As we have seen, Lenin and his followers were anti-statists. Once in the saddle they set up a powerful state machine and began to apotheosize the state. Not only did the term “Soviet State” come into quite general use in place of “Soviet Power”; what is still more significant is the special sanctity with which they endowed the state. In this they go as far as Hegel, though they do not use his spiritual terminology. The German philosopher saw the state as “the Divine Will embodied in the human will,” as “Reason manifested,” and as “the Eternal personified.” Upon that conception the Prussian-German ideal of the state was based. That the state must be absolute, its authority unquestioned, is equally the basic conception upon which the Bolshevist régime rests. In no modern nation, not even the Germany of Bismarck and Wilhelm II, has the authority of the state been so comprehensive, so wholly dependent upon force or more completely independent of the popular will. Notwithstanding the revolutionary ferment of the time, so arrogantly confident have the self-constituted rulers become that we find Zinoviev boasting, “Were we to publish a decree ordering the entire population of Petrograd, under fifty years of age, to present themselves on the field of Mars to receive twenty-five birch rods, we are certain that 75 per cent. would obediently form a queue, and the remaining 25 per cent. would bring medical certificates exempting them from the flogging.” It is interesting to note in the writings of Lenin the Machiavellian manner in which, even before the _coup d’état_ of November, 1917, he began to prepare the minds of his followers for the abandonment of anti-statism. Shortly before that event he published a leaflet entitled, “Shall the Bolsheviki Remain in Power?” In this leaflet he pointed out that the Bolsheviki had preached the destruction of the state _only because, and so long as, the state was in the possession of the master class_. He asked why they should continue to do this after they themselves had taken the helm. The state, he argued, is the organized rule of a privileged minority class, and the Bolsheviki must use the enemy’s machinery and substitute their minority. Here we have revealed the same vicious and unscrupulous duplicity, the same systematic, studied deception, as in such matters as freedom of speech and press, equal suffrage, and the convocation of the Constituent Assembly--a fundamental principle so long as the party was in revolt, anti-statism was to be abandoned the moment the power to give it effect was secured. Other Socialists had been derided and bitterly denounced by the Bolsheviki for preaching the “bourgeois doctrine” of controlling and using the machinery of the state; nothing but the complete destruction of the state and its machinery would satisfy their revolutionary minds. But with their first approach to power the tune is changed and possession and use of the machinery of the state are held