recommended for brains, energy, and integrity. Then they must serve a probationary period of one year before they can become full-fledged members. Notwithstanding these strict conditions, however, many careerists and other riff-raff work their way into the Party. Such elements constitute at once one of the greatest dangers and problems of the organization. Indifferent, incompetent, dishonest, and sometimes even counter-revolutionary, they tend to bureaucratize the Party, lower its moral standard, and discredit it in the eyes of the masses. The militant Communists look upon them as a menace and wage ceaseless war against them. They periodically weed them out, and the means to this end is called re-registration.
The Party re-registration is a drastic affair. It takes place once a year, when every member is called before the local boards and made to give an account of his membership. Those who can not show records of real service are dropped forwith. Often the general public, non-party members and all, are invited to come before the boards to give voice to any complaints they may have against Communist officials, so that the Party can locate the unworthy and clean them out. Ordinarily such re-registrations eliminate thousands of "dead-ones." The living revolutionary body of the organization is stripped of the encumbering useless tissue. Last year, in 22 states, the Party membership was cut by the re-registration from 191,687 to 131,085; a reduction of 60,602, or about 32 per cent. The following table indicates how sharply the process operated in the big industrial districts:
| Before | After | |
| Perm, | 14,145 | 9,773 |
| Petrograd, | 26,159 | 21,613 |
| Ekaterinburg | 26,432 | 18,044 |
| Moscow, | 43,389 | 36,407 |
| Totals | 110,125 | 85,837 |
But despite such drastic pruning and the heavy mortality among its members, the size of the Party constantly increases. The figures below (also taken from the statistical exhibition of the III International) indicate the numerical strength of the Russian Communist movement at the periods of its congresses:
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