In December of 1917 there was established in Russia for the protection of the Revolution and “to carry on the merciless struggle against those trying to overthrow the Soviet system; against sabotage, banditage and espionage and speculation” an organisation known as the Extraordinary Commission. It has an Advisory Board of fifteen persons, all members of the Communist party. Its head and chief is a man named Dserzhinsky, a fanatical Communist whose adoration of Lenin is notorious. He is assisted in his work, according to the Vice-President, with whom we had an interview, by a definite staff of four thousand five hundred persons, estimated by others who were present on this occasion at a number enormously greater than that. These assistants consider it their duty to arrest all whose actions appear to them to be inimical to the welfare of the Communist State. This great army of spies and police agents, largely the same men as served the Czar’s régime, arrest for the most trivial offences and on the slightest suspicion. A young man who has saved his money and is buying his sweetheart a few expensive blossoms on her birthday is arrested by the person standing next him in the shop on suspicion of having received the money from some counter-revolutionary organisation. He is kept in prison for several months. A delicate woman is kept three days in prison for having too large a supply of white flour in her house. She got it for a dying father and a sick sister by selling valuable household goods. She was “denounced” by a former servant who occupies a room in the same house though he is not now in their service. This Extraordinary Commission has its agents everywhere, in every organisation and at every public gathering; and nobody can be sure of his neighbour or even of his friend. It has its own soldiers, who enjoy better rations than the men at the front, its own prisons and its “secret police.” It formerly had the power of life and death, and has executed thousands of persons without trial. Though nominally that power has been taken from it and handed over to the Revolutionary Tribunals, it is by no means clear that the power does not actually remain. In any case, the Revolutionary Tribunals work in complete sympathy with the Commission, so there is no real change. The Extraordinary Commission works independently of the Government and is so strong, thanks to the fear created by the war, that it is regarded as the Government in everything that matters. It was said that there is nobody in Russia who does not go in fear of it except Lenin. I have no means of testing this, of course; but I know that everybody I met in Russia outside the Communist party goes in terror of his liberty or his life. The pervading fear worked terribly on the subconscious selves of some of us, and we lived hourly in a spirit of hot hate of the cruelties and tyrannies which met us at every turn.