etc. which aге the more varied, the more highly bourgeois democracy has developed—all this disappears under the Soviet system. Freedom of the press ceases to be an hypocrisy because the printing presses and the paper are taken away from the bourgeoisie. It is the same with the best buildings, the palaces, the villas and the country houses. Thousands and thousands of these best buildings have been taken away from the exploiters by the Soviet authority, which has thereby made the right of meeting for the masses a thousand times more "democratic" than before, since without this right all democracy is a fraud and a delusion. The indirect elections to the non-local Soviets make it easier to arrange for congresses of the Soviets, render the entire apparatus cheaper, more elastic, more accessible to the workers and peasants at a time when life is overflowing and it is necessary to be able rapidly to recall a delegate or to send him to the General Congress of the Soviets. Proletarian democracy is a million times more democratic than any bourgeois democracy, and the Soviet régime is a million times more democratic than the most democratic régime in a bourgeois republic.
This could only have remained unnoticed by a person who is either the deliberate henchman of the bourgeoisie or is politically dead, does not see life from behind the dusty pages of bourgeois books, is permeated through and through by bourgeois democratic prejudices, and thereby, objectively speaking, becomes the lackey of the bourgeoisie.
This could only have remained unnoticed by a man who is incapable of putting the question from the point of view of the exploited classes: is there one single country in the world, even among the most democratic bourgeois countries, in which the ordinary rank-and-file worker, the ordinary rank-and-file village laborer or village semi-proletarian (that is, the overwhelming majority of the population), enjoys anything approaching such liberty of
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