Throughout his booklet Kautsky returns many times to the question of the intellectual and moral level of the Russian workers, and every time only to deepen his characterization of them as ignorant, stupid and barbarous. To bring about the most striking contrasts, Kautsky adduces the example of how a workshop committee in one of the war industries during the Commune decided upon compulsory night duty in the works for _one_ worker so that it might be possible to distribute repaired arms by night. "As under present circumstances it is absolutely necessary to be extremely economical with the resources of the Commune," the regulation read, "the night duty will be rendered without payment...." "Truly," Kautsky concludes, "these working men did not regard the period of their dictatorship as an opportune moment for the satisfaction of their personal interests." (Page 90.) Quite otherwise is the case with the Russian working class. That class has no intelligence, no stability, no ideals, no steadfastness, no readiness for self-sacrifice, and so on. "It is just as little capable of choosing suitable plenipotentiary leaders for itself," Kautsky jeers, "as Munchausen was able to drag himself from the swamp by means of his own hair." This comparison of the Russian proletariat with the impostor Munchausen dragging himself from the swamp is a striking example of the brazen tone in which Kautsky speaks of the Russian working class. He brings extracts from various speeches and articles of ours in which undesirable phenomena amongst the working class are shown up, and attempts to represent matters in such a way as if the life of the Russian proletariat between 1917-20--_i.e._, in the greatest of revolutionary epochs--is fully described by passivity, ignorance, and egotism. Kautsky, forsooth, does not know, has never heard, cannot guess, may not imagine, that during the civil war the Russian proletariat had more than one occasion of freely giving its labour, and even of establishing "unpaid" guard duties--not of _one_ worker for the space of _one_ night, but of tens of thousands of workers for the space of a long series of disturbed nights. In the days and weeks of Yudenich's advance on Petrograd, one telephonogram of the Soviet was sufficient to ensure that many thousands of workers should spring to their posts in all the factories, in all the wards of the city. And this not in the first days of the Petrograd Commune, but after a two years' struggle in cold and hunger.