organization dealing with all sides of all questions, without any exception." And if it is omnipresent it is also omnipotent. Although it is entirely unofficial in character, it has the deciding voice in all social questions, no matter of what sort. When the Communist Party speaks everybody in Russia obeys. Even the Soviet Government itself is no exception: the Communist Party maps out its general policies and virtually issues it direct instructions. In practice, as well as in accepted theory, the dictatorship of the proletariat resolves itself into the dictatorship of the Communist Party.
Many writers have marvelled that an organization so small as the Russian Communist Party—the latest official figures give it only 705,245 members—can exert such throughgoing control. This shows that they have failed utterly to grasp the true nature of the Party. It is not a mass organization. Mere numbers mean nothing to it. Quality, not quantity, is its very breath of life. In the ranks of the workers there are a small percentage of keen, brave, intelligent, tireless idealists; who, man for man, when serious work is to be done, are worth a hundred or a thousand ordinary people. It is of these natural leaders of the working class that the Communist Party is composed; all others being rigidly excluded. The masses would only clog up the organization machinery and prevent the smooth working together of these militants. The Communist Party is the distilled essence of working class energy and revolutionary spirit. It is the little leaven that leaventh the whole lump. Its influence and power is enormously greater than its small numbers would indicate.
The natural power of the Russian Communist Party's militants is multiplied many fold by their scientific system of organization. This is based upon the Communist cell, or "yatchayka." In every institution in Russia where people assemble to work, legislate, fight, educate, or whatnot, the Communists among them always organize themselves into a yatchayka and proceed to influence the general mass about them to the Communist viewpoint. And as the yatchaykas usually contain a monopoly of the brains and idealism of the people in their respective spheres they ordinarily dominate the situation. The Communist Party as a whole is the sum total of thousands of such yatchaykas, all locked together in a general organization. It is the
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