adventures. Once he was stopped on the street and robbed of the automobile in which he was riding, and another time he was shot through the neck by a counter-revolutionist. The situation rapidly went from bad to worse.
Then the Communists took the matter seriously in charge. They instituted the Extraordinary Commission and the Revolutionary Tribunals and began dealing out justice with a stern hand. Counter-revolutionists were summarily dealt with, and ordinary criminals shot at the scenes of their crimes. Along with these harsh measures went an extensive educational campaign showing the danger outlawry brought to the revolution. Soon the anti-social forces were vanquished: the counter-revolutionists transferred their open activities to countries outside Russia, and the common bandits found that their trade was one that did not pay. Today Russian cities are as orderly and free from crime as any in the world. Holdups and burglaries are practically unknown. Although the streets of Moscow and Petrograd are almost entirely unlighted at night one may walk about them at any hour in perfect safety.
A great deal of outside criticism has been directed against these special revolutionary courts, before all the Extraordinary Commission, which has been painted as a darksome monster that holds the whole country in shivering terror. The Russian revolutionists a!so lament the necessity for such bodies, but they had no choice in the matter. It was either fight the reaction with its own weapons, or see the revolution collapse. And the Russians also know full well that most of the "terror" of the Extraordinary Commission is pure enemy propaganda. The whole thing has been grossly exaggerated. The few thousand reactionaries that met death at the hands of that organization are numerically insignificant when compared wi the millions of workers and peasants slaughtered by these same reactionaries in the horrible world war. The special revolutionary courts were products of the great revolutionarycrisis and they are disappearing as that crisis wears itself out.
The essential mildness of the revolutionary justice system, and the true spirit of the workers' new society is to be found in the Peoples' Courts. There crime, at
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