One of the principles which the Bolsheviki proposed is rule by the Workers’ Councils. In June, 1918, we were told to elect one of 135 delegates. We did, and only fifty pro-Bolsheviki got in. _The Bolshevist Government was dissatisfied with this result and ordered a second election._ This time only twenty pro-Bolsheviki were elected. Now, I happen to have been elected a member of this Workers’ Council, from which I was further elected to sit on the Executive Council. According to the Bolsheviki’s own principle, the Executive Council has to do the whole administration. Everything is under it. But the Bolshevist Government withheld this right from us. For two weeks we sat and did nothing; then the Bolsheviki solved the problem for themselves. They arrested some of us--I was arrested myself--and, instead of an elected Council, _the Red Government appointed a Council of selected Communists_, and formed there, as everywhere, a special privileged class.[4] [4] Menshekov’s account is from a personal communication to the present writer, who has carefully verified the statements made in it. All such charges have been scouted by the defenders of the Bolsheviki in this country and in England. On March 22, 1919, the _Dyelo Naroda_, organ of the Socialists-Revolutionists, reproduced the following official document, which fully sustains the accusation that the ordering of the “election” of certain persons to important offices is not “an invention of the capitalist press”: Order of the Department of Information and Instruction of the Executive Committee of the Soviet of Workers’ and Peasants’ Delegates of the Melenkovski District: No. 994. Town of Melenki (Prov. of Vladimir) Feb. 25, 1919 To the Voinovo Agricultural Council: The Provincial Department instructs you, on the basis of the Constitution of the Soviet (Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic). Section 43, Sub-section 6, letter _a_, to proceed without fail with elections for an Agricultural Executive Committee. The following _must be elected_ to the committee: As president, Nikita Riabov; as member, Ivan Soloviev; and as secretary, Alexander Krainov. These people, as may be gathered from the posts to which they are named, _must be elected without fail_. The non-fulfilment of this Order will result in those responsible being severely punished. Acknowledge the carrying out of these instructions to Provincial Headquarters by express. _Head of Provincial Section._ [Signed] J. NAZAROV. Surely there never was a greater travesty of representative government than this--not even under czarism! This is worse than anything that obtained in the old “rotten boroughs” of England before the great Reform Act. Yet our “Liberals” and “Radicals” hail this vicious reactionary despotism with gladness.