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 is actually 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