On October 1, 1919, _Pravda_ published two significant circular letters from the Central Committee of the Communist Party to the district and local organizations of the party. The first of these called for “a campaign to recruit new members into the party” and to induce old members to rejoin. To make joining the party easier “entry into the party is not to be conditioned by the presentation of two written recommendations as before.” The appeal to the party workers says, “During ‘party-week’ _we ought to increase the membership of our party to half a million_.” The second circular is of interest because of the following sentences: “The principle of administration by ‘colleges’ must be reduced to a minimum. Discussions and considerations must be given up. _The party must be as soon as possible rebuilt on military lines_, and there must be created a military revolutionary apparatus which would work solidly and accurately. In this apparatus there must be clearly distributed privileges and duties.” The frenzied efforts to increase the party membership by “drives” in which every device and every method of persuasion and pressure was used brought into the party many who were not Communists at all. Thus we find _Pravda_ saying, December 12, 1919: “The influx of many members to the collectives (Soviet Management groups) comes not only from the working-class, _but also from the middle bourgeoisie_ which formerly considered Communists as its enemies. One of the new collectives is a collective at the estate of Kurakin (a children’s colony). Here entered the collective not only loyal employees, _but also representatives of the teaching staff_.” _Pravda_ adds that “this inrush of the bourgeoisie, the bourgeoisie that formerly considered the Communists as its enemies, is not at all to our interest. Of course, there may be honest Soviet officials who have in fact shown their loyalty to the great ideas of Communism, and such can find their place in our ranks.” Other Bolshevist journals wrote in the same spirit deploring the admission of so many “bourgeois” Soviet officials into the party. In spite of this abnormal and much-feared inflation of the party membership, _Pravda_ reported on March 18, 1920, that with more than 300,000 workmen in Petrograd the total membership of the Communist Party in that city was only 30,000. That is to say, including all the Soviet officials and “bourgeois elements,” the party membership amounted to rather less than 10 per cent. of the industrial proletariat, and that in the principal center of the party, the first of the two great cities. Surely this is proof that the Communist Party really represents only a minority of the industrial proletariat. If even with all its bourgeois elements it amounts in the principal industrial city, its stronghold, to less than 10 per cent. of the number of working-men, we may be quite certain that in the country as a whole the percentage is very much smaller.