate position. At times the Communist Party has exercised the entire power of government, as, for example, from July, 1918, to January, 1919. Thus we read in _Izvestia_, November 6, 1919, “From October, 1917, up to July, 1918, is the first period of Soviet construction; from July, 1918, up to January, 1919, the second period, _when the Soviet work was conducted exclusively by the power of the Russian Communist Party_; and the third period from January this year, when in the work of Soviet construction broad non-partizan masses participated.”