hings are temporary, compromises with
the ideal due to the extraordinary circumstances prevailing in Russia, and
to beg a mitigation of the severity of our judgment on that account.

The answer to the plea is twofold: in the first place, they who offer it
must, if they are sincere, abandon the savagely critical attitude they have
seen fit to adopt toward our own government and nation because with
"extraordinary conditions prevailing" we have had introduced conscription,
unusual restrictions of movement and of utterance, and so forth. How else,
indeed, can their sincerity be demonstrated? If the fact that extraordinary
conditions justified Lenine and his associates in instituting a regime so
tyrannical, what rule of reason or of morals must be invoked to refuse to
count the extraordinary conditions produced in our own nation by the war as
justification for the special measures of military service and discipline
here introduced?

But there is a second answer to the claim which is more direct and
conclusive. It is not open to argument at all. It is found in the words of
Lenine himself, in his claim that there is absolutely no contradiction
between the principle of individual dictatorship, ruling with iron hand,
and the principle upon which Soviet government rests. There has been no
compromise here, for if there is no contradiction in principle no
compromise could have been required. Lenine is not afraid to make or to
admit making compromises; he admits that compromises have been made. It was
a compromise to employ highly salaried specialists from the bourgeoisie, "a
defection from the principles of the Paris Commune and of any proletarian
rule," as he says. It was a compromise, another "defection from the only
Socialist principle," to admit the right of the co-operatives to determine
their own conditions of membership. Having made these declarations quite
candidly, he takes pains to assure us that there was no such defection from
principle in establishing the absolute rule of an individual dictator,
that there was absolutely no contradiction in principle in this.[76]

Moreover, there is no reason for regarding this dictatorship as a temporary
thing, if Lenine himself is to be accepted as an authoritative spokesman.
Obviously, if there is nothing in the principle of an absolute individual
dictatorship which is in contradiction to the Bolshevik ideal, there can be
no Bolshevik principle which necessarily requires for its rea