Finally, in Paris itself the elections took place after the bourgeoisie, or at least its most active elements, had fled, and after Thiers' troops had been evacuated. The bourgeoisie that remained in Paris, in spite of all its impudence, was still afraid of the revolutionary battalions, and the elections took place under the auspices of that fear, which was the forerunner of what in the future would have been inevitable--namely, of the Red Terror. But to console oneself with the thought that the Central Committee of the National Guard, under the dictatorship of which--unfortunately a very feeble and formalist dictatorship--the elections to the Commune were held, did not infringe the principle of universal suffrage, is truly to brush with the shadow of a broom. Amusing himself by barren analogies, Kautsky benefits by the circumstance that his reader is not acquainted with the facts. In Petrograd, in November, 1917, we also elected a Commune (Town Council) on the basis of the most "democratic" voting, without limitations for the bourgeoisie. These elections, being boycotted by the bourgeoisie parties, gave us a crushing majority. The "democratically" elected Council voluntarily submitted to the Petrograd Soviet--_i.e._, placed the fact of the dictatorship of the proletariat higher than the "principle" of universal suffrage, and, after a short time, dissolved itself altogether by its own act, in favor of one of the sections of the Petrograd Soviet. Thus the Petrograd Soviet--that true father of the Soviet regime--has upon itself the seal of a formal "democratic" benediction in no way less than the Paris Commune.[6] [6] It is not without interest to observe that in the Communal elections of 1871 in Paris there participated 230,000 electors. At the Town elections of November, 1917, in Petrograd, in spite of the boycott of the election on the part of all parties except ourselves and the Left Social Revolutionaries, who had no influence in the capital, there participated 390,000 electors. In Paris, in 1871, the population numbered two millions. In Petrograd, in November, 1917, there were not more than two millions. It must be noticed that our electoral system was infinitely more democratic. The Central Committee of the National Guard carried out the elections on the basis of the electoral law of the empire. "At the elections of March 26, eighty members were elected to the Commune. Of these, fifteen were members of the government party (Thiers), and six were bourgeois radicals who were in opposition to the Government, but condemned the rising (of the Paris workers).