affords opportunities for governmental pressure, but I had no chance
of finding out whether it is used for this purpose.

In country districts the method employed is somewhat different. It is
impossible to secure that the village Soviet shall consist of
Communists, because, as a rule, at any rate in the villages I saw,
there are no Communists. But when I asked in the villages how they
were represented on the Volost (the next larger area) or the Gubernia,
I was met always with the reply that they were not represented at all.
I could not verify this, and it is probably an overstatement, but all
concurred in the assertion that if they elected a non-Communist
representative he could not obtain a pass on the railway and,
therefore, could not attend the Volost or Gubernia Soviet. I saw a
meeting of the Gubernia Soviet of Saratov. The representation is so
arranged that the town workers have an enormous preponderance over the
surrounding peasants; but even allowing for this, the proportion of
peasants seemed astonishingly small for the centre of a very important
agricultural area.

The All-Russian Soviet, which is constitutionally the supreme body, to
which the People's Commissaries are responsible, meets seldom, and has
become increasingly formal. Its sole function at present, so far as I
could discover, is to ratify, without discussion, previous decisions
of the Communist Party on matters (especially concerning foreign
policy) upon which the constitution requires its decision.

All real power is in the hands of the Communist Party, who number
about 600,000 in a population of about 120 millions. I never came
across a Communist by chance: the people whom I met in the streets or
in the villages, when I could get into conversation with them, almost