People may think that I underestimate the importance of, the Extraordinary Commission.I am perfectly aware that without this police force with its spies, its prisons and its troops, the difficulties of the Dictatorship would be increased by every kind of disorder, and the chaos, which I fear may come, would have begun long ago.I believe, too, that the overgrown power of the Extraordinary Commission,and the cure that must sooner or later be applied to it, may, as in the French Revolution, bring about the collapse of the whole system.The Commission depends for its strength on the fear of something else.I have seen it weaken when there was a hope of general peace.I have seen it tighten its grip in the presence of attacks from without and attempted assassination within.It is dreaded by everybody; not even Communists are safe from it; but it does not suffice to explain the Dictatorship, and isactually entirely irrelevant to the most important process of that Dictatorship, namely, the adoption of a single idea, a single argument, by the whole of a very large body of men.The whole power of the Extraordinary Commission does not affect in the slightest degree discussions inside the Communist Party, and those discussions are the simple fact distinguishing the Communist Dictatorship from any of the other dictatorships by which it may be supplanted.
There are 600,000 members of the Communist Party (611,978 on April 2, 1920).There are nineteen members of the Central Committee of that party.There are, I believe, five who, when they agree, can usually sway the remaining fourteen.There is no need to wonder how these fourteen can be argued into acceptance of the views of the still smaller inner ring, but the process of persuading the six hundred thousand of the desirability of, for example, such measures as those involved in industrial conscription which, at first sight, was certainly repugnant to most of them, is the main secret of the Dictatorship, and is not in any way affected by the existence of the Extraordinary Commission.
Thus the actual government of Russia at the present time may be not unfairly considered as a small group inside the Central Committee of the Communist Party.This small group is able to persuade the majority of the remaining members of that Committee.The Committee then sets about persuading the majority of the party.In the case of important measures the process is elaborate.The Committee issues a statement of its case, and the party newspapers the Pravda and its affiliated organs are deluged with its discussion.When this discussion has had time to spread through the country, congresses of Communists meet in the provincial centres, and members of the CentralCommittee go down to these conferences to defend the "theses" which the Committee has issued.These provincial congresses, exclusively Communist, send their delegates of an All-Russian Congress.There the "theses" of the Central Committee get altered, confirmed, or, in the case of an obviously unpersuaded and large opposition in the party, are referred back or in other ways shelved.Then the delegates, even those who have been in opposition at the congress, go back to the country pledged todefend the position of the majority.This sometimes has curious results.For example, I heard Communist Trades Unionists fiercely arguing against certain clauses in the theses on industrial conscription at a Communist Congress at the Kremlin; less than a week afterwards I heard these same men defending precisely these clauses at a Trades Union Congress over the way, they loyally abiding by the collective opinion of their fellow Communists and subject to particularly uncomfortable heckling from people who vociferously reminded them (since the Communist debates had been published) that they were now defending what, a few days before, they had vehemently attacked.
