factory, volost, regiment, etc. To be sure, there are guarantees, just
as legal, of the strictness of elections, as are used in creating
democratic dumas and zemstvos. But there are in the Soviet incomparably
more serious, more profound guarantees of the direct and immediate
relation between the deputy and the electors. A town-duma or zemstvo
member is supported by the amorphous mass of electors, which entrusts
its full powers to him for a year and then breaks up. The Soviet
electors remain always united by the conditions of their work and their
existence; the deputy is ever before their eyes, at any moment they can
prepare a mandate to him, censure him, recall or replace him with
another person.

If during the revolutionary month preceding the general political
evolution expressed itself in the fact that the influence of the
fusionist parties was being replaced by a decisive influence of the
Bolsheviki, it is quite plain that this process found its most striking
and fullest expression in the Soviets, while the dumas and zemstvos,
notwithstanding all their formal democratism, expressed yesterday's
status of the popular masses and not to-day's. This is exactly what
explains the gravitation toward dumas and zemstvos on the part of those
parties which were losing more and more ground in the esteem of the
revolutionary class. We shall meet with the same question, only on a
larger scale, later, when we come to the Constituent Assembly.



THE DEMOCRATIC CONFERENCE

The Democratic Conference, called by Tseretelli and his
fellow-combatants in mid-September, was totally artificial in character,