party coloring of the Assembly, ensures that the controlling organ shall accurately reflect the feeling of the electorate.
No limit is set to local re-election. Deputies are withdrawn and others substituted for them whenever this seems necessary to the local electorate. Thus the country is free from the danger of finding itself governed by the ghosts of its dead opinions, and, on the other hand, those ghosts find themselves expeditiously laid in their graves as soon as, becoming ghosts, they cease to have the right to rule.
Just as the Soviet constitution ensures that the actual law-givers shall be in the closest touch with the people, just as it ensures that in deed instead of in amiable theory the people shall be their own law-givers, so also it provides for inter-communication in a contrary direction. The remotest atom on the periphery is not without its influence on the centre. So also the centre, through the Soviets, affects the atoms of the periphery. The institution of the Soviets means that every minutest act of the Council of the People’s Commissaries is judged and interpreted in accordance with its own local conditions by each local Soviet. No other form of government could give this huge diverse entity of Russia with its varying climates and races, with its plains, its steppes, its wild mountains, the free local autonomy of interpretation which it needs. The shepherd of the Caucasus, the Cossack from the Urals and the fisherman from the Yenisei can sit together in the All-Russian Assembly, and know that the laws, whose principles they approve, are not steel bands, too loose for one and throttling another, but are instruments which each Soviet can fashion out in its own way for the special needs of its own community.
This constitution is one particularly apt for Russia. It is also particularly apt for a country in a time of revolution. It affords a real dictatorship to the class that is in revolt, and such dictatorship is necessary, since no one could expect from members of the class that is being ousted from its place of domination whole-hearted assistance in its own undoing. Those democrats in other countries and in Russia who do not understand what is happening under their eyes, exclaim at the unfairness of excluding the bourgeoisie from power. They forget or have never realized that the object of the social
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